Unscientific Myths

Here is a summary of the story about transgendered six-year-olds. This commenter has the rational assessment:

Gender is a social construct. I’m very wary indeed of declaring a preference for a certain socially defined set of behaviors as being somehow “innate”. It strains credulity to assert these children acquired their gender identification ex nihilo. If you mean that they weren’t coached to “be girls”, that’s one thing, but if you mean they were “born into the wrong biological body”, um… that’s a bit harder to swallow when the “wrongness” is purely in relation to a mutable social construct.

It is very difficult to understand how the “reality-based scientific” people can support the position that some people are “born” transgendered or gay. If they are physically male or female, any “gender identity” is in their heads. How is that different from the scientific atheist rant against theists, that their God is only in their heads?

There are many ways in which non-scientific Christians are positivistic, meaning that they believe in a single, discoverable reality that completely explains everything. This is philosophically the same as the atheist scientific materialist view of reality. However, scientific materialism becomes corrupted when it becomes associated with political positions that require ethical justifications, which explains why many so-called materialists believe in unsupportable myths that are politically popular.

The Scientific American

Madison Grant (November 19, 1865 – May 30, 1937) was an American lawyer, known primarily for his work as a eugenicist and conservationist. As a eugenicist, Grant was responsible for one of the most famous works of scientific racism, and played an active role in crafting strong immigration restriction and anti-miscegenation laws in the United States. As a conservationist, Grant was credited with the saving of many different species of animals, founding many different environmental and philanthropic organizations, and developing much of the discipline of wildlife management.

. . .

Grant is most famously the author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the “racial history” of Europe. The work is considered one of the most influential and vociferous works of scientific racism and eugenics to come out of the United States. Coming out of Grant’s concerns with the changing “stock” of American immigration of the early 20th century (characterized by increased numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as opposed to Western and Northern Europe), Passing of the Great Race was a “racial” interpretation of contemporary anthropology and history, revolving around the idea of “race” as the basic motor of civilization. Similar ideas were proposed by Gustav Kossinna in Germany. Grant specifically promoted the idea of the “Nordic race” — a loosely-defined biological-cultural grouping rooted in Scandinavia — as the key social group responsible for human development; thus the subtitle of the book was The racial basis of European history. As an avid eugenicist, Grant further advocated the separation, quarantine, and eventual collapse of “undesirable” traits and “worthless race types” from the human gene pool and the promotion, spread, and eventual restoration of desirable “traits” and “worthwhile race types” conducive to Nordic society:

A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit — in other words social failures — would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.

Other messages in his work include recommendations to install civil organizations through the public health system to establish quasi-dictatorships in their particular fields with the administrative powers to segregate unfavorable races in ghettos. He also mentioned that the expansion of non-Nordic race types in the Nordic system of freedom would actually mean a slavery to desires, passions, and base behaviors. In turn, this corruption of society would lead to the subjection of the Nordic community to “inferior” races who would in turn long to be dominated and instructed by “superior” ones utilizing authoritarian powers. The result would be the submergence of the indigenous Nordic races under a corrupt and enfeebled system dominated by inferior races and both in turn would be subjected by a new ruling race class.

. . .

The book was immensely popular and went through multiple printings in the United States, and was translated into a number of other languages, notably German in 1925. By 1937 the book had sold 1,600,000 copies in the United States alone. Nordic theory was also strongly embraced by the racial hygiene movement in Germany in the early 1920s and 1930s; however, they typically used the term “Aryan” instead of “Nordic”, though the principal Nazi ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, preferred “Aryo-Nordic” or “Nordic-Atlantean”. Stephen Jay Gould described The Passing of the Great Race as “The most influential tract of American scientific racism.” Grant’s work was embraced by proponents of the National Socialist movement in Germany; Passing was the first non-German book ordered to be reprinted by the Nazis when they took power, and Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant that, “The book is my Bible”.

. . .

Historian Jonathan Spiro has argued that Grant’s interests in conservationism and eugenics were not unrelated: both are hallmarks of the early 20th-century Progressive movement, and both assume the need for various types of stewardship over their charges. Grant viewed the Nordic race lovingly as he did any of his endangered species, and considered the modern industrial society as infringing just as much on its existence as it did on the redwoods. Like many eugenicists, Grant saw modern civilization as a violation of “survival of the fittest”, whether it manifested itself in the over-logging of the forests, or the survival of the poor via welfare or charity.

. . .

At the postwar Nuremberg Trials, Grant’s Passing of the Great Race was introduced into evidence by the defense of Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician and head of the Nazi euthanasia program, in order to justify the population policies of the Third Reich or at least indicate that they were not ideologically unique to Nazi Germany (it seemed to have had little effect, as Brandt was sentenced to death).

Grant’s works of scientific racism are often cited by scholars to demonstrate that many of the genocidal and eugenic ideas associated with the Third Reich did not arise specifically in Germany, and in fact that many of them had origins in the United States. As such, because of Grant’s well-connectedness and influential friends, he is often used to contradict the idea that the U.S. did not have its own history of racism, eugenics, and the popularity of quasi-Fascist ideals. Because of the strong associations his eugenics work had with the policies of Nazi Germany, his work as a conservationist has been somewhat ignored and obscured, as many organizations with which he was once associated do not generally want to overstress their connections with him.

Of course, this is brought to you courtesy of Wikipedia, whose truthiness may be suspect.

What shall we take away from this narrative . . . a direct “causal” connection between Darwinism and Nazism? No, for the hundredth time, there is no such thing, not for any idea or system of ideas in human history. People are free agents who decide what to do based on their own reasoning. They are not compelled to believe anything or act in any particular way due to some mystical forces emanating from ideas.

However, we may note that Grant had a significant impact on government policies, legislative action, and public opinion in the US and the world, mostly due to the fact that he sounded scientific. Sure, some scientists said his opinions weren’t “really” scientific, but he was very influential in professional and philanthropic circles. Anyway, we know that scientific knowledge is provisional and cannot specify absolutes, especially in ethics; so what if his eugenics beliefs were not discredited* for decades, and he fell out of favor only because of political events? At the height of his popularity, he was telling a story using as much truth as science knew at the time, so anyone who questioned him was derided as some kind of irrational, unscientific kook.

[*Was eugenics ever scientifically disproven, or did it simply become unpalatable to a few people?]

Science is not “value-neutral” at all. On the contrary, it is a peculiarly human enterprise, so it amplifies every human quality. Science is the application of technology to the investigation and control of natural forces and systems; but it is also the application of technical efficiency to theory formation (the technology of ideas) and social control (the technology of government). Thus the moral value of humanity as dominator of nature, physically and intellectually, is explicitly advocated by science. That includes human control over human nature itself; thus transhumanism is the only logical objective for evolutionary theory.

An-arche

Robert Beale rants and goes to jail. Over at Vox Popoli they are weeping for him, but really, the curtain has fallen and it’s time to go home. There will be plenty more such cases under the next presidential administration.

I love reading about tragic figures who confound the shallow mediocrity of the middle class, go mad with paranoia, and then deliver dramatic monologues before being dragged off stage. Sometimes they actually “win,” but usually they don’t, and that’s just fine. The act of defiance is what matters. Anarchists are like performance artists, living out their art despite boredom, bafflement, and catcalls from the audience. [That's also a fair description of blogging, by the way.]

It’s kind of a bizarre fascination that’s hard to explain to normal people, but it’s somehow fundamental to my psychology. Perhaps it’s fundamentally immature, but I consider myself lucky to have been able to interview some of these anarchists and even live out some of their scenarios. That is also why I count as some of the high points of my life the times when I first read Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Büchner, Robert Anton Wilson, Jacques Ellul, and the four gospels of Jesus Christ.

Which, interestingly enough, brings me to this blog entry by Greg Boyd, former pastor to Theodore Beale:

A Call to Christian Anarchy

The Kingdom Jesus established is anarchistic in that it recognizes God alone as the arche (supreme power). It thus lives free from all other powers (an-arche [anarchy] means without authority). Governments are part of the fallen, oppressed world system that has been done away with in Christ.

In Ellul’s estimation, it’s not appropriate for Kingdom people to either support or revolt against governments. This gives them too much credit. Rather, following the example of Jesus, we should ignore them as much as possible, put up with them as much as we need to, and stay focused on living out the radical Kingdom. If we do this, then we, like Jesus, will find ourselves revolting against the government (and culture). We are, most fundamentally, called to be non-conformists. Our service to the world is the way our counter-cultural lives expose the invalidity of all forms of government by manifesting the reign of God.

Gray Day

In case you thought I was joking about Vox Day being similar in outlook to British political philosopher John Gray, here is commentary from Robert Baird at Digital Emunction:

In general, Gray’s point is that the rationalist arguments that drive the New Atheist polemics—on the basis of which they claim their intellectual authority—very often depend on irrational or arational beliefs, metaphors, and/or premises. (Jacques Derrida made the same argument, mutatis mutandis, about the humanism of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger in “The Ends of Man.” The implicit suggestion of his essay is that any humanist system of thought–i.e. any system that assumes a special status for human beings in the world–is “metaphysical,” i.e. it depends on some non-rational belief.)

Specifically, Gray makes the point that many of the cherished ideas of the New Atheist program owe their development to a religious (and in particular a Christian) outlook, and further that this debt raises questions more serious than those of mere provenance.

Sounds just like a description of Vox, doesn’t it? Baird draws a conclusion from John Gray’s article that you might expect to read from Vox: “while a person might find the philosophical-political programs of the New Atheists preferable to religion for any number reasons, he should not delude himself into thinking that they constitute a pure expression of human reason.”

From John Gray’s article for The Guardian, The Atheist Delusion:

Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest may still believe that, over the long run, the advance of science will drive religion to the margins of human life, but this is now an article of faith rather than a theory based on evidence….

Gray explicitly calls the scientific atheists on their unacknowledged debt to religion:

The secular era was in any case partly illusory. The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion, and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed. The current hostility to religion is a reaction against this turnabout. Secularisation is in retreat, and the result is the appearance of an evangelical type of atheism not seen since Victorian times….

But the idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is biblical in origin (think of the Genesis story). The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith, and like most varieties of atheism today, [Philip] Pullman’s is a derivative of Christianity.

Zealous atheism renews some of the worst features of Christianity and Islam. Just as much as these religions, it is a project of universal conversion. Evangelical atheists never doubt that human life can be transformed if everyone accepts their view of things, and they are certain that one way of living - their own, suitably embellished - is right for everybody. To be sure, atheism need not be a missionary creed of this kind. It is entirely reasonable to have no religious beliefs, and yet be friendly to religion. It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion….

Gray attacks the indefensible thesis that science will eliminate religion and save humanity:

The notion that religion is a primitive version of science was popularised in the late 19th century in JG Frazer’s survey of the myths of primitive peoples, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. For Frazer, religion and magical thinking were closely linked. Rooted in fear and ignorance, they were vestiges of human infancy that would disappear with the advance of knowledge. Dennett’s atheism is not much more than a revamped version of Frazer’s positivism. The positivists believed that with the development of transport and communication - in their day, canals and the telegraph - irrational thinking would wither way, along with the religions of the past. Despite the history of the past century, Dennett believes much the same….

Dawkins makes much of the oppression perpetrated by religion, which is real enough. He gives less attention to the fact that some of the worst atrocities of modern times were committed by regimes that claimed scientific sanction for their crimes. Nazi “scientific racism” and Soviet “dialectical materialism” reduced the unfathomable complexity of human lives to the deadly simplicity of a scientific formula. In each case, the science was bogus, but it was accepted as genuine at the time, and not only in the regimes in question. Science is as liable to be used for inhumane purposes as any other human institution. Indeed, given the enormous authority science enjoys, the risk of it being used in this way is greater….

Gray points out the evident defects of atheist political regimes:

Contemporary opponents of religion display a marked lack of interest in the historical record of atheist regimes. In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, the American writer Sam Harris argues that religion has been the chief source of violence and oppression in history. He recognises that secular despots such as Stalin and Mao inflicted terror on a grand scale, but maintains the oppression they practised had nothing to do with their ideology of “scientific atheism” - what was wrong with their regimes was that they were tyrannies. But might there not be a connection between the attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom? It is unlikely that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet with the slogan “Religion is poison”, would have agreed that his atheist world-view had no bearing on his policies. It is true he was worshipped as a semi-divine figure - as Stalin was in the Soviet Union. But in developing these cults, communist Russia and China were not backsliding from atheism. They were demonstrating what happens when atheism becomes a political project. The invariable result is an ersatz religion that can only be maintained by tyrannical means.

Something like this occurred in Nazi Germany. Dawkins dismisses any suggestion that the crimes of the Nazis could be linked with atheism. “What matters,” he declares in The God Delusion, “is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does.” This is simple-minded reasoning. Always a tremendous booster of science, Hitler was much impressed by vulgarised Darwinism and by theories of eugenics that had developed from Enlightenment philosophies of materialism. He used Christian antisemitic demonology in his persecution of Jews, and the churches collaborated with him to a horrifying degree. But it was the Nazi belief in race as a scientific category that opened the way to a crime without parallel in history. Hitler’s world-view was that of many semi-literate people in interwar Europe, a hotchpotch of counterfeit science and animus towards religion. There can be no reasonable doubt that this was a type of atheism, or that it helped make Nazi crimes possible….

Gray attacks the scientific atheist superstitions about progress and liberal values:

Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it. This is what Nietzsche did when he developed his critique of Christianity in the late 19th century, but almost none of today’s secular missionaries have followed his example. One need not be a great fan of Nietzsche to wonder why this is so. The reason, no doubt, is that he did not assume any connection between atheism and liberal values - on the contrary, he viewed liberal values as an offspring of Christianity and condemned them partly for that reason. In contrast, evangelical atheists have positioned themselves as defenders of liberal freedoms - rarely inquiring where these freedoms have come from, and never allowing that religion may have had a part in creating them.

Like Vox, Gray admires Onfray above the British and American atheists:

Among contemporary anti-religious polemicists, only the French writer Michel Onfray has taken Nietzsche as his point of departure. In some ways, Onfray’s In Defence of Atheism is superior to anything English-speaking writers have published on the subject. Refreshingly, Onfray recognises that evangelical atheism is an unwitting imitation of traditional religion: “Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy.” More clearly than his Anglo-Saxon counterparts, Onfray understands the formative influence of religion on secular thinking. Yet he seems not to notice that the liberal values he takes for granted were partly shaped by Christianity and Judaism.

Gray also foresees an ignoble death for secularism:

The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

For further proof, we can look to one of Gray’s articles for The New Statesman, about the ever-popular Enlightenment:

As an intellectual movement, the Enlightenment has always had a distinctly seamy side. In its political incarnation, it was one of the factors that shaped modern-day terror. Right-thinking French philosophes campaigned for the prohibition of torture, but their ideas also gave birth to the Jacobin Terror that followed the French revolution. Later, Enlightenment ideas animated some of the most repressive and murderous regimes of the 20th century. Contrary to views often voiced on the left, state terror in the Soviet Union and Maoist China was not produced by national traditions of despotism. It resulted from the utopian character of communism itself. The tens of millions who starved or were killed under communism perished for the sake of an Enlightenment ideal.

What is needed today is not the return to faith beloved of Enlightenment believers and born-again Christians alike. It is realism and doubt - especially regarding the myth of progress in ethics and politics. A couple of hundred years ago, this myth may have been useful. Today, after the disasters of the 20th century, it is merely a sedative. How many times has one heard the plaintive cry “If I didn’t believe in progress I couldn’t get up in the morning”? The Enlightenment revival is not a return to rationality. It is fuelled by the emotions, and above all by fear.

It isn’t as if John Gray is pro-Christian; he’s just anti-atheist and anti-Enlightenment, and he doesn’t accept science-worship as a reasonable substitute for religion. From reading Straw Dogs, one would think he is a pantheist in the tradition of Spinoza, and in that respect he has some ideas in common with Vine Deloria.

So, how do we get from Mr. Gray to Mr. Day? I have no clue yet.

UPDATE:

You can read about a slapstick encounter between a liberal humanist reporter and John Gray at The New Humanist. It’s like reading the script from The Three Stooges in Orbit, with Gray as a hideous monster alien bent on destroying the earth. The reporter simply cannot believe that such a creature exists. It also reminds me of a radio show in which Alex Jones, an ultraconservative commentator, interviewed Ann Coulter and made her apoplectic with rage by demonstrating her hypocrisy in supporting George W. Bush. Political stooges can be hilarious.

Techno Reboot

Waste of Time

Despite appearances, I really don’t have a position on the question of Intelligent Design vs. Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection or Creation Science vs. Theory of Evolution by Common Descent, or any similar “scientific” controversy.

Such controversies have nothing to do with science, in my opinion. Rather, they are about the best way to enthrone scientists as our moral guides, or the best way to use science to support idealism, or the best way to ensure that the entire ignorant populace obeys their gloriously scientific leaders, or the best way to prop up an ailing and weary old god, or the best way to make money from superstitious science-worshippers, or some other corrupt, worldly enterprise.

God is God; He doesn’t need any whiny defenders. God’s created universe is also going to be exactly what it is meant to be, regardless of what we say about it. And if you are a scientific materialist atheist who thinks that your highest calling in life is to beat down the irrational godbags so you can prove your moral superiority, well then, have at it. But it has nothing to do with science.

Beware of Dawgs

All your base are belong to us:

**************************************

Ladies and gentlemen, we are on the cusp of a glorious age…the age of…the machine!

[roar]
[gasp]
We appreciate your concern…it is noted and stupid. After all, we are scientists, much, much smarter than you. But perhaps a little demonstration will set your mind at ease.

    Somehow, the hidebound atheist scientific materialists don’t get it. It is such an effective parody because they actually believe that science is an unstoppable autonomous machine and they are smarter than anyone else. The pathetic, arrogant gangsta atheists really get off on their own bling-flinging. You see, no one who disagrees with them could actually understand science, because their personal prejudices are empirically derived! If you understand science, then you will agree with them, of course. If you disagree with them, it’s because you hate science, and therefore you are irrational and subhuman.

     I am willing to grant that every person has the benefit of volition and rational thought; and that given the same material reality, two people might come to different conclusions about the nature of truth, given different perceptual filters, emotional states, decision making process, education, and so forth. That doesn’t mean that material existence is not real, nor that there is no positive truth. It means that there is no perfect perception and no perfect rationality.

    Someone’s claim to superior rationality based on an appeal to scientific authority does not constitute a valid defense of their personal prejudices. An appeal to authority is an admission that you have chosen not to reason something out for yourself. Perhaps you don’t have time, you don’t understand the relevant concepts, you want to preserve your personal relationships, you need to keep your job, or you need the support of some political party, but the credit is not yours. Therefore, it is disingenuous to turn around and claim that “you” are more rational, that “you” rely only on science, or that “you” are more firmly grounded in reality, when actually it is your chosen authority who has those attributes, and your opinion is more properly classified as a superstition.

    A superstition is nothing more than the acknowledgment that you can observe a regularity in events, but do not understand the reason for the pattern. The scientific materialist, who hates the idea that there is something he cannot understand, claims that he can understand it because he can name the scientific discipline that would explain such phenomena. Even if he doesn’t understand it, someone does. Someone, somewhere in the world, has a science degree and an explanation for it, an explanation that would be confirmed by a majority of the recently published peer-reviewed studies by specialists in the field who hold tenure and have government funding, if the science fetishist could understand those studies.

    Someone knows the real answer or someone could know, someday; and that makes all the difference in the world to the faithful.

False Gods

In response to my comment:

I did not declare that I believe in god whether he exists or not; I declared that I do not care if you disprove the existence of god. Any god whose existence can be disproved is an idol and deserves to be smashed. I may have sentimental attachment to it, but I should not worship it.

Sam says:

For you apparently the only “true” god is one that does not exist. After all, a god that can’t be proven to not exist is one that doesn’t interact with reality at all. Even up to the point of not even creating the universe. Tell me, what would you call such a creature that is your God?

The only true god is one whose existence cannot be disproven. The fact that someone cannot prove that a god does not exist would indicate only that the skeptic’s knowledge is limited, which is typical of humans.

I think that the basis of Sam’s comment here is actually the principle of falsifiability, that is, the doctrine that if something cannot be falsified, it cannot be proven true. This idea is commonly attributed to Karl Popper, who used it to distinguish hypotheses that scientists could test from those that they could not. It is used by some science fetishists as a club to beat up on any claim that does not come from a scientist.

One problem with Popperian falsifiability is that it requires an artificial dichotomy. Every claim is subjected to a binary test, such that it may either be proven true or false. If there is no condition under which it could be proven false, they say, then it cannot ever be proven true. The idea is that if it cannot be proven false it must necessarily be an a priori assumption, and therefore it is not empirically verifiable, and that makes it invisible to scientific materialism. Therefore it is an invalid hypothesis, and may be terminated with extreme prejudice.

The truth of some things cannot be subjected to this binary logic, however. The universe cannot be falsified, for example, and universal attributes such as gravity cannot be falsified (it is an inherent attribute of mass in space). That is, for any aspect of the universe’s existence that you can disprove, it does not exist anyway, and so it is not part of the universe.

With regard to God’s existence, this would seem to be a method of withdrawing to a more and more abstract definition of God. Perhaps, but the Christian God makes clear that if I think I can confine him to a whirlwind, a temple, a statue, a lawbook, or any other particularity, I will be proven wrong. He will prove me wrong, and the things I thought were “evidence” of God will turn out to be false gods, or idols. Therefore, I welcome on principle anyone who wants to help me smash my idols. I may not like it, and I will probably call a stop to it at some point because I still have sentimental attachments to them, but I have no basis for claiming that God disapproves of it.

The Irrational Atheist, Part 4

In chapter 3 of The Irrational Atheist, Vox Day makes “The Case Against Science.” This chapter is quite straightforward, being based almost entirely on Sam Harris’ contention that Science + Faith = Extinction, or something like that. Toward the end, Vox includes a list of religious sins against science that is collected from PZ Myers’ site.

The case against science seems pretty uncontroversial to me in principle, but I’m sure Vox calculated that this chapter would get a rise out of most people, especially people whose philosophy of life is predicated on the inherent goodness of science. He takes pains to show that he is neither Luddite nor anarcho-primitivist, but simply following Harris’ argument to a logical conclusion.

To that extent, it is kind of surprising that anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan gets a warmer reception from liberal atheists than Vox does. Zerzan, however, taps into the fundamental cultural nihilism of liberal atheists; that is to say, he appeals to their ignorance of history and their disdain for modern Euro-American consumer culture.

Vox is actually closer philosophically to political philosopher John Gray, author of Enlightenment’s Wake and Straw Dogs. One of Gray’s favorite whipping boys is the unreasoning faith of the modern Euro-American in meliorism, or cultural progress. The superstition is that science will continually make progress in real knowledge; this will raise people’s consciousness and enhance their aggregate rationality; then the people will democratically reform the institutions and norms of society according to their newfound understanding; and society as a whole will then advance to the next stage of ethical and political evolution. Gray claims that such progress is not inevitable, since advances in science and technology have no positive correlation to political and ethical progress. He goes further and states that political and ethical progress is actually illusory, since any changes are never permanent, and there is no justification for believing that they ever could be.

Science as method is merely a tool, and so carries no particular moral valence. It is possible to see scientific method as a kind of spiritual discipline, but that still leaves its objectives unspecified and its products open to misuse by anyone else. Science as a body of knowledge is itself a form of historical narrative and not a conclusive view of present reality in any sense. Moreover, the supposed “body” of knowledge does not exist in any coherent form anywhere, not even in the heads of the wisest practitioners, and cannot produce a definitive conclusion on any controversial topic. Science as a profession arguably has the most impact on a society, but there is no positive correlation between its existence and “social progress.”

In sum, science does not constitute an unqualified good. To regard it as either inherently good or evil is actually to assign it a moral quality it cannot possess. Likewise, it is unsupportable to claim that scientific understanding causes atheism, as many atheists do. Constant meditation on the scientific method may cause one to conclude that all knowledge is provisional, and so that any particular claim of absolute knowledge is false, and thus that atheism is the only rational theological position. However, this is not positive knowledge; it is only a speculation.

Whereas Vox’s progress through chapter 3 is well paced and fairly conclusive, he breaks up a little near the end by once again dismissing, out of hand, atheist objections. In this case, he lists the sins of religion against science collected from a casual blog survey, then waves his hand and pronounces them irrelevant. However, he recovers at the end by showing how scientists themselves tend to interfere with science in more significant ways.

Supernatural Atheism

This is precious:

An atheist, in my understanding (and Messrs Merriam and Webster’s), is a person who denies that there is a God. You can deny that there is a God and yet believe in a whole ontinuum of supernatural critters, from everyday (-night?) ghosts up to the angels. You seem to be using “atheist” to mean “a person who denies the supernatural.” That would be a “naturalist,” or colloquially a “materialist.” [John Derbyshire]

First, Derbyshire makes an error by attributing his personal views to some kind of dictionary authority. Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary refers to “a disbelief in the existence of deity” and “the doctrine that there is no deity”; it later defines deity as either “the rank or essential nature of a god,” “supreme being,” “a god or goddess,” or “one exalted or revered as supremely good or powerful.” The wording in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate is just a condensed version of the wording in Webster’s Third New International.

Clearly, Derbyshire intends to take the position of the traditional European atheist, who may be culturally religious and merely opposes monarchical theism on principle. This position makes a mockery of the modern atheism that claims positive knowledge of the structure, history, and fate of the entire universe through the magic of “scientific materialism.” This modern, positivistic atheism is transparently nothing more than a soulless, mechanistic, and idealistic form of humanism.
Derbyshire also makes the common error of stating that “a person who denies the supernatural” is a “naturalist,” and that a colloquial synonym is “materialist.” However, a naturalist would properly be one who accepts whatever is found in nature, including human society; and human society includes many who attest to the existence of supernatural forces or beings. Also, the naturalist would not seek to impose any ideal upon nature by claiming that any particular unobserved phenomenon could not occur.

The dogmatic materialist, on the other hand, asserts that all of nature follows an ideal form in which unexplainable phenomena cannot occur at all. The other difference between the naturalist and the materialist consists in how phenomena are explained; for a materialist may be infinitely reductive and mechanistic, whereas a naturalist would allow for growth and change according to an organic potentiality, as well as unforeseeable complex interactions.

Some atheists claim that through scientific knowledge they come necessarily to the logical conclusion that everything is reductively explainable and that there is nothing supernatural. But that is not the same as Derbyshire’s opposition to a supreme, personal, monarchical deity; nor is it the same as the liturgical, religious, ascetic contemplation of a monk who reveres a transcendant human; nor is it a form of philosophical naturalism. Such an atheism is rather a pathological, idealistic egotism, which unsurprisingly manipulates tribalism in order to facilitate unrepentant mass murder.

So, are egotism and tribalism irrational? What about the everyday activities of the average person, who unthinkingly eats and talks and performs non-ideal bodily functions? These are only irrational in comparison to some kind of mathematical or “scientific” abstraction of human rationality, an ideal model of human thinking that is entirely contrived and lacking any basis in the natural world.