10.23.06

Marilynne Robinson on Dawkins

Posted in Science & Religion, Booknotes, Evolution at 5:25 pm by nemo

Harper’s review of Dawkins

The God Delusion

Marilynne Robinson

Richard Dawkins is an Oxford professor and the author of a series of best-selling books that popularize a version of evolutionary theory. According to Dawkins, evolution is driven by “replicators”—genes, and also “memes,” viruses of the mind that spread and persist in human populations. Those genes and memes that replicate most effectively become dominant, with every consequence for the natural world and for civilization and history. The usefulness of this notion, which does have the virtue of simplicity, is a question obscured by the demands Dawkins has placed on it. By his lights this is the universal etiology, a fully sufficient refutation of religion in every form and the basis for a new view of humankind. Under the name of Darwinism it has been thrown into the rhetorical wars that seem, to the combatants, to pit science against religion. As argument it has taken on the character of this environment, getting lost in the miasma of its own supposed implications.

It is never a surprise to find Dawkins full of indignation. In his new book, The God Delusion, he has turned the full force of his intellect against religion, and all his verbal skills as well, and his humane learning, too, which is capacious enough to include some deeply minor poetry. Truly this book is a sword which turneth every way, to judge by the table of contents at least. There is no doubt in Dawkins’s mind that the evils of the world are to be laid at the doorstep of the church, mosque, and synagogue, and that science must be our salvation. It is the “God delusion,” which has afflicted almost everyone almost anywhere through the whole of recorded time, that has made us behave so badly. And Science (by which he really means his version of Darwinism) is our potential rescuer from this vale of tears. We need only to become more Dawkins-like in our thinking. This is a fairly cheery view of things beside others on offer, at least as regards the ongoing life of the planet, which he seems to assume.

Still, it is a difficult thing to set reason aside, and the habit of critical thought, and the sense of the past, not to mention the morning news. While I was reading this hook, I noticed an article about a speech the British physicist Stephen Hawking delivered in Hong Kong. In it he said that the early colonization of other planets would be necessary to save humankind from extinction, given the likelihood of disaster that would render Earth uninhabitable. He mentioned nuclear war and biological weapons as probable agents of catastrophe. Another scientist, when asked for his view of Hawking’s remarks, noted that Hawking was speaking outside his area of expertise. Much better, said he, to think in the short term about burrowing under Antarctica.

I have never seen the suggestion anywhere that the threat of imminent catastrophe on a “biblical scale”—a phrase favored by journalists— which has hung over the world for more than half a century, might have consequences for the stability of the global public mind. Is it really any wonder so many people turn to mass-market apocalyptics? It is amazing, when the movers and shakers of the so-called postwar have devoted so much effort and rhetoric to policies with names like Mutual Assured Destruction, that anyone could be surprised to find some significant part of the populace reading up on End Times. But here is Richard Dawkins to dispel the clouds of fear and gloom — that is, religion. He is by profession a dedicated promoter of the Public Understanding of Science. In his view, understanding is clearly not to be achieved by looking at history, or at present or potential consequences of science and its practice for that same Public. I note these omissions because Dawkins implicitly defines science as a clear-eyed quest for truth, chaste as an algorithm, while religion is atavistic, mad, and mired in crime.

Since Dawkins’s declared intention in this book is to hearten the many atheists who, he is sure, exist, but who conceal their convictions for fear of disapproval or rejection, no doubt his tendentiousness is meant to be enjoyed by the like-minded, as is so much that is called “objectivity” in these fulminating times. Yet Dawkins is in earnest in presenting himself as a man in possession of liberating truth — another characteristic of the genre — and his readership is sure to be much wider than the crypto-atheist community. So it seems fair, if not strictly possible, to take him as seriously as he takes himself.

These are, certainly, troubled times. The tectonics of culture are suddenly active, and all the old rifts and stresses and pressures that seemed to have fallen dormant have awakened at once, with a great deal of portentous rumbling and spouting. The God Delusion is another instance of this phenomenon. Like so much of the contemporary clamor, it is out to name and denounce the great Satan, which in this case is religion. This view is commonplace now, in part because the institutions of religion, like the institutions of journalism and government, have done a great deal to trivialize or disgrace themselves lately.

The gravest questions about the institutions of contemporary science seem never to be posed, though we know the terrors of all-out conflict between civilizations would include innovations, notably those dread weapons of mass destruction, being made by scientists for any country with access to their skills. Granting for the purposes of argument that Dawkins is correct in the view that the majority of great scientists are atheists, we may then exclude religion from among the factors that recruit them to this somber work. We are left with nationalism, steady employment, good pay, the chance to do research that is lavishly funded and, by definition, cutting edge — familiar motives of a kind fully capable of disarming moral doubt. In any case, the crankiest imam, the oiliest televangelist, can, at his worst, only urge circumstances a degree or two farther toward the use of those exotic war technologies that are always ready, always waiting. If it is fair to speak globally of religion, it is also fair to speak globally of science.

There is a pervasive exclusion of historical memory in Dawkins’s view of science. Consider this sentence from his preface, which occurs in the context of his vision of a religion-free world: “Imagine . . . no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers.’” In a later chapter he condemns Jews for discouraging “marrying out” and complains that such “wanton and carefully nurtured divisiveness” is “a significant force for evil.” It is of course no criticism to say that he values the tradition of Judaism not at all, since this is only consistent with his view of religion in general. He seems unaware, however, that there was in fact significant intermarriage between Jews and gentiles in Europe as well as secularism and conversion among the Jews, and that this appears only to have fired the anti-Semitic imagination. While it is true that persecution of the Jews has a very long history in Europe, it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale — Jewishness was not religious or cultural, but genetic. Therefore no appeal could be made against the brute fact of a Jewish grandparent.

Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil “in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific eugenics theory.” But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it.

There is indeed historical precedent in the Spanish Inquisition for the notion of hereditary Judaism. But the fact that the worst religious thought of the sixteenth century can be likened to the worst scientific thought of the twentieth century hardly redounds to the credit of science. To illustrate the point: Dawkins tells the story of Edgardo Mortara, the Italian Jewish child taken from his family by the police in 1858 and reared by priests because he had been secretly baptized by a maid in his parents’ house. A terrible story indeed. And how might it have been worse? If the child had fallen, as in the next century so many would, into the hands of those who considered his Jewishness biological rather than religious and cultural. To Dawkins’s objection that Nazi science was not authentic science I would reply, first, that neither Nazis nor Germans had any monopoly on these theories, which were influential throughout the Western world, and second, that the research on human subjects carried out by those holding such assumptions was good enough science to appear in medical texts for fully half a century. This is not to single out science as exceptionally inclined to do harm, though its capacity for doing harm is by now unequaled. It is only to note that science, too, is implicated in this bleak human proclivity, and is one major instrument of it.

The nineteenth-century abolitionist, feminist, essayist, and ordained minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson made the always timely point that, in comparing religions, great care must be taken to consider the best elements of one with the best of the other, and the worst with the worst, to avoid the usual practice of comparing, let us say, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie with the Golden Rule. The same principle might be applied in the comparison of religion and science. To set the declared hopes of one against the real-world record of the other is clearly not useful, no matter which of them is flattered by the comparison. What is religion? It is described by Dawkins as a virtually universal feature of human culture. But there is, commingled with it, indisputably and perhaps universally, doubt, hypocrisy, and charlatanism. Dawkins, for his part, considers religion wholly delusional, and he condemns the best of it for enabling all the worst of it. Yet if religion is to be blamed for the fraud done in its name, then what of science? Is it to be blamed for the Piltdown hoax, for the long-credited deceptions having to do with cloning in South Korea? If by “science” is meant authentic science, then “religion” must mean authentic religion, granting the difficulties in arriving at these definitions.

I wish, then, to speak of science in the highest sense of the word, as the astonishingly fruitful human venture into understanding of the world and the universe. The reader may assume a somewhat greater admiration on my part for religion in the highest sense of the word, though I will not go into that here. Science thus defined does not claim to understand gravity, light, or time. This is a very short list of its mystifications, its inquiries, all of which are beautiful to ponder. These three are sufficient to persuade me that conclusions about the ultimate nature of things are, to say the least, premature, and that to suggest otherwise is unscientific. The finer-grained the image of reality physicists achieve, the more alien it appears to every known strategy of comprehension.

The odd thing about Dawkins’s work, considering his job description, is that it does not itself seem the product of a mind informed by the physics of the last century or so. A reader might find it instructive to start with his last chapter, in which he does acknowledge the fact of quantum theory and certain of its implications. This chapter is an interesting lens through which to consider the primary argument of the book, especially his use of physicality and materiality as standards for determining the real and objective existence of anything, along with his use of commonplace experience as the standard of reasonableness and — a favorite word — probability. He does this despite his awareness that the physical and the material are artifacts of the scale at which reality is perceived. For us, he says, “matter is a useful construct.” Quoting Steve Grand, a computer scientist who specializes in artificial intelligence, he offers these thoughts on the fluidity of matter: “Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn’t make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.” Earlier, Dawkins attributes the origins of the illusion that we have a soul to the persistence of a childish or primitive tendency toward dualism — “Our innate dualism prepares us to believe in a ’soul’ which inhabits the body rather than being integrally part of the body. Such a disembodied spirit can easily be imagined to move on somewhere else after the death of the body.” Yet the image of deeper reality invoked by him here suggests a basis for the ancient intuition of the persistence of the self despite the transiency of the elements of its physical embodiment.

I do not wish to recruit science to the cause of religion. My point is simply that Dawkins’s critique of religion cannot properly be called scientific. His thinking is reminiscent of logical positivism. That school, however, which meant to carry out a purge of language it considered meaningless, specifically metaphysics and theology, by subjecting statements to the “scientific” test of verifiability, plunged into all sorts of interesting difficulty, as rigorous thought tends to do. Dawkins acknowledges no difficulty. He has a simple-as-that, plain-as-day approach to the grandest questions, unencumbered by doubt, consistency, or countervailing information.

The chapter titled “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God” reflects his reasoning at its highest bent. He reasons thus: A creator God must be more complex than his creation, but this is impossible because if he existed he would be at the wrong end of evolutionary history. To be present in the beginning he must have been unevolved and therefore simple. Dawkins is very proud of this insight. He considers it unanswerable. He asks, “How do they [theists] cope with the argument that any God capable of designing a universe, carefully and foresightfully tuned to lead to our evolution, must be a supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide?” And “if he [God] has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know,” and “a first cause of everything.. . must have been simple and therefore, whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers).” At Cambridge, says Dawkins, “I challenged the theologians to answer the point that a God capable of designing a universe, or anything else, would have to be complex and statistically improbable. The strongest response I heard was that I was brutally foisting a scientific epistemology upon an unwilling theology.” Dawkins is clearly innocent of this charge against him. Whatever is being foisted here, it is not a scientific epistemology.

Evolution is the creature of time. And, as Dawkins notes, modern cosmologies generally suggest that time and the universe as a whole came into being together. So a creator cannot very well be thought of as having attained complexity through a process of evolution. That is to say, theists need find no anomaly in a divine “complexity” over against the “simplicity” that is presumed to characterize the universe at its origin. (I use these terms not because I find them appropriate to the question but because Dawkins uses them, and my point is to demonstrate the flaws in his reasoning.) In this context, Dawkins cannot concede, even hypothetically, a reality that is not time-bound, that does not conform to Darwinism as he understands it. Yet in an earlier book, Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins remarks that “further developments of the [big bang] theory, supported by all available evidence, suggest that time itself began in this mother of all cataclysms. You probably don’t understand, and I certainly don’t, what it can possibly mean to say that time itself began at a particular moment. But once again that is a limitation of our minds.. . .”

That God exists outside time as its creator is an ancient given of theology. The faithful are accustomed to expressions like “from everlasting to everlasting” in reference to God, language that the positivists would surely have considered nonsense but that does indeed express the intuition that time is an aspect of the created order. Again, I do not wish to abuse either theology or scientific theory by implying that either can be used as evidence in support of the other; I mean only that the big bang in fact provides a metaphor that might help Dawkins understand why his grand assault on the “God Hypothesis” has failed to impress the theists.

The God Delusion has human history and civilization as its subjects, inevitably, considering the pervasiveness of religion. Dawkins dwells particularly on Christianity, since he is most familiar with it, and because its influence is and has been very great. On the one hand, he professes a lingering fondness for the Church of England and regrets that familiarity with the Bible, a great Literature, is in decline. On the other hand, he finds the Old Testament barbarous and abhorrent and the New Testament mawkish and fairly abhorrent as well. His treatment of these texts depends to a striking degree on a “remarkable paper” by John Hartung, an associate professor of anesthesiology and an anthropologist. The paper, titled “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In- Group Morality,” originally published in 1995, is available on the Web. Dawkins and his wife are thanked in the acknowledgments. Curious readers can form their own impression of its character. A sympathetic review by Hartung of Kevin MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples is also of interest. These are murky waters, the kind toward which Darwinism has often tended to migrate.

Dawkins says, “I need to call attention to one particularly unpalatable aspect of its [the Bible’s] ethical teaching. Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love thy neighbor’ didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew.” As for the New Testament interpretation of the text, “Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.” Pigs being, of course, gentiles.

There are two major objections to be made to this reading. First, the verse quoted here, Leviticus 19:18, does indeed begin, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people,” language that allows a narrow interpretation of the commandment. But Leviticus 19:33—34 says “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. . . . You shall love the alien as yourself.” In light of these verses, it is wrong by Dawkins’s own standards to argue that the ethos of the law does not imply moral consideration for others. (It would be interesting to see the response to a proposal to display this Mosaic law in our courthouses.) Second, Jesus provided a gloss on 19:18, the famous Parable of the Good Samaritan. With specific reference to this verse, a lawyer asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells a story that moves the lawyer to answer that the merciful Samaritan—a non-Jew— embodies the word “neighbor.” That the question would be posed to Jesus, or by Luke, is evidence that the meaning of the law was not obvious or settled in antiquity. In general, Dawkins’s air of genteel familiarity with Scripture, though becoming in one aware as he is of its contributions to the arts, dissipates under the slightest scrutiny.

Nor is Dawkins’s argument from history impressive. He cheerfully posits a “Zeitgeist” that wafts us to ever higher states of ethical sensitivity, granting lapses, specifically those associated with Hitler and Stalin: “We are forced to realize that Hitler, appalling though he was, was not quite as far outside the Zeitgeist of his time as he seems from our vantage-point today. How swiftly the Zeitgeist changes — and it moves in parallel, on a broad front, throughout the educated world.” Dawkins fails to note that the racial anti-Semitism that arose in Germany in the later nineteenth century had appeared to recede, until Hitler and others revived it. The article on anti- Semitism in the 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1911. describes the movement as a German “craze” that had “shown little activity since 1893.” According to the article, “While it remained a theory of nationality and a fad of the metaphysicians, it made considerable noise in the world without exercising much practical influence.” So, although Dawkins’s Zeitgeist might seem a harmless fudge, a spiritus ex machina meant to rescue his Darwinian atheism from the charges of bleakness and emptiness, it excuses his consistent inattentiveness to history. It is precisely the swiftness with which the Zeitgeist can change that makes it profoundly unworthy of confidence.

If the only bad effect of the notion to yield a highly selective reading of the past by dismissing the modem horrors as anomaly, that in itself would he grounds for objection. But it enables a misreading of the history it chooses to acknowledge. For example, Dawkins quotes a passage from an essay by T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s contemporary and champion, in which Huxley says the black man will not “be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival [that is, the white man], in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.” Dawkins cringes at this, but, he says, “good historians don’t judge statements from past times by the standards of their own.” He finds evidence for his advancing moral Zeitgeist in the crudeness of Huxley’s racism: “The whole wave keeps moving, and even the vanguard of an earlier century (T. H. Huxley is the obvious example) would find itself way behind the laggers of a later century.”

But *was* Huxley in the vanguard? The essay from which Dawkins quotes, “Emancipation — Black and White,” published in 1865, is an explicit rejection of the belief in racial equality active in America before and for some time after the Civil War. Huxley dismisses “standards” that had long been salient among his contemporaries. He is saying that emancipation may well prove to have very mingled consequences — “emancipation may convert the slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperised man” — and that the egalitarian hopes the movement inspired should be rejected. This was the crucial period of Reconstruction and of the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which established the full rights of citizenship to everyone born or naturalized in this country. Its passage was the work of emancipationists, and it was meant to create meaningful political equality for African Americans, among others. The vanguard in the period in which Huxley wrote were those Christian abolitionists whose intentions he dismissed as, of course, at odds with science. Huxley’s racism, like Hitler’s, is not a standard from which ineluctable progress can be inferred but instead a proof of the power of atavism.

Dawkins allows that our upward moral drift is a “meandering sawtooth” — he is admired for his prose — but he seems not to be alert to historical specifics. The United States never suffered a more grievous moral setback than when it allowed thinking like Huxley’s to make a dead letter of the 14th Amendment. As for the lesser issues of justice that arose in the wake of slavery, Huxley had this to say: “whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward Lie between Nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy.” No, he wasn’t joking.

Finally, there is the matter of atheism itself, Dawkins finds it incapable of belligerent intent — “why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?” It is a peculiarity of our language that by war we generally mean a conflict between nations, or at least one in which both sides are armed. There has been persistent violence against religion —I n the French Revolution, in the Spanish Civil War, in the Soviet Union, in China. In three of these instances the extirpation of religion was part of a program to reshape society by excluding certain forms of thought, by creating an absence of belief. Neither sanity nor happiness appears to have been served by these efforts. The kindest conclusion one can draw is that Dawkins has not acquainted himself with the history of modern authoritarianism.

Indeed, Dawkins makes a bold attack on tolerance as it is manifested in society’s permitting people to rear their children in their own religious traditions. He turns an especially cold eye on the Amish:

“There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of ‘diversity’ and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture.”

The fact that the Amish are pacifists whose way of life burdens this beleaguered planet as little as any to be found in the Western world merits not even a mention.

Yet Dawkins himself has posited not only memes but, since these mind viruses are highly analogous to genes, a meme pool as well. This would imply that there are more than sentimental reasons for valuing the diversity that he derides. Would not the attempt to narrow it only repeat the worst errors of eugenics at the cultural and intellectual level? When the Zeitgeist turns Gorgon, the impulses toward cultural and biological eugenics have proved to be one and the same. It is diversity that makes any natural system robust, and diversity that stabilizes culture against the eccentricity and arrogance that have so often called themselves reason and science.

© 2006 Harper’s Magazine Foundation

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53 Comments »

1. Zak Kilhoffer said,

   January 13, 2007 at 3:17 pm

   “The fact that the Amish are pacifists whose way of life burdens this beleaguered planet as little as any to be found in the Western world merits not even a mention.”

   Dawkins didn’t argue that the Amish are as harmful as fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. He only pointed out that diversity is a sorry reason to deny yourself of the conveniences, pleasures, and medicines of modern life. Furthermore, though a note-worthy fraction of Amish children leave their communities in their teens, the majority have been sufficiently brainwashed to the point that they never even LEARN about modern ways of life.

   The Amish people aren’t a burden on our society, but have they done anything to contribute to it?

   I find it humorous that Robinson tried using the Bible to justify tolerance. This is just ridiculous, as is anything you try to support with Biblical reference. No matter which version of the bible you read (original Hebrew text, NIV, King James, etc.), you can find material to support virtually ANY feelings you have. Just look at the Westborough Baptist Church for a modern example. When you find seemingly irreconcileable verses, you must choose one or the other to live by. Take enough of these scenarios, and you’ve got your own personalized religion. If the Bible were clear-cut, then why are there (to my knowledge) hundreds of denominations?

2. Ben Dueholm said,

   January 31, 2007 at 11:15 am

   Furthermore, though a note-worthy fraction of Amish children leave their communities in their teens, the majority have been sufficiently brainwashed to the point that they never even LEARN about modern ways of life.

   Most of us live substantially the lives our parents raised us to live–with all our “conveniences, pleasures, and medicines.” We don’t leave. Are we ‘brainwashed’?

3. Dan Wilkewitz said,

   February 8, 2007 at 1:24 am

   I sat and read about a quarter of Dawkin’s book in B&N and searched for some rebuttal and found Marilynne Robinson’s article here. I appreciate her response to what I see as Dawkin’s clearly selective reasoning in his positioning of religion as the great evil - fully delusional. To be an atheist is a deep convenience. How refreshing it must be to be in charge of the universe. Dawkin’s arrogance is his high business and this business runs by its own rules, only vaguely resembling the science he holds so passionately dear. I agree with Ravi Zacharias who said (in paraphrase) that atheism is not a rational decision, but rather a moral one. It’s prime focus is to remove external constraints so that one can live as one wishes, without true regard to an authority. Dawkin’s imagines himself as a liberator. In reality, he is a proponent of the first lie told.

4. David Charlton said,

   February 20, 2007 at 3:01 pm

   The Amish people aren’t a burden on our society, but have they done anything to contribute to it?
   In reply to this statement - must every group justify a contribution to society? And what, exactly, constitutes a contribution? The Amish are people of peace, which seems to me to be a tremendous contribution in our war-torn world. They are environmentalists, although I don’t know if they would use that word to describe themselves. Amish farms are a model of sustainability and taking care about reliance upon chemicals. They are not materialistic and debt-ridden, as so much of our society. So it seems to me that a peace-loving, environmentally sensitive, economically sane group contributes a tremendous amount to our society.

5. Andrew Krause said,

   March 6, 2007 at 6:54 pm

   Robinson’s critique of Dawkins is perhaps the most intelligent and apparently rational I’ve seen. However, it was ultimately unsatisfying and unconvincing by virtue of its glowing omissions and twisted semantics. The most egregious material error she makes is to dismiss Dawkins’ strongest argument on God’s plausibility (God must be greater and hence more improbable than His creation) by giving a reasonably good attack on his secondary weaker co-argument based on evolutionary tautology. She then dismisses the whole thing without addressing the main point simply stating it has “failed to impress theists”. Only those caught in irrational dogma could fail to acknowledge the power of this argument. It also predates Dawkins and has never been definitively countered by any theist or philosopher without resorting to faith or dogma.

   As a scientist, my main objection to Robinson however is her implicit labeling of science as a de facto religion though she never so states explicitly. She does that to give herself license to level her perceived good and evil in each. She would have us believe that science is no better than religion as both are responsible for dangerous theories and destruction. This is where she so skillfully twists and contorts semantics. Science is not the atom bomb or eugenics. Science is the process that produced both of these and in the later case, also overturned it, as science often does its conjectures.

   Yes, one can make the argument that science has parallels to religion. They both have principles, products, icons, and priesthoods of a sort I suppose. The product of science is technology – often misused. Some scientists can form an influential priesthood for awhile it seems, obscuring the search for truth. But in science truth eventually prevails because the core and definition of Science is the scientific method. And this is nothing more than reason and logic skeptically applied to the development of testable hypotheses about the universe. This is at the heart of Robinson’s obfuscation.

   Science, in proper contextual contrast to Robinson’s argument at least, is not it’s technology, it’s practitioners, or it’s facts and theories. There is no such thing as “bad science” in this context. There are bad scientists, dangerous technologies, and false theories (temporary unless codified by religious/governmental dogma). And I might add that what is bad about these things is usually how they are used and manipulated by those in power, who tend to believe in god(s).

   Robinson purposely, I believe, refuses to acknowledge Dawkin’s core thesis, namely, that reason and skeptical inquiry (at the core of science) are good and faith (as he defines it) and dogma (at the core of most religions) is bad. If we were only to discard the delusion of faith without evidence and replace it with reason and skeptical inquiry we would be far better off as a species.

6. Blackblade said,

   March 9, 2007 at 11:08 am

   An interesting conversation would be, I think, to ask ‘why are so many of the world’s great scientists atheists ?’. Were they brought up in theistic or atheistic environments ?

   Statistically, there are a far higher percentage of scientist atheists than the norm for the population.

   Therefore, since they are derived from the host population, something must have rendered them more atheistic than the norm.

   Could it be that ‘the Scientific method’ (Science is simply latin for knowledge, it is meaningless unless accompanied by an area Physical Science, Biological Science etc etc), an approach which treats claims/hypotheses/derivations sceptically, starts them questioning the tenets of their religion, whichever one it may be, and that under sceptical and detailed testing the claims of any religion can be shown to be contradictory, illogical and, in some cases, provably fallacious.

   From there, it’s a very simple step to realise that if the fundamental rationale for a religion is faith and that there are no provable elements then the claims of one faith look remarkably like the claims for any other.

   Is Christianity ‘correct’ and Islam ‘incorrect’ or vice versa ? There is no logical answer to that question only one based on belief. So, whose belief is correct ?

7. Casiano P. Mayor Jr. said,

   March 9, 2007 at 3:55 pm

   Marillynne Robinson has cleanly exposed Richard Dawkins as a charlatan in science in the same sense as the Christian televangilists who preach that the Bible should not be interpreted but taken literally are in religion. Dawkins is not searching for “truth” but is just another fanatic on the other side of the cultural divide.

8. Blackblade said,

   March 12, 2007 at 12:06 pm

   I have to say Casiano that I don’t see it that way. She distorts what he says and then points out that the distortion has fallacies - but they’re ones that she adds herself.

   As has already been said in this thread by several individuals (including me) science is a method, nothing more. It is not in and of itself truth and Dawkins very honestly highlights this; pointing out several cases where heretofore ‘certainties’ have been abandoned and holding this out as laudable.

   The scientific method, as has been pointed out, does not always work from fact to hypothesis but, frequently, the other way around. This is seized on by some to contend that science (usually with a capital S) is the same as a faith.

   However, that ignores one major difference. Both faith and science use hypotheses and then endeavour to see if the facts fit them, true. But, faith will not permit the abandonment of the hypothesis if new facts emerge which don’t fit the hypothesis. The scientific method does.

9. Paul H. Andrews said,

   March 16, 2007 at 9:44 pm

   Andrews said,
   March 16, 2007, at about 10 o’clock

   Richard Dawkins’ book about the God-delusion is a collection of learned (and
   not so learned) ideas, clear (and not so clear) thinking, convincing (and
   unconvincing) arguments–allegedly about God. The key terms used both by
   Dawkins and his critics, however, such as “God,” “science,” and “faith,” are
   not defined clearly enough to make extended intelligible arguments–one way
   or the other. Clear language is the first problem to be solved. As Socrates
   –or was it Plato?–long ago demonstated, issues become much clearer when
   key terms are defined. In this case, I suggest that each person who wants to
   participate in the discussion about the “God delusion” start with his/her
   linguistic clarification of the term “God.” Such a start may surprisingly reveal
   that this intense argument is not primarily about God after all and that apparent
   disagreements tend to dissolve or metamorphose.

10. Casiano P. Mayor Jr. said,

    March 19, 2007 at 8:29 am

    I was glad to find out Saturday that somebody has commented on my comment. Well, thanks Blackblade for giving me the opportunity to elaborate on it. I wrote that comment at almost 12 midnight, Saudi Arabian time, and was in a hurry to post it and opted to make a two-liner.

    I have taken notes on your comments and those of Andrew Krause that Marilynne Robinson distorted some of Richard Dawkins views. I won’t give any word on this particular observation because I haven’t read Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion. Here in Saudi Arabia, where I work as an office employee, books like it are not allowed to come in.

    But surely I see glaring flaws in some of Dawkins’s arguments. Among these is his idea about “our innate dualism.” I zero in on this because Robinson quoted him on this particularly case and, considering Robinson’s reputation as a writer, I presume she won’t misquote Dawkins just to suit an “insidious” end.

    Let me repeat the quote here for analysis. “Our innate dualism prepares us to believe in a ‘soul’ which inhibits the body rather than being integrally part of the body. Such a disembodied spirit can easily be imagined to move on somewhere else after the death of the body.”

    That’s “hocus pocus” logic. Dawkins conveniently dismisses the idea that the ‘soul’ is a separate entity from the body and postulated that it is an integral part of the body as if it were a mathematical given or constant like a logarithm. But come to think of it, how did he arrive at the conclusion that the soul is an integral part of the body? There is no concrete evidence for both ideas and, ergo, there could be no definite conclusion that one is right and the other is wrong.

    I am aware that much of the conclusions made in science are based on inference. For instance, scientists have inferred gravity from the observation that objects in earth fall instead of soaring up. It is likened to a magnet, although we have seen magnets but none of us – including Isaac Newton – has seen gravity. Simply put, gravity is defined as a “downward pull” of an object but can’t be described like a magnet or other physical objects.

    In the case of the ‘soul’ how can we infer whether it is a separate entity within the body or an integral part of the body?

    There are books that deal on the subject of the ‘soul’ like “Embraced by the Light” and “A Glimpse of Eternity.” Pardon me for forgetting the names of their authors, but they tell about their “near death” experiences during which the claim to have seen their bodies being mourned when their souls traveled in “astral space” after they were pronounced “clinically dead.” But, of course, science will not even raise a brow to investigate such claims simply because their testimonies can’t be subjected to lab tests. That’s the same case with the paranormal or psychic phenomena.
    Also, there have been cases of people with cancer being cured by “pray over” and faith healing after doctors pronounced their illnesses to be terminal and had given them definite time to live. But science does not seem to care investigating such cases as if do not happen at all. Worse, many men of science would immediately dismiss such incidents as hoaxes and then give armchair explanations.

    So I beg to disagree with, Blackblade, when he said that “… faith and science use hypothesis and endeavor to see if the facts fit them, true. But faith will not permit the abandonment of the hypothesis if new facts emerge which doesn’t fit the hypothesis. The scientific method does.”

    When other “realities” like psychic phenomena occur, science – or more appropriately physical science - does not abandon its “materialist” hypothesis (I prefer to call it prejudice) to accommodate the idea that there are “realities” that go beyond science and human reason.

    Andrew Krause made the observation that Robinson failed to address Dawkins’s “strongest argument on God’s plausibility (God must be greater and hence more improbable than His creation) by giving a reasonably good attack on his secondary weaker co-argument based on evolutionary tautology.”

    Krause added: “She then dismisses the whole thing without addressing the main point simply stating that it has ‘failed to impress the theists’”. I can empathize with Robinson on this, simply because Dawkins has been so dogmatic in his argument that God should be made part of the evolutionary process, leaving no room for such idea of God being outside space and time. Dawkins’s Science, to quote Robinson, is “his version of Darwinism.”

    Dawkins is not the first atheist intellectual to ruffle the feathers of religion, particularly Christianity. In the 19th century, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche challenged the foundation of Christianity and predicted its demise. Then came Bertrand Russell. But despite Nietzsche’s bold prediction, Christianity has stood the test of time, so the speak. Why?

    The answer is articulated by Dan Brown, author of the Da Vince Code, that there are people who undergo “religious experience” that change their lives completely. I suppose this is the same experience that made C. S. Lewis turn to religion from atheism and Charles Colson, especial counsel for former president Richard Nixon, to abandon politics and take up his ministry for Christ.

    My own “religious experience” prompted me to go back to Christianity where I found peace of mind after undergoing a tumultuous past that turned me into an alcoholic when I lost God while I was studying in a secular university in Manila where I took anthropology as an “elective” subject, i.e. not required.

    It was a long, painful struggle back to the faith, particularly because I was initially repulsed by Christian books, including those of Norman Vincent Peale. I gradually turned to God after reading the book “Peace of Mind” by Jewish psychoanalyst Joshua Loth Liebman. The change was gradual and then firmly rooted when I learned to – in Lewis’s words – make faith a habit.

    I have read Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” and, as far as I can remember, he has not shut the door on the possibility of God’s existence. Einstein himself believed in God, who “doesn’t play dice,” although his belief on the divine is much influenced by Baruch Espinos’s idea of “indefinable” God.

    I agree with Krause that there are “bad scientists” but not “bad science”. But I should add that science should be made a tool to pursue “knowledge,” regardless of where it will to, instead of shutting itself to things that can only be proven in lab tests. Science has its own limitations and it is inevitable that where science ends, religion begins.

    A few days ago, I read in the online edition of The New York Sunday magazine about “dark matter” and “dark energy” which suggests that science is in its infancy. Indeed, I believe that science is still a baby in a cradle and should not be taken as a new “god” to be worshipped. I also believed that science and religion are two different tools with the same purpose and should not be pitted against each other.

11. Blackblade said,

    March 20, 2007 at 6:53 am

    Interesting post Casiano - thank you.

    I would strongly agree with some of your postulations; science is definitely in its infancy - our knowledge of the universe is tiny and the more we seem to discover the more we discover there is to find out. I find that unbelievably exciting but, I know, others find it deeply disturbing. science is NOT something to be worshipped - indeed, since it is simply a method that would be bizarre and illogical. science cannot, now, explain everything; our knowledge, for example, of all the mechanisms of the human body is limited and, in some areas, very crude.

    However, where I differ, is in my view that what now appears unprovable and ‘magical’ may be perfectly amenable to investigation and examination in the future. For example, Einstein predicted the behaviour of Bose-Einstein Condensate (a state of matter that occurs very very close to absolute zero) long before the technology existed to prove or disprove it in the lab. Once the technology to actually measure and test this was developed it was then possible to prove that he was right but, equally, if that had shown he was incorrect then the theory would have been abandoned.

    The existence, or otherwise, of a ’soul’ can’t be proven currently. It may be possible to do so in future. We may discover that there is an electromagnetic (or some other) field generated by the body and call that a soul. We may even discover that it persists for a short while after corporeal death. Scientists are forever being accused of being materialist; given some of the work on Quantum Physics and the like, I think that’s a little unfair. Many of the things that are now testable were, heretofore, unproven and seemed very strange.

    So, I don’t think that, in general, science is ‘completely dismissive’ of evidence contrary to a current theory. However, the standard of evidence required is quite stringent. People’s recollections of events is extremely shaky evidence; I have seen an individual stand up in court and, under oath, swear that a car arrived from the North when the driver of said car and all the physical evidence indicated it had come from the South. The witness was not lying intentionally; the way our brains work is such that we fit what we see to internal models and patterns. However, it does go some way to answering the question as to why individual testimony is usually discounted unless backed up by provable facts.

    Let me state for the record; I don’t believe it’s provable that there is no god and, as a young man, I fervently believed in one. However, on the basis of the evidence I now find it very, very unlikely. And, even if there were one, which one ? The Christian/Judaic/Islamic/Norse/Roman/ ? If you move towards the prime mover type theology then, yes, you move into an area where disproving god becomes impossible. However, in so doing, you move into an area where there is no evidence for any particular religious dogma/approach. Instead, you have what looks far more like a force of nature.

    If, on the other hand, you try to promote one particular form of religion then you run into the fundamental inconsistensies and provable fallacies that each of the holy books contains. There is, for example, much in the bible that can be disproven; that then leads people to ‘interpret’ it but then you’re on a very slippery slope indeed where words can mean whatever you want them to.

    I find no threat in religion; as I said I have many religious friends and we have these kind of discussions regularly (usually after a drink I have to concede). I’m very happy for you if it provides you with succour, meaning and a moral framework.

    However, for me, I no longer have any faith and, until I read Dawkin’s book, would have described myself as an agnostic (essentially, I had a deist philosophy that you couldn’t disprove god but and a force which we could call god might exist). However, having read it, I found myself convinced of the logic that such a deist god would, essentially, not really be a god in any sense that most people define ‘god’. So, reluctantly at first, I would now describe myself as an atheist.

    That doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in anything; I believe that you SHOULD have the right to read any book you choose. I believe in equality of opportunity for all irrespective of colour, creed, sex, orientation. I believe in the rule of law (for all, no exemptions for those that create the law). I believe in freedom of expression. I could go on but I think you get the point.

    Look forward to your response.

    Matt (Blackblade … that’s my motorcycle, but that’s another story)

    PS. I use coComment (www.cocomment.com) to track all my conversations so I don’t have to go back to each individual forum to find out if anyone has responded. You can find all mine at http://www.cocomment.com/comments/blackblade

12. Deicide said,

    March 21, 2007 at 9:46 pm

    Funny; an office employee in Saudi Arabia, where such books are not allowed. Dismemberment, decapitation style executions and other religiously founded ‘joys’ are. I have spoken to many ex-pats who live in that country and all they can talk about is the money. But is it really worth it?

13. hamletta said,

    March 26, 2007 at 8:58 pm

    The Amish are people of peace, which seems to me to be a tremendous contribution in our war-torn world.

    They also invented all the really good desserts.

    But seriously, what about their forgiveness and mercy toward the family of the man who murdered their daughters? If that wasn’t a lesson in walking the talk, I’ll eat my hat.

    I think Dawkins is a twit, myself. I’m a Lutheran, so I’ve got 500 years’ worth of complex theology to deal with, as befits a religion started by a bunch of German academics and lawyers. I see Dawkins refuting 4th-grade Sunday School lessons, and it’s not particularly impressive.

    Wake me up when he takes on Kierkegaard.

14. Andrew Krause said,

    March 28, 2007 at 1:02 pm

    I’d like to address the 3/19 post of Casiano P. Mayor Jr. First, I appreciate the mannered attempt at trying to make a logical argument as opposed to your 3/9 post that was simply an unsupported attack and unreasoned conclusion. Unfortunately, your later post exposes your biases and ignorance in that you make a common mistake of dogmatists and bad scientists, you try to find and show only the evidence that supports your beliefs.

    As evidence of this, you rail against science’s apparent unwillingness to study near death experiences (NDEs). A simple Googling on the matter would have shown you how wrong you are. But apparently you had your mind made up before you made this ignorant allegation and didn’t bother checking. There are a number of scientists studying this elusive phenomenon from various neuromedical and ethnographic cross-cultural perspectives. Perhaps you might want to start with Dr. Susan Blakemore who has authored a book and numerous papers on the subject. Given your disposition however, I don’t think you’ll like what you find. Although NDE’s cannot yet be fully dismissed as having some supernatural connection (nothing really can - it’s the same problem as disproving God - it can’t be done) they appear to be the natural result of a dying/anoxic occipital lobe.

    You make a similar argument for intercessory prayer. While there is lots of anecdotal evidence like the kind you cite, nothing has ever stood up to scientific rigor. Perhaps you haven’t read about it but there have been scientific studies testing the effectiveness of intercessory prayers across several religions including Christianity. None show a significant effect over chance (some cancers just naturally go into remission whether you’re Christian, Hindu, or atheist). And one might think that in thousands of years of such reports like yours that something definitive would have emerged beyond just word of mouth or mass delusion (yes, I’ve studied such “miracles” like that at Fatima). But there, alas, again you will come up short. If I saw and confirmed such convincing evidence, I would change my beliefs immediately.

    Now I would like to address the issue of dualism where you attack Dawkins. Here I believe you are on firmer ground, not because Dawkins is wrong, but because HIS semantics and logic are occasionally strained and murky. Here, you might well want to read Sam Harris’s works (The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation), who takes spirituality much more seriously scientifically and who, I believe, puts dualism and the “soul” in much better perspective. I am not sure you fully understand dualism (otherwise known in my circles as the Mind/Brain problem) from a scientific perspective but I’m not going to explain it fully here unless requested other than through my counter arguments to yours. One problem is semantics; what is a soul? Well I don’t want to argue the semantics so let me state plainly the definition I’ll use which is probably similar to Dawkins. It is the mind - our conscious and unconscious thoughts, personality traits, cognitive functions, feelings, memories, (senses in some sort of incorporeal way?), etc. Let’s leave the “spark of God”, as I often hear preached to me, out of it since I’ve never heard anyone give a rational definition of what that is.

    You are arguing for the mind (soul) as separate from the brain from a supernatural perspective, i.e., for it to be able to go to heaven without a body/brain. So first let me ask you to provide rational evidence for this. There is none and the burden is on you my friend. But let’s set this aside. As Blackblade points out, science is not dismissive of mind surviving the body and even physicists (see Tipler’s Omega Point Theory) have taken the possibility of resurrection of past minds seriously and even provided a totally scientific (non-superstitious) hypothesis for it (though it is currently on the far fringe). No God needed! Kurzweil also argues for the inherent duality of mind and brain as he postulates that we will one day be able to download our minds into machines. But this still takes a materialistic path, the mind must have some substrate for it’s computation and there is no evidence of how any complex electromagnetic phenomena can otherwise be sustained. Dawkins is implicitly acknowledging this fact.

    You basically say, “there is no concrete evidence” for the mind’s dependence on substrate (brain or other computing infrastructure). This is ridiculous. There is evidence for nothing else and the evidence supporting this is right in front of your nose. It’s so obvious that Dawkins probably felt it was unnecessary to establish its foundation or elaborate. The effects of brain injuries, drugs, psychostimulation and many other avenues attest to it. Where the brain is affected the mind follows, and what the mind pursues induces physical changes in the brain, and so on. Let me turn the tables on you a moment and let’s say the separate soul you believe exists does. Assuming you are a fairly standard Christian who believes in the afterlife please answer the following questions - take your best guess, they’re only speculative.

    1. If you have a stroke that destroys your ability to speak and understand language does that part of your mind go to heaven ahead of you?

    2. At what point does a human get a soul, at conception? What happens to the souls of precognitive forms e.g., blastocysts? Do they develop thinking in the afterlife even though they have no human/earthy senses or experience?

    There are enumerable published cases of major personality changes caused by accidents, disease, drug use, and other phenomenon not necessary caused by choices of the subject (for which he would otherwise be liable to God). One early well-documented case was that of Phineas Gage, a 19th century railroad worker, who accidentally had a railroad spike driven through his head. He amazingly survived but there were major changes to his personality (he became a very disagreeable fellow but was otherwise fairly normal). Here are some questions pertaining to personality that we most closely associate with “soul”. Pretend a man’s personality drastically changes due to no fault of his own.

    3. Does his soul split into two souls, each subject to Holy Judgment?

    4. If it does split, can one go to heaven and the other to perdition?

    5. Let’s say it doesn’t split and the guy starts off as an evil but highly intelligent jerk who denies God and Jesus. A stroke later turns him into a wonderfully sweet Christian with the mental capabilities of a 3-4 year old. This new person accepts Jesus. What does his soul look like in heaven?

    6. Now let’s reverse this, an otherwise nasty, yet born-again Christian man with below-average intelligence takes a new experimental drug to enhance his intelligence. It works and has the side effect of turning him into thoroughly wonderful person who nonetheless loses his religion and denies Jesus. Does he go to hell (or fail to go to heaven if you don’t believe in hell)? What is his mind/soul like in the afterlife?

    I hope this got you thinking. The mind is inextricably linked to the material brain and itself evolves not only according to free-will choices (assuming that exists) of the person but due to the food we ingest, quality of air we breathe, and all other manner of natural means that change our brain and our thinking without our conscious knowledge.

    When you definitely observe a mind that can see, think, and act outside of the brain please send me the evidence.

    Now I want to get back to spirituality. I consider myself to be a spiritual person in a manner that may not be far of from what you have experienced – except in our interpretation of same. Whether through dreams, wonder, meditation, deep sadness, or wild happiness I have experienced awe, the feeling of oneness with the universe and other humans and I even had an amazing hypnogogic dream once (that convinced me once and for all what must surely be the cause of many religious “miracles” and delusion). I do not deny the legitimacy of the spiritual experiences you underwent and I’m happy that they made a positive difference in your life. But the fact that they helped you doesn’t make Christianity or belief in God true. The experiences you had and the transformations you enjoyed are common to every religion and faith throughout history whether one believed in Zeus, Osiris, or in atheistic religious strains of Buddhism and Hinduism. Science is only beginning to study mystical and spiritual experiences and I have no doubt that it will have much to tell us on these phenomena in the future.

    Finally, I want to conclude this post by discussing why Dawkins irks you and others so. I found this paragraph of yours very telling:

    “ Krause added: “She then dismisses the whole thing without addressing the main point simply stating that it has ‘failed to impress the theists’”. I can empathize with Robinson on this, simply because Dawkins has been so dogmatic in his argument that God should be made part of the evolutionary process, leaving no room for such idea of God being outside space and time. Dawkins’s Science, to quote Robinson, is “his version of Darwinism.” “

    You seem to be less concerned about the truth of an argument than what you perceive as the personality and motives behind them. While Dawkins has his own viewpoints, ideas and theories that he aggressively fights for, he is known to be an excellent scientist in all respects. Excellent scientists can rarely be dogmatists (but occasionally some are for lucky discoveries) and Dawkins is no dogmatist. I have no doubt that he would change his mind on his most cherished beliefs if provided rational evidence sufficient for others in his field. The fact that you may think Dawkins is an overly strident, intolerant, arrogant, know-it-all does not make your argument correct or his more likely to be wrong even if he is all those things.

    It might amuse you to know that Dawkins is so perceived by many atheists as well. I used to be among them to some degree. After all, I grew up being told I was going to hell and I didn’t want to fight that intolerance with intolerance of my own. But then a bunch of things started to happen. We elected a fundamentalist Christian nut-job who thinks cells in a Petri dish have souls and would defile science on many fronts (evolution, climatology). Most Americans believe in angels who can help them, deny evolution and 44% think they’ll probably see Jesus in their lifetime. We had religious Muslim fanatics fly airplanes into the Twin Towers. And I’ve watched highly religious nations become more and more polarized and dangerous. I now believe that rational people can no longer sit back, be silent, and respect the beliefs of others, no matter how foolish or irrational simply because they are under the guise of religion or some other dogma (e.g., communism). We have to call BS when and where we see it. To me the willingness to believe without evidence (“faith”), coupled with reluctance to truly question or doubt is the root of most evil in our world.

    I cannot fully disagree with those who say Dawkins turns off many people who we might hope can be rationally awakened. He does. But there are many who would not wake up from a less moderate voice. There is a place for Dawkins. By analogy, he is the pit-bull Malcolm X in contrast to the moderate Martin Luther King. I would argue that both types have their place and necessity in hastening a better world – a world where many fanatical irrational groups will eventually be able to acquire WMDs. Otherwise, I don’t think our civilization will survive this century.

15. Andrew Krause said,

    March 28, 2007 at 4:27 pm

    Corrections to my last post:

    Second paragraph should read temporal lobe not occipital.

    Question #2 should read:

    At what point does a human get a soul, at conception? What happens to the souls of precognitive forms that don’t survive e.g., blastocysts that are aborted or die naturally? Do they develop thinking in the afterlife even though they have no human/earthy senses or experience?

    Last paragraph (#21) should read:

    I cannot fully disagree with those who say Dawkins turns off many people who we might hope can be rationally awakened. He does. But there are many who would not wake up from a MORE moderate voice. There is a place for Dawkins. By analogy, he is the pit-bull Malcolm X in contrast to the moderate Martin Luther King. I would argue that both types have their place and necessity in hastening a better world – a world where many fanatical irrational groups will eventually be able to acquire WMDs. Otherwise, I don’t think our civilization will survive this century.

16. Andrew Krause said,

    March 28, 2007 at 5:08 pm

    To Hamletta:

    I got a kick out of your post, especially since you so glaringly exhibit the air of smugness and superiority people like that “twit” Dawkins are accused of – a trait I’ve always observed far more in the religious who also have a habit of injecting the threat of hell into their arguments.

    I also found it hilarious that you don’t want to engage refutation of “4th-grade Sunday School lessons.” It so happens I’m married to a devout Catholic who attended Sunday School as did my mother. That’s apparently about the time, after kids have realized there’s no Santa that they really begin to ask the really fundamental questions that narrow-minded dogmatists such as you have NEVER been able to rationally answer. And yes, all Dawkins really has to do in remake those arguments intelligently and in greater context. But I understand your answer very well. The brainwashing indoctrination and inoculation against rational questioning you learned in Sunday school apparently worked quite well. So I doubt you have the true intellectual and rational ability to engage the philosophical heights you’re waiting for. Rest Kierkegaard.

17. Andrew Krause said,

    March 28, 2007 at 6:34 pm

    Hamletta,

    I also couldn’t help comment on your following quote:

    ” I think Dawkins is a twit, myself. I’m a Lutheran, so I’ve got 500 years’ worth of complex theology to deal with, as befits a religion started by a bunch of German academics and lawyers. I see Dawkins refuting 4th-grade Sunday School lessons, and it’s not particularly impressive. ”

    As for your Lutheran heritage, your inference of its history of wisdom doesn’t impress me. It’s founder and his brethren were aggressive anti-Semites who went out of their way persecute the Jews. Martin Luther himself wrote many missives on that topic. I guess God didn’t see fit to guide his hand on the matter as he supposedly did to those who wrote the Bible.

18. Blackblade said,

    March 29, 2007 at 4:00 am

    Hamletta said: “I think Dawkins is a twit, myself. I’m a Lutheran, so I’ve got 500 years’ worth of complex theology to deal with, as befits a religion started by a bunch of German academics and lawyers. I see Dawkins refuting 4th-grade Sunday School lessons, and it’s not particularly impressive. Wake me up when he takes on Kierkegaard.”

    It doesn’t need to be impressive, just factually and logically correct … if the argumentation and logical premises are demolished, as they are, then the entire edifice crumbles. If the fundamentals fail then so does the construction based on them; if 2+2 = 4 is untrue, delete everything which depends on that axiom.

    Philosophers, including Kierkegaard, have been attempting, and failing, to prove the existence of god ever since the enlightenment. Which god does become a pertinent question of course … there seems to be a default to the abrahamic, christian god but most of the reasoning is not predicated on that.

    To cite Kierkegaard is, in my opinion, very self-defeating. He agreed with Kant that god could NOT be proven by reason and was only revealed through faith. Somewhat strange for a philosopher perhaps ? To paraphrase … “I’ve spent my life dedicated to reason but, when reason takes me somewhere I don’t want to be, I’ll abandon it in favour of superstition”.

19. Andrew Krause said,

    March 29, 2007 at 6:17 pm

    To Blackblade:

    Awesome post! Wish I’d said it.

20. Blackblade said,

    March 30, 2007 at 3:45 am

    To Andrew :

    You’re way too kind … I thought yours was much more complete.

21. chris said,

    April 3, 2007 at 8:23 am

    To Andrew Krause:

    1. If you have a stroke that destroys your ability to speak and understand language does that part of your mind go to heaven ahead of you?

    Do you understand fully the brain/mind relationship? Could they be interdependent? Can you assert that cognitive abilities and consciousness are one and the same thing? How do you explain qualia? What is awareness? Could the brain just be a receptor for consciousness in a way similar to a TV being a receptor for broadcasting signal? If so, could a damaged brain distort the signal?

    2. At what point does a human get a soul, at conception? What happens to the souls of precognitive forms e.g., blastocysts? Do they develop thinking in the afterlife even though they have no human/earthy senses or experience?

    Is physicalism a dogma or is it likely that science evolves and could explain the yet unexplained in the future in ways you believe impossible today?

    I will not answer your other questions since they only concern people with religious beliefs, which I do not have. But maybe the questions I asked are the basis for some of it for people who try to make sense of them. Why don’t you rationally awaken them all by providing answers to my questions?

22. Andrew Krause said,

    April 4, 2007 at 2:36 am

    Chris,

    My block of questions can be dissected, as you have done, to examine interesting questions, which I’m happy to do. However, their power was intended as a whole to examine the meaning of the soul and its ties to brain and you have subverted this process by using your claimed non-religiousness as an excuse to avoid answering the later questions, which are the core of my argument. The fact that I will honor your request to answer your questions does not absolve you of this dodge. I think you know what I’m after and you could have rephrased my questions you refuse to answer to render them non-religious, which in fact, were intended to address some of your points rather implicitly. For this reason, I’m not going to answer your questions as completely as I could right now until you take a holistic stab at my questions. You can either take the heaven and soul as a given or you can choose a convenient semantic approach of your choosing incorporating cognition, consciousness, and qualia. If I can do it and am non-religious, so can you.

    In answer to your questions, first, I don’t think anyone fully understands the mind/brain relationship yet. I’ve already explicitly and implicitly stated they are interdependent. We could sit here for days and debate the meaning alone of the terms qualia, cognition, and consciousness and get nowhere. What you are arguing for, it seems, provides a good basis for dualism and its descriptors, which I already accept. I can provide you with all sorts of plausible conjectures for how each of these states and qualities arise and exist in the brain without resorting to unsubstantiated physical forces or dimensions (e.g., Penrose’s quantum mind) not to mention supernatural forces and dimensions. That does not diminish mind as a distinct entity on it’s own – but in my view, dependent on the brain for subsistence.

    I did not assert that cognition and consciousness are the same thing. I don’t believe that but I would argue there is overlap. However, I could give you plausible arguments that they are different or that they are the same. So what? If by qualia you mean the internal mental representation and interpretation of sense and feelings (I’m trying to keep it simple here), most believe as I do that this results from higher (cerebrum) brain processing/interpretation of lower (reptilian brain) sense and feeling. This permits me to avoid using terms like “consciousness” or “cognition” (both higher brain functions) because I personally believe the phenomenon is more holistic than that. However, I could just as easily have argued that qualia is no different from consciousness or is just a part thereof as John Searle has done. What consciousness really is and how to define it is a current area of intense scientific debate. Some think we’ve simply fooled ourselves into thinking it’s a big deal at all. I’m still on the fence – awaiting more evidence as usual.

    Could the brain just be a consciousness receiver analogous to a TV? I laughed when I read that because I just heard that charlatan Deepak Chopra make the same assertion on the Bill Maher show when he claimed he had used that argument to “destroy that idiot Dawkins” (or other words to that effect) in a recent blog of his (I read it – complete BS and gobbledygook as usual from him). Partly I laughed too because I was brought up by a mother who believed in ESP and imparted that to me. I actually believed something akin to this until I went to college and begin seeking the evidence for psychic powers and studied neuroscience. I completely changed my mind because there is no good evidence for either and I believe in Occam’s Razor. As Hitchens said, “what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed just as easily”. If you’ve discovered such a medium of communication and conveyance for consciousness, please present some compelling evidence. I could become a believer again. I certainly would like to believe in such things – they’re cool!

    But I don’t want to leave your question high and dry. I assume you’re serious. If I accept your premise that the brain is a consciousness receiver, I would be prepared to concede that some of the manifestations of brain function I analogized could possibly be mimicked in appearance. But this is very debatable and brain mapping and processing as understood today provide absolutely no support for this. There are many different brain disorders and properties elicited by effects and affects to many different parts of the brain from the lower (reptilian) to upper (cerebrum). Does that mean the receiver is distributed through every agency or is there one point of entry (as for a TV)? How do you explain inductive brain states caused by neurostimulation such as those first attributed to Penwell? Your assertion begs many other fundamental questions:

    - Is it possible that one could construct a cage to block transmission? If so, what would happen to the man inside?

    - Do animals have this receiver (not to mention consciousness and qualia)? When and where did it evolve and what part of the brain is it in? For that matter, when and where does in arise in fetal development?

    - Do you believe AI replete with cognition, consciousness, and qualia can ever be created as I do? And/or alternatively, could it be possible to download a human mind into some other substrate created and understood by man (I doubt this personally but don’t dismiss it)? If the creation of either of these things were made possible in computers having no provision for any type of external consciousness communication, would you reject your hypothesis? If not, why not?

    -I have many other questions and would love for others to chime in. (Blackblade – you are always able to articulate trenchant ideas with greater brevity than me. I look forward to your contribution.)

    OK, that brings me to your last question concerning physicalism, dogma, and science. You have phrased it in the provocative manner of people I’ve usually observed to be desperately seeking to justify belief in something they can’t factually support. So they want smart people to acknowledge its possibility so that they might allow themselves to confuse that with probability. Any tenet of scientific discourse, be it physicality or Newton’s Laws, can become a dogma if it is unquestioningly and uncritically believed without sufficient evidence. Good scientists don’t blindly accept dogmas. I wish this were true of all people.

    Again, you claim to be non-religious but you seem to be demonstrating that you have a faith or dogma of your own. What is it – a belief in psychic powers? Life after death? What is it that you want so desperately to believe in that you have to postulate and believe in possibilities (see, I made a concession) for which there is no convincing evidence? And why is that a healthy thing for you or society to do?

23. chris said,

    April 5, 2007 at 6:11 am

    To Andrew,

    Frankly I did not know about this Deepak Chopra guy and I was only toying with you. Happy you laughed because that was a positive reading, wasn’t it?

    I am quite happy with the way you replied to my questions. You accept that many things are still unknown and remain open to the possibility that dualism could be right but that it would need to be proven, just as physicalism or naturalism in their variants would need to. Indeed the debate is still open… And this was only my point.

    I assume that your targets are only people who believe blindly in religious books and other practices and try imposing their beliefs to others. I am not of this kind (although I think you kind of assume it) and this is the reason why I could not just reply to your other questions. I would also agree with you that this attitude is plain wrong.

    My only problems is to see many atheists with poor arguments who know nothing about dualism or physicalism but believe that the arguments of “the beginning of the universe”, “consciousness” and other yet to be solved scientific problem will be solved with the current physicalism paradigm: a wild assumption that puts physicalism to the rank of dogma when we know that the scientific theories change over time. I have even met some who believed these problems had already been solved. Yes! I have met such people. Of course, they are not of the scientific kind that you mentionned.They usually come with the “giant sausage living on Mars” argument without realizing that physicalism could be the “giant sausage”. Arrogance and ignorance affect theists and atheists alike…

    I do not believe is Strong AI as you do. One day I was making a case for strong AI at university to my friends until one of them told me I think like a “Turing machine”. I did not grasp exactly what he meant at the time. I thought about it for a long time. Nowadays I believe that cognition and experience are 2 completely different things. I am not able to prove it to you otherwise I would already have written a book and be famous. This is only my intuition! On the opposite side believing that it is possible to implement qualia in an artificial manner is also intuitive and as yet unproven. However, I believe that animals have qualia since they have sensorial experiences. And also, there is an obvious mind / brain overlap, I never meant to argue this. For the moment, I will just follow my intuition and keep trying to solve the mistery if I can. I suggest you do this to.

    I am not trying to prove anything unlike what you believe.But I tell you what is healthy though: to keep these questions open!

    PS: I am not american so don’t worry, I am not speaking in tongue and will not cast a spell on you!

24. Andrew Krause said,

    April 5, 2007 at 5:25 pm

    Chris,

    LOL! You really had me going! I figured you to be one of those types who makes the mystical arguments of the form that just as there is a fabric of space-time there is also a fabric of space-time-consciousness (like Chopra). Actually that is an interesting area and you had me thinking because areas of subjectivity are real problems for science. I have to confess, I’m almost disappointed cause I love a good fight with someone intelligent. I was even contemplating my next opening line to you, something like: “Blackblade, be careful of this one Chris, the Force is strong in him.” I was even about to ask you to measure your metachlorian levels and tell you I’m your father. But you spoiled all that for me – you a**hole.

    You pretty much have me pegged, but I don’t reserve my wrath just for the religious and superstitious. In fact, because I hate hypocrisy, I despise scientists that behave dogmatically and suppress questioning or exploration worst of all. And I see it happen more often than I like – even with some very decent ones. But they’re just human, like the faithful.

    Perhaps I should say that I sympathize and can understand the conundrum of the believer. I have had several ideas in my life I considered brilliant only to feel sullen and wasted when they were invalidated – in most cases by me! I felt proud that I could live up to my ideals and emptied at the same time. As a scientist it bothers me that most people really don’t know what doing real science is like. It should be like life.

    The bizarre thing, for me at least, is that the process of science actually mirrors spiritual experiences in many ways. I think most people think science is this methodical machine where things move gradually from point A to point B. But a big reason I love science so is for those rare moments of insight, intuition, and perception that just seem to come out of nowhere. Perhaps the best idea I ever head came to me as I was falling asleep on an airplane – not trying to think about anything. It was a true vision (an uncontrolled movie/slideshow in my mind) in the religious sense only I don’t ascribe it to God. I had to gather my senses to wake up and write it down because I could feel it fading just like a real dream as I awoke. I believe my subconscious mind simply solved a problem I had been struggling with and couldn’t solve consciously through “trying” for a long time.

    Have I had ideas many would find ridiculous? Yes, I have and I thought they were wacky too in some cases. But my intuition compelled me to investigate and often I discovered I was right or was led to some other unexpected opportunity and discovery. Some of the most compelling ideas in science are ultimately found to be dead wrong. But they help make arguments cohesive and inspire people to discover the right ones. The key difference with religion is the whole process becomes focused on the formulation of testable hypotheses to support such conjectures and the experiments that follow. That is why string theory both fascinates and concerns me so. Some physicists seem so enamored by the elegance and explanatory power of their creation that they seem to be falling towards a faith that some experimentally verifiable proposition will emerge some day. This worries me. I’ve had similar concerns with some who propose emergent neural network properties for explaining intelligence (i.e., just connect enough neurons with the right learning process and bang – intelligence) – though they’re usually better grounded than string theory is now.

    Now back to your ideas of duality. The mind/brain problem is truly fascinating and even if I’m right about strong AI and we could build sentient machines, I don’t believe that will completely settle the issue (maybe our AI will for us though). I think the problem will be around awhile. So here I am about to actually give fodder to the irrational who would certainly use my arguments against me. But I agree with you, open communication of provocative ideas with the proper balance of skepticism and open-mindedness is good.

    As I said, I think science is at it’s weakest in the subjective domain. Think about a theory of love and hate. How can science define the qualia of love and hate? When you hate someone, you can give me a definition based on other qualia for anger, frustration, dislike, etc. but that isn’t really what you’re experiencing mentally. You’re not saying to yourself, I’m angry, sad, hurt, etc. There may be no internal voice at all. You’re experiencing a feeling that we can reasonably believe that most people share and can understand because our brains our made similarly enough. There are, of course, brain conditions that strongly indicate that such qualia don’t exist in some people or are experienced in a much different way. How can we relate to each other or, for that matter, to an extraterrestrial who behaves like they love or hate in a manner indistinguishable from humans? Do they experience love and hate the same way? Can we even use those words? This is one reason why I don’t accept the Turing test as a complete verification of Strong AI.

    Obviously the qualia of “green” as you experience may be red or blue for ET. He’d respond the same way so you’d never know the difference. How can science ever tell the difference? Is this question even important? Is there something a science of subjectivity could answer about us or the universe that would add value? Perhaps it simply says more about the limitations of our brains themselves and the fact that we are entrapped by the limitations of our languages, semantics, and powers of abstraction. But then we’re talking about constraints on knowledge acquisition (for humans at least). Uh-oh, epistemology.

    Otherwise, if I’m right to the degree I believe in physicality, the best science can hope for is the ability to identify and predict brain states without ever being able to describe their mental essence. We might be able to completely analyze neurons, connective pathways, and their properties (action potentials etc.) and say this person is, has, or will experience love, hate, red, etc. Perhaps we could then predict or give probability curves for the likely responses to these experiences. But there’s still something missing….

    Of course the faithful are now free to take my arguments, stick on Kant and Kierkegaard, and say that I just made their argument for faith. Of course I demure because I’m tired of writing. It’s time for you or Blackblade to take over. If the people who believe in God don’t know how to make their case properly, let’s do it for them and then have the fun of shooting it down all to ourselves.

    OK, I’m a smug, arrogant bastard just like Dawkins. You got me. Wake me up when you get to p-zombies.

25. James said,

    April 6, 2007 at 9:00 am

    I’ve posted my own response to Dawkins (as well as a response to a visiting speaker of a six-day creationist bent) on my blog at http://blue.butler.edu/~jfmcgrat/blog/ and so I won’t bother repeating the points I make there. It is ever so hard not to swing to the other extreme in response to extremism. Young-earth creationists make one want to throw religion out altogether. Arrogant atheists almost make one believe that science really is intrinsically opposed to faith. The ‘narrow way’ that avoids the extreme may or may not be right, but it certainly is more rational and reasoned than the voices on the extremes, including Dawkins. It is, of course, rather ironic that Dawkins, in advocating reason, should do it so unreasonably!

26. Andrew Krause said,

    April 7, 2007 at 11:26 am

    James. McGrath:

    I checked out your website and while I saw much intelligent commentary across several of your blogs and references, I did not find one mention of the “narrow way” there. Nor did I find one particularly cohesive argument that I might have inferred to be the “narrow way”. I must have missed it or it isn’t there, so please elaborate.

    Nevertheless, I find much to agree with in your blogs. If you read mine, then you saw that I acknowledge the divisiveness of Dawkins. Here are just two quotes:

    “…The fact that you may think Dawkins is an overly strident, intolerant, arrogant, know-it-all does not make your argument correct or his more likely to be wrong even if he is all those things. … It might amuse you to know that Dawkins is so perceived by many atheists as well. I used to be among them to some degree. After all, I grew up being told I was going to hell and I didn’t want to fight that intolerance with intolerance of my own.”

    “I cannot fully disagree with those who say Dawkins turns off many people who we might hope can be rationally awakened. He does. But there are many who would not wake up from a more moderate voice. There is a place for Dawkins. By analogy, he is the pit-bull Malcolm X in contrast to the moderate Martin Luther King. I would argue that both types have their place and necessity in hastening a better world – a world where many fanatical irrational groups will eventually be able to acquire WMDs. Otherwise, I don’t think our civilization will survive this century.”

    On balance, I think that Dawkins aids the cause of reason more than he hurts it. But I would concede that his message is probably best suited to fence-sitters and for mobilizing those who already share his beliefs.

    Think about the original promulgation of the Christian faith (and most other faiths). Its success cannot be credited just to those who espoused an inclusional, moderate, loving, turn-the-other-cheek approach. It owes its existence at least equally to saints and martyrs who would certainly be said to be far more militant, arrogant and strident than Dawkins. In fact, some were even torturers and murderers.

    So I agree that Dawkins is a militant figure. And if that causes you to reach out to moderate atheists and believers to counter the dangers of faith (as Dawkins/Harris define it), while securing a future for what you believe faith in God should be about, that’s great! I remember as a boy hearing from the fence-sitters on the race issue. Many just wished blacks (like atheists today), would somehow just disappear. Many were moved to follow the path of MLK mostly because they feared the alternative and more extreme paths espoused by Malcolm X or the Black Panthers. So if you feel militant atheists mock and insult the faithful and threaten to one day marginalize your beliefs, then continue your good work to encourage reason and education to make religion and its professed “true believers” less rationally ridiculous.

    You don’t like Dawkins semantics for faith, religion, and God and your attacks on him are primarily a pirouette around his semantics. I don’t believe Dawkins is as ignorant as you suggest about the other possible meanings for God and faith. However, I would hope that you would concede that his definitions probably cover >90% of the “faithful”. You are as much on the fringe in some of your positions as he is. In order to address your highly refined and moderate interpretations probably would have required doubling the size of his book and muddling his message.

    I also think you need to take some of Dawkins semantics on face value and go from there. It is not fair for you or others to redefine faith, against Dawkins arguments, as anything other than believing without evidence. Dawkins argument (and I like Harris’ better) is not so much for science vs. faith as it is about reason vs. faith. Science is just one manifestation of reason just as religion is only one manifestation of faith. I think that Dawkins muddles this sometimes but Harris does not. To paraphrase Harris, no society has ever suffered from becoming too reasonable. But many have suffered from too much faith. I also believe that societies have suffered from too little reason and see no evidence that having insufficient faith has damaged any culture.

    So in essence, as I define faith (congruent with Dawkins and Harris), it is not compatible with reason in making meaningful decisions about the universe or our lives. My challenge to you is to identify and explain those attitudes, beliefs, and actions, on both a personal and societal level, that really require faith with or without reason. And then explain how your superior way of faith cannot be achieved or matched through reason alone.

    I would welcome debating you on these topics and others. I believe that you are a rational voice for good even though I disagree with many of your views and semantics.

    Best regards,
    Andy

27. Blackblade said,

    April 9, 2007 at 12:03 pm

    Wow, a week away and the conversation gets really serious !

    Lots to think about before I even consider posting …..

28. James said,

    April 9, 2007 at 12:46 pm

    Thank you Andy for your thoughtful reply to my post about Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion. Let me begin my reply by commenting on the idea of the ‘narrow way’, which was itself an allusion to one of two phrases sometimes used in connection with the teaching of Jesus: On the one hand, there is reference to a ‘narrow way’ that does not simply go along with the way the majority is headed. On the other hand, there are places particularly in the Sermon on the Mount that seem to teach a ‘third way’ or an alternative to two main possible responses to oppression and powerlessness in that time, namely resolute but non-violent resistance and protest, as an alternative to either passivity or violent revolution. It was perhaps your reference to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King that brought the idea to mind, but I ought to have explained further what I meant. In essence, I was referring to finding a middle ground, not so much as an absolute position, but in recognitions that there are alternatives to the extreme viewpoints that often get the most press nowadays, and that it is possible to preserve the creative tensions between apparent opposites in a way that can be personally and even socially beneficial. Mind and heart, body and soul, classic and innovative, old and new - the idea of a ‘narrow way’ is my way of referring to an ideal of finding a way of preserving what is good in apparent opposites. I do this both out of conviction and pragmatically - it is precisely the feeling that there is a baby in the bathwater Dawkins throws out that leads many people to object to his stance.

    I’ve been reading Daniel Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell and interestingly enough, he raises the question of whether the race issue was helped or harmed by being made the focus of so much attention. He doesn’t claim to know the answer, and nor do I, but I certainly see the aftereffects of polarization, and can see parallels with the Christianity-evolution situation. In the early days of Darwin’s theory, there were a great many supporters of the theory who were also people of faith and did not see any conflict. Indeed, it might be argued that it was the misuse of evolution as supposed justification for a whole range of evils (including worldviews all the way from Capitalism to Communism) that probably led many to feel that their values were under attack. And so, on the one hand, it is my concern that Dawkins and others like him will continue to give the impression that evolution is intrinsically incompatible with their faith, and that this just perpetuates people feeling justified in their scientific ignorance, which is the opposite of what Dawkins (and you and I) would see as a desirable outcome.

    As for faith and its definition, it may be true that the English word in its modern usage has connotations of believing without evidence. But it is not difficult to show that this is not the classic Christian usage. The New Testament Greek word translated by “faith” has connotations of trust, of faithfulness. There certainly have been religious believers in all ages that have been opposed to reason, and I am not interested in disputing that. But I am interested in disputing their interpretation of “faith” and of the Christian faith in particular, as well as disputing the impression such people have given and continue to give that faith and reason are fundamentally opposed.

    For me, faith is about an attitude. It is an attitude that is expressed in and shared by many religious traditions, and it is one that people without any particular religious faith or worldview have also had. It is, in essence, the response of awe to existence (not only our existence), and a humble recognition that we are not ultimate (or in other words not God) and do not have a God’s eye view of the universe or of our place in it. For me, and for other believers like me, this leads to humility and an awareness of my own human limitations. It does not lead me to seek scientific information in pre-scientific texts, or to fear increases in our understanding of the natural world or of our own selves. If you ask me what is religious about this, the answer is that I interpret our place in the universe as being meaningful. I would be the first to admit that any language I may use to speak about God, ultimate reality, transcendence and the spiritual is not only intrinsically metaphorical but intrinsically inadequate. But I do not see an alternative to the use of such language in avoiding reductionism and the suggestion that life is either ultimately meaningless or that meaning is something that we each individually give to life, or perhaps give to it on the level of cultures or even species. My language of God and faith is an expression of trust and hope that life is ultimately meaningful. This does not lead me to conclude that my own individual personality and ego will survive death. But it does lead me to hope that my species may survive extinction, and that all that we create as a species will not simply be obliterated in a cosmic catastrophe that marks an ultimate end to everything our universe may ever produce. Once again, I would be the first to admit that these hopes are an interpretation of the universe and not something inherently part of the data it provides, nor something that I feel one can rationally prove or disprove. For faith, in the sense that I am using the term, to be “rational”, I require that it be in agreement with available evidence; it does not necessarily have to be a conclusion required by the evidence.

    If there are levels of existence that transcend us and connect us all as part of something bigger, could we ever hope to see that, much less prove it, from our perspective? To use my favorite analogy, if we were cells in a human body, could we ever prove that there is a transcendent organism that unifies us? Could we ever find language that would adequately express what a human being is like? In short, is there anything more that we could attain than a mere hope and trust that there is transcendence, and meaning, and unity to our disperate existences beyond the horizons of our limited perspectives?

    I’m not certain that I’ve addressed all your concerns - but that is what dialogue is for, so I’ll ask you to reply and ask more questions, if you’re willing. But I will conclude by summarizing that for me faith is part of my overall worldview which seeks to appreciate aspects of existence which I believe are compatible with reason but are not simply reducible to it. I think that, whatever accounts a biologist or a neuroscientist may give of the processes involved in falling in love, those are not a replacement for the experience. As I write this, I am listening to a new release on the Naxos label, Carson Cooman’s Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3. I have no doubt that there are ways of analysing this music in terms of reason, as well as in terms of the history of music, aesthetics, physics, and in other ways. My faith is my way of saying that there is more to that, that acknowledging beauty and wonder is not simply a misguided human response to aspects of our existence, but does in fact tell us something about the nature of reality itself.

    Let me also add one more transcendent component of experience, namely humor, since I have just finished reading The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I remember a presentation on the philosophy of humor given soon after I began working at Butler Universityby a colleague who was soon to retire. Philosophers do not yet understand what makes something funny, nor do biologists - nor do I, my students would say! I do not think that attempts to understand the workings of humor are a threat to humor, and I am persuaded that current anti-scientific stances adopted by religious believers are the equivalent of late-night talk show hosts seeking to oppose scientific investigations into humor. But I equally feel that anyone who treated scientific advances as somehow undermining humor would also be equally misguided - indeed, laughable! This is not because I think humor is in a special category and should be exempted from investigation, but because I think that it would be a mistake to confuse explaining humor scientifically with experiencing humor. In the same way, I support scientific investigation of the universe and all it contains, and yet find I still need the language of faith to express my conviction that there are other legitimate levels and perspectives on which to look at it.

    Looking forward to continuing the discussion!

    Best wishes,

    James

    [The above is also posted on my blog at http://blue.butler.edu/~jfmcgrat/blog/200704.html#e91]

29. Andrew Krause said,

    April 9, 2007 at 8:47 pm

    James:

    Thank you for the dialogue and another thoughtful submission. I find I’m enjoying these debates lately so much I’m not getting any productive work done. But I’m procrastinating for fun. God would approve wouldn’t He? Or is procrastination a sin?

    Anyway, let me first say that I cannot significantly disagree with anything in your first two paragraphs. In fact, I’ve had the same thoughts as you expressed and decided to play just one side of things for my argument. In reality, I’m on the fence, I’ve been a moderate if occasionally noisy heathen most of my life and only lately have I been tiptoeing in the militant’s playpen. I think there is sound reasoning and historical evidence to support both your argument and mine. You may well be right and I wouldn’t bet against you here. Revolutions, like the one I wish to see, do not succeed for good unless militants meld with moderates like you (and me?) at the right time and under the right conditions. Militants are volatile and potentially dangerous catalysts. History will judge.

    Now let’s move on to the semantics of “faith”. You are correct, of course, from an historical Christian perspective, on the wider meaning of faith. So the wording of my admonition to you to stick with Dawkins’ definition could certainly have been interpreted as arrogantly ignorant, as I think it did to Mr. Allen who commented on my previous blabbering too.

    Where I think you both may miss the point is that I believe it was correct for Dawkins to distill his argument in faith as belief without evidence because that is at the essence of its putative opposition to reason. You have given me a cogent personal and historical Christian definition for faith I’m not sure most believers, much less most theologians and philosophers, would agree with. I am no theologian but I’m sure you would agree that we could get into a very involved argument on this subject alone. How many theologians have earned their degrees on this one topic I wonder? Of course, you shouldn’t blame Dawkins for not wishing to fall into that trap.

    I think you need to accept and address Dawkins’ simplified semantic distillation in your arguments at face value and use your ancillary lemmas and definitions for faith to explain why faith, as Dawkins defines it, isn’t really at the proper center of the debate (I think Kant and Kierkegaard would agree with Dawkins on this point, despite their alignment with you). I believe you have failed to do that in your response to me. Moreover, Dawkins has clearly anticipated your response and deliberately made his semantic adjustments to prevent what I believe promotes, rather than elucidates, semantic distortions that muddle arguments common in theology. Frankly, Dawkins does address your subjective attitudinal issues on faith (e.g., awe and transcendence), but he does so in the parts of his book devoted to the scientific explanation of spiritual and mystical phenomena. Incidentally, in my opinion, Sam Harris does a much better job at this than Dawkins and I’m no Dawkins groupie, or Harris groupie for that matter. I also wish to assert, as we carry on this debate, that my ideas are my own and I do not wish to be tied to those of others anymore. I’m no apologist either.

    Since I’m on my own two feet, I’ll also add my own two cents to your views on faith as beyond believing without evidence. You are essentially making claims to a type of evidence in your definition for faith which is tautologic. Moreover, you need to explain how people like me exist who do not believe in God and yet also experience awe, transcendence, and even rare amazing experiences like hypnogogic dreaming (in my case) that would certainly be explained by many religious people as religious “miracles”. Of course, I anticipate that your answer may be that was God tapping on my shoulder and I refused to listen. But since this tapping has been going on throughout the ages on people of all faiths, or lack thereof, many without the benefit of scripture or knowledge of your god, the burden is on you to prove that, especially when there are alternative plausible scientific explanations. Can you understand why I believe your registration of such feelings with God probably has more to do with the religious indoctrination (a form of brainwashing in my opinion) that you likely received in Sunday school and/or via family, cultural, and peer pressure (as I experienced too and found hard to resist)? This is more in line with historical fact and evidence and is a major reason why Dawkins is so against such indoctrination and the labeling of children as Christian, Muslim, etc. I agree with him and have seen the damaging effects of same in my own family not to mention the world.

    As you can see from my other blogs, I am both a dualist and physicalist who realizes there are some puzzling gaps. But to paraphrase myself, “Science is just one manifestation of reason just as religion is only one manifestation of faith.” The fact that your subjective experiences may be outside science in some ways (which I do not yet concede) does not mean they are beyond the analysis of reason. Just because we lack a science of the subjective today does not mean we always will. I have a connectionist neuroscience background and emergent properties simulated in the lab can seem miraculous, but they aren’t since I can create them (unless you’d like to give up now and acknowledge I’m God ;-)).

    I think you make some truly beautiful and elegant points on the nature of humility, aesthetics, humor, and the meaning of life. I don’t think by your prose even you are claiming those as a strong argument for God. I think your point of view here is best summed up when you say, “I have no doubt that there are ways of analyzing this music in terms of reason, as well as in terms of the history of music, aesthetics, physics, and in other ways. My faith is my way of saying that there is more to that, that acknowledging beauty and wonder is not simply a misguided human response to aspects of our existence, but does in fact tell us something about the nature of reality itself.”

    If you substitute “intuition” for “faith” I couldn’t agree with you more (in fact, try that substitution throughout your blogs and see if that tells you something). Perhaps you would be surprised to learn that I, like most atheists, share your sense of wonder, awe, humility, and transcendence in our appreciation of nature and our approach to our fellow man. I certainly feel gratitude that I should be so fortunate to have been given this life even though I have no god to express it to. Understanding the essence of something, like the nature of a rainbow, does not make it less awesome to me. It’s the other way around. I believe that many scientists have even more appreciation of this transcendent feeling than non-scientists because not only do they see the beauty of nature but the intrinsic beauty and elegance in the underlying mathematics and logic as well (which, unfortunately, most laymen never experience). Yes, some scientists, even a few brilliant ones, see this as even more evidence for God. But they are in the minority, an amazing fact considering the pressures and indoctrination to believe in God in our society and where >94% of Americans believe in God..

    Please do not confuse intuition with faith as many do. Although we do not fully understand intuition, it has a rational basis as the mind’s subconscious ability to rapidly recognize patterns and meaning without conscious thinking. It is often wrong but it is right far more often than chance would allow. There are many reasons for intuition to have evolved, not least of which is that when a lion leapt out at us in the jungle, we often didn’t have time to reason about it. We just had to run like hell. Likewise, most champion chess players make decisions they can’t fully explain when push comes to shove. So intuition is rather like imperfect shadow reasoning and like science, it makes testable decisions that can be refined through experience, just as morality can be tested and improved by observing it’s consequences. If our minds are at least partially hardwired for faith, as they are for language, this could also explain much of your subjective nature with or without added indoctrination. For you to fall back on intuition is based on rationality to some degree. To fall back on faith is not (as I define faith).

    So I clearly don’t buy your subjective argument for faith. Moreover, I find your deductions concerning life’s meaning to be very limited and almost degrading in some ways, especially for someone who presumably understands and apparently appreciates the writings of Carl Sagan. I think that the meaning of life is limitless without God and far richer unless God’s meaning for our lives is also truly limitless (I can argue it isn’t, in fact the Bible suggests it’s highly constrained – but let’s not argue this much