Author: Ophelia Benson

Well great. Just great. Wonderful. Brilliant. Meera’s in India right now, and she was going to be presenting a paper at a science conference. Well, I hope to hell it wasn’t this one!

A gunman has burst into a science conference in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, opening fire and injuring at least five people, police said. The gunman escaped after firing his automatic rifle at the Indian Institute of Science…The victims were said to be scientists and laboratory technicians attending the conference.

Good move. Well done, gunman – that’s the ticket. Don’t want any pesky scientists cluttering up the place in India, do we. No – what possible use could scientists and lab technicians be in India?!

God damn it. I hope all the injuries are superficial. I hope millions of Indian schoolchildren, outraged by this assault on the hope of a better life, are fired with determination to become scientists themselves, and proceed to do exactly that – thus thwarting the plans of obscurantist thugs everywhere.

Well isn’t B&W up to date. Yes, it is. No sooner do I find Daniel Dennett’s comment on the Kitzmiller decision in my email and rush to post it, than I find a Spiegel interview with Daniel Dennett on evolution and ID.

Spiegel asks why evolution is so particularly troubling to religious people, compared with other scientific theories.

It counters one of the oldest ideas we have, maybe older even than our species…It’s the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You’ll never see a spear making a spear maker. You’ll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You’ll never see a pot making a potter. It is always the other way around and this is so obvious that it just seems to stand to reason.

And then pesky Darwin gummed up the works.

And he shows, hell no, not only can you get design from un-designed things, you can even get the evolution of designers from that un-design. You end up with authors and poets and artists and engineers and other designers of things, other creators — very recent fruits of the tree of life. And it challenges people’s sense that life has meaning…We are the only species that knows who we are, that knows that we have evolved. Our songs, art, books and religious beliefs are all ultimately a product of evolutionary algorithms. Some find that thrilling, others depressing.

Spiegel asks about Michael Ruse…

Michael is just trying to put the implications of Darwin’s insights into soft focus and to reassure people that there is not as much conflict between the perspective of evolutionary biology and their traditional ways of thinking.

Then they get on to the implications for religion and the deity.

One has to understand that God’s role has been diminished over the eons…When God is the master of ceremonies and doesn’t actually play any role any more in the universe, he’s sort of diminished and no longer intervenes in any way.

Spiegel offers the usual bit of boilerplate. ‘Natural science talks about life whereas religion deals with the meaning of life.’

Yes but does it? (I would have said had I been there, elbowing Dennett aside in my impatience to talk.) Does it really deal with the meaning of life? If so, how? If none of its truth claims are true, then what does it bring to the discussion of the meaning of life, or the dealing with it, that non-religious ideas can’t bring? That’s what no one who offers that bromide ever really seems to explain. At least not that I see.

So then Spiegel says the thing about moral standards – the other bit of boilerplate.

If that’s what religion does, then I don’t think it is such a silly idea. But it doesn’t. Religions at their best serve as excellent social organizers. They make moral teamwork a much more effective force than it otherwise would be. This, however, is a two-edged sword. Because moral teamwork depends to a very large degree on ceding your own moral judgment to the authority of the group. And that can be extremely dangerous, as we know.

Indeed we do.

At B&W he put the matter this way:

Gods have been given many job descriptions over the centuries, and science has conflicted with many of them. Astronomy conflicts with the idea of a god, the sun, driving a fiery chariot pulled by winged horses – a divine charioteer. Geology conflicts with the idea of a god who sculpted the Earth a few thousand years ago – a divine planet-former. Biology conflicts with the idea of a god who designed and built the different living species and all their working parts – a divine creator. We don’t ban astronomy and geology from science classes because they conflict with those backward religious doctrines, and we should also acknowledge that evolutionary biology does conflict with the idea of a divine creator and nevertheless belongs in science classes because it is good science.

The deity is just going to have to find other work. If steelworkers and blacksmiths have to, why shouldn’t the deity?

I think that what the expert scientists may have meant was that the theory of evolution by natural selection in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine . . . prayer-hearer, or master of ceremonies, or figurehead. That is true. For people who need them, there are still plenty of job descriptions for God that are entirely outside the scope of evolutionary biology.

There’s also the thing about turning up on cinnamon rolls and old pieces of cheese on toast. That’s good honest work, and the deity is just the right person to do it.

This again. I seem to have this argument every ten days or so. The issues are just never framed properly – instead they’re framed evasively and euphemistically, and how can anything be discussed properly when the air is clouded by evasion and euphemism? I ask you.

What argument? The free speech one. The one that swirls around the thought that free speech is not about the easy cases but about the hard ones. One version of that is the discussion of hypocrisy and double standards, as in Mark Steyn’s inaccurate whinge about Hampstead big guns who ‘lined up’ to defend Rushdie but wouldn’t (according to Steyn) line up to defend Lynette Burrows, and as in this one about Orhan Pamuk and David Irving. Why are people making free speech noises about Pamuk and not about Irving?

Two European writers have recently fallen foul of European governments for expressing their views about genocide. Both are threatened with trial and imprisonment for something they said or wrote. Yet one is supported by EU politicians and the international literati – who have rallied around to defend him from censorship and to champion the right of writers to speak freely – while the other has been ignored, or even told that he got what he deserved.

Yes. That’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It leaves a great deal out. It oversimplifies – drastically. The two writers didn’t say or write the same thing, about the same subject, in discussing the same genocide, with the same implications. That paragraph tries to make it look as if they did, but they didn’t. Just saying ‘for expressing their views about genocide’ and ‘for something they said or wrote’ is not good enough. You might as well say both Martin Luther King and Timothy McVeigh went to jail for protesting against the government. You might as well say that both Osama bin Laden and Irshad Manji are controversial. Both are true statements, but incomplete – to put it mildly.

This is bad news, because when it comes to free speech it’s all or nothing: we either have it or we don’t. And if we were to have free speech for one writer but not for another, then we wouldn’t have free speech at all.

Is that true? It seems to me to be quite untrue. It seems to me to be a rather stupid oversimplification, and unargued besides. Why is free speech all or nothing? Why do we either have it or not? Why can’t we have it in some things and not in others? As in fact we already do – for good or ill, or both. And why do we not have free speech at all if we have it for one writer but not another? What if one writer’s entire output consists of exhortations to murder certain groups of people? If that writer does not have free speech, does it follow that none of us do? I don’t offhand see why.

Brendan O’Neill does finally get around to saying that the two writers ‘could not be more different’. But then –

Yet their cases are the same: both could be incarcerated, not for physically harming another person or for damaging property, but for the words they spoke; both could have their liberty removed because they expressed views that the authorities – in Turkey and Austria – decree to be distasteful.

But that is not the point. That just evades the real point, which is much less easy to deal with. And that’s what is so irritating – free speech absolutists are so predictably apt to do that: to evade the real difficulties in their position by resorting to adjectives like ‘distasteful’ – or controversial, offensive, shocking, objectionable, or the like. As if the only issue were emotional reactions. But that is not the only issue, and it’s very dishonest to shove the real issue behind the sofa and hope no one will notice. Austria doesn’t make Holocaust denial illegal merely because it is ‘distasteful’ but because, rightly or wrongly, they think it is dangerous. Obviously there is plenty of room for argument on that: it’s an empirical question as well as a question of principle, and there’s a lot to say. But that is the issue, not anything so silly and trivial as distaste.