How New Atheists are like Victorian-era bishops

The secularization thesis -- the most traditional version, rather crude, which predicted religion would disappear from the modern world -- is dead. I don't know that there's a generally agreed upon moment when that theory died. Certainly by the late 90s it was clear to sociologists that while certain social relationships, such as that between the general population and religious authorities, were changing, and that many religious beliefs and practices were morphing and diversifying, religion itself wasn't going away.

About a decade later, there were the New Atheists. While of course this movement made arguments about the validity of theistic beliefs, a major emphasis was actually on the moral imperative of secularization. The argument was that religion was a destructive, negative force that should disappear from the modern world. The New Atheists didn't rely on secularization as an empirical claim, particularly, saying that religion was, observably, disappearing (though sometimes they said that too), but made, more, a normative moral claim that religion ought to disappear.

Is there a connection between the demise of the sociological theory of secularization and the emergence of New Atheists' arguments for secularization?

Philosopher Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age, said that there might be during an international, interdisciplinary graduate seminar at the University of Tübingen this last week.

Asked about the New Atheists during a question-and-answer period, Taylor said:

They are people who are really in a position where they’re, where they have a feeling ... of being besieged. I think I understand why they’re so upset. They had this sense that history was on their side and then this didn’t happen. It’s rather like bishops in the Victorian church and then there was Darwin.... That’s a very interesting phenomena. It used to be the picture, where dogmatic views were dying and freethinkers felt they owned the future. I don’t really understand this development. I’m just reporting on it. But it’s very interesting that there’s been this reversal, so that they now feel besieged.

Taylor's suggestion was that the much commented-upon style of the New Atheists -- the "militancy" and aggression -- comes from a sense that history is arcing in the wrong direction. In that way, if not in any other, these public atheists might be compared to American fundamentalists.

For their part, at least some of the New Atheists remain committed to the sociological thesis of secularization that sociologists have now either completely abandoned or dramatically modified (into various neo-secularization theories, including Taylor's own). In an interview to promote their recent documentary, both Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss said they thought theistic beliefs would, eventually, come to an end.

Krauss said, "When I was a kid in the ’60s, I was sure that by now there would be no religion. In a way it’s very surprising that there are these momentary resurgences. I think it’s going to be a long road."

Dawkins was more adamant that religion is vanishing, even if not as evenly and as quickly as was once commonly predicted. He said, "If you look at the broad sweep of history, then clearly we’re on the winning side. I think things are moving in the right direction, probably not as fast as I would like to see."

Only time will tell "who owns the future." There's an interesting question, though, that could be further explored, about how the sense of whether or not historical trends are tending towards or against one's position shape the way that position is articulated and the tenor of the general arguments.

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Science vs. religion vs. facts

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, perhaps America's most popular promoter of science, pointed out several years ago that there's no necessary conflict between science and religion. Not if you're being scientific about it. As a matter of a concrete fact, discoverable by investigation of the world around us, there are people who are scientists and religious, and there are likewise many religious people who embrace science. The idea that there's an intractable, inevitable, necessary struggle to the death between the two abstractions, "religion" and "science," is not supported by any evidence that can be discovered by an empirical investigation.

"The notion that if you're a scientist you're an atheist, or if you're religious you're not a scientist," Tyson said, "that's just empirically false."

Historians have made this argument for a long time. The "warfare model," the "conflict thesis" offered to explain the relationship between religion and science, just doesn't work.

Over a decade ago, Colin A. Russell wrote that the narrative frame of opposition dates back to two anti-religious science history books from the Gilded Age, both of which had political reasons rather than historical reasons to use that frame. There were axes to grind. The historiography was problematic. The evidence didn't support the guiding metaphors of opposition, struggle, and conflict. The narrative of an age-old fight, Russell showed, obscured a lot of important details. Missing from all such histories is the recognition of the many cooperative relationships and cases of close alliance between science and religion. Relatively minor squabbles are exalted, according to Russell, and normativized. Besides: the assertion of conflict has come to stand in for any actual historical explanation of the conflicts that did happen. Conflict thesis histories don't say why conflicts happened, but assume that they have to.

The whole thing is "at best an oversimplification and, at worst, a deception," Russell wrote.

At the time, Russell's thesis was pretty familiar to historians. Changes in the study of history in the 1980s and 1990s led to a near complete rejeciton of the story of a triumphant, progressive march of science through history that was so easily accepted in the 1870s, '80s, and '90s. Concern about "Whiggishness," "presentism," and the "retrospective fallacy" changed how things were done. Now historians' totem was "complexity," and a standard test for historians was whether or not they could persuasively, sympathetically present an account of a position or figure or movement with which they personally disagreed. According to David B. Wilson, "This radically different methodology yielded a very different overall conclusion about the historical relationship of science and religion." The simplicity of the story that these two traditions of knowledge and practice had always and everywhere of necessity been opposed, and also has always and everywhere been clearly distinguishable, became very suspect. And that simple story didn't stand up to suspicion very well.

Ronald L. Numbers assessment was more blunt. Way back in 1985 he said the conflict thesis was "historically bankrupt," and persisted only because of "cliché-bound minds."

"Cliché-Bound Minds" might have been a good title for the new documentary that premiered this week to a full house in Toronto. Instead the film, which features Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, and a raft of celebrities spouting about the conflict between science and religion, was titled The Unbelievers.

The first four showings of the documentary reportedly sold out, and the audience's response to the premiere was overwhelmingly positive.

Thank you to everyone who stood in line all day for The Unbelievers! You made it an amazing evening for everyone involved!
— The Unbelievers (@unbelieversfilm) April 30, 2013

Just finished world premiere of @unbelieversfilm . Standing ovation. Was one of the most remarkable and gratifying sights I can remember.
— Lawrence Krauss (@LKrauss1) April 30, 2013

The first review posted at Rotten Tomatoes confirms that the film is not exactly nuanced in its depiction of the relationship between science and religion. The audience reviewer reports: "Very good to see that there are people out there fighting for science, reason and intellect. Some great scenes of Muslim protesters being shouted down and heavily outnumbered."

The trailer also shows a woman in a hijab holding one of Krauss' popular books about science and looking very happy and shaking Krauss' hand. While that image could be understood as an example of the many ways people engage religion and science simultaneously, as this woman is both practicing her religion and engaging science without imploding, Krauss talks over the scene, interpreting it as a moment of liberation for the woman, freeing her from her crazy beliefs. He says "If you confront a belief they have and show them immediately that they can see for themselves that it's crazy, then they remember it."

Or perhaps it's just the condescension that sticks out so clearly in their minds.

The most problematic moment of the trailer, though, is when Krauss leans over a podium and says "There's no one whose views are not subject to question." The very obvious exception to this, given the tenor of the trailer and the rest of the promotional material about The Unbelievers, are those who have their own documentary made about them globetrotting from packed hall to packed hall like heroes to perpetuate a myth about a necessary conflict between science and religion.

The filmmakers could have at least given some space to Neil De´Grasse Tyson, a non-religious scientist who has questioned not only this false opposition but the value of Dawkins' rhetorical style, saying, for instance,

Your commentary had a sharpness of teeth .... Being an educator is not only getting the truth right, but there's got to be an act of persuasion in there as well. Persuasion isn't always, 'here's the facts and either you're an idiot or you're not'. It's, 'here are the facts, and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind.' And it's the facts plus the sensitivity, when convolved together, creates an impact. And I worry your methods, and your -- how articulately barbed you can be, ends up simply being ineffective.

This film at least appears to be untroubled by this or any other serious question, though.

The real question that this documentary raises, though, is why there's such a market for the conflict thesis. Why does it persist in its obfuscations and false oppositions so long after it was demonstrated to be historically bankrupt as a theory and demonstrably empirically false? It's an entirely contingent historical fact that Dawkins and Krauss and others would be so warmly hailed as they preach this message. It's not necessarily the case that it makes sense to score their speaking tour to rock anthems in a documentary that gets a standing ovation in Toronto. It would be good to have a good historical account to explain the accident of time and place that is The Unbelievers.

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The very, very basic problem of scientism

"Scientism" is the idea that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge, subject to experiments, empirical verification, and so on. It is "the view that all answerable questions are empirical."

Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and the author of A Universe from Nothing, recently argued for (and, more, from) this position in The Guardian. He argued that philosophy should be replaced by science, since answers, to count as answers, have to be science's answers. What some might see as science's "imperialism," he said, is actually "merely distinguishing between questions that are answerable and those that aren't. To first approximation, all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science."

The standard challenge for scientism -- dealt with, kind of, in the interview -- is about ethics. How can a statement about what one ought to do be proven empirically? How could an injunction against, say, cannibalism, be verified by observation? What would "verification" in such a case even mean?

Another issue with this idea that all answerable questions are empirical is raised by Mark de Silva at the New York Times' philosophy blog. Math, de Silva says, is generally not considered to be empirical. The answer to the square root of negative one can't be found in experience, but that doesn't mean there's not an answer.

There's an even more fundamental problem with this idea, though.

The claim is nonsense by its own standards of nonsense.

If it's the case that "all answerable questions are empirical," what empirical evidence could be proffered to answer the question of whether all answerable questions are empirical? There's an induction problem here, and also a self-referential coherence problem. What possible scientifically acceptable test could there be to prove that scientific tests offer the only real form of knowledge? What observable fact can be cited to support the claim that questions have answers if and only if such answers are observable facts?

The claim can't logically be grounded in empirical evidence. Which means, it itself isn't grounded in itself at the very moment it claims to arbitrate the only available ground of reason. If it's true that "all answerable questions are empirical," then the question "are all answerable questions empirical?" is not an answerable question.

This is not a novel argument I am making. In the history of philosophy, the above issue is most directly associated with the critique of the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. I make no claim to originality on this point. It would be helpful, though, if those claiming science has or can or should replace philosophy knew enough philosophy and history of philosophy to at least recognized the very well established problems with their overly simplistic claims for science.

Scientism -- or at least this version of it -- has a problem with morals, and it has a problem with math. It also especially has a very very basic problem of making its own claims meet the standards those claims set for legitimate claims.

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