if richard dawkins did not exist
Wednesday 25 June 2008 | 10 cookies in the jar
Yesterday’s amused quotation (of the gentleman from Balliol’s bleak little homily on an impassive universe) may have kicked off the very first comment thread which outstrips the original post completely, in volume if not in vehemence.
And your distractable, lawbreaking narrator still hasn’t yet made it to the DMV.
Ensuite to the Brujo’s last comment, I rummaged in my brain for some dim memory from ancient grad-school days of reading evolutionary biology, and to my surprise and delight, emerged with Stephen Jay Gould’s nonoverlapping magisteria:
In his book Rocks of Ages (1999), Gould put forward what he described as “a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to…the supposed conflict between science and religion.” He defines the term magisterium as “a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution….The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm. The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).”
In his view, “Science and religion do not glower at each other…[but] interdigitate in patterns of complex fingering, and at every fractal scale of self-similarity.” He suggests, with examples, that “NOMA enjoys strong and fully explicit support, even from the primary cultural stereotypes of hard-line traditionalism” and that it is “a sound position of general consensus, established by long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria.” [via wiki]
Interdigitation! Sexy. But you’d better BELIEVE Prof. Dawkins has a tidily packaged counterargument ready to leap out of the gate all over this one.
Gould’s separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it’s a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf. Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.
Au fond, I take Dawkins’ point, which is one of praxis, of Realpolitik: the political world isn’t peopled with well-heeled Church-of-England Xianity or highbrow Urdu-poetry-reciting Islam, but on the contrary seems to be generally composed of frothing-at-the-mouth cult leaders and numberless suckers who troll around adoringly after them, killing in the name of; and we’d undoubtedly be much better off dropping all the chestbeating/Bedouin/King David my-God’s-bigger-than-your-God stuff.
He says as much himself, in this Times Online piece wherein he refutes detractors with all the blistering subtlety of a hair dryer.
If subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would be a better place and I would have written a different book. The melancholy truth is that decent, understated religion is numerically negligible.
Pre-nap, I found myself telling the B. about a time when the Physicist and I went to hear Dawkins in London, busily Unweaving the Rainbow for an audience of appalled Oxbridge ladies. I myself felt sympathetic to the burden of his refrain, having been methodically informed all my life by well-meaning friends and relatives that being a scholar and critic meant I would no longer be able to enjoy movies, books, or music. (You can imagine my surprise.)
My memory of this event is rendered patchy by plummeting estrogen, but what I recall is Dawkins telling a story about some pleasant South Sea islanders who believed the moon to be stuck in the palm tree branches above them. I don’t know whether they were unable to clamber up and verify this, or just unmotivated, but for whatever reason they never bothered to get empirical about it. (The Brujo doesn’t think they were being literal; but I don’t have the book and thus can’t get empirical myself.) Dawkins’ point being that the West’s vaunted obeisance to “multiculturalism” wasn’t merely hypocrisy in most cases but in fact wrong Wrong WRONG—capital letters, unvarnished, plain old normative WRONG. The moon is NOT stuck in the tree branches. Preliterate peoples’ understanding of the world IS more primitive than that of people with modern educations. And we cannot in good conscience, he argued ferociously, continue to let other people excise their daughters’ clitorides in the name of tolerating alternate religious worldviews. Any questions?
One by one, a number of Oxbridge ladies stood up and said timidly that they thought the story about the moon in the tree branches was actually very pretty. One by one, they were made into sugar-powdered tuppence mince pies by Professor Dawkins. There was a stunned silence and scattered applause. Afterward, the Physicist shook hands with him and tried to suggest a similar counterargument but using terms from theoretical physics (if I weren’t such a South Sea islander myself, maybe I could remember what it was—but my dyscalculia rendered his careful explanations meaningless). For his part, Dawkins was too busy being brutally and politely dismissive to understand the Physicist’s suggestion. We meekly left and all I remember is the pretty story left tattered and limp on the lecture hall carpeting.
[Holy THAMES do I miss London. If only it weren't lethal. The Physicist escorted me to many formative lectures there and in Boston—Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Jeffrey Sachs. Probably because he listened religiously (haha!) to public radio. If only it didn't bore me to fucking pieces.]
Oleoptene wondered earlier today, What Would Annie Dillard Say? And in fact she sits perched freshly atop the knot of squabbling men of science and faith, seemingly secure in the cleft of the question, swathed in her breathlessly lacerating prose (or, per one reviewer, “pompous flowery crap“). From Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, this passage (freely excerpted, scandalously so, and I hope you read the original), which immediately follows her account of one parasite’s convoluted, inefficient—yet fiercely successful, generation after generation—attempt at surviving nature’s own agnosticism. Dillard’s speculations hearken, most of all I think, to the Brujo’s beloved Mystery.
Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. We value the individual supremely, and nature values him not a whit. It looks for the moment as though I might have to reject this creek life unless I want to be utterly brutalized. Is human culture with its values my only real home after all? Can it possibly be that I should move my anchor-hold to the side of a library? This direction of thought brings me abruptly to a fork in the road where I stand paralyzed, unwilling to go on, for both ways lead to madness.
Either this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak.
Consider the former: the world is a monster. Any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over onto its feet. We are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world.
This view requires that a monstrous world running on chance and death, careening blindly from nowhere to nowhere, somehow produced wonderful us. I came from the world; I crawled out of a sea of amino acids, and now I must whirl around and shake my fist at that sea and cry Shame! If I value anything at all, then I must blindfold my eyes when I near the Swiss Alps. We must as a culture disassemble our telescopes and settle down to backslapping. We little blobs of soft tissue crawling around on this one planet’s skin are right, and the whole universe is wrong.
Or consider the alternative.
Julian of Norwich, the great English anchorite and theologian, cited, in the manner of the prophets, these words from God: “See, I am God: see, I am in all things: see, I never lift my hands off my works, nor ever shall, without end….How should anything be amiss?” But now not even the simplest and best of us sees things the way Julian did. It seems to us that plenty is amiss. So much is amiss that I must consider the second fork in the road, that creation is blamelessly, benevolently askew by its very free nature, and that it is only human feeling that is freakishly amiss. The frog that the giant water bug sucked had, presumably, a rush of pure feeling for about a second, before its brain turned to broth. I, however, have been sapped by various strong feelings about the incident almost daily for several years.
All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.
What I have been after all along is not an explanation but a picture. This is the way the world is, altar and cup, lit by the fire from a star that has only begun to die. My rage and shock at the pain and death of individuals of my kind is the old, old mystery, as old as man, but forever fresh, and completely unanswerable.
I cannot really get very exercised over the hideous appearance and habits of some deep-sea jellies and fishes, and I exercise easy. But about the topic of my own death I am decidedly touchy. Never- theless, the two phenomena are branches of the same creek, the creek that waters the world. Its source is freedom, and its network of branches is infinite. The graceful mockingbird that falls drinks there and sips in the same drop a beauty that waters its eyes and a death that fledges and flies. The petals of tulips are flaps of the same doomed water that swells and hatches in the ichneumon’s gut.
That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, fired into it, a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very compromising terms that are the only ones being offers.
The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my old age.”
Myself a rainbow-monger by trade, it’s easiest for me to refer the mystery to lyric. Perhaps because Ms. Dillard invoked the uncanny blue flame, this song came to mind (written by Ms. Williams about a friend dying of breast cancer). Its lyrics echo my fledgling thoughts about “envirorexia/ecorexia,” too—this increasingly common confusion of our natural (yes) human duty with the pathological god-complex, with a compulsive belief that we are individually, solely, and uniquely responsible for the plastic carrier bags floating in the Pacific.
Dr. Ian Malcolm would shrug: Life finds a way.
Ms. Dillard would add brightly: And so does death.
And the poet? The poet just points and says, Look. In your heart. Blue fire.
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Postscript: Shall we take on intelligent design next?
10 cookies in the jar
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I think I am going to start nudging “get empirical” into the vernacular. Has a certain ring to it.
As to Miss Dillard, I concur with “pompous flowery crap.” I actually like Dillard’s writing style, but it only sometimes serves the book’s purposes and when it fails, the reader feels cheated—well, okay, I FEEL CHEATED. I don’t really speak for the objective, proverbial reader. I just hated Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a lot.
But enough about me! Wouldn’t you rather bypass Dillard’s god/devil life/death dichotomy entirely? What would a Zen master say?
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Editor: Ah, those Zen masters. Tricky bastards. They tend to tell you to clean something; also, they gesture a lot. Other times they laugh merrily and then steal your dessert when you aren’t looking. Mostly nonverbal responses, though. Whereas lyric poets try to use words (beautiful futility!) to point at the moon.
I think I’ve been holding back comment because I grew up in a faith that held the basic agreement of religion and science:
As with the tenet proclaiming the fundamental equality of women and men, or calling for the elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty, easier to proclaim than to follow all of its implication….
And if I guiltily put a quotation from my religion on your blog, it isn’t meant to argue with the Richard Dawkins of the world, but it’s where my understanding of religion comes from, and I do it awkwardly, having learned to keep my mouth shut after realizing that I was the only person who held much belief in God in the whole of the UNM philosophy department, and no arguments were going to change anyone’s positions and I didn’t really want to be in the business of changing anyone else’s position, thank you very much. Or sometimes, I wanted to say, the same God you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in, but materialism, it’s just not cutting it for me. I enjoyed the semester of philosophy of science spent lambasting creationism, (so tempting the straw men, there, like this image). I also figured out that a semester of ethics did little to persuade anyone to behave ethically—that all any theory of ethics really did was poke holes in the previous system. So it started to seem that there were things for which one ought to turn to religion, and things for which one ought to turn to science and, yes, things for which one ought to turn to poetry. Is that magisterial interdigitation?
The Sponsor, also given to wordless gestures and dessert-stealing activities, once said, “If you have a problem with the God we’re talking about, it’s not the God we’re talking about.”
Fascinating.
I can’t help but see humanism as ultimately childish, stuck in toddler-hood. Wisdom has a lot more to do with experience than knowledge does. Empiricism has been completely blown out of the water for a century now by those wacky quantum physicists, excellent scientists all. Like those troublesome electrons, we need to bilocate for a time if we want to be honest.
“Empiricism has been completely blown out of the water for a century now by those wacky quantum physicists, excellent scientists all.”
I disagree. Empiricism is still the only way to do actual science (as opposed to “Creation Science”), as its the only way to stay truly grounded in reality. When we stray from empiricism, we risk invoking the human mind’s fanciful nature and end up with things like “string theory”. *shudder*
I do like that Annie Dillard excerpt, I may have to check out that book. While I agree that our life is defined by death and the end, I think it’s important to focus on our lives so that we may make the best of what we have (~6 dozen trips on the solar rollercoaster)
While it’s true that the universe around us is non-deterministic, aimlessly moved by exchanges of electrical potential, it would be an Appeal to Consequences to argue that as a disproof. Living organisms are the foil to the universe’s entropic ways; we are determined to survive and self-replicate for no other purpose than to exist. We build and create order in this quixotic notion that we can somehow make our existence a little more durable, only to be disheartened when the waves crash in and slowly melt our sandcastles.
The impermanence of it all is what makes it so bittersweet, though. As Dillard said, it’s the death that defines us — if we lived eternally in the supernatural, our earthly life would be meaningless. (I can actually prove that mathematically, if you’re interested ;) ) The fact that life itself is a scarce commodity is what makes it so precious.
I spoke with a tattoo artist today who spent ten years working on a single…what? canvas? customer? client? skin? whatever. He called the result a “body suit.” Skin inked from foot to neck. “I only did 70 percent of it, though,” the tattoo artist said. I didn’t get a chance to ask who did the other 30 percent.
The universe is similar to this. Or not.
These constructs exist in our imaginations. They are no more nor less empirical reality than anything else in that fanciful place.
Dawkins has a great imagination, a veritable body suit of one. He tells a particular story with which many have relatively recently become enchanted.
“These constructs exist in our imaginations. They are no more nor less empirical reality than anything else in that fanciful place.”
Ok — what I *think* you’re saying is that scientific concepts, such as the “electron” are not quite as discretized in nature as they are on paper. And I would agree with you on that point. Atoms look less like the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant logo (the Rutherford model, IIRC) and more like a hollowed out cotton ball with a microscopic pinhead in the center.
However — Empiricism itself, as a tool, is far from being as willy-nilly as your comment suggests.
There are certain things we can observe about the universe, and we create conceptual models based on them. (i.e. the atomic model) But what’s terrific about these empirically derived models is that we can extrapolate accurate predictions from our observations.
I can look at an organic molecule’s stick-model (Ethanol, for example) and predict with some certainty what the likely products will be, given a known reagent. I can do this even if I have not witnessed the reaction with my own eyes, because the empirically-based conceptual model is *that accurate*.
I can look at an HNMR spectroscopy reading and determine (sometimes with the help of an FTIR or GCMS reading), with confidence, what the molecular structure is, how it will behave, and even how much of it is in there — all of this without actually hand-counting or directly observing the individual atoms.
If these imaginary constructs were merely something that a drunkard dreamed up after a liver-wrecking weekend bender (such as Intelligent Design), then predictions such as these would not be possible.
With regard to Dawkins’ alleged body suit, are you speaking more in terms of his positions on Science or on Atheism/Humanism?
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Editor: Seems to me that by empiricism, Aaron might be primarily referring to logical positivism/rationalism (of the deductive, phenomenological flavor), while the Brujo might be coming at the term via American pragmatism (postanalytic or Jamesian radical empiricism?)—these being yet another set of nonoverlapping magisteria. Anxious hostess that I am, I call on both e-gentlemen to spit and shake hands, any slights against alcoholics and/or Xianity being obviously unintentional. For “one man likes to push a plough, the other likes to chase a cow, / But that’s no reason why they cain’t be friends.” Plus I think Alan Sokal already had this argument—albeit with himself; and I am not at all sure who, if any of him, emerged victorious.
We’re not at odds, really. The thread has remained interesting and civil, IMO. There’s a music and art blog called Bagatellen, for example, where people threaten to hunt each other down and engage in fisticuffs. Fistfights over aesthetics and all that.
Empiricism in science is tautological. What we see is determined by the act of seeing itself, and so we are seeing the act of seeing (and of course, ad infinitum, seeing what the seeing of the act of seeing looks like). Our minds create the world in this way. There is no world “out there” versus world “in here.” This duality is itself a red herring created by the mind. We dream the world, we imagine it. Science is another likely story, like all myth. It’s a subset of 20,000 years of meaning-making behavior that happens to enjoy contemporary hegemony.
Science’s materialistic story is satisfying in many ways. The impulse to know and be right about what we know is down at the root of the brain somewhere, close to the general terror-inducing realizations of exactly how puny we are. Repeatability and predictability are wonderful things. Power is a wonderful thing too. Turning a key and having a car engine explode into action, for example. Yay! Seriously. That we live in a universe where the rules don’t change on a Newtonian level every day or hour or whatever is very fine indeed.
But Dawkins is talking, it seems to me, about something else. His evangelical zeal is admirable, but he’s using the wrong tool for the job. Like opening a bag of potato chips with an AK47. In the same way, intelligent-design flunkies and zealots of all stripes use the wrong tool for the job. Rhetorical question alert: Is it so hard for us to say “I don’t know”?
Oh yeah, re: Dawkins’ body suit. I was being too fancy. All I meant was, he’s looking at the 70% we know and forgetting to ask about the 30% that got done somehow but we know not how. The 70% I meant to suggest is the great finite warehouse of the World, with its named things and behavioral formulae. The 30% is not in that cataloging, not in the lists, not in the analytical mind at all. You could draw the split anywhere….this material catalog is really zero and what’s important is 100. Or the warehouse contains 100% of all there is and what’s important is nothing.
In the Big Book, Bill W. talks about finally coming to terms with this: “God is either everything or God is nothing.” The Sponsor asks: why not both?
But perhaps after all this monologue at McSweeney’s says it best….
Then too, if you just caint get enough arm-wrestling over whether God-believers are touchingly, romantically idiotic or just plain idiots, check out the Richard Dawkins forum, where the sharp-tongued, quick-witted members (with delightfully vainglorious usernames like “Nietzschesbulldog”) have got you covered.