Recently I wrote:
“Few of the skeptics in the above mentioned magazines have theological training. While Dawkins, Dennett, Harris excel in their respective fields of expertise, their writing often shows they lack theological training.”
A reader asked me this:
Considering the fact you’re an atheist, I find it difficult to comprehend why you feel “theological training” is important. If we are in agreement that The Bible is not in any way inerrant, whether it concerns Genesis or Jesus, then why should the faculty of theology hold any weight whatsoever? If The Bible is nothing more than another book, despite its indisputable importance to literature down the centuries, I struggle to see why we should need to be schooled in theology before being able to dismiss it as just that. Should we all have an in-depth knowledge of Scientology before attacking it for the depraved sham that it is? Should I waste valuable time reading through each pamphlet I receive from the Mormons before debunking it as nonsense?
Theology matters because the vast majority of people in the world have theological beliefs. If the skeptic community is going to effectively reach religious people then they must be conversant in that which they criticize.
I subscribe to every skeptic/atheist/humanist magazine that is available in the U.S. Every issue there are multiple articles about religion, mostly about Christianity, and every issue there is an author that shows they are long on criticism and short on knowledge. Sometimes, I think they do what skeptics deplore, a Google search, end of research. There was a commenter on this blog who used to do that all the time. The depth of his “knowledge” about Christianity was as deep as what could be typed into a search field. As an atheist, I was embarrassed by his ill0informed rants about Christianity.
I am not suggesting that someone must have a theology degree before criticizing Christianity. However, skeptics routinely dismiss Christian critics by challenging their training, degrees, etc. How dare the Christian critique the scientist, scholar of professor. They don’t have sufficient training to do so.
Yet, the same is true when skeptics criticize Christianity. Christianity is treated as a shallow, simplistic system of thought that any idiot can understand in 15 minutes. In what other school of thought do we allow such a thing? If a person is going to be a critic of Christianity then they must sufficiently educate themselves about that which they criticize.
That’s why people like Dan Barker, John Loftus, and yours truly are in a better position to criticize Christianity. We have the training, the background, and are conversant in Christianese, especially Evangelical Christianese. Evangelicals may vehemently disagree with us BUT they KNOW we KNOW and I suspect that is what upsets them the most.
Now I know where my educational shortcomings lie. That’s what you will not see me get into certain debates and arguments. I don’t have sufficient training and I don’t like looking like a fool so I stay out of some debates and arguments. When it comes to science, I leave it to those who are trained in the sciences. When it comes to Christian church history and the languages of the Bible, I leave it to scholars and experts like Bart Ehrman or Elaine Pagels. (I have a lot of training in Christian history and some in the original languages but I would never suggest I am an expert on these subjects)
I wish that some critics of Christianity would do the same. They may be brilliant scientists but it is evident that their understanding of Christianity is lacking. Better to leave the criticism of Christianity to those who have a background in it and focus on the things you have expert knowledge about.
Years ago, an old man and his “son” walked into our church asking for money. They needed to buy a bus ticket, or so they said. The old man said he was a preacher and my father-in-law gave him some money. I told my father-in-law that I thought the old man scammed him. He asked, “how do you know that?” I said, “Look at the Bible he is carrying. It is a 3.95 Sunday School give-away Bible. Do you know of ANY preacher who carries a cheap, cardboard, give-away Bible?” Preachers are known for their leather bound, expensive Bibles. I always used Oxford Bibles. Top of the line. The Bible was a tool of my trade.
More than a few critics of Christianity remind me of the old man with the cheap Bible. Yes, they have a rudimentary understanding of Christianity BUT their arguments (and rants) show a lack of true understanding and depth. Since it is unlikely that they will get additional training, the skeptic community would be better served if they refrained from criticizing Christianity unless they absolutely had to.
Let me be clear, I am not suggest for one moment that people NOT share their experiences with Christianity. This is a whole other genre in the critique of Christianity. Personal stories are vitally important and many people are drawn to this blog for this very reason. My story resonates with them. However, my personal story, which shows the “effects” of Christianity, is not he same as criticizing the specific teachings of Christianity,
I also wrote:
“…the whole knowledge thing seems to be a one way street”
A reader stated:
The scientific method does not have an agenda. It slowly, but surely reveals the fabric of reality as it is, “Nature is there, and she’s gonna come out the way she is. And therefore when we go to investigate it we shouldn’t pre-decide what is it we’re trying to do, except to find out more about it.” ~Richard Feynman What point is there in wasting precious academic resources learning more about gods that don’t exist? Knowledge is a one way street, and on the journey along that street we out grew our primitive first interpretations of the world around us.
While the scientific method does not have an agenda, scientists do. To suggest that men like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris don’t have an agenda is ludicrous. In fact, I would say most science is driven by some form of agenda or another.
There is this fanciful notion that science is this this pure, virgin pursuit untainted by the machinations of men. Virtually every science article I read shows the folly of such a belief. Scientists are hired by companies who have an agenda. Scientists work at labs and universities that have an agenda. Agendas are everywhere you look.
And that is OK. All of us are agenda driven. None of us are unbiased or neutral. This whole notion that a person can pursue the truth in a bias-free, agenda-free vacuum is not rooted in reality. This might be a grand objective for all of us to aspire to but we are humans and we have biases and agendas. That is just how it is.
Now, I certainly think the reader is right in suggesting that we should not start with a conclusion and then find evidence that fits the conclusion. True, honest, inquiry requires a person to follow the evidence wherever it leads. I like to think that is why I am an atheist today. I didn’t start out with the idea that I wanted to become an atheist. I just wanted to re-investigate the claims of Christianity and in doing this I was set on a path that led from Evangelicalism to Liberal Christianity to Agnosticism and finally to Atheism. This is not a path I would have willingly chose.
Most of the criticism of Christianity is agenda driven. To think that people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Barker, John Loftus, or even myself, are agenda free is laughable.
We have an ax to grind. We don’t like what Christianity has done to the world we live in. We don’t like how Christianity has affected us individually and the people we love. How could we NOT have an agenda.
Let’s face it…….most of what Christians believe really doesn’t matter. Why should an atheist care one bit about a person’s religious beliefs? As long as those beliefs are kept private and personal, who gives a shit?
Of course, the problem is that Christians (and Muslims) are heaven-bent on forcing everyone to believe like they do, obey their holy book, and live according to their moral and ethical standard. Because of this, we must forcefully criticize Christianity. If Christians would take their beliefs and retreat to the privacy of their home and church house, people like me would have little to write about. However, Christians are insistent on shoving their beliefs down everyone’s throat. They want the Bible to be the civil law book. They want sectarian prayer in school. They want their views on matters like abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex and the like taught in the public schools. They want to teach creationism as science. They want a Christian nation, owned and operated by Christians according to the Christian Bible. (and yes I know all Christians don’t think this way)
And so we fight and it is an agenda driven fight.
I do appreciate the comments of this reader. I hope my response is in some way helpful.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by critic of Christianity here. Some critics go to far in the heat of the moment, but I don’t think most atheists care about the religious until they do something to affect us like teaching creationism, not immunizing their children, restricting reproductive rights, etc..
I wish that was the case but there are way too many atheist bloggers, magazine writers, and authors, who spare no opportunity to bash Christianity, even when there is no reason to do so. They rip verses out of context to prove that the Christian God is evil and give verses interpretations I have never heard in all my years as a pastor. If we are going to engage Christianity, let’s do it honestly and without malice and anger.I realize many Christians don’t treat us in the matter I expect from atheists but we as atheists have a wonderful opportunity to show that our way of life is superior to Christianity. We must be better than those we oppose.
Take Dan Savage’s latest verbal attack on Christianity and the Bible. I agree with everything he said. HOW he said it is where I have a problem. He did not help the skeptic cause with his attack. The faithful thought he was wonderful. Way to go Dan, standing up for the godless. What was his purpose? To preach to the choir or to effectively advance gay rights in this country? Those he needed to reach walked out on him.
There is a time for strong words and rhetoric. Sadly, we as humans, myself included, rarely seem to know just when that time is.
PZ Myers has a post on this subject. It gives the other point of view on the Dan Savage situation which was distorted by Fox news.see http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/05/01/truth-will-sometimes-make-you-cry/
The Christians had planned to walk out of the talk part way through before they even knew what he was going to say. It was staged.
Thanks for the link Clare, esp the Z. Jones post. Regarding the students planning to walkout, is that what they said? That doesn’t absolve Savage unless he was expecting it. I don’t follow him so maybe this is standard behavior at his speeches. If so this makes this a more interesting story.
Well said Bruce. I wasn’t aware of the video clip until you mentioned Savage. There is a better way to make the same point that will resonate in minds for years. It will take years for most of these students to mature enough to question their beliefs. Sam Harris comes to mind as a good spokesman for these audiences. When the religious leave their personal faith and intrude into politics then we need the Dan Savages.
You know what I find most interesting about this particular post of yours Bruce? Its because if you just swap the words “atheist/skeptic community” with “Christian/religious community”, it’ll still work!
I believe you’ve come to touch upon the heart of the matter, which is the human condition itself. Whether you’re a hardcore Christian Fundamentalist or hardcore Atheistic skeptic, you will do little to advance your cause if you go about it in an arrogant and condescending way.
And to think, my devotional this morning was about humility too.
“He mocks proud mockers but gives grace to the humble.”
- (Proverbs 3:34, NIV)
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.”
- (Matthew 5:5, NIV)
I’m afraid that I have to disagree with something you write (perhaps for the first time). I don’t think it is accurate to say that scientists have an agenda and that most science is driven by an agenda of some form.
The vast majority of science that I’ve ever been involved with or witnessed occurs at universities in a process in which there are strict protocols and methods to try to keep agenda out of the process. Scientists are trained to try not to bring their bias into their work. The work is all peer-reviewed, usually ruthlessly, to help keep bias and agenda out and ensure that the data is accurate and the conclusions are objective. Most funding agencies are kept at arms length from the actual process that the scientists undertake. I’m not saying the scientific method is practiced flawlessly, but in my experience the method of discovery in science is one of the most agenda-free in all of society.
All of this is not to say that people do try to use science for their agenda. Here in Canada, the government is muzzling many federally funded scientists if their findings don’t jive with the political agenda. News media is also notorious for spinning scientific findings to make it more marketable.
My two cents as a humble scientist…
Wow, I didn’t know you were a scientist! What field do you specialize in?
I had hoped of becoming a scientist when I was a child, but then I just couldn’t handle the math.
The best I could do was to get special honors for my Physics class in High School. At least my grandfather got awarded the National Scientist Award by our government for his contributions in the field of veterinary science.
You wouldn’t by any chance specialize in agriculture would you?
I am a physiologist.
Ah, that’s very interesting! I’ve always wanted to ask a non-Christian biologist if Laminin really does look like the Christian Cross.
Do you know what else looks like a cross? If you stand upright and hold your arms out to your sides, then a human resembles the Christian cross. It’s quite a coincidence.
Gasp! You’re absolutely right! I guess we’re all meant to be Sons and Daughters of God!
an excellent essay written by nobel prize winning physicist about how science is still affected by human nature and politics:
———-
CARGO CULT SCIENCE by Richard Feynman
Adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974.www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm———-an essay by john michael greer, author of the archdruid report, about science vs scientism——————–http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/02/toward-ecosophy.htmlScience, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other. Science and scientism are not the same, but it’s one of the most common habits of modern thought to assume their identity – or, more precisely, to fixate on science and fail to notice that scientism as a distinctive worldview exists at all.—–Worldviews and values, after all, are among the things the scientific method handles most poorly – it’s very hard to quantify a value judgment – and this problem becomes particularly serious when the scientist faces the worldview and values that derive from science itself. No controlled double-blind experiment could possibly prove, for example, that truths revealed by science are more important than those uncovered by other means, much less that the scientific method is the best hope for the human future! The fact that scientists have made these claims doesn’t make them scientific. Rather, they’re among the value judgments that unfold from scientism.The same point can be made with even more force about humanity’s supposed “conquest of nature,” perhaps the most distinctive concept of scientism. A military metaphor that defines humanity as Earth’s enemy is an odd way to understand our relationship with the natural systems that sustain our lives. Still, scratch today’s attitudes toward the natural world and the hackneyed image of Man the Conqueror of Nature is rarely far below the surface. Even the narratives of modern environmentalism, far from rejecting this view, reinforce it; most of them glorify human power, in fact, by embracing the claim that humanity has become so almighty that it can destroy the Earth and itself into the bargain. The conflict between these beliefs and the hard realities of the predicament of industrial civilization could not be more stark. Human limits, not human power, define the situation we face today, because the technological revolutions and economic boom times that most modern people take for granted resulted from a brief period of extravagance in which we squandered half a billion years of stored sunlight. The power we claimed was never really ours, and we never conquered nature; instead, we stole as many of her carbon assets as we could reach, and spent most of them. Now the bills are coming due, the balance left in the account won’t meet them, and the only question left is how much of what we bought with all that carbon will still be ours when nature’s foreclosure proceedings finish with us.——————–http://www.worldwisdom.com/uploads/pdfs/141.pdf”Scientism: The Bedrock of the Modern Worldview”, by Huston Smith[taken from the book: Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief, (San Francisco: Harper, 2000)]—–Before I had laid hands on Appleyard’s book [Bryan Appleyard’s "Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man."], I attended a conference at the University of Notre Dame. Finding myself at breakfast one morning with the noted British scientist Arthur Peacocke, I asked him about the book [...] He said that he had not read it but had heard that it was an antiscience book.Click! Scientism. Scientism, because when I got to the book it turned out not to be against science at all, not science distinct from scientism. But because it spells out with unusual force and clarity what social critics have been saying for some time now—namely that we have turned science into a sacred cow and are suffering the consequences idolatry invariably exacts—it is a sitting duck to be taken as an attack on the scientific enterprise.Not by all scientists. It is not a digression to say (before I continue with Appleyard) that not all scientists idolize their profession. The spring 1999 issue of the American Scholar that crosses my desk on the day that I write this page bears this out forcefully. Its review of Of Flies, Mice, and Men sees its author, the French microbiologist François Jacob, as having written his book “to renounce much of the epistemological privilege of science, for as [he] points out with surprising and even extreme determination, the myths, misconceptions, and misuses of science can be insidious. They infiltrate our language and beliefs even as we try to expel them.” ——————–as a further example, look at the nuclear power debate. note how whenever there is an accident, such as fukushima,they always do something like blame it on human error, or unusual circumstances, or that those problems will be fixed in the next generation reactors. this is (to me) a much higher belief in “science” than is justified.in short, all the above essays make the point that science is still subject to human frailties, and we give it far more power than it deserves sometimes.–sgl
I don’t understand the need for a term like scientism. It seems unnecessary. Aren’t we really talking about our ability to process science technology products responsibly? As Feynman pointed out we need to create careful models to eliminate as much noise from the result as we are able. If the public is prone to rely on science to solve societies problems on a predictable schedule, or comfort level, we can factor that into the model if we have time. Some problems like global warming seem to have a relatively short time frame if we cannot change our political system to rapidly adjust to the problem solving. For example, slowing carbon emissions which require power conservation, or costs that upset consumers. It’s not that we give science too much power, but that we give ourselves more than we can responsibly handle. Feynman would say, I can give you the Fukashima reactors, but you must be aware of what can go wrong, like putting the generators in the basement vulnerable to flooding.
i’ve only heard the term ‘scientism’ a few times, so perhaps we don’t need it. however, i think there is certainly a set of cultural assumptions that ‘science’ and ‘progress’ go together, and that if we can do it, we should do it. because we can take a pig gene and put it into an asparagus plant, we should do it; it’s progress, and nervous-nellies concerned about what might occur down the pike are merely anti-technology luddites.
i say this as someone who was raised watching the jetson’s cartoon; my parents bought a b/w tv specifically to watch the moon landing, and let us kids get up in the middle of the night to watch it (the only time we were allowed up that late!). i have an engineering degree, worked on various tech projects, including nasa space station work, and on projects related to nuclear power plants. i recall laughing at the truth in a cartoon i saw shortly after graduation college, of one engineer talking to another and saying: “who cares what it does — it’s made with titanium alloy!” so i have definitely been enamoured of technology before, and still to a certain degree today. however, i also realize technology is not always what it’s cracked up to be.
for a much better description of these embedded assumptions about how science will always improve our lives, i’d suggest searching the archdruid report for “myth progress”, as he has some excellent essays about that general topic, and excellent examples. (‘progress’ isn’t exactly the same as ‘science’, but quite similar; the point is he does a great job of pointing out assumptions that are hidden from us because we’ve never actually thought about them.) and he turns some clever phrases too. when i first stumbled across his blog, i spent the next 3 evenings reading the entire archive, and i check for his new essay every wed. he’s that good.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/search?q=myth+progress
(yields multiple blog entries, excerpts from one below to whet your appetite)
——————–
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/01/this-faith-in-progress_10.html
This Faith in Progress
—–
It’s not going too far, I think, to call belief in progress the dominant
religion of the modern world. For most people nowadays, what matters
about our past is that it’s a story of progress, a vast upward sweep
from the brutal squalor of a primitive past to the Promethean splendor
of a science-fiction future out among the stars. In the modern
imagination, the present is by definition bigger and better than the
past, just as the future will by definition be bigger and better than
the present. For believers in progress, to call something “new” is to
define it as “better,” while what’s old is by definition inadequate.
—–
The myth of progress also implies that whatever industrial civilization
happens to be good at doing is the most important thing human beings can
do, and whatever we aren’t good at doesn’t count. This belief remains
fixed in place even as the details change. In the 19th century, for
example, many believers in progress pointed to the western world’s
literature, philosophy, music, and art as evidence that it was more
advanced and therefore better than anyone else. 20th century
literature, philosophy, music and art all slipped well below 19th
century standards, but 20th century science and technology passed the
previous century’s mark, so inevitably people today point to our science
and technology as proof that we are more advanced and therefore better
than anyone else. Like most faiths, in other words, belief in progress
chooses its own evidence and provides its own justifications.
All this has an important role in driving the predicament of industrial
society, because the dead end of dependence on rapidly depleting fossil
fuels can’t be escaped by going further ahead on the path we’ve been
following. Almost without exception, the technological progress of the
last century will have to shift into reverse as its foundation—cheap
abundant petroleum—goes away, and most of the social and cultural
phenomena that grew out of petroleum-based technology will go away as
well. I’ve argued elsewhere that the downside of the Hubbert peak will
force a return to 19th-century technology, and the slower exhaustion of
coal and other non-renewable fuels will complete the process of
reversion, returning the western world to something like the technology
and society it had before the industrial revolution began in the first
place.
What will happen to the faith in progress in an age of
obvious technological regress, when cars and computers and footsteps on
the Moon all belong to the departed glories of the past?
——————–
you can also google “Kurzweil Singularity”. he believes that science is accelerating so fast, that within a couple decades, machines will create all the new progress and we humans can just sit back and enjoy the ride. call me skeptical. but this is another example of a very strong belief in science solving all our problems.
re: fukushima
an excellent source is http://www.fairewinds.com
“Arnie Gundersen has 40-years of nuclear power engineering experience. He
attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where he earned his
Bachelor Degree cum laude while also becoming the recipient of a
prestigious Atomic Energy Commission Fellowship for his Master Degree in
nuclear engineering. Arnie holds a nuclear safety patent, was a
licensed reactor operator, and is a former nuclear industry senior vice
president. During his nuclear power industry career, Arnie also managed
and coordinated projects at 70-nuclear power plants in the US.”
he was responsible for the 3 mile island cleanup. he knows his stuff. today, he’s highly critical of nuclear power, and is well informed of what the issues are, and does a great job in his videos of explaining everything without hype or an alarmist style. i highly recommend watching his videos.
the real points i’m trying to make overall, (in support of bruce’s original points), is that many will project onto “science” (or scientism) all sorts of attributes that a skeptical view would show as not there, or not as solid as it appears. the same way many could not conceive of the pope/catholic church doing anything wrong, which is part of why the pedophile priest scandals have taken multiple decades to come to light.
a blind belief in anything, including science, or ‘progess’, can be a dangerous thing.
–sgl
(hmmm. let’s try this again, and hopefully the formatting will work out ok this time)
an excellent essay written by nobel prize winning physicist about how science is still affected by human nature and politics:
———-
CARGO CULT SCIENCE by Richard Feynman
Adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974.
http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
——————–
essay by john michael greer, author of the archdruid report, about science vs scientism
——————–
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/02/toward-ecosophy.html
—–
Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other. Science and scientism are not the same, but it’s one of the most common habits of modern thought to assume their identity – or, more precisely, to fixate on science and fail to notice that scientism as a distinctive worldview exists at all.
—–
Worldviews and values, after all, are among the things the scientific method handles most poorly – it’s very hard to quantify a value judgment – and this problem becomes particularly serious when the scientist faces the worldview and values that derive from science itself. No controlled double-blind experiment could possibly prove, for example, that truths revealed by science are more important than those uncovered by other means, much less that the scientific method is the best hope for the human future! The fact that scientists have made these claims doesn’t make them scientific. Rather, they’re among the value judgments that unfold from scientism.
The same point can be made with even more force about humanity’s supposed “conquest of nature,” perhaps the most distinctive concept of scientism. A military metaphor that defines humanity as Earth’s enemy is an odd way to understand our relationship with the natural systems that sustain our lives. Still, scratch today’s attitudes toward the natural world and the hackneyed image of Man the Conqueror of Nature is rarely far below the surface. Even the narratives of modern environmentalism, far from rejecting this view, reinforce it; most of them glorify human power, in fact, by embracing the claim that humanity has become so almighty that it can destroy the Earth and itself into the bargain.
The conflict between these beliefs and the hard realities of the predicament of industrial civilization could not be more stark. Human limits, not human power, define the situation we face today, because the technological revolutions and economic boom times that most modern people take for granted resulted from a brief period of extravagance in which we squandered half a billion years of stored sunlight. The power we claimed was never really ours, and we never conquered nature; instead, we stole as many of her carbon assets as we could reach, and spent most of them. Now the bills are coming due, the balance left in the account won’t meet them, and the only question left is how much of what we bought with all that carbon will still be ours when nature’s foreclosure proceedings finish with us.
——————–
http://www.worldwisdom.com/uploads/pdfs/141.pdf
“Scientism: The Bedrock of the Modern Worldview”, by Huston Smith [taken from the book: Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief, (San Francisco: Harper, 2000)]
—–
Before I had laid hands on Appleyard’s book [Bryan Appleyard’s "Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man."], I attended a conference at the University of Notre Dame. Finding myself at breakfast one morning with the noted British scientist Arthur Peacocke, I asked him about the book [...] He said that he had not read it but had heard that it was an antiscience book.
Click! Scientism. Scientism, because when I got to the book it turned out not to be against science at all, not science distinct from scientism. But because it spells out with unusual force and clarity what social critics have been saying for some time now—namely that we have turned science into a sacred cow and are suffering the consequences idolatry invariably exacts—it is a sitting duck to be taken as an attack on the scientific enterprise.
Not by all scientists. It is not a digression to say (before I continue with Appleyard) that not all scientists idolize their profession. The spring 1999 issue of the American Scholar that crosses my desk on the day that I write this page bears this out forcefully. Its review of Of Flies, Mice, and Men sees its author, the French microbiologist François Jacob, as having written his book “to renounce much of the epistemological privilege of science, for as [he] points out with surprising and even extreme determination, the myths, misconceptions, and misuses of science can be insidious. They infiltrate our language and beliefs even as we try to expel them.”
——————–
as a further example, look at the nuclear power debate. note how whenever there is an accident, such as fukushima,they always do something like blame it on human error, or unusual circumstances, or that those problems will be fixed in the next generation reactors. this is (to me) a much higher belief in “science” than is justified.
in short, all the above essays make the point that science is still subject to human frailties, and we give it far more power, and less critical reflection, than it deserves sometimes.
–sgl
Hi Sgl,
This is an excellent distinction between science and scientism that is often forgotten.
Regards,
John Arthur
I think I get the main theme of your post, and I don’t totally disagree with it. Arrogance is rarely a good way to connect with people. But, it can also be very difficult not to appear arrogant in certain circumstances whether one wants to or not.
As an example, if I’m teaching biology to a class of university students and someone starts mouthing off about cerationism, I’m going to have a very hard time not coming across as arrogant to them, simply because I am right. While I might engage with the student in a respectful way, and while I might listen to them and try to help explain things, in the end there is no getting around the fact that I am right about evolution. If they stick stubbornly to their creationist position, then ultimately I’m probably going to seem arrogant tot hem because my attitude is going to reflect the fact that they are wrong and I am right, and that fact is supported by all the evidence.
I’ve always taken this approach to dealing with Christianity: It deserves the same level of respect as any other fairy tale. If someone wants to engage with me in a discussion about Snow White, and whether she might have had a secret 8th dwarf in her life, I might need some knowledge of the fairy-tale literature in order to have a discussion about that issue, but ultimately we all know how relevant it is to real life. If that person having the Snow White discussion with me then made it clear that they took the whole thing seriously and believed it to be true, well, it’s going to be very hard for me not to appear arrogant and condescending in my attitude towards them. I might try to gently explain the truth to them, but it’s not as if I can say: “Well, I respect your point of view and I’ll give it some serious thought.” We all know it’s fiction.
So, I think where a lot of the seeming arrogance and condescention comes from in scientists like Dawkins and other atheists, is a built-up impatience and frustration in constantly dealing with people who want us to take their fairy-tale as seriously as a discussion about anything in the real world.