Daniel Lazare on the Atheist Diasphora

Daniel Lazare, writing in the Nation, has an interesting article about differences of opinion even among atheists:

This is the problem, more or less, confronting today's reinvigorated atheist movement. For a long time, religion had been doing quite nicely as a kind of minor entertainment. Christmas and Easter were quite unthinkable without it, not to mention Hanukkah and Passover. But then certain enthusiasts took things too far by crashing airliners into office towers in the name of Allah, launching a global crusade to rid the world of evil and declaring the jury still out on Darwinian evolution. As a consequence, religion now looks nearly as bad as royalism did in the late eighteenth century. But while united in their resolve to throw the bum out--God, that is--the antireligious forces appear to have given little thought to what to replace Him with should He go. They may not face the guillotine as a consequence. But they could end up making even bigger fools of themselves than the theologians they criticize.

Richard Dawkins is a case in point. It is no surprise that, along with Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, and Daniel Dennett, author of Breaking the Spell: Religion As a Natural Phenomenon, he has emerged at the head of a growing intellectual movement aimed at relegating religion to the proverbial scrapheap of history (which by this point must be filled to overflowing). He's bright, obviously, a lively writer--his 1978 book The Selfish Gene is regarded as a pop science classic--and as an evolutionary biologist, he's particularly well equipped to defend Darwin against neofundamentalist hordes for whom he is the Antichrist. But Dawkins is something else as well: fiercely combative. Other scientists have tried to calm things down by making nice-nice noises concerning the supposedly complementary nature of the two pursuits. Einstein famously said that "science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," while the late paleontologist Stephen J. Gould once characterized the two fields as "non-overlapping magisteria" that address different questions and have no reason to get in each other's way. But Dawkins, to his great credit, is having none of it. Although he does not quite come out and say so, he seems to have the good sense to realize that no two fields are ever truly separate but that, in a unified body of human knowledge, or episteme, all overlap. Conflict is inevitable when different fields employ different principles and say different things, which is why an evolutionary biologist can't simply ignore it when some blow-dried TV evangelist declares that God created the world in six days, and why he'll become positively unhinged should the same televangelist begin pressuring textbook publishers to adopt his views.

Read the whole thing.

I just finished reading the new Einstein biography by Walter Isaacson. (It's quite good, and I thoroughly recommend it.) Anyway, he discusses at length Einstein's religious beliefs and the almost cottage industry that developed around getting him to answer the question whether he believed in God.

Einstein's religious beliefs could be characterizes as similar to Spinoza's. He saw God as a law-giver and clock-maker who made the world ordered and expressed his wisdom through the fact that the universe was comprehensible to the human intellect. Here is a quote that summarizes his views nicely:

I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things.

He expressed his beliefs in his personal life aritualistically; he never attended church. Rather he explored the mystery of that universal order -- such as trying to create universal field equations that would resolve quantum mechanics and relativity.

In many ways, I find his view of God admirable. His is not a personal God that interferes with men's lives, but a rational one that organizes the cosmos from afar. I mean, after all, there is no particular reason to expect the world to make sense. That it does is rather remarkable. (Incidentally, I am speaking with admiration about Einstein's beliefs, but that does not mean that I subscribe to them. I have never believed in either a personal or a deistic deity.)

However, I think that many of the people currently arguing against ID would take issue with even Einstein's views as superstition repackaged. In truth, Einstein never found his equations -- maybe there are no equations to be found, and his near-irrational drive to find them is at least suggestive of a religious animus.

In dealing with religion, scientists tend to take one of two courses. One group declares religion and science orthogonal subjects dealing with totally different classes of information. This group tends to regard the culture war between science and religion as largely ancillary to the progress of science and possibly a distraction from it -- but not malicious in and of itself. (These scientists may or may not be religious themselves.) The other group argues that the premises of science and religion are mutually exclusive and that religion is by its nature corrosive to the scientific enterprise. This group regards the culture war as an important -- perhaps the important -- battle for scientific progress.

I would argue that Einstein was in the former group while people like Richard Dawkins are in the later.

However, the issue brought up in the article and the issue in comparing someone like Einstein to someone like Dawkins actually has remarkably little to do with religion. It is almost an intra-scientific argument about how we as scientists should deal with religion. This is why I don't tend to get worked up as much as Dawkins et al. about fundamentalism. I don't view them as the primary participants. If they don't like some of the conclusions we reach, I doubt that will be fatal to the whole enterprise. (Then again I am probably one of the first group, so this would be an argument you would expect me to make.)

Fundamentally, I don't see this particular aspect of the culture wars as a class between atheists and religious people. I see it as a clash between scientists and other scientists about the degree to which science is both an professional and an ethical/philosophical stance. In this sense, I found the article cited very interesting because it indicates a roiling conflict even among the supposedly monolithic atheists.

Hat-tip: 3 Quarks Daily.