Disrepute???

I’d say it never gets old, but it does. Michael Ruse is back writing ‘Dawkins et al bring us into disrepute‘, stirring up those terrible “new atheists” who claim that all religion is necessarily evil and that science is the only way of knowing things! Those “New Atheists” that bring science and the philosophy of science into disrepute!

I think Ruse has been wrestling with straw men for so long he’s forgotten what a real interlocutor looks like.

Ruse asks, “Is there an atheist schism?” A schism between godless people like himself, and others like Dawkins and Dennett.

I’m going to say “no”. In order for there to be a schism, there either has to be two distinct camps in the atheist population, or at least an atheist formal structure of some kind to be split in the first place. The latter doesn’t exist – there was no formal alliance between those dubbed the new atheists – no plot to release their books in a coordinated fashion and draw a line between their like and the rest of the godless. The former is illusory, whatever anyone tells you. Atheists still differ on a number of issues, even quite wildly within the “new atheists”.

There was never enough unity of thought for their to be a schism to begin with. Which really is what you’d expect from a bunch of free thinkers.

But that doesn’t stop Ruse from fabricating a schism.

He points to unkind things said about him by those evil “new atheists” as an example of the schism. (So a new atheist is an atheist that calls Ruse names? A bit of a narcissistic demarcation criterion?)

Dawkins compared his evolution campaigning to the appeasement practised by Neville Chamberlain, which is perhaps a bit too Godwinish, but otherwise you get the point. Jerry Coyne channelled Orwell to paint Ruse pretentious. PZ Myers called him a “gobshite”, which is perhaps going too far. Ruse, after listing these insults, tells us that he will “spare you what my fellow philosopher Dan Dennett has to say about me.”

What could have Daniel Dennett said that could have been so bad? This seems like the calculated impression Ruse wants to leave in people’s heads. But I’m totally unaware of anything Dennett has said about Ruse that could compete in terms of acerbic rhetoric, with the comments attributed to Dawkins and the others. Indeed, Dennett has a reputation for being the nice guy.

Which Ruse does not. A few years back, Ruse kicked up a stink about Dennett’s Breaking The Spell, running a line about how it was all scientism, evolutionism, reductionism, blah, blah, blah and all the rest of the usual strawman arguments. Further to that though, Ruse started a bit of a grudge with Dennett, sending him some emails with rather colourful language. Then when thinking he had the upper hand (the emails were chock full of some pretty audacious  self-indulgence), without permission he passed on the exchange to William Dembski of the Discovery Institute, and they’ve been open to the public ever since.

If you are interested in the exchange, it can be found here. Aside from rhetorically turning Ruse’s cleaner words back on him, Dennett’s harshest comment seemed to be the calculated “I doubt that you mean all the things you say here. Think it over.” Which frankly, is pretty mild. Especially when compared to Ruse’s antics in the exchange – indeed, even PZ Myers’ “gobshite” is made to look considerably more mellow!

If there is an example of Dennett acting up like this, I’ve never seen it and it would seem out of character.

Somehow, I think trash-talk is a pretty poor choice of demarcation criterion for Ruse to use, given his own hyperbole.

So then he moves onto the strawman arguments.

“First, non-believer though I may be, I do not think (as do the new atheists) that all religion is necessarily evil and corrupting.”

(Michael Ruse, 2009)

Oddly enough, Dawkins doesn’t believe think this either, which if you read Atheists for Jesus, or any of a number of other his essays, is obvious. Indeed, one need only look to the example of the Muslim taxi driver in God is Not Great and you can see that Hitchens doesn’t think that all religion is necessarily evil and corrupting. To characterise Dennett like this, in light of what he said in Breaking The Spell, is a particularly grotesque distortion. For one, Dennett didn’t say anything of the sort, and moreover, he was very tentative about what he did say.

Ruse is distancing himself from a caricature. And in taking himself so seriously, makes a caricature out of himself.

“Second, unlike the new atheists, I take scholarship seriously. I have written that The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist and I meant it. Trying to understand how God could need no cause, Christians claim that God exists necessarily. I have taken the effort to try to understand what that means. Dawkins and company are ignorant of such claims and positively contemptuous of those who even try to understand them, let alone believe them. Thus, like a first-year undergraduate, he can happily go around asking loudly, “What caused God?” as though he had made some momentous philosophical discovery.”

(Michael Ruse, 2009)

Well, Ruse’s history of deploying the strawman completely puts the lie to the claim that he takes his scholarship seriously. Let’s not be fooled by this, even if Ruse has fooled himself.

And if Ruse has taken the effort to try to understand what it means, that God exists necessarily, why doesn’t he tell us what it means? Why not demonstrate this scholarship, instead of just telling us how good he thinks he is? Coyne was right to call him out on being pretentious.

But it gets sillier.

“Dawkins was indignant when, on the grounds that inanimate objects cannot have emotions, philosophers like Mary Midgley criticised his metaphorical notion of a selfish gene. Sauce for the biological goose is sauce for the atheist gander. There are a lot of very bright and well informed Christian theologians. We atheists should demand no less.”

(Michael Ruse, 2009)

For a start, Mary Midgley did criticise The Selfish Gene, and she did so in the most disingenuous fashion, alleging that Dawkins was setting up the grounds for philosophic egoism, and trying to make her argument through multiple distortions of the content. To quote Dawkins in the end notes of The Selfish Gene…

“This strategic way of talking about an animal or plant, or a gene, as if it were consciously working out how best to increase its success… has become commonplace among working biologists. It is a language of convenience which is harmless unless it happens to fall into the hands of those ill-equipped to understand it. Or over-equipped to misunderstand it?”

(Richard Dawkins, ‘The Selfish Gene’, 30th Anniversary Edition, pg. 278, 2006)

Midgley’s utterly ludicrous distortion of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene can be read here. If you get the gist of Dawkins’ book, it should be easy to grapple with where Midgley has gone badly wrong. If not, you can read Dawkins response here, where he addresses several specific distortions point by point. Just remember, Ruse is throwing in his lot with Midgley and presents her as “a bright and well informed Christian.” If I were a Christian, I’d be offended, both by the specious flattery and the association with Midgley’s particularly unscholarly distortions.

(If you want things simplified on Midgley on Dawkins, consider that she has accused Dawkins – who has argued against social Darwinism on several occasions, has called paying tax in support of the welfare state a moral act, and who has never voted conservative – of ideological Thatcherite competition worship.)

Finally, Ruse gets to the point of who Dawkins brings us all into disrepute with.

“Fourth and finally, I live in the American South, surrounded by ardent Christians. I want evolution taught in the schools and I can think of no way better designed to make that impossible than to spout on about religion, from ignorance and with contempt. … If, as the new atheists think, Darwinian evolutionary biology is incompatible with Christianity, then will they give me a good argument as to why the science should be taught in schools if it implies the falsity of religion?”

(Michael Ruse, 2009)

Firstly, that bit about contempt I think is a bit of an over-exaggeration, at least in as far as the inference is that there is undeserved contempt. When contempt has been shown, it’s been directed at specific examples – the antics of the Haggards, the Hagees, the Liberty and Pat Robertson Universities and so on. All quite deserving of contempt. There isn’t a contempt for the general Christian population. That’s just baloney.

As for Darwinian evolutionary biology being incompatible with Christianity, let’s get a few things straight.

• There is a difference between saying that the ideas of Christianity and the idea of Darwinian evolution are incompatible, and saying the Christian faith and the idea of Darwinian evolution are incompatible. The former is argued by Coyne, Dawkins and Myers at least, but none of them argue the latter. To Dawkins et al, the Christian faith is a state of mind which doesn’t necessarily exclude Christians from believing things that are incompatible with Christian ideas. Dawkins has said as much repeatedly, on the tour for his current book and previously in The God Delusion when talking about Ken Miller. Myers and Coyne recently went over the same points in relation to the beliefs of Francis Collins after the announcement of his appointment to the NIH.
• There are plenty of ideas taught in secular science that conflict with religious ideas. If Ruse is setting this as a standard to have secular science chucked out of classrooms, then he’s the one who’s guilty of giving support to the anti-science crowd. Geology contradicts Young Earth Creationism. Geometry contradicts a literal parsing of The Old Testament where Pi is described incorrectly. Are we going to hold back teachers from discussing the archaeology of the ancient Middle East, just to satisfy some religious narratives? Can we talk about menstruation in biological terms, if we don’t want to contradict notions of original sin? There is already contradiction!
• The question of evolution being kicked from the classroom is only one side of the story – the introduction of creationism, indeed, the introduction alongside evolution, is frankly a larger issue in the debate, and the potential hostility to religion of evolution isn’t relevant to the way the establishment clause works in regard to this.
• Finally, why would we not want to bring to debate on the civics of teaching evolution in public schools, the notion that it is incompatible with religion, if indeed it is? It’s an important civic debate and such obfuscation is tantamount to withholding evidence – being flatly dishonest and ultimately impractical in that it only delays the inevitable.

Apparently not having actually made his final point, and needing to needle a little more, what would be better to finish off with that an unscholarly summation of The God Delusion.

“In the God Delusion, we have a message as simplistic as in The Genesis Flood. This too will solve all of your problems. Peace and prosperity await you in this world, if not the next.

Forgive me if I don’t sign on.”

(Michael Ruse, 2009)

Of course, anyone who has actually read The God Delusion without such blinkers, knows that it makes no such claim as to “solve all of your problems.” Indeed, it only pretends to solve a very few, specific maladies. Like Dennett, I really doubt that Ruse believes what he says.

But then, perhaps Ruse, in one honest phrase in his exchange with Dennett, explains the apparent contradiction between Ruse’s professed respect for scholarship, and his lack of it.

“I have no reputation to preserve, and frankly can say and do whatever the f**k I want to without sinking further.”

(Michael Ruse, 2006)

Says a lot really, doesn’t it?

Kind of makes the assertion that Dawkins et al are the ones bringing us all into disrepute look a bit silly, really.

~ Bruce

(HT: Mattincinci for the heads up on Ruse’s Guardian article.)