I have just finished watching Richard Dawkins' new Channel 4 documentary The Genius of Charles Darwin, about Darwin's legacy and the impact of his great idea on science and society. Dawkins is covering a lot of old territory, but he manages to keep it fresh. It was still fascinating and entertaining. The latter half of part 3 was even life-affirming to me, inspiring and meaningful in a way I predict will change my outlook on my life for years to come. In the documentary you'll also find some very funny segments and some familiar (if you're a Dawkins fan) surprise guests.
All three parts of The Genius of Charles Darwin are available for free (as downloads and streaming video) on RichardDawkins.net. They are meant to be watched sequentially, but it isn't absolutely necessary that they are.
I anticipate that Dawkins' critics will complain that he is conflating evolution and atheism and that he should stick to either being a scientist or an atheist, but not mix the two together. (Just as I thought: Libby Purves has written a review in The Times with just that complaint. Dawkins responded.) Well, what did you expect? The argument from design is dragged out every time someone wants to justify their belief in God; it is virtually the only empirical argument still used to try to support the God Hypothesis. Besides, who says that being a scientist and an atheist have to be separate things? For someone as zealous about truth as Dawkins, someone who will not let diplomacy or political correctness get in the way of facts, beliefs about God are not in some charmed circle of unassailability where science cannot hope to reach them. This is the situation many Christians imagine, but whether God is real or imaginary is as much a scientific question as whether continents drift or not, or whether homeopathic medicines work better than placebos. Why, if God is imaginary, people believe in him anyway is also a scientific question of great importance, a question that atheists bear the burden of answering (for more on this subject I direct you to a talk by Dawkins' friend the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett who is the author of Breaking the Spell: Religion As a Natural Phenomenon, one of my all-time favourite books).
It's not like science has never had anything to say about articles of faith: what about geocentrism, the Christian doctrine that Earth is the center of the cosmos? And then there's the obvious example of the Genesis account of Creation. Of course the science of evolution is profoundly relevant to the (scientific) question of whether God exists, because virtually all evidence cited to support God's existence comes in the form of the argument from design, and evolution utterly debunks that argument!
The deepest questions about the universe are not divided into neat little categories labeled "religious" and "scientific"; truth is truth. Science and Christianity are merely different ways we can use to find the answers to those deep questions. The answers from Christianity are radically different from science's answers; we cannot hope to reconcile the two without fatally compromising both. Somewhere, something must have gone terribly wrong. It must be that not all methods of inquiry are created equal, since at least one of them has got to be wrong. In fact, calling Christianity "a method of inquiry" is being too generous, since its method involves nothing more than blindly, baselessly trusting the authority of priests and pastors and the authority of the Bible. How reliable a method could that possibly be? Science, on the other hand, works. We see the success of science as a truth-finder, a question-answerer every day. Without its discoveries, you and I would probably be dead for lack of antibiotics. We wouldn't have Western civilization as we know it: we'd still be living in the Dark Ages (or maybe worse).
If creationism poses a threat to our scientific understanding of the world (and many Christians will agree on this), Christianity poses a much larger threat, being much more popular (Christians are generally less inclined to agree on this point). Therefore it is as much in the interest of science to fight Christianity as it is to fight creationism. Dawkins knows this and he doesn't arbitrarily partition his mind into the scientist Dawkins attacking creationism and the layperson Dawkins attacking God. To him, scientific questions are scientific questions, truth is truth. The truth is subverted just as much by teaching children the universe in which we live is God's divine scheme of the as it is by teaching them life started in the Garden of Eden.
Friday, August 22, 2008
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The biologists Matthew Cobb and Jerry Coyne have published a letter in the science journal Nature about the Templeton Foundation and more generally the relationship between science and religion. They managed to express what I was trying to get across in my post much more clearly and eloquently and in far fewer words.
"We were perplexed by your Editorial on the work of the Templeton Foundation ('Templeton's legacy' Nature 454, 253-254; 2008). Surely science is about finding material explanations of the world -- explanations that can inspire those spooky feelings of awe, wonder and reverence in the hyper-evolved human brain.
Religion, on the other hand, is about humans thinking that awe, wonder and reverence are the clue to understanding a God-built Universe. (The same is true of religion's poor cousin, 'spirituality', which you slip into your Editorial rather as a creationist uses 'intelligent design'.) There is a fundamental conflict here, one that can never be reconciled until all religions cease making claims about the nature of reality.
The scientific study of religion is indeed full of big questions that need to be addressed, such as why belief in religion is negatively correlated with an acceptance of evolution. One could consider psychological studies of why humans are superstitious and believe impossible things, and comparative sociological studies of religion using materialist explanations of the rise and fall of the world's belief systems.
Perhaps the Templeton Foundation is thinking of funding such research. The outcome of such work, we predict, will not bring science and religion (or 'spirituality') any closer to one another. You suggest that science may bring about "advances in theological thinking". In reality, the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism."
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