Prometheus Unbound

In reading my most recent dead tree edition of Skeptic magazine, I noticed that there were two articles on the Large Hadron Collider and the potential catastrophic effects that could come from bringing it up to full power (black holes eating the Earth etc.). I’ve raised my own nervy questions about this here, but I was expecting Skeptic to set my nerves to rest, and to offer, well, a skeptical deconstruction of the very idea that there was any danger at all to bringing the Large Hadron Collider to full throttle up. Like ghosts and UFOs, I fully expected Skeptic to conclude, in no uncertain terms, that catastrophe concerns surrounding the Large Hadron Collider are born of pseudoscientific hysteria and conspiratorial bullshit.

But that’s not what the lead article argued. In fact, it went over the issue with a good deal of thoroughness and concluded that maybe this whole subject should be discussed more, and in public. There was a short one page rebuttal to the cautionary article, and it was offered by a physicist who is highly respected in both the atheist and scientific communities (Lawrence Krauss). I read Krauss’s rebuttal carefully, as well as the lead cautionary article a second time, and I must confess that the cautionary article struck me as, frankly, more thoughtful. And Krauss’s rebuttal struck me as rather prickly, snarky, and contemptuous (as opposed to thorough and substantive). There was an underlying impatience in Krauss’s response, as if to say, “Trust me on this. I’m an expert and I’m very smart.” In response I was thinking, “Well, I agree you’re very smart, but at least refute the previous article point by point.” But Krauss, apparently, couldn’t be bothered.

After reading the dead tree edition, I thought I’d see if the two articles are online, and they are. The link is here. Read them carefully. If nothing else, they are both exercises in critical thinking from two very different vantage points. And if the first article is anything like near correct, then we could all be in real peril a month or two from now (when the Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to go with full throttle up).

I think that these two questions, when answered with two yeses, represent the thrust of what Intelligent Design proponents are up to in their critiques of evolution, as William Dembski recently (and concisely) stated at his blog:

The theory [of evolution] purports to give a materialistic account of life’s development once life is already here, but it has a gaping hole at the start since matter gives no evidence of being able to organize itself from non-life into life. The fossil record, especially the sudden emergence of most animal body plans in the Cambrian explosion, sharply violates Darwinian expectations about the historical pattern of evolutionary change. The nano-engineering found in the DNA, RNA, and proteins of the cell far exceeds human engineering and remains completely unexplained in Darwinian terms. Darwin lovers are quick to reject such complaints.  After all, as novelist Barbara Kingsolver declares, Darwin’s idea of natural selection is “the greatest, simplest, most elegant logical construct ever to dawn across our curiosity about the workings of natural life. It is inarguable, and it explains everything.”

Dembski seems to be critiquing evolution on solid grounds here. I know he is an Evangelical, and that he is thus highly motivated to make such critiques, but my question is this: do these lines of critique, with regard to evolution, have at least some validity? I think that they have. If I’m wrong about this, what, as an agnostic, am I missing?

Dembski, in the same blog post, continues:

Any theory that explains everything and that can and must be true is either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the greatest swindle ever foisted on gullible intellectuals. The intelligent design community takes the latter view, siding here with Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote: “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.” Still, it’s easy to understand why so flimsily a supported theory garners such vast support. It provides the creation story for an atheistic worldview. If atheism is true, then something like Darwinian evolution must follow.

I’m not sure which side—the Intelligent Design side or the Darwinist side—will be laughed at, say, a century from now. I suspect that it will be the Intelligent Design hypothesis, at least in terms of its current critiques of evolutionary biology, but it’s hard for me, as a nonscientist, to say. My hunch is that the gaps in evolutionary theory that Intelligent Design currently exploit will be filled over the next century in ways that will make the evolutionary conclusion even more compelling than it appears to be now.

But notice that this is merely a prediction, a guess really. And whether you’re a scientist or not, when it comes to the future, that’s really all we have. In the meantime, a bit of humility might suit all of us—religionist, agnostic, and atheist alike. I think that Dembski often comes across as unduly arrogant and overconfident, as do, say, atheists like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. Everybody seems just so darn cocksure, as if the other side consisted of fools. But competing confidence poses should not be mistaken for anything other than that. Maybe at profound and fundamental levels, both sides have elements to their arguments that, a hundred years from now, will be shown to be not just wrong, but spectacularly so.

Let’s see what happens. And keep an open mind.

Today in Salon, Camille Paglia, an atheist who obviously hasn’t been paying much serious attention to the post 9/11 New Atheist movement, stumbled upon Richard Dawkins talking about religion on NPR, and having never heard his voice before, she thought he sounded a bit, well, ridiculous:  

I was recently flicking my car radio dial and heard an affected British voice tinkling out on NPR. I assumed it was some fussy, gossipy opera expert fresh from London. To my astonishment, it was Richard Dawkins, the thrice-married emperor of contemporary atheists. I had never heard him speak, so it was a revelation. On science, Dawkins was spot on — lively and nimble. But on religion, his voice went “Psycho” weird (yes, Alfred Hitchcock) — as if he was channeling some old woman with whom he was in love-hate combat. I have no idea what ancient private dramas bubble beneath the surface there. As an atheist who respects and studies religion, I believe it is fair to ask what drives obsessive denigrators of religion. Neither extreme rationalism nor elite cynicism are adequate substitutes for faith, which fulfills a basic human need — which is why religion will continue to thrive in our war-torn world.

The thrice-married emperor of contemporary atheists? In Camille Paglia’s broadside of Dawkins I detect the distinctly catty suggestion that Dawkins’s religion bashing is psychosexual detritus from his wars and disappointments with ex-lovers. Not a nice innuendo, but I suppose that most religion obsessed atheists, however many times they’ve been married or discouraged in love, are, at bottom, brides left at the altar. God has disappointed and disillusioned them, and you never hear the end of it.

Decoupling religion from war is not an easy thing. The poet Stephen Spender, in reflecting upon World War II, wrote these lines (in his poem, “Rejoice in the Abyss”):

Against an acrid cloud of dust, I saw

The houses kneel, revealed each in its abject

Prayer, my prayer as well: ‘Oh, God,

Spare me the lot that is my neighbor’s.’

The impulse to pray for your own survival, and leave the fate of neighbors and enemies to God (as a matter of indifference) is natural, but it is not in accord with love. So in a secular age should love, in the name of Darwinian survival, be abandoned? Should the fate of neighbors and enemies be a matter of indifference to any sane person trying to survive in a competitive, unjust, absurd, and tragic world? Or should you wed your own fate to following love and an expansion of concern, even at the expense of your own life?

What matters? What should matter?

Just asking.

Daniel Dennett. PZ Myers. Richard Dawkins. Jerry Coyne. Philosopher Michael Ruse is an atheist too. But don’t sign him up with the above confidence atheists.

Why? Here’s one reason that he gave in a recent essay in the UK’s Guardian:

[H]ow dare we be so condescending? I don’t have faith. I really don’t. Rowan Williams does as do many of my fellow philosophers like Alvin Plantinga (a Protestant) and Ernan McMullin (a Catholic). I think they are wrong; they think I am wrong. But they are not stupid or bad or whatever. If I needed advice about everyday matters, I would turn without hesitation to these men. We are caught in opposing Kuhnian paradigms. I can explain their faith claims in terms of psychology; they can explain my lack of faith claims also probably partly through psychology and probably theology also. (Plantinga, a Calvinist, would refer to original sin.) I just keep hearing Cromwell to the Scots. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” I don’t think I am wrong, but the worth and integrity of so many believers makes me modest in my unbelief.

And for sensibly counseling against intellectual hubris, what has Michael Ruse received for his pains? Well, here’s how Ruse characterizes the confidence atheists’ response to him:

Richard Dawkins has likened me to the pusillanimous appeaser at Munich, Neville Chamberlain. Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True, says (echoing Orwell) that only someone with pretensions to the intelligentsia could believe the silly things I believe. And energetic blogger PZ Myers refers to me as a “clueless gobshite” because I confessed to seeing why true believers might find the Kentucky Creationist Museum convincing. I will spare you what my fellow philosopher Dan Dennett has to say about me.

I like to hear, in the teeth of opposition, an intellectual of Michael Ruse’s stature holding up for a more modest atheism. It strikes me that Ruse is advocating for a pre-9/11 atheism, a sobered atheism that harkens back to Albert Camus and the grim realities of existence that atheists grappled with during and after WWII. Religion had not poisoned and fucked up the 20th century public sphere—it was secular ideologies that had done that—and an atheism sobered by this fact was, in my view, a saner atheism than contemporary confidence atheism. Camus, sounding for all the world like Michael Ruse today, once said to a gathering of Dominican Friars (in 1948):

I wish to declare also that, not feeling that I possess any absolute truth or any message, I shall never start from the supposition that Christian truth is illusory, but merely from the fact that I could not accept it.

If atheism is as compelling a philosophical position as Dennett & Co. believe it to be, then there really is no need to over sell it, for it will sell itself. The very fact that Dennett & Co. don’t trust atheism to sell itself tells you something about what must be going on beneath the surface of its most aggressive proponents. The evangelical atheist (who I imagine must be repressing a great deal in the psyche to be so confident of so many uncertain things) reminds me of the evangelical religious apologist. The broken wheel usually squeaks loudest, and against obnoxious resistance, Michael Ruse should continue to speak his modest Socratic truth: confidence atheism is intellect divorced from wisdom and humility. In not mixing the intellect with Socratic caution, the New Atheism is folly’s exhibit “A” (just as religious fundamentalism is folly’s exhibit “F”). Put in mythic terms, the New Atheists are rehearsing hubris; they are Oedipus and Jocasta before they crash. And so with Tiny Tim, and as an agnostic, I say to all those who provide pushback against the New Atheists, and try to recall to the world a saner Camus-style atheism, ”God bless them!” (If there is a god.)

And Ruse even looks a bit like a character out of a Dickens novel:

And here’s William Lane Craig, a Christian philosopher, making observations similar to Ruse:

Sometimes we think that if we could just have a stunning visual demonstration of something we believe in, that it would convince the nonbelievers in our midst. So it is that alien enthusiasts fantasize about UFOs on the White House lawn, and Evangelical enthusiasts fantasize about Jesus coming in the clouds (“See, we told you so!”).

But what, then, do atheist evolutionary biologists, whose beliefs about evolution are resisted by large majorities of the human population, fantasize about? Well, if you are Richard Dawkins, you fantasize about the recovery of prehuman primate species as an example of something that would “change everything.” 

But would the recovery of, say, a Neanderthal from recovered genetic material, or the creation of a genetic hybrid between chimps and humans really “change everything”?

Though Richard Dawkins thinks it might, I’m not so sure. Most persuadable and reasonably educated people already know that the Earth is old, that evolution occurred (and is occuring), and that we share a common ancestor with other hominids. They’ve seen artist reconstructions of these creatures. They’ve seen images of their bones. And they have read what science writers have to say about them. I think it would be a shock and novelty to see, for example, a real Neanderthal baby in a human crib, and it would be a fascinating story following its birth—and it would have a Truman Show quality to it—but I just doubt that it would cause an earthquake in the psyche of most people.

I think that Dawkins is being a bit naive about how a piece of evidence functions in the minds of the determined-to-be unconvinced. I would guess, for example, that most fundamentalists, though rocked backward a bit by news of the birth of a baby Neanderthal, would ultimately be unswayed to believe in evolution by such an event. Fundamentalists are very, very good at ad hoc  reasoning, and would quickly come up with some bullshit to explain the cute little baby Neanderthal.

I can think of a quick rationalization that would preserve their worldview already: “See—the book of Revelation is full of monsters—and scientists are creating the very monsters that will mark the last days!”

See how easy that was?

Happy Halloween!

It might be, especially if you think of acts of faith as akin to fantasy. Faith, like fantasy, may function to do real work in the psyche. I think this observation of Ethel Spector Person, from a book of essays titled Imagination and Its Pathologies (MIT Press 2003, p. 116), though concerning fantasy, can also be thought of as a kind of defense of faith:

Daydreaming often signals recognition of an emotional reality previously denied. . . . Perhaps most important of all, daydreaming lends solace in sorrow and pain. Fantasizing a happier future may permit us to bear an untenable present rather than be overwhelmed by depression and feelings of hopelessness. Therefore fantasy’s chief benefit may be that it allows the fantasizer to hope, to trust in the future, even in a seemingly hopeless situation.

The above passage on fantasy strikes chords similar to those that I hear in the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, as when he writes:

Human vitality has two primary sources, animal impulse and confidence in the meaningfulness of human existence. The more human consciousness arises to full self-consciousness and to a complete recognition of the total forces of the universe in which it finds itself, the more it requires not only animal vitality but confidence in the meaningfulness of its world to maintain a healthy will-to-live. This confidence in the meaningfulness of life is not something which results from a sophisticated analysis of the forces and factors which surround the human enterprise. It is something which is assumed in every healthy life. It is primary religion. Men may be quite unable to define the meaning of life, and yet live by a simple trust that it has meaning. This primary religion is the basic optimism of all vital and wholesome human life.

If fantasy and faith are near of kin, perhaps Don Quixote is the proper model for human existence. What do you think? Is Don Quixote a comic figure, a tragic figure, or an admirable figure worthy of our emulation?

Is faith the performance of a fantasy in which the pirouettes multiply as the audience, slack-jawed, applauds? Are people of faith (I’m thinking in particular of someone like William Blake here) kind of like the characters in Jack Kerouac’s novels, burning with mad human beauty and naivety? I like this classic quote from On the Road :

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”

Is that what faith is? Is it Niebuhr’s “animal impulse and confidence in the meaningfulness of human existence”?

Do you have faith?

On Monday Major Adrian Agassi, one of the military court judges who holds jurisdiction over the West Bank, bluntly told the Guardian that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews, and that’s basically that:  

In an unusually frank interview, which offers insights into the melding of religion, politics and law that underpins land seizures in the occupied territories, Agassi has laid out his belief that Israel has a biblical claim to territory beyond its borders and that he, even as an immigrant, has a right to live on it when those born there do not. “When we [Israelis] say that this is a political conflict, then we lose the battle,” he told the Guardian, adding that it should be remembered that the ancient land of Israel is “given to us by the Bible, not by some United Nations”.

God gave it, I believe it, that settles it? It’s not hard to predict the outcome of such talk, should it prevail in Israeli politics.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (1816), is an extraordinary instance of an atheist addressing—or speaking to—the shadowy side of the ontological mystery (the mystery of being) as if it possessed a human persona, or was even a god.

The poem has seven stanzas. Here’s the first one:

The awful shadow of some unseen Power

      Floats though unseen among us,—visiting

      This various world with an inconstant wing

As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,—

Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,

          It visits with inconstant glance

          Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,—

          Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—

          Like memory of music fled,—

          Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Notice that, like a theist who might capitalize a reference to God, Shelley capitalizes his reference to the “unseen Power” that reveals itself “with an inconstant wing”—and yet unmistakably and directly—to each individual “As summer winds that creep from flower to flower”. A “Power” likened to a hovering cloud that “Floats”—or the flight of a bird or an unpredictable wind—oddly borrows Christian tropes for the Holy Spirit. This is curious poetic language for an atheist. It seems that Shelley, who professes to not believe in God, nevertheless, in this poem, finds himself addressing, as it were, an unknown god: the dark ontological mystery that is sometimes curiously present to the mind as a kind of unstable and elusive peak experience:

          It visits with inconstant glance

          Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,—

          Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—

          Like memory of music fled,—

Then Shelley, again curiously, speaks of this “music” as grace. Grace. Absorb that. Why is an atheist turning elusive beauty into telos  distributing grace?:

Like memory of music fled,—

          Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

This is very strange language. It makes me wonder. When Shelley calls himself an atheist, does he mean merely that the conventional religious language used for talking about the ontological mystery strikes him as false—as a reduction of something completely mysterious—but that he nevertheless feels to be present—and that is in some sort of curious didactic relationship with him? Stanza 2 of this poem is startling for its religious longing and perplexity concerning suffering. This is hardly the way that you would expect an atheist to talk, and yet Shelley here sounds like the psalmist David:

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate

    With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon

    Of human thought or form,—where art thou gone?

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,

This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

          Ask why the sunlight not for ever

          Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river,

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,

          Why fear and dream and death and birth

          Cast on the daylight of this earth

          Such gloom,—why man has such a scope

For love and hate, despondency and hope?

These questions of ultimate meaning are necessarily met by the elusive “Spirit of Beauty” with silence, and so in the third stanza Shelley offers a theory for the debasement of the ontological mystery by religion:

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

      To sage or poet these responses given—

      Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavor,

Frail spells—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,

          From all we hear and all we see,

          Doubt, chance, and mutability.

Thy light alone—like mist o’er mountains driven,

          Or music by the night-wind sent

          Through strings of some still instrument,

          Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

Notice that Shelley insists that conventionally superstitious and religious language—”Demon, Ghost, and Heaven”—function as “Frail spells” that do not really tame “Doubt”, nor answer the deep questions that we address to the ontological mystery concerning “chance, and mutability”. The ontological mystery does not tell us why we exist, experience beauty, suffer, and die: “No voice from some sublimer world hath ever / To sage or poet these responses given—”. Only by periodic and direct heightened experience with the “Spirit of Beauty” is a kind of answer hinted at “to life’s unquiet dream”:

Thy light alone—like mist o’er mountains driven,

          Or music by the night-wind sent

          Through strings of some still instrument,

          Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

For Shelley, the apprehension of the “Spirit of Beauty” contains the kernel of an ontological secret. Like John Keats’s famous lines from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, in which Keats says that, in life, we should not “follow the money” but ”follow the beauty” (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”), so Shelley gives beauty—albight intellectual beauty—first place in his soul’s quest. The apprehension of the “Spirit of Beauty” is the clue to the ontological mystery by which Shelley claims to navigate and investigate his existence. In stanza 5 he describes his dramatic youthful conversion to following this elusive mystery that he periodically perceives, this “shadow”:

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped

    Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,

    And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;

          I was not heard—I saw them not—

          When musing deeply on the lot

Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing

          All vital things that wake to bring

          News of birds and blossoming,—

          Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

Notice that Shelley, in a youthful prophet-like wilderness experience, seeking the voices of the gods of traditional religion, and musing on life, was taken unawares, on the cusp of spring, by the direct apprehension of a “shadow” that  ”fell on me; / I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!” Here is Shelley describing a possession of his spirit that claims to have held him for life. And this from stanza 6:

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

      To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow?

And at the end of stanza 6 Shelley sounds like a Christian convert expressing eschatological longings:

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours . . .

They know that never joy illumed my brow

          Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free

          This world from its dark slavery,

          That thou—O awful Loveliness,

Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.

Shelley, at least in this poem, seems not so much an atheist as one who has made the unseen mysterious power beneath things his “god.” And so Shelley ends his poem (stanza 7) with a kind of prayer that his youthful memories of the dark “Spirit of Beauty” will stay with him, and calmly sustain him in the future:

The day becomes more solemn and serene

      When noon is past—there is a harmony

      In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

Which through the summer is not heard or seen,

As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

          Thus let thy power, which like the truth

          Of nature on my passive youth

Descended, to my onward life supply

          Its calm—to one who worships thee,

          And every form containing thee,

          Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind

To fear himself, and love all human kind.

Shelley was an atheist. But the scaffoldings of religious impulses—of the need for worship, and to speak to, and enter into communion with, the ontological mystery and “love all human kind”—were present in him. He thought that there was an invisible, maybe intelligent, “shadow” undergirding things and occasionally revealing itself to our trembling apprehensions (as individual flowers tremble in separate gusts of wind). He thought that this “shadow”—which I’m calling the ontological mystery and which he called the “Spirit of Beauty”—gives “grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.” Odd that an atheist would express himself in such curiously religious language. Would a contemporary atheist like Daniel Dennett approve?

Shelley’s poem also recalls for me these words, attributed to Jesus, in the Gospel of St. John (3:8 KJV):

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

I think that Jesus might have recognized Shelley as a compadre, as someone who was also born of the Spirit. Shelley, in a calm moment, might even have agreed.

I’m a fan of David Berlinski, and if you live in the Los Angeles area, I notice that he will be speaking at the Beverly Hills Public Library on Tuesday of this week. Here’s the notice that I found:

Noted mathematician, philosopher, author, and senior fellow of the CSC, Dr. David Berlinski will be giving a lecture entitled:

An Agnostic Challenges Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists

Tuesday, October 27
7:30 PM
Beverly Hills Public Library
444 N Rexford Dr
Beverly Hills, CA

Admission: Free to the public
Parking: Free

And here’s more info.

Richard Dawkins has famously said, and on more than one occasion, that Darwin’s theory of evolution has made it possible for him to be, not just an atheist, but “an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

But what, exactly, does it mean to be “an intellectually fulfilled atheist”?

I would like to suggest this as a key element: symphonic harmony. Human beings love the feeling of balance and wholeness in their lives (as any perusal of, say, a health or yoga magazine attests). Perhaps this feeling has to do with our evolution. We feel anxious when the environment is ill-defined around us, and we feel safe and in control when we can account for what’s going on around us.

As a consequence, nobody likes to say, “I’m an atheist”, or “I’m a theist”, or “I believe in UFOs” even as they have things about that belief that they cannot account for. Thus to be not merely an atheist, or a theist, or a UFO believer, but an intellectually fulfilled atheist, or theist, or UFO believer, entails that one has some elegant and satisfying theory that accounts for your belief—something that makes sense of your affirmation. And so it is that:

• Atheists, as materialists, are anxious to account for all phenomena via materialist explanation
• Theists, as believers in a good God, are anxious to account, in some plausible way, for suffering in the world
• UFO enthusiasts, as believers in aliens, are anxious to account for alien absence (perhaps by positing an elaborate government coverup)

In other words, if you don’t have an elegant theory to account for your beliefs, you find yourself anxious and in cognitive dissonance. You either set certain things about your beliefs to the side and don’t deal with them—or even deny that your beliefs have any problems at all—or you seek out satisfying holistic explanations that will account for them to the minutest detail. This latter move can have pleasures all its own—the pleasures of anticipation or imminence (not to be confused with immanence). Something is about to be solved, and it is just around the corner:

• And so it is that atheists anticipate the advance of physics to account for the universe’s material existence out of nothing, and of the advance of neurobiology to account for the appearance of mind via matter
• Theists anticipate the soon coming of a revelation or “second coming” to resolve the perplexities of human suffering or purpose
• UFO enthusiasts anticipate the coming of whistle blowers with physical evidence, from within the government, who will reveal (for example) that at Roswell the bodies of aliens were recovered from UFO wreckage

In each case, there is the hope of a future discovery that will arrive, as it were, as a public revelation and vindication—a satisfying and visually stunning and elegant solution—readily apprehended—that will account for the current perplexities of those who are true believers. Thus, just as UFO believers and theists have cognitive dissonances that drive them into longings that extend into the future, so atheists have cognitive dissonances that make for atheist longings. Richard Dawkins is right that Darwin’s theory of evolution is intellectually satisfying. It’s elegant, it’s beautiful, and it sets in place a large piece of the materialist puzzle (“If there are no gods, where did life’s diversity come from?”). But atheism still has many loose ends that make it less than intellectually satisfying. Most obviously, we have yet to account satisfactorily, in materialist terms:

• for where the laws of physics have come from in the first place
• for how the laws of physics could make matter from nothing
• for where the first cells derived their information
• for how matter could possibly make minds
• for how determinate meat could imagine itself to have free will

Dawkins is right that, with regards to speciation, it is intellectually satisfying to be a materialist. But much of the rest of the atheist project is not wholly satisfying, and anticipates, in promissory form, new and elegant revelations.

In this sense, Dawkins, as a scientist who loves the elegance of structure, is different from some literary atheists of the past. Albert Camus, for example, as a literary stylist, loved elegance and structure, but did not expect it from his universe. Camus’s atheism entailed an acknowledgement that the universe is, at bottom, not a cosmos, but a chaos. The universe is, at some disturbing level, utterly contingent and absurd. Likewise, the human demands upon the universe that it match our desires for harmonic convergences with us is also absurd (at least according to Camus).

Put differently: Dawkins’s atheist vision is symphonic; Camus’s atheist vision is discordant. If you’re an atheist, do you embrace the symphonic or the discordant? Or something in between?:

Or is your atheism more like this?:

In the early 1960s, C.P. Snow (who was both a scientist and a novelist) famously asserted that there is a great (and he thought unnecessary and tragic) divide between the scientific sensibility and the literary sensibility. This divide, I would submit, is seen most obviously within atheism itself. But maybe it’s good that scientific and literary visions of atheism not converge too tightly. Might it be that this is a way to resist excess reduction and scientism?

One last quick thought: in explanatory terms, the left, historically, has had a tendency toward positing structural explanations of phenomena; the right, by contrast, has tended to posit telos—or conspiracies—as forms of explanation. So it is that the left might see the world’s economy in Marxist structural terms, and the right in terms of Illuminati conspiracies. I wonder if the “intellectually satisfying” aspects of atheism aren’t just additional manifestations of leftist sensibility generally—that there are structures as opposed to “big daddies” responsible for history. Likewise, theism’s underlying assumption (that there is ultimately a mind and not a structure deep beneath things) feeds into the conservative psyche rather nicely.

Just a thought.

And here’s Ian McKellen playing Macbeth in 1976:

I’m an agnostic who is not really all that sympatico with movement atheism, but earlier this month, I attended all of the Saturday sessions of the Atheist Alliance International (AAI) annual conference in Burbank, California. Most of the luminaries of the New Atheist movement (Dawkins, Dennett, Coyne, Shermer etc.) were in attendance, or speaking, at the conference, but the person who gave, by far, the most stimulating talk of the day was physicist Lawrence Krauss.

Krauss’s talk was so stimulating (it led off the morning) that the rest of the day felt like a tired and thoroughly predictable let down (at least for me). Krauss is clever and funny and thinks hard and honestly about the ontological mystery. He doesn’t think that the perplexing questions of the ultimate origins of things are silly or uninteresting to ponder. He’s one of those “I’m an atheist, but” kind of atheists who I deeply respect. Anyway, Krauss’s AAI conference talk has been posted to YouTube, and I’ve embedded it below. It is well worth an hour of your time.

And an LA Examiner report on the above talk is here.

Mathematician David Berlinski (from his new book of collected essays, The Deniable Darwin, p. 422):

At some time in the history of the universe, there were no human minds, and at some time later, there were. Within the blink of a cosmic eye, a universe in which all was chaos and void came to include hunches, beliefs sentiments, raw sensations, pains, emotions, wishes, ideas, images, inferences, the feel of rubber, Schadenfreude, and the taste of banana ice cream. A sense of surprise is surely in order. How did that get here?

The list is a bit Freudian at the end (rubber, echoes of Freud in Schadenfreude, and banana ice cream), but his point is well taken (pun intended, I suppose). How, exactly, did the mind get here from matter? Strange alchemy! Base matter turned to mental gold!

In other words, how is strict atheist materialism different from 16th century alchemy? What if mind can’t, in fact, be reduced to base matter or derived from base matter? Maybe the ontological mystery (the mystery of being) extends not just to matter but to mind. Maybe there are two irreducible things in the universe (matter and mind). At the very least (and given our current state of knowledge), the inference that mind might not derive from matter is not unreasonable, is it?

Is it?

I mean think about it. Who would have predicted (if anyone had been there) that the young and hot matter at the Big Bang would cool and congeal over time into, well, us? Isn’t that absurd? It’s like being told that hot water, on the way to cooling down and turning to ice, passes through a stage in which it loves the Beatles and the smell of coffee, and can talk about the plays of William Shakespeare with you at your kitchen table! Like the roiling water in a pot on your stove top, that hot thing at the Big Bang doesn’t appear that it would eventually do such ridiculous things. Matter isn’t like that. But here we are. Base metal turned to gold is a fancy that has nothing on what actually did happen. The cooling carbon “steam” from the stove tops of the stars cooled into us.

Ab. Surd.

But the author of the book does not call Rand a “conservative” because Rand was an atheist!

Hmm.

Jennifer Burns is a University of Virginia historian, and her book on Ayn Rand is titled Goddess of the Market. Here is part 1 of 7 of a talk that she gave on Rand at Kepler’s Book Store:

Freddie, at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, is not a movement New Atheist. He’s just an atheist. And he likes it that way:

[T]here is an elementary consonance between evangelist religion and evangelist antitheism that I find inarguable, that both insist that their adherents have duties and responsibilities that are a product of their theological stance. I chafed early and often against the social expectations of atheism for a simple reason: I dislike being a foot soldier. I cannot work my mind to the headspace necessary to believe that emptiness insists that we must be conscripted into a grand cultural war. I have said before that the real benefit of being an atheist is that you never have to get up early to go to church or temple. I say that only partly in jest: to me, what makes atheism attractive as a practical matter is that it requires nothing of me.

And he makes a great observation concerning what atheism, when you look at it closely, is (and isn’t):

Atheism is not a project. It proceeds towards no goal. It involves no work. Atheism is absence, an emptiness and, often, a comfort with that emptiness. . . . There is a freedom that is breathtaking and terrible in spiritual and theological nihilism that I find singular. But it is not an experience I share with antitheists; they are too filled with their belief in being unfilled, too bent by the force of what they are rejecting to understand or enjoy the awful quiet of actual atheism.

I’m not sure that living in that empty space is tolerable for more than a very tiny ironic minority. History suggests that vacuums do not go long unfilled. Political religion or some other pseudo-religious activity fills the void. But I admire any atheist who finds a functional and happy path in the full terror of unblinkered nihilism. The Buddhist saints somehow manage it. And Camus managed it.

As an agnostic, I’m still trying to keep my options more open.

The Daniel Dennett deepity slide that Jerry Coyne took a picture of here is one that I wrote into my notebook (I was at the same conference). A deepity, according to Dennett, “is a proposition that seems to be profound because it is actually logically ill-formed.”

My question: Doesn’t Dennett’s deepity construction render just about all symbolic or paradoxical language suspect? In other words, is it really a good idea for atheists to set upon the poetic in such a dismissive fashion—and show impatience for it? For example, wouldn’t these famous sayings be rendered “deepities” under such a definition?:

“I measured out my life in coffee spoons.” (T.S. Eliot)

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.” (attributed to Jesus)

“The arc is long, but it bends toward justice.” (Martin Luther King)

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” (Zen koan)

Paradox and symbol exercise the mind in ways that might bring forward deep structures, or evoke the human spirit to a hopeful cause, or drive the imagination into an encounter with the sublime, or help us intuit the ontological mystery (the mystery of being). Do atheists really want to be the dismissers of such poetics? If a trope doesn’t have a readily obvious or available analog or target (as in Eliot’s “I measured out my life in coffee spoons”), shall it safely be ignored as nonsense?

In short, will you destroy the metaphorical villages to save them from religion?

And isn’t the universe already a huge deepity? Isn’t Dennett, well, late to the game? Atheists, for example, believe that the mind reduces to matter. This idea is almost certainly a deepity that appears to connect two things that are utterly ill understood, mysterious, and different from one another, even as it actually tells us very little. The explanation offered by atheists (such as it is) to the connection between mind and matter breaks down rather quickly when put under scrutiny. Atheists also believe that matter reduces to, well, nothing. Matter has always been, or it leaped into existence from physical laws that were just there (for no apparent reason). That too is a deepity. Looked at too closely and such atheist assertions start to haze into improbability, paradox, and nonsense too.

Talking about matter as an endpoint to explanation ends up driving us into the same deepity territory that theists drive into when they start talking about God. “There is no floor to the universe / but we walk the floor” (the poet AR Ammons).

Is the wise atheist move Wittgenstein’s: silence?

In any case, people living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Oh, and what does one make of particle physics in such a Dennett scheme? Is the particle/wave function of light a deepity? Must there be some reductive logical primacy that renders the paradox only apparent? Is that part of the atheist faith too, to deny the deepity qualities in quantum physics, and the mysteries at the heart of being? And if not, why does physics get to keep its deepities, even as human language must surrender its deepities for Dennett’s tidy formulations of what constitutes the permissable and rational in thought? 

And one more thought: maybe humans use “deepities” in language precisely in the effort to speak to the ontological mystery itself. To not address the ontological mystery with deepities is to fundamentally mispeak to it. In other words, to pretend that the universe is not itself an ontological deepity is to miss its strangeness. It is akin to trying to send the perfect love letter that sets into words all that is contained by your love. Nothing quite works, so you write it again and again.

The universe is the veiled lover that we are trying to speak, write, and sing to.

I know, that’s a deepity too. It appears to say something about the universe, but when you look closely at the logic of it, it turns to jello, right?

Welcome to the jello factory:

Oh, and just one more thought (this time, I promise!): could somebody offer me just one example of symbol usage in literature, or some sublime lines of poetry (or poetic language of any sort) that doesn’t function as a deepity (by Dennett’s definition)? Is, for example, this William Blake poem a deepity? (Forgive the line break mistakes, I’m quoting from memory.):

“O rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm that
flies through the night
in the howling storm
has found out thy bed
of crimson joy and
his dark secret love
does thy life destroy.”

What’s the rose, what’s the worm, what’s the night, what’s the storm, what’s the bed, what’s the love, what’s the life? Dawkins once called Blake an “obscurantist.” Is he right? Shall we show Blake to the door?

This looks good, and it’s hosted by a British scientist (Lord Robert Winston). Winston wrote a children’s book on evolution, and also claims to believe in God (whatever that means). In any case, here’s part 1 of 18:

Most American conservatives (presumably) follow the expert advice of their family physicians when they are told that, say, they need to see a specialist with regard to a symptom, or need surgery. And they might well go under the knife on the advice of no more than one doctor. But when politics or religion enter the equation, suddenly the consensus of highly trained experts is set under extreme suspicion. Here are just three examples:

• Evolution. Scientists are as certain as they can reasonably be that the Earth is very old and that plants and animals have changed over time. But lots of conservatives make it a point of pride to simply ignore what geologists and biologists say about such matters, and continue to read Genesis as if it were, well, a science book (and not poetry).
• The Greenhouse Effect. Professional climatologists are certain that the amount of energy in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing, and over the course of the next century this fact will have serious, if not catastrophic, effects upon the Earth’s climate. Most conservatives yawn.
• Swine flu vaccination. Again, experts in virology are universally agreed on this. Get your flu shot. The benefits far outweigh the risks. (Therefore, Rush Limbaugh won’t be getting his.)

Shouldn’t expert advice on the Large Hadron Collider also be in this category of things that conservatives ignore? Isn’t it evil socialist and secular Europe and Ivy League elites delivering these soothing “expert” pronouncements?

Still, it’s curious to me how little attention is being paid to this among American conservatives. Perhaps it is because there is no obvious way to score political points against Barack Obama by doing so. Or maybe conservative are, subconsciously, death worshipers (akin to the mid-20th century Spanish fascists who infamously used as a slogan, “Viva la morte!”) and kind of want the end of the world (so that they can go to heaven). 

Below is what Wikipedia says about the Large Hadron Collider’s safety. If conservatives were consistent intellectually, they would express wild alarm about the safety of the collider for exactly the same reasons that they doubt evolution, the greenhouse effect, and the need for vaccination against the swine flu:

• experts have motives other than pure science;
• experts cannot be trusted to tell the truth; and
• people, including scientists, are foolish to express themselves too confidently with regard to complex matters (unless there is a verse in the Bible that explicitly supports their expressions of confidence, in which case they can then engage in whatever wild speculation that they want).

Here’s what Wikipedia says about the CERN collider: 

The upcoming experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have sparked fears among the public that the LHC particle collisions might produce doomsday phenomena, involving the production of stable microscopic black holes or the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets.^[44] Two CERN-commissioned safety reviews have examined these concerns and concluded that the experiments at the LHC present no danger and that there is no reason for concern,^[45][46][47] a conclusion expressly endorsed by the American Physical Society, the world’s second largest organization of physicists.^[48]