Someone pulled Richard Dawkins out in an online brawl I was involved with a few days back. I realized it was the first time someone had done that in years, it was kind of a surprise considering how his claim to fame is fallen into discredit these days. So I wrote this response. I'm tempted to post links to things I've written about most of these subjects here but if you're interested you can do a search of my archive. I generally gave full citations and links which may still work though I don't have enough online time these days to check that.
ATHEISM WOULD HAVE BEEN better off if the new atheist fad of the first decade of the 21st century hadn't happened, it was in every way a sign of intellectual decadence and often sank into grotesque stupidity. As any popular fad, its stupidity is bound to lead to intellectual discrediting and they gave the opposition to them the motivation to discredit them. Though their bullying and nagging probably led most people to just get tired of them. Especially the mean-boys who have always dominated ideological atheism and its false front, "skepticism." The necessity of responding to them has forced people who probably had other things they'd rather have been doing to confront their arguments and claims and citations which, in so far as I've dealt with them in depth, all pretty well fall apart when subjected to even the standards that the new atheists claimed to champion. There are, certainly, valid criticisms of the varied doctrinal, dogmatic and theological claims of the various sects and traditions of religion but materialistic atheism has turned out to be a pretty threadbare and tattered and raffish basis for making those criticisms. And atheists have their own doctrines and dogmas and faith holdings that are not less vulnerable.
The rigorous internal criticism of religion is more exigent and compelling than the general practice of throwing up what is generally either an ideologically motivated or popular level concept of science against those. That is why what is what should have been, for any practical purposes, a minor and esoteric semi-science, the general study of evolution, has gained such an absurd place in modern culture, because it could be thrown up against a naive, far from majoritarian, mostly Christian reading of the first chapters of Genesis and could shock naive literalists out of what was generally never a deep knowledge of Christianity or any kind of secure faith. Almost any other legitimate, observation-based aspect of biology is far more scientific and far more important for doing something to make life better or even possible. There is no helping the trillions of dead organisms that comprise the actual subject matter of any subject of evolution, all but the most vanishingly tiny percentage of them has even left physical traces that can be studied in any specificity and even those fossilized remains can only be known on the basis of what is left of their observable, measurable physical remains. All the rest is grossest speculation and, more frequently than will ever be admitted, frequently self-interested fantasy.
It seems to me that it is the weakest faith that is grasped onto most fanatically, leading to some of the greatest sins committed in the name of Christianity. It is an irony that that the Fundamentalism that is the foil of modern atheism is, itself, a product of the same modernism that modern science is, the oldest theological traditions in Christianity didn't read Genesis as if it was either science or a modern conception of history. The Cappadocians and even Augustine said taking those as stories as literally true was a misuse of them. So that was never news to the Christian tradition, no matter how many never got the message or suppressed it. I think Darwinism is enforced as the required framing of evolution - EVOLUTION which I have never doubted is the way in which the diversity of life on Earth came about - out of the knowledge of those who have thought most deeply about it, that it has never had much of any evidentiary or rational basis. It has been maintained on plausibility based on how little instead of how much is securely demonstrated in actual physical evidence. As I said to your objection, "natural selection" has no known material existence so it cannot reliably even be located within the material universe. You didn't tell me where it is when I asked you.
Other than as an object of curiosity, I don't think that much of practical importance has come out of the most rigorous and, perhaps, accurate claims about evolution. Certainly as compared to the study of diseases, their prevention and their cures, even the lines of early hominids and even far more remotely back into our ancestry is of vanishingly little importance. And that's not to count the most important of related science, the science into how to sustain life against human activity and, worst of all, the quest to amass and concentrate wealth, the fossil fuel industry.
I think the extent to which evolution has led to some real science about life, now, as it is, much of it could probably have been achieved more directly and probably more usefully. The bulk of scientific claims about evolution, especially on the basis of Darwinian natural selection and its drastically altered form in the "modern synthesis" a combination of something like Darwinism with that now 90 year old, and so quite naive, view of genetic inheritance, have been a disaster in human culture and history.
Eugenics, modern scientific racism, much of fascism, the foundation of Nazism, some of the worst law made in the modern period and tens of millions of murders, forced sterilization, neglect of the poor and destitute, untold economic privation, the obscene homicidal policy of "herd immunity" and the corrupt policy flowing out of the racist neo-eugenics such as is popularized in The Bell Curve, are all directly attributable to that one idolized aspect of the elevation of the semi-scientific study of evolution. I think someday someone should really ask what the world has paid to allow biologists to pretend they have had a central theory as compelling as Newtonian physics or the 20th century additions to that. Though the products of modern physics, atomic and nuclear weapons and nuclear power, may run up a body count that puts that of Darwinian eugenics as a distant runner up.
Which leads to my most important refutation of your contentions.
The most compelling criticism of a belief in God and the assertion that God is all good, the problem of suffering, is far more a problem for the attempt to replace God with science because science is, by common agreement, permitted to entirely ignore questions of morality and so is by definition amoral.
I will take a few seconds to point out that "amorality" is not a quality that is removable from the minds of People in which that "amorality" just sits there alone. Without positive moral restraint, "amorality" is just the precursor of immorality, indeed, when it is realized as an opportunity, it is often the certain precuror of the most appalling immorality that there has been in the human population. The modern self-consciously, self-defined scientific regimes have some of the most damningly huge body counts in human history. The Nazis considered their basis to be biological science and the pseudo-sciences of modern anthropology, linguistics, etc. The various Marxist regimes regarded their practically similar governance as being based in science. Other than, possibly, the bloody conquests of the Mongol Empire, they have the highest murder rates of human history. That is certainly not unrelated to the status of the science they claimed to uphold as being held apart from moral consideration. If it were to be taken as an ideological entity having different sectarian definitions and applications, materialist-atheist-scientism, probably counts as the most murderous ideology in human history.
The behavior of scientists has often been quite as terrible as any of the worst figures in the history of religion. Christianity - which I'll address because it's always the focus of attacks made on what I write - forbids its followers to commit that kind of evil. There has never been a murder committed by a Christian, an act of war committed by a Christian, the starvation or privation or discrimination against someone, violence against someone, which is not a violation of the Gospel of Jesus or the teachings in the books of the New Testament. The same cannot be said of the relation of murderous, racist, etc. scientists to the central holdings of science because science was invented to exclude any consideration of morality. Dr. Josef Mengele was faultless as a man of science and his scientific colleagues requested he send the parts of the bodies of those they knew he was murdering, he was an immoral monster by the most basic reading of The Gospel. I am unaware of any of them who lost so much as a faculty position in a major university for that. What criticism there was of their mass murder, torture and amorality cannot come from science, it can only come from outside of it. I look at the moral depravity of so many in so many of the sciences, the pseudo-sciences and that most putrid of philosophical specialties, "ethics" and am convinced that that self-granted permission to jettison all considerations of the morality of what is advocated has infected much of academic life.
I think it's because such questions are alive mostly within departments of theology accounts for not a little of the hostility of academic atheists to that area of study. What is true of biologists who invented and supported eugenics is true of Charles Darwin as he asserted that sustaining the least among us was a danger to the population as a whole and that the early deaths of the least among us would be a boon for the surviving, neglecting and murdering human population, the very basis of Nazi theory. Science has never honestly admitted what is so obvious in the written evidence of what Nazism was and its inventors motives. One of the most impressive campaigns of intellectual lying in modern life was the post-WWII campaign to sanitize the image of Darwin and Darwinism when even a reading of the later editions of On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man proves he, himself, asserted the "Social Darwinism" that most allegedly educated persons will assert he had nothing to do with. Virtually no one in the previous period, up till the crimes of the Nazis were exposed denied the connection of Charles Darwin to eugenics and scientific racism. His own sons, his closest colleagues all directly connected him to eugenics and what they didn't call but which was scientific racism. I have noted that five months before the start of World War II and the beginning of their genocides, his son, Leonard Darwin, proudly linked his father to Nazi eugenics as he had linked him to eugenics over and over again. If you think you know Charles Darwin's thinking better than his sons, than his colleagues whose eugenic writings Darwin cited as reliable science in support of natural selection, you have discredited yourself. That lie of post-WWII conventional thought is long, long due for discrediting and refuting because eugenics is alive and as dangerous as it's ever been.
The same point about the life consequences of the amorality of science is true of those physicists and chemists who worked on atomic and nuclear bombs, who work in other weaponry. I have noted before that even as it was being contemplated to bring Fritz Haber up on charges of war crimes for his part in inventing AND IMPLEMENTING the use of gas in warfare during the First World War, his colleagues in science gave him a Nobel prize in 1918. That it was one of his inventions, Zyklon, that was adapted and used in the gas chambers of the Nazis carries a lesson in the danger of that self-granted permission to ignore moral consequences even within science. I once encountered atheist-sci rangers online who argued that Haber had, on-balance, saved more lives than his chemistry caused to be murdered, so as to exonerate him of any moral culpability, such is the amoral calculation of materialist sci-amorality.
Materialism, atheism and scientism all lack the necessary foundation on which to mount an accusation of even the most evil acts in the recorded history of the human species. As an ideological position, all of them being radically monistic, no one who upholds those as the foundation of reality has any rationally consistent basis for even addressing questions of evil. In fact, all of them have proven far more of a basis for anything from the denial that such acts are evil to the actual claim that such evil is a force for "good" such as natural selection has been used to claim since the publication of the first edition of On the Origin of Species. I have mentioned the very early adopters of that theory, Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, etc. almost immediately championed what became, through political and legal policy in various places, some of the greatest evils of the 20th century. I have also pointed out that the atheism of Marxism has been a quite independent verification of the ability of another ideological formulation of materialist theory to generate huge numbers of murder, general enslavement and moral depravity. I'd say the current ideological claims of academic atheists, such as those in utilitarian "ethics" in what one used to hope is the post-Nazi period is the third strike against atheism as a force for good. It is striking how soon, within the first five years after On the Origin of Species was published, that Darwin's closest colleagues were applying the claims of it to contemplate genocide, wiping out future generations from the human species, by neglect of the least among us, imperialistic genocide, forced sterilization, other legal policies (as I've mentioned Charles Darwin supported such proposals made by his son, George) the opposition to mandatory vaccination of the poor, . . . Darwin even complained that the British death camps, the notorious work houses kept too many poor people alive to adulthood for it to be safe for the human species to even give that starvation level of sustenance to the British poor. Thomas Huxley claimed that his anticipated genocide of African-Americans would be a boon for their white murderers at the conclusion of the American civil war on the basis of his belief in natural selection.
I could and have gone on about all of these things, look for my citations in my archive, you can use the search engine on the left hand sidebar.
Getting back to the shoddy internal criticism of science.
I think it would probably be a much better world if science made a rigorous internal criticism of what has been successfully passed off as science since about 1860 which has little to no actual foundation in the rules of science, kicking out those things that couldn't be based in actual observation. But, given the power of entrenched establishments in academia, such as those of psychology or sociology or ethology or the grosser speculative aspects of the study of evolution, that house cleaning is hardly likely to happen. I think that much of the decadence of science that, for example, John Horgan bemoaned four years ago is due exactly to that ideological motivation. I could contrast the decadence which Bertrand Russell bemoaned about ninety four years ago, not on the basis of the legitimacy of the physics of relativity and quantum mechanics, but because he feared modern science undercut the ideological validation that Russell's 19th century style materialist, atheist, scientistic thinking so enjoyed.
Just last week I listened to a young physicist brilliantly dismantling the 30 year fad that dominated the popular understanding of physics and not a little of the academic establishment of science, string theory, (see below, I can't get the friggin' thing to post where I want it to) complaining that because of it the particle physicists are finding it hard to convince democratic governments to fund even bigger, niftier accelerators (we just need another two hundred jillion dollars! to find the next particle!). She also goes into that life-saver for materialist atheism in the face of Big Bang cosmology, multiverse fantasy, though not in as much depth.
Though I think that an even better criticism of scientists discrediting science (without the friggin' annoying video game she was playing while she talked, on the screen) was made by the late Richard Lewontin in that essay I've quoted so often here, Billions and Billions of Demons, in which he points to the absurdly elevated claims of scientists as inevitably leading the public to being skeptical of science. I'd have liked to discuss the issue with him because he, himself, in other writing, gave a good reason to be skeptical of Darwinism, which I've also quoted here before, you can't observe or measure the alleged "selective forces" that he claimed drove evolution because they happen over too long a period and were too weak a force to measure. Yet he put his faith in them. If you can't observe it and you can't measure the basis of natural selection, then any claim that it can enter into science needs to be explained fully because such stuff is exactly why science has become so decadent as so much money has been thrown at it. I think natural selection is an imaginary entity that can't be defined and can't be observed and can't be measured, so it may as well be admitted that it may well be as imaginary as those things that made Ptolemaic cosmology seem to work or any of a myriad of once widely held concepts within science which has now fallen into desuetude and the amnesia that is such a part of scientific culture.
I think that even as they allow the absurdity of academic psychology into science, the dominant forceful rejection by those working as scientists of the rigorously controlled research into those things bundled together as psychic phenomena, which has more than a century of rigorously proving those within the rules of science, even when they have implemented the critiques of their critics and still come up with highly significant confirmation of their hypotheses, is strong evidence in support of my contention that current science is ruled by a materialistic-atheistic, would-be scientistic ideology that may be the central driver of science into decadence.
It is certainly consistent with the organized "skepticism" industry such as can be seen in the alphabet soup entities started by Paul Kurtz and his fellow atheist ideologues, CSICOP (since the disgraceful sTARBABY scandal* - CSI, CFI, etc.) being, in fact, a front for the promotion of materialism, scientism, and the atheism which is, certainly, an obsessive interest of just about everyone involved with them. Even the few of those who demonstrated they could understand the mathematical basis of the research into psychic phenomena, lied and covered up the obvious validity of that as scientific research, an effort that is ongoing in that pseudo-scientific debunking propaganda. The efforts of the extraction industries in debunking legitimate climate change science and those who attacked the scientific response to the Covid-19 pandemic could certainly have been copying the "skeptics" in their tactics.
I think one of the things that's most obvious is that many, maybe most scientists in at least the English language are seriously stupid when it comes to thinking or arguing out of any philosophical rigor. It is one of the things which I have to admit shocked me when I decided to look at what the new atheists of the 00's were writing and saying. In looking into the history of such ideological atheism, it was certainly not something that was uncharacteristic of ideological scientists before the turn of the century. I was prepared to find it in Hitchens and Harris but was shocked at how bad Dawkins, Carroll, Coyne, etc. were in thinking. I think it's been a huge mistake and more than just implicated in the general decadence of the college-credentialed class that there were not rigorous requirements for at least dealing with how to make and sustain logical arguments and reasonable conjectures starting before college but certainly before they got a bachelors degree. But it's not as if current academic philosophy departments are without their own decadent tendencies. Some of the stupidest proponents of materialist-atheist-scientism have had careers in university based philosopy departments. Paul Kurtz was just such an ideologue. Dennett with his eliminative positivism is a true meat head.
* Do read about the sTARBABY scandal in which those champions of science such as Paul Kurtz proved he never bothered to master the mathematical basis of most of what he claimed about what he opposed, not to mention that scummy liar, the more popularly known (because he was a figure of show biz, like Trump) James Randi whose excuse was that he didn't understand statistics. It is remarkable how many of the biggest-fattest traders in that racket are far more ignorant of the scientific basis of what they champion and assert is the only reliable means of knowing anything than, in fact, those whose work they denigrate. But, then, the actual scientists, EVEN THOSE WHO HAD TO UNDERSTAND THE STATISTICAL CLAIMS THAT CAUSE CSICOP TO DISCREDIT ITSELF, didn't think it was important enough to correct Kurtz et al because they were afraid upholding the science they claimed to champion would harm their ideological campaign against scientists who did and do follow the rules, coming up with stuff they didn't want to be true. In the sTARBABY scandal, the professional statistician and planetary astronomer who collaborated with Kurtz on it proved to be worse mathematicians than the neo-astrologers were. I think organized "skepticism" is one of the most easily seen symptoms of the decadence of not only science but the ideology of modernism. If they'd followed the basic rules in science, it wouldn't have reached the stage of intellectual decadence it has, though it would probably be as morally attrocious as it has so often been. Perhaps the very neglect at applying the rules of mathematics in science depend on a moral committment to integrity and truth that is, as well, damaged by materialist, atheist, scientism.
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