I’d like to, in the spirit of Will’s talk, I’d like to start with a little something,
so if everyone could just close their eyes, just for a second.
Are everyone’s eyes closed?
Now, during the lunch break, my briefcase disappeared, and if the atheist who stole
it could just quickly return it, there would be no questions asked.
Alright thanks.
I understand I’m the last person of a long day, and I’m going to talk about media representations
between science and religion, and I thought I’d, I’m a philosopher too, so I thought
I’d also start with a quote from Voltaire.
It’s not as well known as the other one, and that quote is: “If Richard Dawkins hadn’t
existed we would’ve had to invent him.”
No one gives us more to talk about in the science religion debate than Richard Dawkins,
and there are other folks involved in this; Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell, Christopher
Hitchens, God is Not Great, and we’ve already seen references to all three of these, and
you can add Sam Harris to this group as well.
I mention them because there probably have been 30 or 40 times as many books written
that are more pro-religion than, say, Richard Dawkins is, but I bet most of you don’t
know anything about them.
These people have sold, their books have sold millions, their views are the ones in the
media, Richard Dawkins is practically a rockstar when he goes around the world and talks about
science and religion.
By the way, one time I invited him to debate Alvin Plantinga, who’s one of the best religious
philosophers in the world, and he wrote back, emailed back to me, and this was before The
God Delusion, he wrote back and he said “I don’t talk about religion.”
Something happened, you know now he’s like a kid that had sex, you know he goes to the
locker room and he just can’t stop talking about it in high school, it’s all he talks
about now, I don’t get it, but he refused to debate it that time.
All these people are united in this one thing, and I was asked to relate some sort of social
scientific research to some of the issues that have been raised in the science and religion
debate in the media, and I think there’s a couple, there’s a natural human tendency
that we have, I’m not even going to spell the stuff out, we’ve heard it all day long,
so it’s a natural human tendency, I think, to think that if someone believes something
that we don’t, there’s a natural tendency to think that they’re wrong, no big deal.
The other thing though, is that I think there’s a natural human tendency to think that they’re
irrational, and irrational usually means that they’ve done something in a way defective,
and we’ve done something properly with respect to the acquisition of beliefs.
You can see this in an example, Time magazine did an article, “Is God In Our Genes”
was the cover article, October 25, 2004, and we found these things in there.
It was based on Dean Hamer’s book The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes,
and I don’t think Dean Hamer is all that great or famous as a scientist, but he did
have this book about the fact that there’s some gene that we have that codes us for God
beliefs, and he claims to have located that gene, and this is where it is: the vmat2-
for vesicular monoamine transporter.
Who’s the one who made those science things up?
Was it you that made up the science?
It sounds like a made-up one.
It turns out the correlation between that and God beliefs was entirely made up; there’s
no scientific basis whatsoever for this alleged “god gene”.
In the Scientific American, which takes a different approach to this topic, Carl Zimmer
suggests that the book really ought to have been titled this: “A Gene That Accounts
for Less Than One Percent of the Variance Found in Scores on Psychological Questionnaires
Designed to Measure a Factor Called Self-Transcendence, Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging
to the Green Party to Believing in ESP, According to One Unpublished, Unreplicated Study”.
And yet it’s the cover story on Time magazine.
We get people like Michael Persinger asserting, with great authority, “God is an artifact
of the brain.”
Daniel Dennet—god-faculty is a “fiction-generating contraption”—and Richard Dawkins, who
said, “Belief in God is due to a built-in irrationality mechanism in the brain.”
So, not only are religious believers wrong, they’re irrational.
I think there’s a second tendency that we have.
Time had another article on science and religion a few years later.
It’s talking about the conflict—and I think “conflict” is the dominant metaphor
that’s used in science and religion discussions—and I think it’s unfortunate that the conflict
is usually pitched between militant atheists on the one hand and fundamental religious
believers on the other hand, and the media likes to portray it like that.
It’s a lot more exciting.
In this Time magazine article, they said, “Well who could we get to possibly speak
on behalf of science in the science and religion debate?”
They have long paragraphs describing these people and their positions.
So on the one side we have Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and Mark Howser and Sam
Harris.
Then they said this: “Dawkins and his army have a swarm of articulate theological opponents,
of course.
But the most ardent of these don’t really care very much about science, and an argument
in which one party stands immovable on Scripture and the other immobile on the periodic table
doesn’t get anyone very far.”
And so they looked around.
Who could we get?
In the one corner, we’ve got Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Howser.
One person, Francis Collins.
That is the only person on the religious side.
The conflict metaphor, the irrationality metaphor, and the lone, sort of middling voice of reason,
Francis Collins.
That’s the best they could do.
So, not only are they wrong, they’re irrational.
Here’s the second point—we have a fundamental tendency to think people who disagree with
us on fundamentally important things are immoral.
We see this in these books.
In The God Delusion, it’s an unbelievable attack on Muslims for their wickedness.
Sam Harris, The End of Faith.
We’ve already seen quotations from Christopher Hitchens.
They go on.
This is a documentary Dawkins produced, The Root of All Evil?, and he blames it on religion.
We may not need religion so much now to make us good, but we did.
Religion was absolutely powerful in the ancestral landscape for bringing humans together and
helping them cooperate together in groups bigger than kin groups.
Religion was absolutely essential to our path to becoming human beings.
It’s correlated even now with generosity and honesty.
If you have a big government looking over you maybe you don’t need religion so much,
but it does make people good.
There’s just no doubt about it.
I don’t know how you would tell overall, throughout all of human history, if religion
is a net force for good or a net force for evil.
I think it’s really complicated, but I think Dawkins, Hitchens, and the like think it’s
pretty clear that it’s a net force for evil.
But then I think, what about the eradication of infanticide, the gladiatorial games, and
eventually slavery?
Christian involvement and religious involvement.
Poverty, famine.
Martin Luther King’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
People who are learning to be kind—not just to their children, but to neighbors and even
to strangers.
Not easy, but religion has motivated people to do that.
Institutions such as hospitals, universities, and orphanages all owe their creation in the
West to Christians and part of the East.
And for god’s sake what about potlucks?
How does this sort of figure in?
Anyway, I don’t know how you add all this stuff up.
I don’t know what wins.
It’s an empirical question that some scientists should look at, whether or not religion is
a net force for good.
My point is that there’s a natural human tendency to think that people who disagree
with us on matters of fundamental human concern aren’t just wrong.
They’re irrational and they’re immoral.
I saw this recently.
I wrote a blog for the Huffington Post.
I usually write on Islamophobia.
I’m not in favor of it.
I usually write against it.
About a month ago, an atheist killed three Muslims.
I turned the table and I said, if this was a Muslim, we’d instantly think it was Islam,
the religion, which motivated the killing.
So I wrote this blog starting off with “Is atheism evil?”
Are atheists evil?
And this is what I said after turning the table.
I substituted “atheist” for “Islam” and blamed the killings on atheism.
Then I said this in the end: “Atheists don’t want to and shouldn’t be judged by Craig
Steven Hicks (or Stalin or Mao).
Christians don’t want to and shouldn’t be judged by Westboro Baptist.
And Muslims shouldn’t be judged by ISIS and Al-Qaeda.”
I thought it measured and reasonable.
Don’t commit the fundamental attribution error.
What did I find out?
This is what I found out—don’t insult atheists.
Don’t even semi-insult.
Don’t use satire with atheists.
I got these responses.
“Good grief!
One lone atheist commits an atrocious crime and lookie here at all the hypocrites demanding
explanations and condemning atheists in general!
What the hell is wrong with you?”
Not only was I wrong, what the hell’s wrong with me?
“’Ideologically charged atheism’ is a meaningless combination of words.
Well, actually the entire article too.
I feel sorry for his students (if he teaches any classes in that university).”
“Most of these comments point out that Kelly James Clark got his facts wrong and was unfair
to atheists.
I agree.
However, he does make one good point.”
And that was as good as it got.
“You are not in touch with reality.”
“Mr. Kelly James Clarc [sic]!
Obviously you know nothing about communism.
I recommend you to read Marx!”
Godless Mom tweeted, “Clark is a massive tool”, which went out to thousands including
me.
Hardass Badguy retweeted Godless Mom with a GIF of a fart.
Anyway, not only was I wrong, I was irrational and immoral.
Why should we care about this?
I think what happens when people think that people they disagree with are irrational and
immoral, we have a natural human tendency to go to our sides and be insensitive to evidence.
We don’t care about the evidence.
We just dig in our heels.
I can imagine Richard Dawkins, who I think is an intellectual bully, has a lot of confirmation
bias.
I think he’s smart, but he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
I can imagine him going home and his wife saying, “Richard, you made a lot of good
points, but did you have to be such a dick?”
Why don’t we want to be dicks?
I think the happens is, if we portray science as evil, if it has to be associated with atheism,
if you have to give up your religious belief to go into science, it hits people where it
hurts.
We’re going to leave out 7% of the world from wanting to go into science.
Why attach that burden to it?
We’re going to get people like this representative Paul Brown.
[Video Start] But God’s word is true, and I’ve come
to understand that all that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big
Bang Theory, all of that is lies straight from the pit of hell, and it’s lies to try
and keep me and all the other folks that were taught that from understanding they need a
savior.
You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that
actually show that this is really a young earth.
I don’t believe that earth’s but about 9,000 years old.
I believe it was created in six days, as we know them; that’s what the Bible says!
And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call
it; it teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches.
But it teaches us how to run public policy and everything in society.
That’s the reason as your congressman, I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions
as to how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.
[Video End] Brown is on the House Committee on Science
and Space with Todd Akin, and Todd Akin thinks that women cannot be impregnated by legitimate
rape because the female body shuts itself down at those times.
Ralph Hall is the chair of the committee, he does not believe in human-made global warming
because God is in control of global warming.
Just this week, the House of Representatives voted that there will be no expert witnesses
who have peer reviewed journals, peer reviewed articles in scientific journals, that can
testify to the EPA.
We can’t have them doing it, but lobbyists that represent the Keystone pipeline can.
We don’t want to keep Christians out of science, and if we think in order to do science,
science is invariably attached to atheism, people are going to stay away from it.
That’s just the way it’s going to be.
So, here’s a scientific summary of my findings: you can be an atheist, you can be a scientist,
but don’t be a dick.