Uncle Eric once again goes after scientism and New Atheism, touting “other ways of knowing.” I. The supposed failures of New Atheism

The good news is that, as most of us know, Eric MacDonald, the Official Website Uncle™, reinstated his website Choice in Dying after a very short interlude at Freethought Blogs and an announcement that he would write no more. I’m glad he changed his mind.

The bad news is that Uncle Eric is banging on again about the failures of New Atheism, the dangers of scientism, and the vindication of Other Ways of Knowing.  He and I have had this argument several times, and it saddens me that it’s still going on, for I think that Eric, for all his wisdom, is palpably wrong here.

But into the fray. Eric’s latest pair of posts, “How several misunderstandings led Megan Hodder to faith,” and “On not replacing one system of doctines [sic] with another” are related, and espouse all three themes: the failures of New Atheism, especially its inability to replace what religion gives people; the dangers of scientism, which Eric apparently sees as a pervasive and destructive attitude; and the fact that there are Ways of Knowing other than science.  I’ll take quotes from both pair of essays, and to avoid making this response too long, I’ll divide it into several parts. Let’s take Eric’s first claim:

New Atheism has been a failure. The failure is apparently twofold: first is the common accusation—and I’m surprised to see this from Eric—that the New Atheists don’t come to grips with the “best” arguments for religion, proffering instead a simplistic caricature:

Megan [Hodder, a new Catholic driven to faith by reading the New Atheists] didn’t understand that. Nor do many of those who have read the new atheists, and who think that it is enough to field simplistic arguments that amount to no more than caricaturing religious believers as intellectual lightweights who argue from simplistic premises to definite conclusions, which often take the form of “Such-and-so, ergo Jesus.”

To be fair, note that the next sentence is “And some people’s religious faith is indeed simplistic in precisely this way.”  But he goes on to say:

One of the unfortunate results of P.Z. Myers “Courtier’s Reply,” is that it has actually discouraged people from looking more closely at the arguments themselves. As an immediate response to a kind of popular demolition of religious belief it has much to commend it, but if it is taken as a careless refusal to consider the religious case more deeply, then it can be found, as Megan Hodder found it, self-defeating.

I find this strange, because in my correspondence with Eric and in his comments on my website, he has always maintained that the arguments of more “sophisticated” theologians are simply a bunch of verbose twaddle, no more substantive than those of less refined believers. When I read more deeply in theology and found it wanting, Eric basically said, “See, I told you so!”

In fact, the “such-and-so, ergo Jesus” argument—which I take as a direct criticism of me, since I’ve said that often—is often close to the mark, even with Sophisticated Theologians™.  Take Alvin Plantinga, who sees Christianity and the divinity of Jesus as “basic beliefs.” That’s precisely the “ergo Jesus” argument above.  Likewise with all the New Natural Thelogians like John Haught, John Polkinghorne, Karl Giberson, and the like, who claim that the existence of certain unexplained phenomena, like the “fine tuning” of physical constants, or instinctive morality in humans, is direct evidence for God.  That’s surely an “ergo Jesus” claim. So let’s leave this “we don’t understand the deep religious case” behind because, even by Eric’s admission, it’s bunk.

The other claim, which has lately become quite popular, is that New Atheism is a failure because it demolishes religion without putting anything in its place.  That is, people are religious for social as well as epistemic reasons, and we simply haven’t considered that deeply enough.  And when we do, then we’ll know that to efface religion from our world we must also assume the burden of replacing what we take away. As Eric says:

Nevertheless, I would go further, and point out that, as a cultural product, religion still provides for millions, probably billions of people, a cultural context within which to go about the business of creating a life. It does not seem to me that atheism has really grappled sufficiently with this problem, though humanism has certainly begun to make inroads here. Still, even so, the context within which most young people are expected to go about shaping their lives, and examining them as they go, is still largely the product of thousands of years of religious believing, where it has not been eroded completely. We should be in the business of replacing some of this religious context by one that can actually stand the test of real world experiences. Until then religions will continue to pull up the slack for a lot of people who are looking for cultural contexts within which they can live and seek to understand the significance of their lives.

and

But the more comprehensive ideal, that shaped much education until very recently, of providing the materials out of which individuals in community could shape worthwhile and meaningful lives, has fallen on hard times. New atheists take little interest in this because, at root, the solution is thought to be quite simple. The answer is simply more science. For if science is the only route to the truth, then science should be an educational panacea that needs no further insight or support.

No, the answer is science combined with humanism, a humanism that comes from adopting Enlightenment values.

With all due respect, Eric is erecting a strawman here. Who among us thinks that science, at least conceived as the acquisition of truth by professional scientists, will tell us how to replace religion? First of all, it’s not clear the religion needs replacing with anything other than a caring, just, and egalitarian society—the purview of humanism. Second, it’s not clear that when religion disappears because its tenets can no longer be supported rationally, the replacement of what it gives to people can’t be achieved by a natural process of cultural evolution. If people don’t believe in God, they will find other ways to fulfill their social needs. I don’t see that it’s up to us to tell them what to do. For one thing, it’s patronizing: think of the failed “atheist church” suggestions of Alain de Botton, and how ludicrous and unnecessary they were.

I see the dispelling of religion as a good in itself. As Steve Gould used to say, getting rid of bad science—which in many ways is like getting rid of religion—is a good things, for it clears away misconceptions that are harmful. There’s no need, when criticizing a bad paper or a mistaken result, to also provide the correct result.  Without religion, many horrible things would vanish from this world: persecution of gays, much persecution of women, persecution of people of other faiths, invidious control of sexual behavior, warping of young lives by instilling guilt, and so on.

Finally, empirical methods can indeed help us build a better world, despite Eric’s claim that

We can only determine what constitutes human flourishing by finding out what human beings value, or, perhaps, more correctly, what they ought to value; and if we want to think of value as somehow “out there” in the world, we must find out what things have value. It is not clear that the new atheism, which tends in a determinedly scientistic direction, has an answer to these questions, and it is not clear that it is altogether aware of the consequences of this failure to provide an answer.

Well, science can’t tell us what we ought to value, for that’s a subjective judgment. But it can help us determine what we do value, simply by surveying people or examining their behavior. That can be done empirically, and constitutes “science” if one construes the term as meaning “the use of reason, logic, and observation to determine what exists in the universe.” And once we know what we do value, or want to value, science can help us achieve it.  If, for example, we find that humans value health, then we can simply develop better treatments and drugs and get those to as many people as possible.  All of that rests on empirical observation, even the claim that free health care for everyone won’t destroy our economy.

I often say that when societies become godless, and do so naturally, their members simply develop other vehicles to meet their needs for communality, comity, and so on. After all, that’s what happened in Scandinavia, where belief in God has largely disappeared yet society is flourishing. Eric has an answer for that, but it’s not convincing:

Sometimes new atheists point to Scandinavia as the place where religion is merely the formal background to a largely irreligious culture. But this is, to my mind, a misunderstanding of the role that religion still plays in the region, even where very few people take part in religious celebrations or observances. I think of the small town in which I live. I have no idea what percentage of the population actually attends church or practices some other religious observance, but I suspect that it is less that 50%. Yet it would be hard to say what life in this town would be like without the resources of the churches themselves, and the invisible cultural framework that they provide for the lives even of those who do not participate in them. Neglecting this dimension of culture is, I believe, a serious misunderstanding by those who do not or can no longer believe. Places that were officially, if not actually, atheist, did not simply abandon the kinds of cultural observance which in North America or Europe are often provided by the religions. They created rituals and celebrations of their own which provided a kind of cultural cement giving individual lives context and meaning.

Well, perhaps some Danes and Swedes can weigh in here, but I simply can’t see how the presence and resources of churches have been the framework for social flourishing in Scandinavia.  Really? Atheists in Denmark derive great succor from the presence of churches nearby?

What Eric neglects here is that churches and rituals that used to exist in Scandinavia haven’t been supplanted by secular venues and rituals. Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians celebrate “rituals” exactly the same way that religious people do: funerals, birthday celebrations, weddings and the like.  Those will occur on their own, and New Atheists don’t have to say “we need more weddings,” or, à la Botton, “we need atheist ‘churches’ and rituals.”  Water will seek its own level.  People will find what they need. No, religion in Scandinavia has been replaced not by other rituals, but by developing the kind of socieities that make religion unnecessary: societies that provide health care, succor for the aged and poor, and a sense of being cared about.

But, as I said, I don’t find it necessary for New Atheism to replace religion with other stuff that people need. Getting rid of faith itself is an inherent good, and will go far to ease the world’s troubles. If one wants to go further, well, there’s humanism, but that’s a separate issue. Regardless of Richard Dawkins’s supposed ignorance of theology, his “simplistic” arguments against religion, and his failure to suggest replacements for faith, he’s done the world a lot of good.

I was going to discuss in this post the other two aspects of Eric’s criticisms—for when they come from our side they’re certainly worth considering—but this is already getting long, so I’ll deal later with the twin issues of scientism and “other ways of knowing.” But I’m curious to know why Eric has lately donned the mask of R. Joseph Hoffmann.