A new form of religious fundamentalist has been making itself heard: the anti-Dawkinists, most notably in the form of “God-particle” physicist Peter Higgs. In an interview reported in the Guardian, Higgs is quoted as saying
What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind.
Keith Kloor then weighs in on the side of Higgs, fingering both Dawkins and Jerry Coyne as representing a “sneering and strident approach by the religion haters”. Unfortunately he gives no citations to support this, ending his piece lamely, in response to Coyne’s argument that religion is the enemy of democracy, with the conclusion “I think that intolerance may also be considered an enemy of democracy. Fundamentalism, whatever its guise, is certainly the antithesis of science.”
There is nothing new here of course. Kloor, like Higgs, sets up straw-man arguments against Dawkins, ignoring completely the nuance of what Dawkins has written in his numerous books and articles on the subject.
Coyne responds ably to Kloor here:
Presumably Kloor would have cautioned the early suffragettes to stifle themselves, as they were making enemies of almost everyone. Every moral advance in this world begins with a small minority of vocal people.
It is also quite ignorant to claim as Kloor does that ” The atheists who frequently disparage religion for all its faults don’t dare acknowledge that it has any redeeming value, or that it provides some meaning for those who can’t (or aren’t yet ready) to derive existential meaning from reason alone.” This issue is covered extensive in much atheist literature, and was one of the main themes in a talk By Dan Dennett in Cork a couple of years ago, who posed the question as to how atheism could do better all those things like community support and charitable work that religions can do well.
All this is just more of the usual turgid apologism for religion, attacking those who very reasonably challenge the privileged and fact-free status that religion still holds in society as “intolerant” and “fundamentalist”. In doing so, “atheists” like Higgs and Kloor are themselves an embarrassment, serving only to prop up corrupt institutions which in the long run for the betterment of humanity should really be on the way out. Indeed, this is how religions perpetuate themselves and survive against the reality of… well, of reality with its inconvenient “facts”: it lashes out at any who dare question it. The nebulous idea of “faith” has no other defence against the weight of evidence: look too closely and the Emperor will indeed appear to have no clothes.
But maybe there is a little more to the issue. On Twitter, @geneticmaize wrote
and asks:
This seems reasonable- many scientists are indeed religious. Tell people science and religion are incompatible, they might cling to religion.
But whatever you tell people, the fact surely is that science and religion clearly are not compatible, however much you might try to make them so or wish they were: religion depends on unquestioned faith- depends in fact on not being questioned- science depends on being challenged, and builds its truths on a process of questioning and always going with the best evidence, however unsettling those truths might be.
This does not mean that one cannot work productively with religious people of those with faith; nor is it a good idea to necessarily burst through the doors of the local church of a Sunday morning and loudly disrupt proceedings by yelling out “There is no God you fools! Dont believe the Priest- he’s just after power, money, and little boys!”
But while it might seem a reasonable political tactic in the short term if you are trying for example to get the religious vote to support science on genetic engineering, in the long run it may do more harm than good.
The whole project of science is undermined by religion in exactly the same way as it is undermined by pseudo-science- religion promotes and validates the idea that some things at least are beyond question, out of reach from the scientific method, untouchable and protected from criticism, and since in principle this might not be confined to “traditional” beliefs of established religions- the Church, say- but could be anything one happens to want to ring-fence in this way, this approach seems to me to be dangerously likely to back-fire.
Not even to mention all the real evils that religion is indeed responsible for.
Indeed, much of the environmental movement has been compared to being a religion, and can be seen to hold its position on various political issues as it were religiously: Gaia, Mother Earth and “other ways of knowing” are routinely invoked by the faithful to justify bans on the technology. Genetic engineering is not natural after all; and we just kind of know, in a deep inner-knowing kind-of-way that it is bad and dangerous. Our instinct, our feelings tell us so, and science is in any case reductionist and, well, fundamentalist in its tiresome demands for evidence.
Which all starts to sound very close to what Higgs objection is to Dawkins. To defend religion or pseudoscience, not on issues of facts, science or evidence or validity of their claims, but on the grounds that those you challenge might not like it, is weak and pathetic and reactionary. It also anti-democratic.
Should we really have to tolerate these intolerant fundamentalist anti-Dawkinists?
Good response to Higgs here by Nigel Farndale
and to Kloor here by PZ Myers
