Re: [asa] Can biology do better than faith?

At 01:38 PM 11/26/2007, John Walley wrote:
>Can biology do better than faith?
>
>19:00 02 November 2005 NewScientist.com news service Edward O. Wilson
>
>Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published
>150 years ago, but evolution by natural
>selection is still under attack from those
>wedded to a human-centred or theistic world
>view. Edward O. Wilson, who was raised a
>creationist, ponders why this should be, and
>whether science and religion can ever be reconciled. [....]
>
>Today we live in a less barbaric age, but an
>otherwise comparable disjunction between science
>and religion still roils the public mind. ....." ~ E.O. Wilson

@ How funny to see one of the quintessential
examples of a barbarian talking about "a less barbaric age"

"Subjectivism about values is eternally
incompatible with democracy. Subjectivism leads
to tyranny. “The very idea of freedom presupposes
some objective moral order which overarches both ruler and ruled alike.

We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as
we are subject to one law, but if there is no law
of nature, the ethos of any society is the
creation of its rulers, educators, and
conditioners, and every creator stands outside
his own creation.” ~ C.S. Lewis - The Abolition of Man

"... And remember who the barbarians are. The
barbarians come, Lewis told us, not over the
parapet, not carrying their clubs and wielding
their weapons, but they come with polished
fingernails and blue pin-striped suits, gathering
in well-lighted conference rooms. They are the
good people who say that they know how to make
life better for all of us. "Of all tyrannies, a
tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive. It may be
better to live under live robber barons than
under omnipotent moral busibodies. The robber
baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity
may at some point be satiated; but those who
torment us for our own good, will torment us
without end, for they do so with the approval of
their own conscience." ~ C.S. Lewis

>So, will science and religion find common
>ground, or at least agree to divide the
>fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains? A
>great many well-meaning scholars believe that
>such rapprochement is both possible and
>desirable. A few disagree, and I am one of them.
>.....Rapprochement may be neither possible nor
>desirable. There is something deep in religious
>belief that divides people and amplifies
>societal conflict. ..." ~ E.O.Wilson

@ I'll let McGrath (and his book reviewers)
respond to the "do-gooder" barbarians:

The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of
Religion and the Ecological Crisis by Alister Mcgrath
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0385500602/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books

 From the Hardcover edition.

Inside Flap Copy
"...the author of the critically acclaimed In the
Beginning exposes the false assumptions
underlying the conflicts between science and religion.."

Traditionally, science and religion have been
thought of as two distinct and irreconcilable
ways of looking at the world, and scientists have
often chastised the world's religions for keeping
their eyes on the heavens and paying scant
attention to the destruction of Earth's precious
resources and its natural wonders. In The
Reenchantment of Nature, Alister McGrath, who
holds doctorates in both molecular biology and
divinity, challenges this long-held and dangerously misguided dichotomy.

Arguing that Christianity and other great
religions have always respected and revered the
bounty and beauty of the earth, McGrath calls for
a radical shift in perspective. He shows that by
defining the world in the narrowest of scientific
terms and viewing it as a collection of atoms and
molecules governed by unchanging laws and forces,
we have lost our ability to appreciate nature's enchantments. ...."

Editorial Reviews

 From Publishers Weekly
"..McGrath argues that historically it is not
Christianity but prosaic, reductionistic
godlessness that has led to the destruction,
domination and exploitation of nature.
Christians, unlike disenchanted heirs of the
Enlightenment, value nature as God's creation and
as a source of divine revelation, and this
Christian worldview, he contends, is as
intellectually respectable as any scientific theory. .."

 From Library Journal
"...McGrath claims that humanity's vanishing
sense of marvel or enchantment in nature results
from scientific rationalism. He maintains that
religion, specifically evangelical Christianity,
urges humanity to cherish its divine origins and
see in the beauty of nature not God but signposts
that point to a transcendence wherein we find
God. Alongside this...McGrath sustains a running
quarrel with Lynn White's 1967 article "On the
Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" and
Darwinian Richard Dawkins, taking a chapter to
prove Dawkins's "strident antireligious advocacy." .."

5.0 out of 5 stars
  An important thesis, fairly well presented., December 14, 2004
By Wesley L. Janssen (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews

"...McGrath, with Oxford doctorates in both
theology and molecular biophysics, is highly
qualified to address Dawkins' polemics. ... But
above all, this book aims to set out the
intellectual excitement of engaging with nature
and recovering that lost sense of wonder."
...McGrath does make his points, and does so
without the historical disconnection (and skewed
take on Christian ethos) that arises in Lynn
White's influential 1967 essay, or the
inattentive preaching of Richard Dawkins. ... As
McGrath argues, the 'Christianity is destroying
nature' assertion (E O Wilson being one example
among many) is misguided, or worse.

Theism (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, Islam,
theistic Hinduism, Sikhism, Baha'ism) asserts
that humans are liable stewards of planet Earth
and that nature is to be revered for its divinely
assigned significance; it is quite a different
viewpoint that insists that humanity is a
quasi-ultimate, yet purposeless, accident of
"blind" mechanism and that all of nature is but
an assemblage of meaningless 'selections'. In
this view, whatever significance Nature 'has' is
fleetingly assigned to it by (Enlightened?) "Humanism".

...Throughout much of the twentieth century, the
world witnessed, most notably in the Soviet
Union, the extent to which an atheistically
dominated society will render nature a mere
economic commodity, significant first and last
for its humanistic quotient. Lynn White accused
Christianity of being the most dangerously
anthropocentric philosophy of human history --
but it is cold scientism (not to be confused with
science) which boasts of "unweaving the rainbow"
and demands that humans answer only to human
"scientific" wisdom (see again E O Wilson). ...

As to Dawkins paranoiac defenses of (what he
calls) science: adducing science's limits and/or
scientist's miscues, does not equate to
'anti-science'. Not unless one directly equates
science itself with human foolishness. That would
be an irrational leap, and McGrath, a trained
scientist, certainly does not suggest such
equivalence. It seems that very few would.
Dawkins does battle with a theistic 'boogie-man'
malignancy that exists primarily in his own mind. Why?
In debunking a demagogue of atheism of Dawkins'
stature, McGrath will be a very unpopular figure
in certain circles. His book "Dawkins' God", not
yet available in the US at this writing, will
predictably draw the wrath of the smug,
'Enlightened' crowd. So far, McGrath seems to be
flying beneath the radar of those who will
pathologically reject his arguments. Perhaps this
will change, his thesis here surely warrants a
broad hearing. This is a book that needed to be
written ..... I rate it as better than four
stars, simply because McGrath presents, in a
restrained and erudite manner, a set of strong arguments that must be heard."

*

About the Author
ALISTER McGRATH is currently Professor of
Theology at Oxford and Principal of Wycliffe
Hall. He is a consulting editor at Christian
Today, the general editor of The New Thematic
Study Bible, and the author of several books,
including In the Beginning, which was a Los
Angeles Times "Best Book of the Year." He lives in Oxford, England.

 From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE

The Meaning of Life and Other Enigmas

What is life all about? Does it possess any
intrinsic meaning? Or is this "meaning" just
something we impose upon a meaningless void?
These are sincere and important questions, and
there has been no shortage of answers. In his
comic masterpiece Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, Douglas Adams tells how a race of
superintelligent beings from a very advanced
civilization constructed a supercomputer called
Deep Thought to answer the question "What is the
meaning of life, the universe, and everything?"
Deep Thought's circuit boards pulsed with
activity for seven and a half million years and
finally produced a result: 42--an enigmatic
answer, to say the very least. Perhaps an even
more puzzling answer is offered in Alan Dean
Foster's Glory Lane, which tells of a group of
people who visit another advanced civilization
and ask its similarly advanced supercomputer more
or less the same question. This time, the meaning
of life is defined in less numerical, but still
slightly baffling, terms: shopping.

Perhaps these answers are meant to caution us
concerning the reliability of some of the more
serious answers to this question. Precisely
because these answers are of such importance,
people tend to treat them with suspicion, even
cynicism. And they are right to do so. How many
people have been deluded, hoodwinked, or
pressured into accepting less than adequate, and
even dangerous, answers? Yet this understandable
degree of cynicism must not force us to draw the
conclusion that there is no meaning to life; or
that, if there is indeed a meaning, it is so
hidden and obscure that none can hope to find it.

Many of the answers given to these questions are
religious, and for that reason they automatically
attract ridicule from the "let's get rid of
religion" school. Oxford zoologist Richard
Dawkins, who is a particularly luminous
representative of this group, is quite clear why
so many people find religion attractive. It
offers them--to use his terms--"explanation,"
"consolation," and "uplift." In every case, of
course, Dawkins argues that what religion offers
is completely false and that the truthfulness of
the sciences is to be preferred. Science may not
always be able to offer the equal of religion,
but at least what it offers is absolutely true.
As Dawkins puts these points in an article in
Humanist magazine, following his election as Humanist of the Year:

Humans have a great hunger for explanation. It
may be one of the main reasons why humanity so
universally has religion, since religions do
aspire to provide explanations. We come to our
individual consciousness in a mysterious universe
and long to understand it. Most religions offer .
. . a cosmology and a biology; however, in both cases it is false.

Consolation is harder for science to provide.
Unlike religion, science cannot offer the
bereaved a glorious reunion with their loved ones in the hereafter . . .

Uplift, however, is where science really comes
into its own. All the great religions have a
place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the
wonder and beauty of creation. And it's exactly
this feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching
awe--almost worship--this flooding of the chest
with ecstatic wonder, that modern science can provide.

One cannot help but feel that Dawkins here
proceeds from preconceived ideas to predetermined
conclusions with almost indecent haste. Religion
is "false"--just like that, totally and
completely. No room for doubt, discussion, or
debate. The possibility of even a hint of the
truth in any religion is excluded as a matter of
principle. Nothing that religion says can
possibly be right. Dawkins seems to live in a
chiaroscuro world, in which everything is black
and white, true or false. Science is true,
religion is false--a neat little slogan, with
about as much plausibility as George Orwell's
creed from Animal Farm: "two legs bad, four legs good."

One of the reasons that religion is enjoying new
public interest is a new awareness in its ability
to address questions about what gives life its
meaning, what consoles us in moments of darkness
and despair, and what gives us a sense of hope,
vision, and wonder. It is almost as if we are
preprogrammed to ask these questions and deem
them important. As the philosopher Bertrand
Russell famously remarked in his History of
Western Philosophy, once humanity has managed to
work out how to feed itself, it naturally turns
its attention to the great questions of meaning
and significance. How do we fit into the greater
scheme of things? These questions underlie the
new interest in spirituality that has swept
through much of the Western world in recent years.

The Recovery of Religion

One of the most distinctive features of the last
few decades has been a rediscovery of the
spiritual dimension to human existence. In every
continent of the world--with the conspicuous
exception of western Europe--there has been a
surge of interest in the concept of the
transcendent, with a growing reaction against
what are seen as the unsatisfactory reductionisms
of various materialist philosophies and
worldviews. Why has there been this cascade in
interest in spirituality and religion? Social
theorists offer us explanations that sometimes
sound rather like academic sour grapes--religion
is just what infantile minds hang on to in times
of crisis, or what people turn to in an attempt
to resist modernization. Sure. Yet there are
other more compelling reasons, which help us
understand why religion will continue to play
such a major role in human life and culture.

Religion offers explanation, consolation, and
inspiration in about equal measure. Each of these
resonates with a fundamental aspect of human life
and thought. For the Christian, this is entirely
predictable. If the world and humanity are
created by God, such resonance is to be expected,
as we shall see in a later chapter. Everyone
wants to find something that is really worth
pursuing and possessing rather than the chimeras
whose luster vanishes once they are secured. The
greatest questions life has to offer can be
summed up in just a few words. What is really
worth possessing? And where is it to be found?

These questions dominate the "wisdom literature"
of the ancient Near East and far beyond. In one
of the Gospel parables, Jesus compared the
kingdom of heaven to a pearl of great price. "The
kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for
fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he
went away and sold everything he had and bought
it" (Matthew 13:45-46). On finding a beautiful
and precious pearl for sale, the merchant
realizes that he must sell everything else in
order to possess it. Why? Because here is
something of supreme value, something really
worth possessing. Everything else seems of little value in comparison.

The merchant searching for that pearl is himself
a parable of the long human quest for meaning and
significance. It is clear from the parable that
he already possesses many small pearls. Perhaps
he bought them in the hope that they would
provide him with the satisfaction that he longed
for. Yet what he had thought would satisfy him
proved only to disclose his dissatisfaction and
make him long for something that was, for the
moment, beyond his grasp. Just as the brilliance
of the sun drowns that of the stars, so that
their faint light can only be seen at night, so
this great pearl allowed the merchant to see what
he already owned in a different perspective.

For C. S. Lewis, the discovery of Christianity
was like taking hold of and possessing something
intrinsically precious and beautiful, which
allowed the rest of the world to be seen in its
reflected radiance. He put the significance of
his discovery like this: "I believe in
Christianity as I believe that the sun has
risen--not only because I see it, but because by
it I see everything else." Christianity offers a
spine-tingling vision of the transcendent and a
framework that helps make sense of life's joys,
cruelties, ironies, and pain. For Lewis,
Christianity is more than a theory in which one
can take intellectual delight, offering a new
appreciation of the beauty of the world--to be
compared to Newton's optics or laws of motion or
Maxwell's electrodynamic equations. It points to
something that transcends these, which can be
intuitively grasped in the present and which will
be fully possessed in the future. The beauty of
the world is affirmed, and declared to be a
foreshadowing of the greater glory to come. As
the great English religious poet George Herbert
(1593-1633) put it, we are enabled to catch a glimpse of "heaven in ordinary."

Lewis attempted to put this into words by using
an image from his childhood, when building sand
castles on a trip to the seaside was seen as heaven itself:

Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but
too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling
about with drink and sex and ambition when
infinite glory is offered us, like an ignorant
child who wants to go on making mud pies in a
slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by a
holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

For Lewis, the sense of wonder we experience at
nature is not meant to satisfy us; it is meant to
make us yearn for the greater wonder that it
silently signposts and whispers will one day be ours.

All this seemed a little unrealistic in the light
of the wave of secularism that swept through
Western culture after Lewis's death in 1963.
Secularizing social theorists predicted the
coming of a future secular global culture with
much the same confidence as an earlier generation
of Soviet theorists proclaimed the historical
inevitability of Marxism-Leninism. Religion was
on its way out. Yet as William S. Bainbridge and
Rodney Stark point out in their excellent
critical study The Future of Religion:
Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation, "the
most illustrious figures in sociology,
anthropology and psychology have unanimously expr... [snip]

*
Alister McGrath - a keynote speaker 2007 Edinburgh
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/meetings/Edinburgh2007/papers/Edinburgh_McGrath.pdf

~ Janice

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Received on Mon Nov 26 23:15:36 2007