10.08.08
More on Science article on religion
More stupidity on religion in Science magazine
It is worth re-citing this post on an article in Science magazine, despite its somewhat harsh tone. A harsh tone is needed! Scientists are frittering away our secular opportunity with tactics against religion so limited and sophmoric that the reputation of science is at risk. In fact it was at risk already in the nineteenth century as the Blavatsky era gestating New Age movement(s) simply stopped taking science seriously, beyond the achievements of physics, and parted ways with modernity. I hold no brief for Blavatsky, but we should note that she took one look at Darwinism and permanently self-exiled from modern civilization. The fault line is widening. So scientists should be asking themselves if their ostrich view is realistic, and whether Darwinian oversimpifcations were worth it, crime doesn’t pay, and science propaganda fools noone except scientists.
I certainly don’t reject science in that fashion, but the flatfooted idiocy of Darwinized accounts of religion attempting to ‘play a Dawkins’ by dispatching religion at one stroke using unverified speculations about population genetics isn’t going to ‘hack it’.
And yet the momentum of this kind of thinking is accelarating, at least from one angle. Their opponents are also accelarating.
Let me suggest one thing ( a post’s worth, a lot lot more can be said): the need for historical study of religion. Most scientists are totally unaware of the history of religion, and can’t even differentiate Buddhism and monotheism. That’s not even high-school level thinking.
In an age of experts, we are forced to listen to the views of experts on all subjects. But with biology/Darwinism we have a strangely perverse version of this: someone who is an expert on some specialty of biological study, then adopts a not necessarily expert view of the whole of biology in the form of a Darwinian theory of evolution, and then proceeds to pontificate about man, culture, history, ethics, religion and everything else on this basis. And all this requires is waving the flag of science and hordes submit at once (or simply remain silent).
Surely by the standards of expertise this is a most unprofessional approach. But apparently it is too much to ask the equivalent professional level of knowledge of the study of religion in world history.
Have all these nerdy hotshots who wish to apply the math tricks of kin/group selection theory with the Prisoner’s dilemma to trash all of religion ever read anything on the history of religion?
Clearly not. So we need to keep in mind that this unprofessional behavior doesn’t have any status as science.