I’ve been thinking about zealotry.
Religious zealotry is as common as pig tracks: the very word zealot derives from a militant first-century Jewish group resisting Roman occupation. There is plenty in this department to expose, reject, and confess. But what is saddening and disturbing me at the moment is the zealotry of a group that I would like to think of as allies: PandasThumb.org, a site devoted to the evolution/creationism wars. Its moniker refers to Steven Jay Gould’s argument that the giant panda’s “thumb” or sixth digit, which is actually a modified wrist bone, refutes the idea that God designs organisms. As the panda’s thumb and kindred phenomena show, life is the result of a make-do evolutionary process, not a rational engineering process. And God, of course, would have engineered things rationally.
Well, maybe she would and maybe she wouldn’t, and either way I think it’s clear that she hasn’t, but the panda’s-thumb argument assumes that she would, and any assumption about the divine style is a theological assumption. The panda’s-thumb argument is thus theological (or atheological), not scientific. PandasThumb.org’s name is particularly appropriate on this level, since naïve antireligious philosophizing seems to me too common on the otherwise useful Thumb.
But it’s the zealotry that’s getting to me right now. Frequent Panda’s Thumb contributor P. Z. Myers, a U. of Minnesota biology prof, writes on May 31, 2007 that “faith is the enemy.” Yikes-a-roni! On April 26, 2009, he demands that the National Council for Science Education, an excellent group devoted to keeping creationism out of public-scool science classrooms, drop its
pretense that religion and science are compatible and that the only way to get political support is for the majority of scientists to sit back and shut up about their rational views while the scientists who endorse superstition are propped up as our façade . . .
Parsing: any claim that “science and religion are compatible” must be in bad faith (a “pretense”), the only scientists with “rational views” are atheists, and scientists who affirm evolution and are also religious “endorse superstition.” Anyone who disagrees with me is either lying or irrational.
Then there’s Timothy Sandefur, a lawyer who blogs on the Thumb and has lately continued a controversy there that began with a 2006 article in the Chapman Law Review by Stephen Trask urging that the establishment clause of the First Amendment (Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof) requires the government to teach evolution and creationism impartially in public schools. Sandefur’s 2008 reply in the same journal, “Reason and Common Ground: A Response to The Creationists’ ‘Neutrality’Argument,” has generated some flak from an author who claims Sandefur misrepresented him. Right here I will stick with Sandefur’s 2008 piece. I agree with its legal thesis, namely, that teaching evolution in public-school science classrooms does not violate the establishment clause of the Constitution because science is not a form of religion. But it is depressingly heavy on the zealotry.
First off, I am surprised, even given Sandefur’s mission to trounce Trask, that over half this law-review article (15 of 27 pages) has almost nothing to say about law. What it does have to communicate are lots of opinions about the nature of science, philosophy, and religion, including many that seem to me to have little to do with the First Amendment issues at hand or to be otherwise questionable. E.g., Christianity and postmodernism are mutually exclusive (134-5, fn 31); the scientific community is inherently “diverse, lively, dynamic, and . . . peaceful” (136); religion/magic (they are the same thing) is not science because it cannot, by its nature, provide explanations (“In the end, science avoids these ‘supernatural explanations’ because there simply are no such things; appeals to the supernatural are not explanations at all,” 139); religion/magic is not science because it does provide explanations, but those explanations fail empirical tests (“the reason supernatural ‘theories’ are not a serious part of scientific discourse is that they have not fit the facts and have not yielded useful conclusions,” 145); science is innately “good” because “for human beings there simply cannot be any other definition of goodness than the flourishing of human beings” (142), an end which science has served by creating the “ready-to-eat salad pack” that “keeps salads fresh for weeks” (131fn, 131) and other marvels; and so on. In short, religion sucks and science rocks.
Mr. Sandefur’s zeal for the reputation of science lures him into the same error of which he correctly accuses Trask: the failure “to address obvious objections” (129). Sandefur claims that science is inherently “good” because it provides “the smallpox vaccine, heart bypass surgery, jet aircraft, Apollo 11, and golden rice” (142), not to mention those nifty salad bags, but he does not address the obvious objection that can best be presented as another list of achievements: 20,000+ nuclear weapons poised for flight, Zyklon B, napalm, anthrax bombs, climate change, soil erosion, collapsing fisheries, the ongoing Holocene mass extinction . . .
But even if “science,” however conceived, is inherently and simply good, even if it can be fervently thanked for all the techno-things we like and let clean off the hook for all the techno-things that we don’t like or that may even extinguish our species, what does that have to do with teaching evolution in schools? Since when do we teach science because of its “goodness” rather than its factuality? What does all this have to do with the law? The US government is obliged by the Constitution to not promote a religion, and (as Sandefur eventually does get around to arguing) it does not, in fact, promote religion by teaching evolution, because science and religion are distinguishable and evolution is science. Legally, that would suffice. But Sandefur indulges his anger at religion, arguing irrelevantly and at great length not only that religion and science are distinct but that religion is entirely pernicious and science entirely wonderful.
This not only makes for a misshapen paper but blinds its author to what religion is: a highly diverse phenomenon capable of profound beauty as well as horrific violence and hogwash. For example, on p. 138 we are given this opinion of the book of Job:
If a person asks, “How does magic work?” or “Why does magic have this result instead of a different result?” the answer is simply, because that’s what magic does. There just is no deeper answer. [Footnote 46 continues the thought:] This seems to me to be the lesson of the Book of Job, wherein the abused Job asks for some explanation for his sufferings and is rebuked for daring to question. Job then repents.
The misreading is impressively total. Job demands a moral “why,” not a causal “why”: he wants God to either ethically justify His behavior or admit wrongdoing. In response, God neither punishes, threatens, rationalizes, nor offers a magical (pseudo-causal) explanation of why any event has occurred; he utters several pages of religious poetry that have been hailed even by many non-believers (e.g., Thomas Carlyle) as a literary masterpiece. Job does not then “repent” out of prudential fear, but because his moral outrage has been overwhelmed by numinous awe (“I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes”—42:05-06, KJV). This may or may not be to one’s personal literary taste, but to say that it exemplifies how magic doesn’t explain physical phenomena is to reveal that one has completely failed to grasp the text.
That’s the problem with writing about anything one hates as fiercely as Sandefur hates religion: disgust clouds perception. One achieves a state of mind in which it is possible to misunderstand Job and Abbie Hoffman at the same time. Sandefur cites Hoffman’s public attempt to “levitate the Pentagon” in 1967 as a failed attempt at magic, contrasting it with the science-based Apollo 11 moon landing two years later (141–142). But Hoffman’s Pentagon stunt was a piece of absurdist performance art, not an attempt at effective sorcery. Absurd political theatre was Hoffman’s specialty, the thing he’s famous for. Again, the misread is impressively total.
Moreover, casting an alleged magical failure (Hoffman’s Pentagon levitation) as disconfirmatory of magic should imply that success would have been at least partly confirmatory: if failure signifies, then success must also signify. But in footnote 44 (137), Sandefur says of healing-prayer studies that even if they did show positive effects, this would “prove only the existence of an interesting natural phenomenon, which would then be subsumed under science — but it would prove nothing about a supernatural cause of such a phenomenon.” So negative results are disconfirmatory of supernatural claims, but positive results are not confirmatory of them. I’m no fan of prayer experiments and no believer in magic, but this seems to me pretty slapdash philosophy: having things your way no matter what happens. Sandefur’s style — highly certain that it is highly logical, but in fact saturated with emotion and short on self-checking — betrays, I think, the influence of Ayn Rand, of whom he is apparently an admirer. (We are pointed to Rand’s writings by two footnotes in Sandefur’s article and to various Randian resources by links on his website.)
Abbie Hoffman testified in court in 1969 that at the same demonstration where he tried to levitate the Pentagon he “introduced a drug called lace, which, when you squirted it at the policemen made them take their clothes off and make love, a very potent drug.” I can now reveal to the world that I have obtained several kilograms of this drug and intend to introduce them into the ventilation system at the next meeting of the Ayn Rand Society. The results should be instructive.
I’m particularly saddened by Myers’s and Sandefur’s contempt for religious people who agree with them about the science of evolution (I am one). Zealotry: There is only Us and Them, and you are one of Us only if you think exactly like Us, and if you do not you are one of Them, the enemy. And in fact if you agree partly with Us you are actually a worse enemy because you are a species of traitor. Sandefur writes:
If science is ever destroyed, this will be why. It will be because the defenders of science opened the city gates from within to the forces of unreason, admitting them on the terms of this false equality.
What offends me about the evangelical atheists like Dawkins, Myers, and Sandefur is not their rejection of religion. All sorts of jolly, reasonable people reject religion: rejecting religion is a perfectly sensible thing to do, though I happen not to do it. What offends me is their lack of intellectual curiosity. They have no interest in the complexity of religion considered as a mere phenomenon — the mind-blowing range of the thing. Don’t know, don’t care. Religion is evil, evil religion: that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Incuriosity is sad in anyone, but in a scientist it is self-mutilation.
[Originally published May 11, 2009]