ID Friendly at The New Republic #3: Fear of Religion

Thursday I posted this quote from Thomas Nagel:

I agree with Dawkins that the issue of design versus purely physical causation is a scientific question. He is correct to dismiss Stephen Jay Gould's position that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria." The conflict is real. But although I am as much of an outsider to religion as he is, I believe it is much more difficult to settle the question than he thinks. I also suspect there are other possibilities besides these two that have not even been thought of yet. The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism. Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed.

Nagel elaborated on his idea of the fear of religion in his book The Last Word:

The thought that the relation between mind and the world is something fundamental makes many people in this day and age nervous. I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life. In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper-namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. p. 130

I elaborated on this idea without knowing about Nagel's comments in my previous post Intelligent Design is Frightening:

How can zealous atheists honestly evaluate the scientific evidence when they believe deep in their hearts that there can be no such design or designer before they even consider the evidence? How can they consider the issues objectively when the mere possibility of a designer is likely so emotionally disturbing to them?

I think they could consider the evidence objectively, but they would need to acknowledge their bias and adjust for it.

Fear of religion? That is one way of describing it. Does Dawkins also exhibit a visceral hatred of religion and religious people? What might flow from that?

Another post on the importance of worldviews and how they influence and potentially constrain how people evaluate the scientific evidence is here.

ID Friendly at The New Republic #2: ID Is Science

Is intelligent design science? As noted before, Richard Dawkins says yes. And now, Thomas Nagel agrees, as do many others (bold emphasis mine):

I agree with Dawkins that the issue of design versus purely physical causation is a scientific question. He is correct to dismiss Stephen Jay Gould's position that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria." The conflict is real. But although I am as much of an outsider to religion as he is, I believe it is much more difficult to settle the question than he thinks. I also suspect there are other possibilities besides these two that have not even been thought of yet. The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism. Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed.

Once again, Judge Jones with his double-standard ear plugs, is not likely listening. It should be clear to all the other judges in America that this issue cannot be decided for the entire country by one simple-minded judge in rural Pennsylvania. Philosophers in New York City, and elsewhere, do not want Judge Jones' personal opinions and stereotypes forced on them.

Previous posts of mine on whether ID is science are here and here.

ID Friendly at The New Republic

Thomas Nagel has a review of the book that I like to refer to in shorthand as "Dawkins' Delusion." I was rather surprised to see an article so ID friendly in The New Republic, which is generally considered a center-left publication. I guess the culture wars may not have completely obliterated the honest pursuit of thoughtful inquiry- at least in some publications. It is accessible only by subscription on the tnr.com website, but, for some reason, it is also available on Google's cache if you search by a string of text in quotation marks.

Nagel notes the lack of a good explanation for the existence of DNA, which is the work horse of evolution:

The entire apparatus of evolutionary explanation therefore depends on the prior existence of genetic material with these remarkable properties. Since 1953 we have known what that material is, and scientists are continually learning more about how DNA does what it does. But since the existence of this material or something like it is a precondition of the possibility of evolution, evolutionary theory cannot explain its existence. We are therefore faced with a problem analogous to that which Dawkins thinks faces the argument from design: we have explained the complexity of organic life in terms of something that is itself just as functionally complex as what we originally set out to explain. So the problem is just pushed back one step: how did such a thing come into existence?

Regarding Dawkins' brilliant use of bodily gestures:

Dawkins recognizes the problem, but his response to it is pure hand-waving. . . .

Nagel goes on to comment on the plausibility of a physical explanation for the origin of life:

Dawkins is not a chemist or a physicist. Neither am I, but general expositions of research on the origin of life indicate that no one has a theory that would support anything remotely near such a high probability as one in a billion billion. Naturally there is speculation about possible non-biological chemical precursors of DNA or RNA. But at this point the origin of life remains, in light of what is known about the huge size, the extreme specificity, and the exquisite functional precision of the genetic material, a mystery--an event that could not have occurred by chance and to which no significant probability can be assigned on the basis of what we know of the laws of physics and chemistry.

Yet we know that it happened. That is why the argument from design is still alive, and why scientists who find the conclusion of that argument unacceptable feel there must be a purely physical explanation of why the origin of life is not as physically improbable as it seems. Dawkins invokes the possibility that there are vastly many universes besides this one, thus giving chance many more opportunities to create life; but this is just a desperate device to avoid the demand for a real explanation.

More on this article to follow.

New York Times Pans Dawkins: "An Intellectually Frustrating Experience"

A review of The God Delusion is here. The reviewer observes what I have seen in Dawkins' writing for a very long time- bad logic all around. In my opinion, one could argue surprisingly bad logic.

The book fairly crackles with brio. Yet reading it can feel a little like watching a Michael Moore movie. There is lots of good, hard-hitting stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all stripes, but the tone is smug and the logic occasionally sloppy.

The reviewer made one comment that I had noticed in his interview on the Colbert Report- Dawkins' amazing confidence that the answer is so obvious. Any one who thinks the proof of God's non-existence is so obvious, obviously is not a very thoughtful, or open-minded, person:

Despite the many flashes of brilliance in this book, Dawkins’s failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience.

This is further confirmation that Dawkins is a fundamentalist in his own special way.

The review also includes this interesting quote:

Dawkins asserts that “the presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.”

Of course, Judge Jones ignored people like Dawkins in his Dover ruling, and, by so doing, gave them a free pass. It appears that proving that God does not exist is a scientific question. But examining the evidence of design in biology is a religious issue, even if it only has religious implications. Aren't double standards convenient?

Regarding whether the no God hypothesis is falsifiable:

Nor is it obvious what sort of event might unsettle an atheist’s conviction to the contrary. [Bertrand] Russell, when asked about this by a Look magazine interviewer in 1953, said he might be convinced there was a God “if I heard a voice from the sky predicting all that was going to happen to me during the next 24 hours.”

Fair standard?