Thinking Christian

Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that religion is a dangerous form of child abuse, a claim he reiterated in an online essay titled “Religion’s Real Child Abuse.” He explicitly says that while sexual abuse by priests may be bad, what’s worse is raising children to think of themselves as members of one religion or another, or saddling them with the fear of hell.

In response to that I wrote an article for our local newspaper, republished in BreakPoint Online in early 2007, showing that this is not just a religious/theoretical claim, but it has distinct scientific implications. Psychologists and sociologists have worked out a clear, empirically-based picture of how abuse affects children. If religion is a form of abuse, it should have some of the same identifiable negative effects on children that abuse has. Research shows, however, its effects are generally quite the opposite: as I wrote then, according to the National Study of Youth and Religion, American youth who are devoted to religion (predominantly Christians in this study) come out better than non-religious youth in every one of the 99 life-outcome dimensions that were measured.

Dawkins is a zoologist by professional training, but he has become much more than that. At the time he wrote these things he was the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. By holding that position, and by his prominence in the media, he has been for many “the voice of science” in the English-speaking world. He has consistently staked out a position as one who speaks for reason, rationality, evidence, and empiricism. When Christian thinkers took him to task for writing on a topic, religion, on which he has done astonishingly little actual research, he responded, “Why bother? What need is there to dig into a topic that’s so obviously irrational?” While there are serious weaknesses with that answer, my attention here is on something even more fundamentally, obviously amiss: as a scientist, a spokesman for science, he persistently and publicly contradicts what science has to say about this topic.

This seems strange to me. Stranger still is that in over two years since then, to my knowledge no scientist and no other journalist has called him to account for it.

I suppose some would say that if Dawkins’s thesis had been presented in a journal rather than a popular publication, it would have been flagged down by peer-reviewers and never published. Or if somehow it had been published, it would have been quickly and decisively answered. The same should not be expected of a popular publication, some might say.

That would be a fair answer to give in many cases, but I think Dawkins’s case is different. In becoming the public face of science, he took on an especially high level of accountability for how he treats science. He ought not to be contradicting scientific findings so cavalierly as he has done with this topic. Those who care about the integrity of science ought not to be letting him get away with it—even in a popular publication; rather, especially in a popular publication, where many, many thousands are supposedly being shown what real science is.

But as far as I’ve been able to observe, no one has raised a word of scientific objection on this point. That raises questions in my mind, which I will leave for discussion here:

• Has there actually been some response that I’ve missed, some scientific or journalistic call to accountability?
• If not, what does this say about the consistent application of self-correction in science? Why is it not being applied in this case?
• What’s really going on? How do we explain Dawkins’s anti-scientific stance on this issue, and the lack of response from the scientific/journalistic world on it?

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Peter Williams has commented on Richard Dawkins’s saying this (scroll to “How to Win an Argument…):

Natural selection is very much not a theory of chance. Natural selection is really the opposite of chance, it’s non-random survival.

To what Peter wrote I would add these questions. (I have raised these questions here more than once, and I will give others another opportunity to show me what I am misunderstanding.) Did natural selection ever create anything? Did it ever devise one solution to one problem of life, or to adaptation to any changing environment? Did it ever invent or otherwise come up with a single mechanism for increasing an organism’s reproductive success?

No.

Every innovation in natural history (according to evolutionary theory) came about by chance. Every new structure or function resulted from a mutation thrown up for no purpose, with no intention, with no connection whatever to any fitness of the organism or any concern whatsoever for the environment or the population or the competition. Every new thing in natural history was purely random.

Natural selection, according to evolutionists, conserved some of those innovations. It is entirely a conservative force in biology; it innovates nothing. Dawkins says nothing in this article about random variation; he presents his case as if evolution were only about a non-random process of selection. Really, though natural selection is quite uninteresting from the standpoint of biological change. All innovation has been driven by chance. All natural selection has ever contributed has been to conserve what a blind, mindless process has from time to time thrown into some organisms by chance.

So what, then, if Dawkins is right that natural selection is not a theory of chance? Evolution never went anywhere that randomness did not send it. Evolution is very much a theory dependent on chance.

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The Mail & Guardian interviewer is rather easily persuaded:

“Yes, yes, I know, I know. People say I’m shrill and strident.” Dawkins has a theory about this [writes the reporter], which is very persuasive. “We’ve all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You’re not allowed to criticise it. And therefore, if you offer even a fairly mild criticism, it really does sound strident, because it violates this expectation that religion is out of bounds.”

[Link: Science is losing to religion - Mail & Guardian Online]

Herewith, then, a few examples of Dawkins’s “fairly mild criticism:”

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

…

Odious as the physical abuse of children by priests undoubtedly is, I suspect that it may do them less lasting damage than the mental abuse of bringing them up Catholic in the first place.

…

I’ve met plenty of people who call themselves religious, but when you actually probe, when you ask them in detail what they believe, it turns out to be this very same awe and wonder that Wilson and Einstein talked about. If they’re genuinely intelligent, it does not involve the supernatural…. My suggestion is that you won’t find any intelligent person who feels the need for the supernatural.

…

As a Darwinian, the aspect of religion that catches my attention is its profligate wastefulness, its extravagant display of baroque uselessness…. Though the details differ across cultures, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking, fecundity-forfeiting rituals of religion.

And finally, when asked, “If you had to make a case for religion—one positive, if minor, thing religion has done—what would it be?” he answered,

… I really don’t think I can think of anything; I really can’t.

I guess the “very persuasive” reason all of this sounds shrill and strident is only because up until Dawkins, no one has criticized religion. (Could this erstwhile Professor for the Public Understanding of Science really be that out of touch? And the reporter, too?)

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Two articles of mine posted on other websites today:

On BreakPoint.com: Handling a Hot Topic (how Christians ought to engage in controversies like the one over Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed).

And on the website for the Center for a Just Society, the first of two articles on the whether there was some connection between Darwinism and Nazism, as the movie claims. This first one looks at Richard Dawkins’s to the matter in his review of the movie Expelled. The second one, to be published around Monday, acknowledges that no legitimate philosophical link can be drawn from Darwinism to Hitler’s ethics. There’s another question, though: was there an historical connection regardless?

I must refer you also to Richard Weikart’s expert article on that topic, published yesterday.

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An “aesthetic argument for evolution”–I hope it’s obvious to you, just by looking at it that this is self-contradictory. When arguing from some fact to a worldview, one ought to be pointing toward a worldview that can accommodate the fact.

Richard Dawkins apparently takes an aesthetic argument as valid, yet as reported by Matt and Dana Higgins, he almost simultaneously supplies the material for his own refutation. They report from a lecture he gave in Austin,

[Dawkins says] “Evolution is more elegant than creationism.” In terms of evolution vs. creationism/intelligent design, he primarily argued from a point of aesthetics. His highly complex theories are preferable to the plain statement: “God did it.” Like saying that a couture dress is prettier than a dress made out of the living room curtains. Fans of “Gone With the Wind” may prefer the curtains. A matter of preference….

Later in the same talk he reportedly said,

Since there is no God and no moral reality, there is no morality that should be held by all persons at all times…. In “The God Delusion,” he strongly argues that morality evolves and changes with society (“the moral zeitgeist”).

So: apparently there is a strong enough argument for aesthetic realism/objectivity that we ought to take it as evidence on which to base our whole worldview. “Evolution is more elegant” is an objective fact, not a subjective opinion. But there is no moral reality. “Child abuse is wrong” is a subjective belief, not an objective fact. (Dawkins happens to agree with that subjective opinion, but that doesn’t make it objective in his mind.)

Does anybody see something being turned upside down there?

Ironically, this showed up (via Uncommon Descent) just minutes after I wrote this.

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Something amazing happened yesterday. The controversy around Premise Media’s upcoming movie Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed became the hottest topic in the blogosphere. According to BlogPulse, a service of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, the issue held the number one slot throughout the day on Monday, March 24th (http://www.blogpulse.com). There were also over 800 results on Technorati (www.technorati.com).

“It is amazing to see the reaction of PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins and their cohorts when one of them is simply expelled from a movie. Yet these men applaud when professors throughout the nation are fired from their jobs and permanently excluded from their profession for mentioning Intelligent Design,” said producer Mark Mathis. Mathis was at the event that has raised this controversy.

[From EXPELLED Controversy Top Issue in Blogosphere]

Nothing unexpected here. Last September I wrote:

Come next winter the Intelligent Design debate is going to have a bomb ignited under it. The film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, featuring Ben Stein, is set for release in February. If the film comes anywhere near the level of the interview Rob Crowther did with producer Walt Ruloff, it’s going to hit our culture hard.

The release date was pushed back, but the interest level is about what we all should have expected. And reactions by P.Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins are about what we should have foreseen as well.

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