Author: Ophelia Benson

Well naturally – Chris Mooney has attained the apotheosis of a Templeton Fellowship – one of the ‘Templeton–Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion.’ Well of course he has. It’s not as if they were going to overlook him, is it!

In the fellowship program, a diverse group of eminent journalists examine key areas in the broad field of science and religion through independent research as well as seminars and discussion groups, led by some of the world’s foremost physicists, cosmologists, philosophers, biologists, and theologians, at the University of Cambridge.

The broad field of science and religion – there is no such ‘field.’ They mean subject, but if they call it a field, that gives unwary people the impression that there is a genuine, respectable, established academic discipline of ScienceandReligion. There isn’t. There are lots of ‘institutes’ and conferences funded by Templeton, but that’s a different thing. And then look at that bizarre pile-up – ‘the world’s foremost physicists, cosmologists, philosophers, biologists, and theologians’ – four genuine items and then a joker at the end, wham.

After decades during which leading voices from science and religion viewed each other with suspicion and little sense of how the two areas might relate, recent years have brought an active pursuit of understanding how science may deepen theological awareness, for example, or how religious traditions might illuminate the scientific realm.

Because Templeton has been energetically shoveling money into that ‘pursuit’! Not because it’s a serious subject or an interesting branch of inquiry, but because a financier made a lot of money and the money is being used to fund the pursuit of bullshit.

Fellowship organizers note that rigorous journalistic examination of the region where science and theology overlap – as well as understanding the reasoning of many who assert the two disciplines are without common ground – can effectively promote a deeper understanding of the emerging dialogue.

How does one go about rigorous journalistic examination of something that doesn’t exist? How does one examine the region where science and theology overlap when there is no such region? Well, one doesn’t, of course, one just pockets the large sum of money and enjoys one’s visit to Cambridge.

At any rate – this is Mooney, and Mooney is this, and that’s that story.

Stanley Fish is being tricksy, as he generally is, but it’s a pretty crude form of tricksiness for a supposedly sophisticated literary ‘theorist,’ especially one who is reputed to have seen through Everything at least forty years ago.

He’s comparing secularism with its opposite by setting out what he takes to be their respective views.

Let those who remain captives of ancient superstitions and fairy tales have their churches, chapels, synagogues, mosques, rituals and liturgical mumbo-jumbo; just don’t confuse the (pseudo)knowledge they traffic in with the knowledge needed to solve the world’s problems.

This picture is routinely challenged by those who contend that secular reasons and secular discourse in general don’t tell the whole story; they leave out too much of what we know to be important to human life.

No they don’t, is the reply; everything said to be left out can be accounted for by the vocabularies of science, empiricism and naturalism; secular reasons can do the whole job.

Oh? Everything can be accounted for by the vocabularies of science, empiricism and naturalism? That’s the secular reply? I don’t believe it. I think most people clever enough to be secularist are also clever enough to realize that not everything can be accounted for, no matter what the vocabulary.

He goes on to make heavy weather of the difference between facts and values, and a book on the subject by one Steven Smith, and a brief acknowledgement that Hume got there first – and then abruptly ends with a sweeping claim that he hasn’t actually justified.

But no matter who delivers the lesson, its implication is clear. Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on.

And the bell rings and the students rush off to Beginning French.

Jerry Coyne points out another outbreak of godbothering from Francis Collins – which is all the more inappropriate (the apt word, for a change) now that Collins is director of the National Institutes of Health. (The outbreak is inappropriate, not the pointing it out.) The publisher does not omit to get in the obligatory slap at those god damn pesky impertinent inappropriate noisy New Atheists:

“Is there a God?” is the most central and profound question that humans ask. With the New Atheists gaining a loud voice in today’s world, it is time to revisit the long-standing intellectual tradition on the side of faith.

‘Is there a god?’ is not the most central and profound question that humans ask; far from it; at this stage of the game it could better be called the most futile time-wasting childish infatuated question that humans ask. The voice the ‘New Atheists’ have gained, if they have gained one, is really not all that loud compared to the voice the Old Theists have had and continue to have for the last however many thousands of years, so I really don’t see why so many people feel compelled to pitch such a huge fit about a few atheists finally plucking up the nerve to say atheist things aloud instead of under their breath in a closet when no one is home. I really don’t. I really don’t see why so many people are so god damn truculent about having to share a minuscule corner of the discourse with atheists. I don’t see why our ‘gaining a voice’ is treated as some kind of foul presumption.

At any rate (she said, smoothing herself down and coughing slightly and picking up the scattered objects that fell off the desk), what is this about revisiting ‘the long-standing intellectual tradition on the side of faith’? Had that ‘tradition’ fallen into desuetude? Not that I’ve noticed. It seems to me that the putative ‘long-standing intellectual tradition on the side of faith’ has been shouting away without a break since Aquinas was a schoolboy.

And that’s just the publisher’s blurb. Collins himself is worse…but check him out at Jerry’s, I’ve run out of time and (for the moment) patience. I’ll just say this. What I would like to know is, even if ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ is a stumper (and of course it is, in its way, as are so many questions of that kind), why does anyone think the answer to it could possibly be ‘God’? Why does anyone think the answer to it is obviously ‘God’? Why does anyone think that’s a good and satisfactory answer? Why does anyone think that’s a logical and reasonable and even inevitable answer? I don’t know. It seems to me ‘I don’t know’ is a better answer, and ‘we don’t know’ is better still. Saying ‘God’ sounds to me like saying ‘Janet’ or ‘Larry.’ It sounds like a risibly human, small, parochial answer – it sounds like saying an orange cat is the reason there is something rather than nothing.