Christmas is but weeks away, as my son has been reminding me diligently, yet this year I’m finding it difficult to get into the spirit of things. I’ve been distracted by a new surge of anti-religious evangelism that’s erupted among scientists.
It’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed particularly over the past couple of months, with a section of the scientific community proving itself increasingly willing to go on the offensive against religious belief.
The most obvious example is Richard Dawkins, whose latest book, The God Delusion (discussed several times in these pages), attacks the irrationality of belief in a deity. Not only does the Oxford biologist not believe in religions, he also disapproves of tolerating them and thinks it’s time for other atheists to come out of the closet.
Of course, Dawkins has been the world’s most prominent scientific atheist for decades now, so the tenor of his book was not unexpected. It’s been more surprising for me, at least, to read the views of at least a few of those numerous others.
In mid-November, for example, a group of leading scientists gathered at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, for a symposium called “Beyond belief: science, religion, reason and survival”.
They were there to talk about whether science should do away with religion and related issues, and their discussions seem to have been pretty strident. Among the speakers was cosmologist Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas, Austin, who answered the first question with a definite yes.
“The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion,” New Scientist magazine quoted Weinberg as saying. “Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may, in fact, be our greatest contribution to civilisation.” Well, no one can accuse him of mincing his words. But as the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett demonstrates in his new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, that honesty needn’t be quite so aggressive.
Dennett’s proposition is that the world needs to cultivate a proper science of religion. “The spell that I say must be broken is the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many,” he says.
I’m still reading the book, and it’s written with such careful, brilliant clarity that I find myself laughing in amazement. Perhaps its most striking aspect is the downright reasonableness of Dennett’s arguments, even if there will be many who find his suggestions an affront.
Dennett is well aware of this risk, and turns on the charm. In one passage, for example, he describes himself as a “bright” - a term hijacked by atheists in recent years in direct imitation of the homosexual redefining of gay. “Some people would not willingly associate with somebody who was openly bright,” he writes. “But there is a first time for everything. Try it. You can always back out later if it becomes too offensive.”
This vaguely reminds me of the approach taken by the late Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist, writer of brilliance and Jewish atheist, who offered his own non-aggressive approach to the relationship between science and religion. His philosophical approach was to make alliances between science and the Catholic Church by espousing a doctrine he called NOMA - “non-overlapping magisteria”.
Gould suggested that religion and science occupied two distinct but adjoining domains of authority that didn’t intersect and thus shouldn’t cause conflict. “To cite the usual cliches,” he wrote, “we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go and they determine how to go to heaven.”
He insisted this concept wasn’t merely a diplomatic solution to the conflict between religion and science. But plenty of atheists in the scientific world - such as Richard Dawkins, for example - would surely see it as just that. At that recent meeting in California, he said he was “utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion”.
But Dawkins and fellow confrontational atheists don’t stand for all scientists. The eminent Harvard biologist Edward Wilson, for example, thinks science and religion should put their differences aside for the sake of the planet. In his new book, The Creation, Wilson pleads for the two powers to work together to save earth’s vanishing natural habitats and species.
Wilson is a self-described humanist, but he composed the book in the form of an impassioned letter to a Southern Baptist pastor, the faith in which he was raised. “My guess is that you and I are about equally ethical, patriotic and altruistic,” he writes. “We would gladly serve on the same jury, fight the same wars, sanctify human life with the same intensity. And surely we also share a love of the Creation.”
Without giving an inch on the factual basis for evolution, or the unscientific nature of so-called Intelligent Design, Wilson reaches across the cultural divide in the name of life on earth. Reading his book reignited my fascination with the diversity that has evolved in the natural world.
In fact, I’m tempted to pop it under the tree for one or two of my friends. Looks like my Christmas spirit has finally arrived... in a way, at least.
