Engaging Today’s Militant Atheist Arguments, Part 1
"The BioLogos Forum" is pleased to feature essays from various guest voices in the science-and-religion dialogue. Please note the views expressed here are those of the author, not necessarily of The BioLogos Foundation. You can read more about what we believe here.
Today's entry was written by Ian Hutchinson. Ian H. Hutchinson is professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His primary research interest is plasma physics and its practical applications. He and his MIT team designed, built and operate the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, an international experimental facility whose magnetically confined plasmas are prototypical of a future fusion reactor. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Cambridge University and his doctorate in engineering physics from the Australian National University. He directed the Alcator project from 1987 to 2003 and served as head of MIT’s nuclear science and engineering department from 2003 to 2009. In addition to over 160 journal articles on a variety of plasma phenomena, Hutchinson is widely known for his standard monograph on measuring plasmas: Principles of Plasma Diagnostics. He has also served on numerous editorial boards and national fusion review panels. For more, see Hutchinson's upcoming book Monopolizing Knowledge.
Last November, a small group of leading pastors, scholars, scientists, public intellectuals, and informed laypersons gathered in New York City to consider several pressing questions at the interface of science and faith (see summary statement here). This was the second Theology of Celebration BioLogos Workshop (see details about the 2009 workshop here). Three papers, each addressing a different question, provided the framework for our discussions at the meeting. These were presented by Faraday Institute Director Denis Alexander (see paper here), Oxford theoretical biophysicist Ard Louis (see paper here), and MIT physicist Ian Hutchinson. Today we begin a series take from Hutchinsons's paper (downloadable here), which addresses the question of how to engage arguments put forward by the New Atheists by offering a critique of scientism, the assumption that scientific knowledge is all the real knowledge there is.
Editor's Note: After some discussion surrounding the use of the world "militant" in the last video from Ian Hutchinson, we've asked him to clarify his use of the word in the accompanying paper. He responds:
What do I mean by Militant? Nothing different from what the dictionary says. 'Vigorously active and aggressive, especially in support of a cause' (Free Online Dictionary). The Pocket Oxford Dictionary says 'engaged in warfare (Church militant, Christians on earth), combative,' So this ephithet has not historically been considered an insult and is not intended by me as one. Militant atheists is a factual description of those who are active and aggressive in support of their atheist cause. If they wish to return the compliment by referring to militant Christians, they will have some historical precedent and I shall not complain, but I am personally less aggressive, even if perhaps not less vigorous, than the likes of those who are often called New Atheists!
The designation “New Atheists” has been gaining ground as a name given to this century's best-selling authors, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and company, who attack religion. I greatly prefer the designation “Militant Atheists". It is far more accurate. There is very little new in their critiques. Their militancy is the distinctive feature of their writings. Calling them “Hysterical Atheists” is funny and makes the same point, but it is a bit too provocative to be useful.
Engaging their arguments has been undertaken already by a very respectable variety of commentators, including both Christians and unbelievers.1 It is not altogether a rewarding task, because while the militants' writings are fluid and stylish, the arguments are often silly. David Bentley Hart's tone is more disdainful than charitable when he refers to their “embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning ... that raises the wild non-sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method”2, but his criticism's content is right on target. Terry Eagleton, no Evangelical apologist, begins his blistering critique in the London Review of Books “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology”.3 There is plenty in the militant atheist writings to criticize.
What I want to do here is not to recap the philosophical ideas in the rebuttals that have already been published. Nor am I really qualified to propose a winning public relations strategy for Christian apologetics in response to militant atheist popularity, important though that might be. I am conscious that my own sensitivity to popular culture is filtered through too many years as an academic for me know what will or won't find a resonance in twenty-first century media, or individual hearts. Instead, I want to explain what I take to be the most important idea that enables us to understand the true relationship between science and the Christian faith;4 and then to examine the extent to which this idea answers the militant atheists.
The idea, put in its simplest terms, is that the predominant basis of confrontation between science and religion as well as between science and other intellectual disciplines is scientism — the belief that science is all the real knowledge there is. What's more, the error of scientism is committed not just by scientists or secularists or atheists. In fact significant threads of scientism permeate the modern Church's thinking, including the thinking of many Evangelicals. But science does not entail or establish scientism. Scientism is actually a philosophical, and in the end a religious, commitment that is internally incoherent, not to mention inconsistent with Christian belief. Making sense of science and Christianity therefore absolutely requires us to draw a clear distinction between science and scientism: to value science for the truths it unveils about nature, and to repudiate scientism as an intellectually bankrupt fallacy. This might seem straightforward but it isn't.
The first thing that makes scientism difficult to repudiate is that it is rarely explicit. Even scientism's most ardent believers almost never get up and say “I believe that science is all the real knowledge there is.” Even in the long-past heyday of Logical Positivism, its criterion of meaning through testability was not explicitly scientific, though it was in a subtle sense an adoption of the methods of science. Rather, and especially now that Logical Positivism is intellectually unsupportable, scientism is implicit. The illustration of implicit scientism that I like to use is this passage from Nobel prize-winning biologist, Jacques Monod, who writes, “The cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that nature is objective. In other words, the systematic denial that `true’ knowledge can be got at by interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes — that is to say, of `purpose’.”5 See in this quotation how there is an almost imperceptible transition from “nature is objective” to “true knowledge”. The second sentence makes sense as an explanation of the first only if all true knowledge is knowledge of nature, i.e. science. He is of course correct that modern science's approach (in contrast to Aristotle) is to avoid final causes and purposes in its description of the world. But to extrapolate this characteristic of `scientific’ knowledge so that it becomes for Monod a feature of any `true’ knowledge is pure presumption, pure scientism.
The second feature of scientism that makes it difficult to combat is historical and philological. It is that the original meaning of `science’, based on its derivation from Latin, was simply any kind of systematic knowledge. The meaning of the word science is still volatile, and that volatility makes it susceptible to misuse. In common usage today, science means what was once called `natural philosophy’, or in today's terminology natural science, the science of the natural world, epitomized by physics, chemistry, biology, geology and so on. When we talk about reconciling Christianity and science we don't mean struggling to understand the consistency of our faith with current economic, sociological, historical or political theories. We mean, and everyone else means, asking how the Bible and Christian doctrine can be consistent with modern cosmology, genomics, and neurology for example: the natural sciences. If, in the teeth of common modern usage, one insists upon a classically-derived meaning of the word — that science simply means any systematic body of knowledge — then scientism is a tautology. On that basis all knowledge is science by definition, and theology, even if it is no longer the Queen of them, is a science like other disciplines. Many discussions of science and scientism founder because of a vacillation between these meanings. If science describes any systematic knowledge, then of course all of our disciplines are science. Yet when we talk about the penetration, power, persuasiveness, or prestige of science we are referring to natural science. It is vital to have in mind a stable meaning of science. I mean natural science.
A third substantial problem in distinguishing science from scientism is made all the greater because current opinions in the philosophy of science emphasize the difficulty in demarcation between science and non-science. It is pointed out that there is no convincing algorithm either for the practice of science (of which a candidate might for example be induction) or for evaluating what is or is not science (for example falsifiability). If then, the thought goes, we are uncertain how science is to be practiced or identified, then who is to say where its boundaries lie? Why should we concede that there are any limits to science's knowledge? And if there are no limits to science, then scientism starts to look very plausible. Maybe we don't yet have really scientific knowledge of some aspects of the world, but that's perhaps just because those aspects are at an early stage in scientific development. We just need to keep working to turn them eventually into truly positive sciences. Actually (and here we touch on the questionable novelty of the militant atheists) these sort of arguments echo the early nineteenth-century positivists: Saint-Simon and Compte.6 But they are erroneous.
It is true that the common simplistic descriptions of the scientific method are largely mythological. But, nevertheless, there are identifiable characteristics in science as it has been practiced since the scientific revolution, and these constitute substantial limitations of the scope of science's ability to describe the world. I identify the two key characteristics as reproducibility and Clarity. Science describes the world in so far as it is describable in terms that are reproducible. An experiment done here, and now, by me, if it is part of science will give the same result when done somewhere else, sometime else, by someone else. Or if we are discussing something inaccessible to manipulation, for example the stars in astronomy, then multiple consistent observations at different places and times, by different observers must be possible, providing reproducibility in practice even if not necessarily at will. Moreover science requires that its descriptions have a specialized Clarity (capitalized to indicate my use as a technical term), so that they are unambiguously understood by the trained scientist. This often (but not always) involves quantitative measurement and mathematical theory. Such mathematical forms of expression most abundantly possess Clarity but other forms such as systematic description or classification also provide it in ways that would not normally be described as mathematical. In any case Clarity is required even to know whether reproducibility has been attained, and these requirements place limitations on science.
Notes
1. Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion IVP books, Downers Grove, Il, 2007, is an approachable place to start. Dinesh d'Souza What's so great about Christianity, Regenery, Washington DC, 2007, is also easy to read. H. Allen Orr's review “A Mission to Convert”. New York Review of Books 54 (1) January 2007, is an example of critique coming from an agnostic.
2. David Bentley Hart Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. Yale University press. New Haven 2009, p4.
3. Terry Eagleton. London Review of Books Vol. 28, No. 20, 19 October 2006, p 32.
4. The present essay is based on my book currently in preparation called Monopolizing Knowledge which addresses scientism on a broader canvas.
5. Jacques Monod. Chance and Necessity. An essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology. Vintage, New York, 1972, p 21.
6. The original Positivists, whose ambitions actually led them to the foundation of alternative churches complete with rituals and religious hierarchies
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March 8th 2011
@ Louis
“I say this because your coments come across as “targeted rants” rather than dialogue/debate/arguments.”
How predictable your response. Then again why should I have expected you to say anything else? Louis, you know that I know that you know that five billion others on this planet know, that the biblegod of your choice is simply mythological bunkum. The attribution of the creation of the universe to a creator-god is none other than a response driven by our genetic survival mechanism through which teleological intentionality was ascribed to things we did not know or could not explain, during our early days of species-hood. Sheesh, it’s as plain as the nose on your face. And the greater the discoveries in neuro-science becomes, the theory of mind that cogently and evidentially explains this predisposition, to conjuring up gods and other supernatural, metaphysical entities, becomes ever more likely.
Louis, you too read a pre-modern eastern text through modern Western eyes, and choose [deliberately] I might add] to gloss over these ‘god’ inspired words as though they are meaningless and less intentional than they really are. Well, tell that to a whole bunch of your theist compatriots that read them just as I do, just as they were originally meant to be read. They are, after all, the very words lifted directly from your ‘sacred’ text. The god that you seem so keen to peddle is only a recent invention, to make religion palatable to the modern gullibles. Such contrivance is the work of Apologetics. And an historical reading of Apologetics clearly shows, not new information or knowledge developed, but simply a change in interpretation, a re-imagining of what the words mean, a three-point turn in a theological cul-de-sac, or a U-turn, based on the exact same words that have been around for 2,000-plus years. Interpretation and re-interpretation of ancient texts in the modern world is called, ‘marking time’ or ‘marching on the spot’.
I add again, remember jesus did not invalidate any of these with his teachings. They were never to be cast aside. “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill the law” [Matthew 5:18] That is, Louis, the law as set down in the OT along with the range of punishments to be metered out.
If you are going to incorporate science into christian thinking, as indeed the BioLogos mission states, then you cannot pick and choose which bits of science to be selected. That just becomes an exercise in Apologetics. One is obliged to accept all of science wherever that science is establishing testable and verifiable knowledge and information.
Reply to this commentMarch 9th 2011
I should add the list preceding was from Jason Long, from his book , Biblical Nonsense’.
Reply to this commentMarch 9th 2011
Papalinton, hmm, your response is typical. How did I expect anything else?
Really, though, there are some big assumptions there:
I’m not a staf-member here at Biologos. There is nothing in any one of my responses calling for an integration between science and religion, selectively or otherwise. Your rant regarding apolegetics and reading and lifting words and modern inventions - seems a bit incoherent. Also how that ties in with my previous response to you is a bit of a mystery.
BTW, I do not have a problem with the findings of cognitive neuroscience, though I’m quite far removed from that field. However, if religion is merely a “response driven by our genetic survival mechanism through which teleological intentionality was ascribed to things we did not know or could not explain, during our early days of species-hood.”, why the violent reaction against a natural process? It does seem to me that the violence of your responses here, with a tendency towards ranting and incoherence, seems driven by its own specific set of psychological processes. You see, calm reasoning and debate would produce a different result.
It is evident here though that the “new” atheism attracts people that would likely quite often fit the psychological profile of angry young men (though of both sexes and different ages), the sort which in previous times would have gravitated to reading Nietzsche.
In ahort, it is the violence and passion of your arguments, leading to near-ranting and incoherence, more than their substance, which tell most about you and your argument. Go hgave a beer and think it over, and when you have calmed down, and expunged the hate, rational debate could begin.
Reply to this commentMarch 9th 2011
Hi Louis
That’s right, attack the man and not the ball. If what I am saying seems angry, you should be so lucky. All your wonderful epithets of my ‘ranting’, ’ incoherence’, ‘violence’ and your wonderful notion of psychologizing my character, are simply delightful. I am pleased to have had an effect on you.
Of course, to challenge and disagree so robustly with the utter nonsense that constitutes the foundation of your worldview, must come as a tear to the quietude you so long for. But unfortunately, Louis, the ugly medusa’s head of the christianities arising about the parapet of public policy must be seriously challenged and brought to account for the shamanic nonsense it is.
Theism has not been, has never been challenged and held to scrutiny at the level currently being maintained. And theism has been found wanting. Catholic involvement in the Rwandan massacres, the worldwide clerical child rape scandals, the shameless attempted secreting of Haitian children by a christian group following the earthquake, are all testament to the temporal malaise of a belief system gone awry.
Incidentally, how does one have a rationale debate with someone who’s belief system is based on everything but rationality?
Louis, you really must look beyond heaven’s gate if religion is to play a purposive role in society into the future.
Reply to this commentMarch 9th 2011
Papa: “But unfortunately, Louis, the ugly medusa’s head of the christianities arising about the parapet of public policy must be seriously challenged and brought to account for the shamanic nonsense it is.”
Papa, You never did answer my question. Do you want to monitor what is said in the pulpit so that pastors can be punished, penalized, or harmed for “misinforming” their congregations?
Reply to this commentMarch 9th 2011
Papa wrote,
I add again, remember jesus did not invalidate any of these with his teachings. They were never to be cast aside. “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill the law” [Matthew 5:18] That is, Louis, the law as set down in the OT along with the range of punishments to be metered out.
You are exactly right, Jesus came to fulfill God’s Law that people must pay for their sin. (Of course there is nothing wrong with paying for one’s sins or mistakes. Do you advocate that no criminals be punished?) Shouldn’t Kim Il Sung pay for his brutal regime?
Jesus did this two ways, 1. He lived a perfect life without sin according to the Law of God including the Torah, Jewish religious law; and 2. Jesus paid the penalty for the sins of humanity and nature with His death upon a Roman cross, so that those who sincerely desire to live for God and to love all of the people of God (which includes everyone) do not have to pay the penalty for their sin and will live together eternally in the presence of God. Thus Jesus came so those prophecies did not have to take place. They probably will, not because God wants them to, but because people prefer war to peace, prefer human hate to God’s love.
If evolution is nature’s program for survival, the good news of Jesus Christ is the promise of eternal life, which is survival plus peace, joy, and love. Thus Jesus is also the fulfillment of natural law.
If materialism and atheism can produce a world without crime and war, fine. Thus far they have been singularly failed in doing so. WW2 and the Cold War are brutal monuments to their efforts.
Reply to this commentMarch 9th 2011
Papalinton,
I’ve been pondering our little interchange here. A couple of things struck me. You are apparently arguing against Christianity, but I’m not engaging in that argument, actually nowhere in our exchange did I enter into a defence thereof. I’m not even arguing against atheism per se. The only thing that I’m doing here is to question the assumptions and motivations and modus operandi of the specific brand of atheism you seem to deal in.
I’m not interested in “but such and such a Christian did a bad thing”-arguments, because they are essentially “guilt by association” arguments, which are bad form and worse dialectic. Not to say that many theists, or religionists as some atheists cal them, can and do make the same type of argument against the atheists. It is all bad form.
I thin the issue which is at hand here, especially concerning your brand of atheism, is that you do not see that you are epistemologically in the same boat as the rest of non-atheist humanity, namely that you must accept the improvable to make the rest of your argument, nay, your whole philosophical system work. Thus you are not above the rest of non-atheist humanity as it seems you think you are (please correct me here if I’m wrong).
As such, I would like to invite you to respond to my earlier question, namely that if religion is merely the evolutionary artefact, a coping mechanism of the human organism within a complex environment, why the hostility? Also, how is atheism then not a different variety of the same coping mechanism?
Reply to this commentMarch 9th 2011
Mike Gene asks Papalinton:
March 10th 2011
Louis,
Reply to this commentIn sympathy to Papa I think that I should point out some basic problems he has. First and formost, he is defending a negative, not a positive. Atheism itself means no Godism. Thus it should be no surprise that he attacks Christianity or the idea that there is a God, but is unable to come up with a positive alternative.
Science of course is positive, but it is unable or has been unable to address many of the basic problems of the world. It really does not have an answer for war, or hate, or crime, or injustice, so Scientism only has a negative anti-God position.
Marxism, which thought it had a positive response to the problems of the world, based on materialistic atheism is rejected by those who are also materialists and atheists without even a farethewell. Someone like Dawkins doesn’t even try explain how and why Marx with apparent good intentions and ideas went wrong.
It is sad that people with intelligence and knowledge are sucked into a negative world view seemingly without being aware of it.
March 14th 2011
So, if I understand this article correctly, and there was a lot of meandering talk to wade through, Mr. Hutchinson is saying that because there may be limits to scientific knowledge there’s always the possibility of finding evidence for God. That is a good argument for why all views about God are equally plausible, or implausible as it were. It doesn’t get us anywhere.
Reply to this commentShouldn’t something substantial have surfaced by now though? And second, even if some sort of evidence in support of God is found, he would be nothing at all like the God that Christians imagine. Would Christians be able to accept that? After all, the fossil, genetic, and archaeological evidence we have now pretty much demolishes the stories in the Bible as any kind of literal, factual history. Once Genesis is discredited the whole of Christian theology comes unravelled, for it was because of Adam’s sin that Jesus had to die. If the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and our human ancestors lived 7-8 million years ago, then Adam never was. And if Adam never lived, then he never sinned. And if he never sinned then Jesus didn’t have to die, etc.. Well, anyway, it seems that playing with definitions of science is merely wishful thinking.
And on the subject of militant atheists. Have you ever encountered insulting, militant language used in the Bible against unbelievers by men of God? I have. Paul says, “You foolish Galatians.” Jesus compares unbelievers to swine and dogs. May I say, “You foolish Christians”? Would that be considered unpolite? May I call a Christians “ravenous wolves” like the inspired authors of the Bible call us unbelievers? I have written an article that walks Christians through their scriptures and shows that their complaints about rude, obnoxious atheists are hypocritical. The language in your sacred texts are much more offensive than your complaints of us atheists indicate. You can visit my blog and read it here: http://whirledbulletin.blogspot.com/2011/03/christian-remove-plank-from-your-own.html . I hope to see you there.
March 16th 2011
Jeff B,
Reply to this commentIn case you haven’t noticed sin is a reality in today’s world. Jesus didn’t die because of the sin of Adam and Eve. Jesus died for your and my sins.
If you have a cure for sin, please share it with us and the world.
March 17th 2011
Jeff B. wrote:
Reply to this commentAnd on the subject of militant atheists. Have you ever encountered insulting, militant language used in the Bible against unbelievers by men of God? I have. Paul says, “You foolish Galatians.” Jesus compares unbelievers to swine and dogs. May I say, “You foolish Christians”? Would that be considered unpolite? May I call a Christians “ravenous wolves” like the inspired authors of the Bible call us unbelievers? I have written an article that walks Christians through their scriptures and shows that their complaints about rude, obnoxious atheists are hypocritical.
Jeff, before you publish your research, you should make sure that it is correct. For instance when Paul called the members of the church in Galatia foolish, he was not talking to unbelievers, but to believers who unwittingly turned from true faith in Jesus back to a form Jewish legalism. Since most people would agree that rejecting truth for a falsehood is foolish, I would say Paul is telling the truth which the best defense againist slander.
Many people characterize those who reject evolution as foolish and I tend to agree, because they reject the facts. However you make clear the primary reason why Christians reject evolution by equating evolution with atheism, which is also false. So while rejecting evolution may be foolish, I think that equating evolution with atheism is foolishness squared or cubed. Thus while anti evolutionists are foolish, atheist evolutionists are many times more foolish.
The false prophets who pretend to be sheep, but are really ravenous beasts are not necessarily atheists either, but it is true that some atheists like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, and Nicholae Ceausescu do fit the description of ravenous beasts. If you want to associate yourself with then, be my guest. Certainly Hitler was also a false prophet and a ravenous beast, but he represents a slightly different situation.
As for Jesus comparing people to dogs, this story is about reversing the “curse of Canaan” and nothing else. In terms of His use of the saying, “Do not cast your pearls before swine,” the meaning is clear, do not share your pearls of wisdom with those who are not prepared to appreciate them.
If I call some people pig headed, it does not mean they are pigs, but they stubbornly refuse to accept facts. Many people are this way, including “Christians” and non-Christians.
I am surprised you did not bring up what Jesus called the Pharisees and the Saducees, white washed tombs and children of the Devil. He was not PC. He was much harder on believing Jewish leaders than pagans and non-believers, but maybe that does not fit in to your ideology.