Author: Ophelia Benson

Something more from that article by Paul Davies in the Atlantic, which answers a question I’ve been wondering about for a longish time.

Even if Homo sapiens as such may not be the unique focus of God’s attention, the broader class of all humanlike beings in the universe might be. This is the basic idea espoused by the philosopher Michael Ruse, an ardent Darwinian and an agnostic sympathetic to Christianity. He sees the incremental progress of natural evolution as God’s chosen mode of creation, and the history of life as a ladder that leads inexorably from microbes to man.

The question that’s been puzzling me is about Michael Ruse, because some of his work that I’ve read sounds quite religious and some of it doesn’t. Though I’m not entirely sure I understand what Davies means by ‘agnostic’ there – but it doesn’t matter much; the basic point is clear enough: Ruse is a theist. I’m relieved to get that straight. I did a N&C on a review of his a few months ago, picking at some woolly language – woolly language of just the kind that Davies uses in this article, if I remember correctly. Why will people do that? January, it was, now that I’ve looked it up.

People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions. There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs — and stays within these boundaries.

I said it in January, so I won’t bother saying too much of it again. But really – I do think that’s pretty woolly stuff. Pretty bogus symmetry. ‘Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions.’ Well, yes, but then science does a better job of coming up with answers that have a good shot at being true. And what is an ultimate question anyway, and why is religion better at asking them than anyone else? If the questions are just unanswerable, is it really to religion’s credit that it not only asks them, it claims to have answers? And the same applies to ‘aiming’ at giving meanings to various things. That’s just empty! It amounts to saying ‘Religion invents answers to ultimate questions and invents a meaning for the world and our place in it.’ And the domain thing seals it all off. ‘This is religion’s domain, where it’s okay to make everything up, and you don’t get to bring science or reason in here to this other domain and ask tiresome questions about all this meaning and all these ultimate questions.’ Come on…can’t people see what a cheat that is? That it’s just not grown-up to make special rules for themselves that way?

Oh well. If they want a domain, a domain they shall have. People like Davies and Ruse can have their domain where they get to have special rules, but the result will be that people who prefer to try to think rationally won’t take them seriously. At least not unless they do better than that.

The odd thing is that that review was published in a science magazine. Why, one wonders. A reader wondered the same thing.

Update: Phil Mole says that Davies’ description of Ruse is not really accurate; that Ruse is sympathetic to religion without actually believing its doctrines, and that his sympathy leads him to say woolly things at times, but he’s not as supportive of religion as Davies implies. I thought it would be fair to add that.

In case anyone wants to find out about the Wason test along with PM, here it is in one easy click.

[Note by Jerry S (Sorry OB, I’m invading your entry!)]: I programmed this four years ago; I’d do it slightly differently if I was programming it today – there are a couple of problems with it. However, it is a pretty rigorous experimental design (on the analysis page, there’s a link with technical details about the ‘between-subjects’ and ‘within-subjects’ aspects of the design). And the results, right at the end, are interesting.

Here is what one might consider another installment of an on-going discussion we’re having here about religion and the way its defenders and supporters and promoters and fans re-define it for purposes of persuasion or coercion. One example is from an article by Paul Davies in an old Atlantic (September 2003) I happened to read the other day: ‘E.T. and God.’ It’s basically about what the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for human religion, but along the way he makes this strange (yet very familiar) comment, after calling the dismissal of religion by the director of the SETI Institute’s Center for SETI Research ‘rather naive’:

Though many religious movements have come and gone throughout history, some sort of spirituality seems to be part of human nature. Even atheistic scientists profess to experience what Albert Einstein called a ‘cosmic religious feeling’ when contemplating the awesome majesty of the universe.

Well, what does that ‘though’ mean, for instance? Why is there a ‘though,’ why is there anything surprising or in need of explanation or at least acknowledgement via a ‘though’ in the fact that atheists can profess to experience some sort of emotion, probably awe, at the awesome universe? What is Davies actually saying there? That awe at the universe is the same thing, or the same sort of thing, or more or less the same thing, as believing in a deity? That is surely at least what he’s implying. Though the usual weasel-word, escape-hatch word, ‘spirituality’ appears in the middle to make the implication slightly more fuzzy. But what does spirituality mean then? Just awe at the universe? If so, surely it’s not incompatible with not believing in a deity – is it? Not in my book. I can feel awe at all sorts of things. I never call the feeling ‘spiritual,’ because that’s a word I’m violently allergic to – but I don’t mind calling it the sublime, for example, and at any rate I have some idea what it is. And it does not require belief in an omniscient benevolent omnipotent person who created us for a purpose and is taking care of us. And I think it’s a kind of cheat to pretend that it does, to conflate the two things, to mix them up and imply that they are inseparable.

We were talking about Darwinism and morality, among other things. Here is George C. Williams in Plan and Purpose in Nature as quoted by Richard Dawkins in the title essay of A Devil’s Chaplain:

With what other than condemnation is a person with any moral sense supposed to respond to a system in which the ultimate purpose in life is to be better than your neighbour at getting genes into future generations,…in which that message is always ‘exploit your environment, including your friends and relatives, so as to maximise your genes’ success…?

Dawkins then quotes George Bernard Shaw doubting evolution because he didn’t like its cruelty, H.G. Wells rejoicing in the cruelty, and Julian Huxley trying to derive some kind of ethics from it, then quotes Julian Huxley’s grandfather T.H. Huxley getting it right in his lecture ‘Evolution and Ethics’:

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

And then Dawkins says what he thinks of the matter, and what he says would doubtless suprise the many people who think all evolutionary thinkers and especially Dawkins conflate is with ought:

As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian…But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs…I have always held true to the closing words of my first book, ‘We, alone on earth, can rebel agains the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’

So. This is part of the picture. People at Twisty Sticks have, it seems to me, been taking it as axiomatic that everyone who believes natural selection has had some influence on human nature has some sort of ruthless right-wing agenda, but that just is not true.

Ah. I see via Normblog and Twisty Sticks that I’ve been neglecting a duty. That’s what I get for reading hastily and selectively because I’m catching up because I’m so far behind because I’ve been working 28 hours a day on this dictionary thing because my colleague kept saying We have to finish in a month no two weeks no a week no three days no an hour no right now, so like Miss Clavell I ran fast and faster, and had such a backlog of reading and posting you would not believe. So, anyway. Jew.

In case there are any of you even more behind than I am, that’s a counter-googlebomb, a googlebomb to counteract an anti-semitic googlebomb. If you have a website, do the same thing yourselves. Post that link to the wikipedia definition and it will drive the other one down the page.