A Response to Coyne (and Contemporary Atheists Generally), Part 2

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Today's entry was written by Robert C. Bishop. Robert C. Bishop is the John and Madeline McIntyre Endowed Professor of Philosophy and History of Science and an associate professor at Wheaton College in Illinois. He received his master’s degree in physics and doctorate in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Bishop's research involves history and philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of social science, philosophy of mind and psychology and metaphysics. He is a member of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Scientific Affiliation and the Philosophy of Science Association. Bishop is the author of The Philosophy of the Social Science and co-editor of Between Chance and Choice: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Determinism. He has also written twenty articles for peer-reviewed journals.

In part one of this series, Robert Bishop looked at the theological, metaphysical and ethical presuppositions that permeate Coyne's critique of religion and of God as creator. Today he argues that science isn’t even the main player in Coyne and other contemporary atheists’ “scientific” attacks on God and religion.

Jerry Coyne–along with other contemporary atheists such as Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Victor Stenger (God: The Failed Hypothesis)–writes about and analyzes religion using a fairly crude evidentialist epistemology. This epistemology, however, is animated by ethical ideals that have largely gone unnoticed and unexamined.

Central to Coyne and these atheists’ approach to religion is what looks to be a straightforward intellectual or scientific value: objectification. Objectification is a stance towards things that abstracts away from so-called subject-related qualities. The latter include the meanings of and relationships among things that show up within our ordinary experience, values, aims and concerns. To take an objectifying stance means to regard things in the world as independent of the meanings they might have for humans, or as independent of how these things figure in our experience.¹ Instead, the objectifying stance reduces things in the world to a network of material objects and efficient causes. An example would be construing religious convictions and attitudes as univocal, propositional statements confirmable by public testing and observation, and thus as subject-independent.

Several important points should be noted about objectification as an exclusive approach to inquiry, let alone thinking about the “God question.” First, this stance is only made possible by a number of historical and cultural affordances that have everything to do with shifts in human ways of viewing the world.² This background betrays the fact that no inquiry is rigorously objective because all inquiry requires some background assumptions. Moreover, no forms of inquiry deal directly with objective realities as objects; rather, humans always experience and deal with their objects of inquiry as interpreted realities, where these interpretations are mediated by our theoretical and experimental practices.³ This holds true for Coyne’s investigations in evolutionary genetics as much as it holds for our explorations human action and God.

Second, and related, objectification involves deleting the values and meanings making up the everyday lifeworld of our human experience. We only engage in this kind of abstraction for particular purposes. Although Coyne and other atheist authors seem to think that scientific investigation delivers a clear “No” to the question of God’s existence, this is only because of the commitments and purposes they bring to their rather naive handling of religious questions.

Third, although objectification certainly has proved its worth in natural science inquiry, religious phenomena touch a domain having much more in common with human science inquiry–a point that apparently never registers with Coyne or other atheist writers–where objectification has proven problematic to say the least.⁴ A key reason for objectification’s failure when applied to the human domain is that it represents as much a moral as an epistemological ideal. This moral ideal can be seen, for instance, in contemporary atheists’ insistence that moral good comes from objectifying the God hypothesis and religions phenomena in general (e.g., liberating people from antiquated superstition and false authorities, or making the world a safer and less violent place to live). Such moral implications derive from a viewpoint already animated by a moral vision of the good life for human beings, not from a scientific viewpoint.

Objectification may be a thoroughly appropriate stance to take towards understanding the properties of electrons, molecules and genomes. However, when applied to human activities and our ways of understanding our world, objectification distorts the human phenomena we are trying to understand by treating self-interpreting beings as if we are no different in kind from electrons, molecules and genomes (a value judgment if ever there was one!). For instance, one may be able to investigate and describe the geological properties of volcanoes without implicitly or explicitly judging whether it would be better if the volcano formed in a different way or place. But when investigating and describing human activity and commitment to God, such judgments about what is good are unavoidable.

Indeed, such judgments routinely show up explicitly in contemporary atheist writings. For instance, Harris and Stenger insist that demonstrating the falsity of particular conceptions of God is a good thing because these conceptions are morally reprehensible. Coyne and Dawkins applaud what they take to be the demonstrated nonexistence of God because (they say) religious beliefs foster irrationality. Even Dennett, who recognizes some positive effects of religion, complains that it would be demeaning to human nature if we required religion for such goodness.

Coyne’s naive demand for “evidence that there is a god” betrays his lack of understanding that the ideal of objectification towards the human realm, religious practices or God is deeply connected with ethical ideals.⁵ For instance, Richard Bernstein shows how adherence to natural science ideals of objectification in human inquiry, though purportedly fostering “value-neutral, objective claims subject only to the criteria of public testing,” turn out to harbor “disguised ideology.” These “proposed theories secrete values and reflect controversial ideological claims about what is right, good, and just” reflecting a “total intellectual orientation” anchored in a complete package of tendentious high Enlightenment ideals such as individualism, autonomy, instrumentalism, and emancipation.⁶

As an example, several thinkers have analyzed different versions of liberal individualism, a disguised ideology that pervasively shapes much human science inquiry.⁷ This is a particular ethical vision or understanding of the nature of human action with a one-sided emphasis on the individual that obscures our cultural embeddedness and downplays the value of lasting social ties. It advocates thoroughgoing neutrality towards all values as a way of promoting particular basic and laudable ends such as liberty, tolerance, individuality and human rights (which, ironically, are themselves values). Simultaneously, liberal individualism’s insistent characterization of human action and motivation as exclusively self-interested and utilitarian undermines our capacity to respect and cherish others. Thus, liberal individualism tends to erode our devotion to the admirable modern ideals of freedom, justice and respect–the very ideals that it seeks to promote.

Remarkably, such disguised ideology is part and parcel of the seemingly innocent commitment to studying human actions, religion and other human involvements through exclusive use of natural science methods.⁸ Coyne expresses such disguised ideology when he demands that religious convictions about God be formulated in clear, objective, publicly (i.e., scientifically) testable propositions for which “evidence” can be adduced. He cannot defend this adherence to natural science methods based on science or on the model of rationality he adopts because both of these already presuppose the very objectification in question. Instead, his reasons for demanding this naively evidentialist line of inquiry are rooted in his desire to free people from what he takes to be illegitimate authorities, superstitions, false beliefs and irrationality.

These ethical ideals may help explain various tendencies of Coyne (e.g., pursuing naive views of falsification and overly simplistic readings of the Bible in contrast to nuanced readings of nature, adopting unsophisticated forms of epistemology in his treatment of “the God question” that would not otherwise be tolerated in his biology research). The ends of freeing people from what he considers to be false beliefs and irrationality mask the adoption of lower intellectual standards as means to achieving these ends. Although rhetorically effective (perhaps only with the atheist choir!), the cost in intellectual integrity is high and quite damaging to the reputation and understanding of science (and to atheism!).

Notes

1. See, Charles Taylor (1989), Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 31f.
2. James Turner (1986), Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, Johns Hopkins University Press.
3. Robert Boyle was quite clear on this for theological reasons! See Rose-Mary Sargent (1995), The Diffident Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
4. Robert C. Bishop (2007), The Philosophy of the Social Sciences, London: Continuum.
5. Turner (1984), especially chs. 4-6.
6. Richard Bernstein (1976), The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 31, 51.
7. See Bishop (2007) and references therein.
8. Bishop (2007).