Defending Science Against Religionist Calumnies

or, Science and Religion: How not to Understand Their Relation.

Saturday’s Globe and Mail (May 22) includes an interview with novelist Marilyn Robinson and a review of her recent book, Absence of Mind, by John Gray, emeritus professor of European Thought at L.S.E. As is typical in the press’s treatment of attacks on atheism and science, there is a striking confluence of attitudes between Ms. Robinson and Dr. Gray: both are desperately eager to criticize science in general, and especially anyone bold enough to suggest that our understanding of the world and ourselves should be grounded in a scientific approach. Both of them might have done better at this if they had a good understanding of science in the first place. Then at least they might have been able to say clearly what they believe religion has to offer us, and how it complements the scientific world view. Instead, their remarks merely reiterate familiar distortions and gross misunderstandings of what science is and what it has taught us about both the world and ourselves.

Science aims to describe and explain the world and its workings. Unlike religion, it does not promise a path to goodness. Yet in her interview Robinson complains that ‘(a)ll the world’s most appalling weapons are the creation of scientists’, as though this were a failure of science. Both weapons systems and the improvements in health, nutrition and comfort that developed countries have achieved show that science works as claimed: it provides descriptions of the world that we can exploit for our own purposes, whether good or evil. Science doesn’t aim at perfecting humans, or even try to tell us what human perfection would be—those aims belong to religion, though it’s worth noting in passing that religion has not been generally successful at achieving them.

In a remarkable display of what must be either ignorance or interpretive legerdemain, Robinson asserts that the creation story of Genesis I is “surprisingly consistent with the Big Bang, with the emergence of life in progressive stages, and with the remarkable phenomenon of speciation.” This is a disgraceful bit of pandering. The Big Bang has nothing to do with waters, separating the heavens from earth, or ‘letting there be light’; if Robinson can connect the language of Genesis I to a high-energy quantum soup in which all the forces were indistinguishable and space-time itself part of the soup, her hermeneutical skills are also, no doubt, more than good enough to transmute lead into gold. Genesis’ ‘progressive’ stages of creation are utterly incorrect about the order of appearance of different forms of life in the fossil record. And what evolutionary accounts of speciation are anticipated in Genesis? Allopatry? Vicariance? Pre-evolutionary scientists like Linnaeus held, in good biblical form, that each sexually-reproducing species began with an initially created pair. Did they miss something in their reading of the Bible? Could a better Biblical exegesis have pointed us towards the truth before Darwin? Or is Robinson just reading evolution into her bible now that science has discovered and documented the evolutionary story of life?

Robinson complains, of the so-called ‘new’ atheists, that ‘(n)ew thinking is precisely what is never found among them’. This is a pretty cheap shot for such a distinguished author, since the label “new atheists” was not adopted by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett or Christopher Hitchens: it was placed on them by others , to mark them as a new generation of forthright atheists who were prepared, as atheists have been (with some caution, given the penchant of religious authorities for torture and execution of heretics) for millennia, to criticize religion’s claims to authority and to defend a humanistic world view that accepts the primacy of science as a source of knowledge about the world (not as a source of values). Robinson is right on the main point, as most contemporary atheists would agree: there is nothing particularly new in the new atheism. But this only makes her distorted account of it the more shameful.

Openness to new evidence is indeed the heart of science—and scientific views of the world have changed and continue to change rapidly, from the introduction of quantum theory and general relativity in the early part of the twentieth century to the emergence of the Big Bang model of cosmology and the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology to plate tectonics and the biochemical revolution that just last week gave rise to the first organism with a wholly synthetic genome. All these developments have been driven by detailed engagement with empirical evidence and the tight constraints that scientific theories impose on evidence by the inferences they license. If we are ever to develop an understanding of the human mind, it will be through the sciences, and real progress on neurological function, psychological development and the evolutionary roots of the complex, layered human central nervous system continues to be made. If science cannot answer every “essential question” (and remember, science does not purport to tell us what is or is not valuable, good and worthy), a harder question for Robinson remains: why should anyone turn to religion, with its chequered and often brutal history, for those answers?

Robinson claims that the new atheists’ argument (whatever she thinks that is) would “fall to the ground if they were to own up to merely proceeding from a clutch of favoured assumptions”. This is an odd criticism coming from someone who describes herself as a Christian: does she really want to go toe-to-toe over claims of the virgin birth or the resurrection? But what are the ‘favoured assumptions’ she thinks these atheists are making? The success of science in illuminating our world is beyond question; grounded in persistent, common-sense observation and the development of theories that allow us to predict and explain so much of what we observe, science has produced agreement on a wide range of questions that were once undecided, from the workings of the solar system to our own evolutionary origins. And it has put that agreement to effective use, from space probes navigating the solar system to the detection of Neanderthal genes amongst some modern human groups. Surely an approach to knowledge that has such a record deserves quite a lot of credit.

Compare this to the record of religion as a source of knowledge, wisdom and moral principles: Genesis includes two obviously conflicting creation stories, neither of which fits the detailed scientific accounts that we now accept; it also includes an impossible flood-legend, and (to quote Mark Twain) upwards of a thousand lies. Far more grievously, the history of religions’ claims to offer moral insight and direction for personal improvement is not impressive. Tradition-bound institutions guard their power and conceal great sins while continuing to claim absolute moral authority. Of course different religions offer differing stories and positions on all these questions—and they demand their followers accept their stories and positions without question, comparison, or efforts to reason out why one, rather than another, is right about the place of women, the morality of homosexuality, the use of birth control, or the proper treatment of apostates.

The scientific model of reasoned persuasion, grounded in evidence and discussion, would be a better starting point for moral inquiry: as David Hume noted long ago, we share many basic moral tendencies, including altruistic concern for others (demonstrated amongst monkeys and even mice in the form of reluctance to press a food-reward lever that administers a shock to a neighbouring animal). Evolution even provides good explanations for how such tendencies could have arisen: kin-selection and reciprocal altruism allow self-sacrificing behaviour that benefits kin or that is responded to in kind by others to be selected for. A discussion of ethics in which human well being and real evidence of what contributes to human well being come first sounds to me like something worth having—and something more likely to lead to agreements and compromises than iron-age doctrines grounded in regrettably authoritarian and misogynistic cultures. Of course it wouldn’t be easy—but it’s something philosophers have been pursuing for a long while, it underlies the enlightenment political institutions that have spread democracy, imperfectly, around much of the world, and it has even made some concern for public welfare and the common good an intermittently effective force in politics. I’ll put that up against the pie-in-the-sky promise of being born again and raised to the kingdom of heaven any day.

As for the review, well, it’s no better. Larding her work with overblown praise—“Absence of Mind is one of the most thought-stirring inquiries into fundamental questions that has appeared in many years” (I can only suppose Gray simply hasn’t read very much)—Gray’s only quibble is that Robinson thinks humans are very special, a thesis he claims is shared by the new atheists: “Dawkins and his followers believe that consciousness makes humans categorically different from their animal kin” He doesn’t document this claim, which is unsurprising since it’s false. And he’s apparently upset that (as he puts it) “these idealogues insist (they always insist) that consciousness emerged without any kind of supernatural intervention.” How else does Gray propose to explain the emergence of consciousness? Does waving the phrase ‘supernatural intervention’ over the process add anything to our understanding of consciousness? Surely studies of phenomena like blindsight, the timing of neurological events in the course of decision making and the cognitive capacities of fish, chimpanzees and other animals offer far more interesting and helpful hints! Or would Gray prefer the Noachian story of the rainbow to the physical facts of raindrops and refraction?

But the weakness of Gray’s own views emerges full-blown in his conclusion: “Before the emergence of complex forms of life, the environments that humans and other animals experience weren’t simply unperceived. They didn’t exist. Will we ever fully grasp the unimaginably strange process whereby the physical universe has spawned these virtual worlds?” It’s hard at first to make sense out of this. Gray’s reference to virtual worlds suggests it is the ‘inner’ worlds of experience that didn’t exist until complex life arose—and that, of course, seems perfectly sensible. But Gray regards the inner worlds of experience as really outer worlds, constitutive of our environments, not merely how we experience them. Hence the superficially outrageous claim that our ‘environment’ didn’t exist until we and other living things came around to experience it. But in the end this is a simple, and simply feeble, appeal to ignorance. Science can’t tell us in advance what we will or won’t understand fully in time. We now understand why the flux of solar neutrinos at first seemed much less than it ought to be. But to know in advance that we’d figure this out, we’d pretty much have to have had the solution in hand in the first place. The status of consciousness and its relation to physical goings-on in the brain is a philosophical perennial—but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a scientific resolution of the problem. After all, philosophers struggled for centuries to give accounts of physical events like the fall of bodies and the motions of the heavens—and now we actually understand them pretty well. Brains are very complicated things, transforming the storm of photons entering our eyes into sight (both conscious and unconscious) and molecules in food and air into tastes and smells. But there is nothing to be achieved by sitting back, marveling at it all, and exclaiming that science can’t ever unravel these processes—and wisely, Gray doesn’t even claim that it can’t. How that sustains his endorsement of Robinson's empty-headed critique of science is the real mystery here.