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Predictably, the anti-science religious group has tagged those who understand that religion is an evolutionary, biological phenomenon with an impotent-rendering label, and then dismissed said evolutionists as silly. Nothing works as well today as labeling a scientific truth as an obviously silly falsehood, and then paternalistically setting it aside. The label in question is “The New Atheists.” We are new, apparently, because we use evolution to explain why humans are religious. We are silly because we use evolution to explain why humans are religious. The dismissing comes, as it always does, from rejecting evolutionary theory. Here matters get a bit complicated, since many who dismiss the “new atheists” claim to accept science and to embrace evolution. But they don’t. They accept a comic book version of evolution.
First, another tactic that works well but which hasn’t been used in a while is threatening the scientists with torture. This what the Catholic Church used on Galileo. Galileo dared to publish a book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, arguing that the Earth was not the center of the universe. (The Church burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600 for using rationality to critically examine Christianity and for doing science.) Galileo wasn’t tortured because he wisely recanted — he denied that he was right and asserted that, Yes, Earth was stationary and at the center of the universe after all (Bruno refused to recant). Nevertheless, Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life by the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church. The imprisonment lasted until his death in 1642. . . . It is important to note that it wasn’t until 1758 that the Catholic Church dropped its prohibition against publishing books saying that the sun, not Earth, was the center of our solar system. And it wasn’t until October 31, 1992, that the Church (Pope John Paul II) admitted that it had made a mistake with Galileo and the heliocentric theory, and cleared Galileo of any wrongdoing. It made this public four days later. Finally, in 2000, 367 years after the deed, the Church (again, in the person of Pope John Paul II) formally apologized for its treatment of Galileo. (The Church has never apologized for Bruno’s murder by burning.)
What happened to Galileo so upset the great philosopher Descartes, that he censored himself: he never published his book The World, or Treatise on Light. (He did publish edited parts, and it was published in full after his death.) So the Catholic Church got at least a two-fer: with one threat of torture, it squelched at least two scientists: Galileo and Descartes.
So far, we scientists and rationalists are safe-ish from religion and its government these days . . . so far. But still violence is being done. Violence against science. To see this, let’s consider a modern response to the scientific, biological theory that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. An excellent exemplar is James Ryerson’s New York Times article “The Twain Shall Meet” (Feb. 9, 2016, Sunday Book Review). Here is his central argument. First, the background he supplies, then his argument.
In recent years, the scientists and polemicists known as the New Atheists have been telling a certain type of evolutionary story. It goes like this:
Once upon a time, when our ancestors were struggling for survival on the African savanna, it was good to see ghosts. What was that rustle in the grass? What was that passing shadow? If your instinct was to detect agency, even in lifeless features of the natural world, you did well for yourself. Sure, you made some silly mistakes, sometimes fleeing from what turned out to be a gust of wind. But you didn’t overlook any genuine threats, and in the end you survived.
The result is a human population hard-wired to detect agency. We hear a noise in the night and assume it’s an intruder when it’s actually a falling tree branch. Researchers report that babies as young as 5 months old perceive intention in the movements of animated colored disks. And grown-ups everywhere ascribe purposefulness to the world at large, understanding the workings of the universe in terms of divine agency — another silly mistake!
The New Atheists tell other stories in this vein: about our predilection to believe in nonphysical entities, to believe in life after death, to believe that everything happens for a reason. These narratives, in which prehistoric habits of survival become today’s intellectual liabilities, are supposed to undermine religion by scientifically demonstrating the irrationality at its core. (Italics, mine.)
Ryerson then gives his attacking argument:
Suppose . . . that someone were to advance a similar argument against the field of biology. Back in the Paleolithic days, the story would go, it was advantageous to differentiate living from nonliving things, to assume that things had causes, to see patterns in nature. But today, far removed from the wilds of East Africa, these cognitive tendencies, detectable in children, drive our biological beliefs. As the “misfiring” of faculties developed for another purpose, these beliefs should be discredited, or at least strongly distrusted. (Italics, mine.)
(Ryerson doesn’t claim this argument as his invention. He says this argument comes from James W. Jones’s book Can Science Explain Religion?: The Cognitive Science Debate, Oxford University Press. Ryerson stresses that Jones is a priest, besides being a professor.)
The intellectual violence in this argument is obvious for all to see. The Jones/Ryerson argument is so appallingly bad that its rational deployment can only be explained by invoking willful misrepresentation of the science. Either that, or Jones/Ryerson need a course in biology.
The only thing that will do here is a list of the argument's deceptions.
1. Note the use of the dismissing, even infantilizing, term “story” throughout Ryerson’s treatment (I italicized them). Ryerson hopes to gain points by name-calling, by ad hominems. These always work, at least on some people.
2. The argument makes a false analogy between religion and biology. In making this false analogy, the argument suckers the reader into thinking that religion and biology are somehow on a par. The analogy is underhanded and completely wrong. Let’s state the obvious. Biology is a strongly supported science. The theory of evolution is probably the first or second most well-supported scientific theory humans have ever developed (the other contender being quantum mechanics). Accordingly, there is one science of biology. Yes, it has many subfields, but it is one thing. However, there are hundreds of thousands of religions on planet Earth today (if you count variations – some who study religion put the number of variants of Christianity at 30,000!). And there are dozens of major religions with over 500,000 adherents. And they all strongly and often times violently disagree with one another. Which one is right? Jones’s and Ryerson’s no doubt. Note, finally, that biology is still profoundly useful today and that it is growing and becoming better -- closer to the truth. Religion is not.
3. By making this analogy, the argument begs the question by assuming what it wants to prove: religion is respectable. But one of the hundreds of thousands of religions could be respectable only if its claims were true. Truth. Remember that notion? Some scientists still regard it as important even in this day and age, or especially in this day and age. And no religion’s claims are true. How do we know? They all have a supernatural component and so all violate the laws of physics, chemistry, geology, and biology, to put it mildly. So they are all everyone false.
It is 2017. Currently, the religious and the governments they control don’t burn scientists at the stake. But today, they do sneeringly deride science and abuse the notion of truth. And smile about it. We should probably prepare for the return of burning.
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