A scientist’s response to Dawkins God Delusion and the “New” Atheism

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe … the starry heavens above me

and the moral law within me.Immanuel Kant 1788

How has Science Challenged Religion in a positive way?• Cosmology and cosmic origins• Biology and evolutionary theory

– Biblical literalism vs other ways to read and understand scripture

– Provide us with a richer way to see inter-connectedness of life

• Psychology, Sociology and other Social Sciences– Understanding of human actions/motivations using a

different set of categories (as opposed to superstition or historically positioned categories)

What’s at stake?

• Intellectual freedom– If you “really believe” then you can’t be critical of

core ideas

• Personal freedom– You are constrained to act a certain way against

your will

Some problems…

• That science has made religion obsolete or un-tenable– Is this a “scientific assertion”? – Is this historically accurate?

• That science must oppose religion– Is this a “scientific assertion”? – Is this historically accurate?

Some problems…

• No “real” scientist can believe in God– Is this a “scientific assertion”? – Is this historically accurate?

• That science is, in principle, unlimited in its explanatory reach– Is this a “scientific assertion”? – Is this historically accurate?

Some problems…

• Religion is a parasitic “meme”– Is this a “scientific assertion”? – Is this historically accurate?

• That science must oppose religion– Is this a “scientific assertion”? – Is this historically accurate?

• Religion makes people act badly!– Is this a “scientific assertion”? – Is this historically accurate?

Some problems…

• Is it true that positive moral values arise through natural selection and if so does this imply that the “religious explanation” is therefore wrong?

But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Matthew 5:39

Deeper Fallacies

• Science is “univocal” wrt religion• Science constitutes a “world view” with a

robust animating myth

Final Analysis…• Dawkins uses the “mantle” of science to

provide authority to his claims :– Fallacy: argument from authority

• Dawkins ridicules or otherwise insinuates that scientists are “not real believers “:– Fallacy: ad hominem argument

• Dawkins uses analogous arguments or contested ideas un-critically:– Fallacy: straw man or slippery slope argument

Some Challenges

• Can science become a secular “super-religion”? If so…– The underlying mythology of science must be

challenged (meaning and purpose)– Science must move toward a more complimentary

and conciliatory way of knowing the world (listen to the voices from the arts and other humanities)

Revisioning of Science

...taking the sociological challenge seriously

My Main Thesis...• Despite the apparent “excess” of some

postmodernist positions vis a vis faith and knowledge, it helps us see that the modernist programme is not an option for Christians (or other theists). Modern Science appears to fit naturally within the modernist framework only to the extent that it is articulated within a scientific-materialist world view by some groups of scientists.

Scientific Materialism• science is the only reliable path to

objective, timeless, value-neutral knowledge

• matter and energy are the fundamental entities of the universe.

Science in a Postmodern Age• Science, appropriately bracketed, is a

powerful means to a type of knowledge about the physical world

• Science needs to acknowledge other ways of knowing and it must understand its own meta-narrative(s) or that it is rooted in a meta-narrative(s)

• The notion of truth itself must be broadened

Living in a World Without Certainty

• How can I know that the findings of science are true? How can I know that my belief in Christ is true and not a delusion? How can I know that Christ is who he claims to be? How can ....

• It would seem to heresy for me to say to you that I am not certain at least that God is the one true God, that Christ is the Word made Flesh and so on. In order to be a Christian (or a Moslem, Jew, ...) surely some of this must be known with certainty!

• I must be certain that the earth goes around the sun, the the basic theory of stellar evolution is true, that U Cep is really eclipsing and the data that I get is reliable. How could I doubt this and call myself an astronomer?

To all of the above I would answer that I hold those statements to be true! But my truth claim does not imply indubitability. I would go on to maintain that no knowledge can be held without admitting that I could be wrong.

Why would we accept Descartes conception of knowledge? Is it possible to know anything (aside perhaps your existence) indubitably? Augustine anticipated this problem and replied "I believe in order to know". The way out of the downward spiral into nihilism is, I think, to radically reshape our understanding of knowledge itself.

Two Influential Books...

Personal Knowledge

1. Science is always done within a tradition. One learns science - especially a practitioner of science - through a process essentially the same as apprenticeship into that science.

2. Scientists "indwell" the tradition in which they operate. They operate from within a matrix or web of theories, questions, conjectures etc. that focus and direct their thinking.

3. We know bodily. The mind/body dualism is false. We cannot know independent of ourselves in some abstracted way. Knowing is not a passive act.

4. To know something is to assert that that thing is true and this always entails risk - the risk that we may be wrong.

5. There is always a tacit dimension to our knowing. We cannot exhaustively unpack all that we know and in many cases we know far more than we think we know.

Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian born chemist who, in mid life, left chemistry to become a philosopher. His greatest book Personal Knowledge (1958) is an attempt to refashion our understanding of what it means to know. Polanyi began with a number of central understandings of science as it is lived and practiced.

So nothing really is "true" then? ...

1. the claim is made with universal intent - it is not true only for me but I state it as though I expect it to be true for you as well. This entails that I acquire the skills and understandings of my craft and that I operate with integrity. I must sincerely - passionately - believe that which I assert.

2. the claim has an "appeal" to rationality. Polanyi's critical realist understanding comes through here. In doing science we make contact with reality. Our act of indwelling and the tacit dimension of our knowing convict us of the truthfulness of our claim. Further, this claim must be fruitful, leading to as yet unknown understandings.

Together, these characterize that which Polanyi labeled "personal knowledge". Gone is radical objective/subjective split and the idea of the dispassionate knower.

Let me try to illustrate this with a few examples that Polanyi used from science: • The Copernican Revolution • Michelson Morely Experiment

Wrong! Polanyi would (and I agree) say that a statement in science can be considered true providing:

Challenges ...

• Facing the relativist claim that science is just a social construction

• Re-visioning of science in the absence of timeless, absolute truth claims

• Recognising the necessity (and unavailability) of making meta-scientific claims

The word "meme" is a shortening (modeled on "gene") of mimeme (from Ancient Greek μίμημα Greek pronunciation: [míːmɛːma] mimēma, "something imitated", from μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai, "to imitate", from μῖμος mimos "mime")[4] and it was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)[1][5] as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches.[6]

Advocates of the meme idea say that memes may evolve by natural selection, in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influencing a meme's reproductive success.Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate the most effectively spread best. Some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[7]

A field of study called memetics[8] arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically. Some commentators[who?] question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.

…From Wikipedia