Recently (in fact, right after I cashed my first paycheck here at Umass), I walked into a book store and found of copy of John Brockman’s “What We Believe but Cannot Prove”. For those of you who dont know, John Brockman is not a writer, but rather an editor who focuses a lot on the “Third Culture” (his term). The third culture refers to the scientists in the world who are taking the forefront of public interest by publishing their ideas in ways that are accessible to most people (popSci books). He runs this site, edge.org, which always has a bunch of articles related to science, mathematics, or the culture surrounding the two. As part of the edge’s activities, every year he poses a question for which he collects responses from leading thinkers in a lot of fields and publishes their responses in a book. Before this one I just got, I had purchased “What is Your Dangerous Idea”, which turned out to be pretty good. The responses to these questions range from half of a page to about three pages, with most responses being a page and a half. Obviously, these works aren’t intended to give you any real scientific thought, but they leave you with some cool things to think about.
While reading “What We Believe but Cannot Prove”, I noticed that many authors chose to write about the afterlife (or rather the lack thereof). Now, I suppose this is the ultimate example of something that we believe but cannot prove, but I was very discontented by these responses. First of all, the response is a cop-out from writing something more interesting and intellectual. Secondly, many of the responses went on to implicitly, if not explicitly, insult those who believe in a higher power or an afterlife. It almost seems that the authors would welcome a continuation of the schism that rests between “persons of reason” and “persons of faith” (quotations meant to emphasize the fact that I find both of these terms to be an unfortunate use of language). I believe that the world would be a better place if everyone valued the scientific method and the knowledge derived from it. Certainly our nation would be better off if we had more people pursuing science as a career. However, those in the scientific community who help drive the wedge between the two existing cultures do nothing but hurt that goal. By publishing books with titles such as “The God Delusion” and telling people they are stupid for believing in a god will never get us anywhere. In fact, I understand the need for a god in people’s lives. I understand the fact that people want to believe in the afterlife and want to believe that humanity is not just some chance happening. Its really not that unreasonable (of course, there are those in religion that take it too far, but I am talking about faith not religion). People who hold faith as their #1 belief are going to be reluctant to join a community full of people who will consider them inherently stupid for their belief.
What I believe, but cannot prove is that those in science who feel that they must ridicule a belief in a higher power are only following a crude and primitive human desire for conflict. Furthermore, I believe they are necessarily stupid in some ways for viciously fighting over something that is inherently unknowable. But perhaps they need that. To quote John Lennon, “whatever gets you through the night, it’s alright.”
June 13, 2008 at 11:20 pm |
Well, I disagree with the premise, but if it’s any consolation the actual -content- of “The God Delusion” is much milder than the title would suggest. In fact, Dawkins didn’t even come up with the title, it was pushed on him by his editors in order to make it sell more. If you can get around the fact that his British accent makes him sound a bit smarmy, you’ll notice that what he espouses (and the way he espouses it) is pretty considerate.
June 16, 2008 at 7:27 pm |
Admittedly, I have not read the ‘God Delusion’ (though I plan to soon) but the content of the book doesnt make a difference in terms of this conflict because very few (if any) are going to actually read the book and instead just point and yell “See, they hate God and hate you for loving him” (or something stupid like that).
June 21, 2008 at 7:31 pm |
Maybe, but I don’t think that that is the primary motivation of most people in the “new atheist” circles. Their goal is not to change the minds of those people who have already made up their minds (the sort of people you’re talking about), but rather to get at the generations that follow.
You can see this in how people like Daniel Dennett suggest that parents be allowed to teach whatever they want to their children, provided that there be a nation-wide religious education curriculum that educates children in the history and beliefs of world religions (like Britain has). The notion, I believe, is that you can’t really convince people that already have an investment in supernaturalism, but you can definitely try to save their children from being indoctrinated.
Regardless of strategy, the main point that I seem to take away from the “new atheists” like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al is that they want to remove religion from the privileged place that it has in terms of philosophical discourse – a twofold embedding.
Firstly, they seek to get rid of the idea that, for some reason, religion is “off-limits” for discussion or criticism. This is not true of any other subject or institution on the planet – if someone is a libertarian and you were discussing politics, no one would call you rude or look down upon you for engaging them in a debate about their views. Similarly, if someone makes a political statement, you can challenge them or request that they back up their claims with factual evidence or reasoning. The same is not true of religion: it’s perfectly acceptable for someone to fall back on “well, that’s just what I think” without criticism when someone is discussing their religion.
Secondly is the degradation of the notion that it is acceptable to label children by the religion of their parents. In a similar analogy to the above, wouldn’t you find it absurd to call someone a “communist child” or a “democratic child” or anything of the sort? A child is certainly not capable of making its own decisions on intricate matters of politics, and the same holds for theology. It is unacceptable (and malicious, in that it degrades a child’s ability to think critically) to indoctrinate them with a set of beliefs (religious, political, or otherwise) that cannot be backed up – before they are capable of analyzing the arguments.
I suppose that was a bit of a long response, but I think that there are a lot of subtleties to the entire movement that are lost on many people. It’s not malicious or aggressive, these people just seem to want to slowly change the paradigm of religious discourse to one that is more reasonable.