For all of their self-publicized objectivity and rigorous standards of reasoning, there are some rather breathtakingly naive ideas that have gained currency in the contemporary culture of atheism and among some of a vaguely scientific bent. Few of these are as astonishing as the assumption that the theorized genetic basis of religious belief necessarily leads to the conclusion that religion is just the undesirable artifact of evolutionary biology and God is bunk. QED. For a person who doesn't believe in God or who is making a career in the burgeoning pop culture field that champions these kinds of ideas, that assumption seems to be immediately grasped because they think it confirms their preexisting preferences. But that is certainly not the most necessary conclusion, nor is their heart’s desire the only conclusion that can be drawn from it using their own level of rigor.
First, the proposition, most often associated with Daniel Dennett, is glaringly lacking in rigorous analysis. It assumes that a proposed creator God who created the entire universe, planets, solar systems, galaxies, clusters, dark matter, energy, the entire shebang, and who also keeps it in motion, wouldn't have any say in what happens in the puny little molecules that make up our genetic inheritance. Perhaps they think that such a God would just have to grow forgetful under the burdens of considering the big picture.
Not only COULD such a creator God’s role be proposed in any such genetic basis of belief, but to leave out that possibility is entirely dishonest in a PHILOSOPHICAL* discussion of the matter. It is hard for me to believe that doing so could be just a rather astounding oversight for a philosopher to make. If you’re talking God, you don’t get to leave the possibility of God out of the picture just at a point when doing so best suits your conclusion. It certainly wouldn't be by a careful philosopher who was thinking about the subject. When talking about “God”, God isn't an unimportant detail in the argument.
Rather charmingly, Dennett and his cubs seem to not realize that even if they were to conclusively prove that faith was controlled by genetics that could lead someone so disposed to take that as the strongest physical evidence ever found that there was a God. Not only a God but a God who wished that people should know of his existence, or at least to have that option open to them as a recessive or latent possibility**. They could be handing the I.D. types, not their death sentence, but fulfilling their greatest desideratum***. I say charmingly only because Dennett, one of the proponents of that other PR disaster in the making, “The Brights” idea, seems to have a bad habit of handing ammo to the other side.
Note: From experience, you can be certain that one of the things that might come up in a discussion of this issue is the matter of “wish fulfillment” to impeach one side of the argument. That is, again, rather an astounding gap between the pretense of the self-identified “realist” side of things and life as it actually is. There are few, established, well accepted ideas found by scientific research which were not fervently desired by their discovers and promoters. And there are a lot of ideas that, found by mistake, lead to an equally fervent desire for confirmation and extension. Wish fulfillment in and of itself doesn’t prove sloppy thinking or dishonesty, though it can certainly be a motive in both. The falsity of an idea isn’t based in whether that it’s considered to be desirable by the person who holds or promotes it but that it has been disproved. If that wasn’t the case then even the idea that there is a genetic basis of religious belief would have to go, since it seems to be pushed most strongly by those who have a well known axe to grind on the subject. And, like many of the ideas of this school of speculation, it’s pretty much a construct made of words and assertions. And , as seen above, many of them are rather shaky in themselves.
* That is philosophical, not scientific, so don’t bother bringing that red herring up. Questions of a God have no place in any part of science. Science is incompetent to address them. Philosophy can and does deal with many things that fall outside of science, whether or not anyone likes that. But it can't do so by lying about the nature of the discussion for opportunistic reasons.
** God help us, the strict predestinarians would have a field day with that one.
***I, personally, am doubtful that there is any such genetic mechanism but I’m not a biological determinist to begin with.
April 25, 2007
This was still the early period of my writing about these issues, before doing most of the research that made me far more critical of popular and, later, more sophisticated atheist writing. I believe it was a reaction to hearing Dennett on the radio with Terry Gross. As I remember, it was the first time I'd heard Dennett in discussion and I was pretty shocked at how flimsy and even ridiculous his arguments were, all of them were based in shifting the meanings of words and opportunistic elisions. In learning more of him, it would seem to constitute his most obvious intellectual practice.
Today I have many more examples of Dennett's polemical and rhetorical distortion of terms, which form a considerable part of his intellectual methods. The point that they want to leave the possibility of their being wrong and that there is a God at points in the argument that suits them is a major one when addressing the idea of God. I don't think I've ever come across philosophers of Dennett's reputation who aren't prepared to play the devils advocate, to address the opposing hypothesis in this question. The one constant in popular and even a lot of formal advocacy of materialism is the insistence on a double standard. There is to be no serious consideration of the possibility that there God is real allowed in academic discussions. In that they remind me of nothing so much as the present strategy of the Republican Party who insist on similar ground rules. It would be as foolish for religious people to give them their own way on that as it is for Barack Obama and the Senate Democrats to have allowed that strategy to work for Republicans.
That God would be impotent at the molecular level when God is believed to have created the molecular level of matter just as much as the intergalactic scale of things is absurd. Religious people should point out that is what they believe as soon as atheists start going on in this way. When you are talking about God the Creator of the universe, you either discuss that God created it at all levels or you haven't really discussed God the creator and produce a flawed conclusion that no one is required to take seriously.
A bit of Wittgenstein for you, going places Dennett cannot follow, or even imagine:
ReplyDeleteFor it is clear that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has disappeared; unless what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has not yet been explained by science which again means that we have hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system. This shows that it is absurd to say 'Science has proved that there are no miracles.' The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle. For imagine whatever fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of that. For we see now that we have been using the word 'miracle' in a relative and an absolute sense. And I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle. Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot express what we want to express and that all we say about the absolute miraculous remains nonsense. Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of you. You will say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt us to attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and importance, this simply shows that by these words we don’t mean nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions. Now when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab initio, on the ground of its significance. That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.
Thank you for pointing this out, I'd never read that lecture before. Google, I don't know if I'd want to do research without a computer anymore. So much faster than card catalogs, indexes and skimming to find things. Not to mention noted in my horrible writing and dim Xeroxes from machines that need toner.
ReplyDeleteI've been feeling unpleasantly nostalgic this past week.