Is atheism reason-able?

Philip Ball is arguably one of most gifted and prolific science writers today. On his blog, he has posted the pre-edited version of a column, The ‘war’ between science and religion is stuck in a rut. Can we change the record now? that just appeared in Nature News. It is a wide ranging piece mentioning C.P. Snow, Richard Dawkins, Francis Collins, Obama, Bush, ....
Although there are points where my perspective is significantly different, I think it is quite balanced and perceptive. Here are a few quotes:

The[Reason] project [recently launched by Sam Harris] aims ‘to spread scientific knowledge and secular values in society’ and ‘to encourage critical thinking and erode the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.’ It is not hard, given the list of backers, to see what that means: doing battle with religion....

Important though such issues are, the Reason Project’s supporters would probably agree that they pale in comparison with the use (or generally, abuse) of religious dogma to justify suppression of human rights, maltreatment and murder. To the extent that those are in the project’s sights, it should be applauded. But with Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great) on board, one can’t help suspecting that the Almighty Himself is the prime target.

What the Reason Project has in its favour is philosophical rigour. That may also be its failing, because it looks unlikely to venture beyond those walls. Like most utopian ideas, atheistic absolutism works so long as it ignores what people are like and remains in a cultural and historical vacuum. Logical neatness and self-consistency is, unfortunately, not enough.

Sadly, when that is pointed out – as for example when the Royal Society’s former director of education Michael Reiss suggested that it was best to understand religiously motivated delusions such as creationism as world views rather than as mere ignorance that the right information would set right – scientists tend to react badly. Reiss, a biologist and an ordained Christian clergyman, was forced to resign, I suspect because some scientists found a whiff of relativism in his remarks.

Two Cultures: 50 years on II

The 50 year anniversary of C.P. Snow's influential lecture has been marked by the publication of a new book, "From Two Cultures to No Culture", which argues the problems highlighted by Snow are now much worse.

I agree that the problem has gotten worse. I think contributing factors are:

• the rise of postmodernism in humanities departments
• a backlash from scientists against postmodernist excesses has further marginalised the humanities within universities,
• the values of economic rationalism have led to universities being more focused on commercial outcomes and job training rather than scholarship,
• the free exchange of ideas, and the intellectual and cultural development of students.

A measure of the disengagement between science and the humanities is well summarised in a perceptive book review in Physics Today. The author of the book, Alan Sokal, is a mathematical physicist who became quite famous in 1996 when he published a paper, "Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity," in the leading postmodern journal, Social Text, and then revealed the article was a hoax.
The book reviewer, Peter Saulson discusses how it is unfortunate Sokal has been unable to have any meaningful engagement with the failures of modernism or with the subtleties which more thougthful postmodernists wrestle.

The Two Cultures: 50 years on

This month is exactly fifty years since C.P. Snow gave his famous "Two Cultures" lecture, decrying the chasm between the humanities and the physical sciences.

There is a nice Editorial and Commentary in Nature Physics. In the latter, Mark Buchanan dialogues with an essay on the topic by Clive James,

The humanities are literally the 'human-ities'; immersed in the lives of people within human cultures, celebrating individual human perspective and experience, and necessarily resisting any universal or objective perspective. In contrast, science always seeks the universal and objective. Inspired rather than alarmed by the Copernican revolution, it aims to determine the Universe (as far as possible) from a non-human perspective, undistorted by emotion and desire.

One of the things this implies, as James points out, is a crucially different perspective on history in the humanities and in science. Science can for many purposes forget history and focus on the present, for scientific advance and the technology it creates can alter our world beyond recognition in less than a generation. In contrast, and apart from the rapid and ceaseless alteration of superficial style, the core matter of the humanities changes only as fast as the deep nature of people and human life changes, which isn't fast at all.

.... differences are so set in the subject matter of the two cultures — one exploring everything human, and the other aiming for what is outside the merely human — that it is difficult to imagine the two cultures ever coming together. Even so, scientists remain human, and artists live in a world described by laws of inspiring beauty. There will always be innumerable points of contact.

To me, this ties in with an ealier post, Why History does (and does not) matter. It underscores why the Bible is just as relevant today, historical criticism has limited relevance, and there is no need for theology to beholden to the latest scientific developments.

On the other hand, I think Buchanan is overlooking the real gulf and communication difficulties between scientists and scholars in the humanities. I will expand on this soon....

How educated are you or what culture are you from?

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."

C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.

Who will be the Master?

In a lecture on C.S. Lewis and scientism, Fritz Schaefer recommends reading the novel The Masters, by C.P. Snow for insights into the internal politics within Oxbridge colleges. I finally read it on my most recent holiday. The novel is part of a series, Strangers and Brothers, chronicling the life experience of Lewis Eliot as over course of several decades he moves from law office to university to industry to government. Some of the series parallels Snow’s own diverse life experience: he began his professional life as a molecular physicist, turned to writing novels, and eventually became a Baron and held high positions in the U.K. government. He is probably best known for his 1950 Rede lectures: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. ( A book I really want to re-read).
The novel, the Masters, describes the political struggle amongst Fellows in a Cambridge College as they position, posture, and politic in anticipation of the election of the next Master of the college, while they wait for the current Master to die, after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Snow is perceptive about human nature and paints an intimate portrait of his characters. Here is a random selection (page numbers are from the Penguin 1983 edition):

“I had known for miutes past, that this was coming: I had not wanted to talk of it that nigh. Jago was longing for me to say that he ought to be the next Master, that my own mind was made up, that I should vote from him. Had had longed for me to say it without promopting. It was anguish to him to make the faintiest hint without repsonde. Yet he was impelled to go on, he could not spotp. It haradssed me to see this proud man humiliating himself.” (p. 15)

The Master says, “Do you remember the trouble we had getting him [Calvert] elected [as a Fellow of the College], Eliot? Some of our friends show a singular instinct for preferring mediocrity. Like elects like of course. Or between me and you,” he whispered, “dull men elect dull men.” (p. 20)

Nightingale “was intensely suspicious, certain that there was a web of plans from which he would lose and others gain….. He had once possessed great promise. That was his bitterness. … By twenty-three he had written two good papers on molecular structure… but the spark burnt out… Often he had new conceptions: but the power to execute them had escaped from him. ……It would have been bitter to the most generous heart. In Nightingales’s it made him fester with envy…. Each job in the college for which he was passed over, he saw with intense suscpicion as a sign of the conspiracy directed against him…… as March came round each year, he waited for the announcement of the Royal Society elections in expectation, in anguish, in bitter suspicousness…” (p.46,47)

“Chrystal wanted to be no more than Dean, but he wanted the Dean, in this little empire of the college, to be known as a man of poer. Less subltle, less freflective, more immediate than his friend [Brown], he needed the moment-by-moment sensation of power. He needed to feel that he was listened to, ……, that his word was obeyed.” (p.61)

This is both comical and tragic. It shows the vanities and trivialities that academics (and maybe anyone in any close community) can become so absorbed with. Unfortunately, it also portrays accurately how often administrative decisions (including some very important ones) in universities are often not made with the same rational detached objectivity and impartiality that we would like to claim we apply in our scholarship.

Who will be the next Master?

"Sin is crouching at the door; it desires to have you, but you must master it” Genesis 4:6

"For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under lawy, but under grace.” Romans 6:14