As promised a week ago, I have been pursuing the intersection of religion, science and political society -- a realm ever bit as energetic as your average hadron collider.
The superstitious skeptic, Professor Daniel Dennett
Noted atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett was spreading his ‘gospel’ at Harvard recently, i.e., his new book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Dennett opened ironically by embracing naturalism, a religion rooted in natural phenomenon. He even encouraged donations to the lecture’s sponsor, the Center for Naturalism. This immediately brought to mind what might have been the reaction if, say, Exxon Mobil, had sponsored a lecture by Pat Michaels, a noted skeptic of global warming.
It is striking the extent to which secularists, the driving force behind the modern skeptical movement, are themselves insular to skepticism. If you are willing to stand up and be counted as a vocal critic of superstition, then anything you believe is presumptively rational – and consequently your exhortations on public policy are blithely accepted by followers. If Pat Michaels would only open his lectures by denouncing intelligent design instead of debunking climatological scare tactics, he could count on a much broader academic engagement of his ideas.
This little backslapping between Dennett and a former student who runs this Center for Naturalism is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the inextricable links between skepticism and the push for a humanist ethic. There is a yin and yang quality to this fact. It implicitly concedes that banishing religious arguments from political discourse leaves a vacuum of values. Ironically, this makes a paragon of philosophy like Dennett an empirical rather than philosophical skeptic.
Meanwhile, empericists like myself find themselves philosophical skeptics, doubting that there is an absolute truth. This isn’t to say that a reasonable, if fallible, understanding of right and wrong cannot be derived in the human sphere. But I think it decidedly suspicious that atheists always set themselves up as the new moralists – as Pete Townsend and The Who aptly observed (and thanks to an objectivist cousin for reminding me it wasn’t Pink Floyd): “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
The collaboration of secularists around building not a climate of reason, but an authority of reason, can be seen beyond the individual relations acknowledged by Dennett. The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims (CSICOP) of the Paranormal, a noted skeptical society that publishes The Skeptical Inquirer and whose founders include the likes of Isaac Assimov and Carl Sagan, joined with the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH) to create the Center for Inquiry (CFI). It is chaired by one of the lesser known but more active founders of CSICOP who is also the Founder and Chairman of CSH, Paul Kurtz, who attempted to slay Pete Townsend's allegations of hypocrisy thusly:
“Pope Benedict XVI fired a salvo at the beginning of his papacy, declaring that “secularization” and “relativism” were leading to a breakdown of “the moral order.” Morality, he declared, must be derived from Christian theology. [CFI]pointed out in response that secular morality has well-established principles and values and that its ethical judgments are amenable to rational criticism and modification—unlike absolute theological codes, which are held to be immune to questioning.”
I decided to test this premise by questioning the derivation of Dennett’s ethics. He had slipped seamlessly from ‘breaking the spell’ of religion to casting his own when responding to a question on the possible benefits of religion (1), citing an analysis by Paul MacCready (noted for the design of successful human powered flight) that found the pre-agricultural human biomass footprint was 1/10th of 1 per cent of the vertebrate population whereas he finds the human component of the contemporary vertebrate throng, i.e., humanity itself plus domestic vertebrates, to be 98%.
This isolate observation of the delta vertebrate biomass was obviously intended, in its sensational appeal to the emotions, to impart some purportedly ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ moral lesson that ought to attach to human dominance among vertebrates. But it is difficult without belief in some correct ratio to ascertain what that lesson ought to be. One was left hanging with the distinct impression that Dennett believed the contemporary ratio represented an ethical lapse of some sort, and that he was uncomfortable with a human world uncharacterized by devotion to this belief, but he offered no evidence in this regard. Rather, he touted Paul MacCready, the author of this proposition and noted for the design of successful human powered flight, as a “visionary”(2) and obviously expected the audience to take some ethical teaching from the isolated anecdote alone.
This postulate seemed to perfectly crystalize the false dichotomy offered by naturalism, humanism, secularism, you-name-itism, that purports to replace religion with scientifically derived values. Secularists argue that MacCready’s maxim is testable, while the resurrection, creation and other articles of faith fail such testing, or defy it altogether.
That is vaguely true, so far as it goes. But when you look at the scientific propositions advanced by secularists as useful in daily life, they have a decidedly qualitative rather than quantitative precision. Vertebrate biomass is a natural phenomenon, but establishing a pre-agricultural zoological census is informed speculation at best. Even positing a current ratio is modeling more than counting. But the larger point is, even if you gain some consensus on historic or contemporary ratios, this says nothing whatsoever about the correct ratio.
None of MacCready’s notes appear to be published anywhere, so no serious testing of his hypothesis has occurred to even establish any kind of range of confidence, probably enormous, for these figures that reek a bit of exaggeration. Like qualitative observations about everything from species diversity to the climate, it is ambiguous, if not downright devious, to present such semantistics as an objective basis for value judgments. Not only does the initial premise, as a quantitative proposition, essentially fail the Popperist test of falsifiability (of which I’m not an outright fan, but I suggest those who live by the sword, in slaying religion this way, ought to die by it as well), derivative inferences to be drawn even if these were hard numbers are themselves from qualitative theories regarding the ‘balance of life’ that are sentimentally appealling, even intellectually useful metaphors but without the kind of grounding that suggests that universal ethics can be stated objectively in their consequence.
Stephen Budiansky, in Nature's keepers: The new science of nature management, authoritatively debunks the theory of “island biogeography” that proposes to predict species diversity as a function of the size of various micro-habitats. It is an appealing analytical rubric, but it doesn’t work. It is not so much that he proves some alternative, but rather reveals the guesswork and subjective assumptions that go into making numerical statistics of complex qualitative relationships. Essentially he questions seriously the very idea that they are subject to uniform prediction. This is certainly equally true with regard to climate science, carrying capacity, etc. Popular securlarist gurus have advanced, with no embarrassment regarding their certainty, the inevitability of global cooling (currently making a comeback with the latest qualitative idea that global warming will shut down the gulf stream and bring on the next ice age), mass starvation as the human population exceeded earth’s agricultural carrying capacity, the loss of hundreds of thousands of species.
The unifying thesis behind this kind of science, chosen as important by secularists, is essentially a retelling of the fallibility of man – what, after all, is so different between their outlook and the idea of the forbidden fruit. Advancing these sensational natural phenomenon is designed to create gnawing doubt that man’s pursuit of technology and industry in the furtherance of economic society can be considered objectively good.
How does enlightenment thinking, that fueled western civilization’s progress along these now ‘suspect’ lines, figure in secularist attacks on the status quo. It might seem counterintuitive for scientists to decry the society resulting in no small part from the enlightenment. But humanist gurus like E.O. Wilson demur, arguing that the enlightenment simply is not complete because modern man has not submitted to the authority of science in the social realm. What a coincidence, that the value system striving to replace religion on the cultural side, has a plan to take over government as well – holism takes on a new meaning.
But, back at the lecture, suppose that one simply concedes the obvious: that the human component, as a percentage of the vertebrate total -- essentially a qualitative function, has changed significantly since the inception of agriculture. Does this lead to any moral rules?
Taken at its purely empirical level, it would seem that humans are the fittest. Indeed, even if The Origin of Species is your bible, a reasonable choice at that, the Genesis idea of dominion doesn’t seem to have been a myth at all. Taken as a metaphor or a parable foreshadowing man’s place in the world, you could certainly call its authors ‘visionary’, in Dennett’s own vernacular, forerunners to Darwin.
Some folks take Genesis literally, which is probably no sillier than believing what Lester Brown and Paul Ehrlich have to say. I have the perspective of believing in no sense what the Bible says. It is a historical novel. It has both a literary and superstitious staying quality that I suspect won’t be supplanted by similar less sweeping efforts, e.g. The Da Vinci code, The Population Bomb or Earth in the Balance. Certainly tomes of the latter genre gerrymander anecdotes of natural phenomenon into secularist books of Revelations. In this sense they capitalize on rather than refute the merits of biblical style.
But is this how Dennett views MacCready’s credo on vertebrate ratio, or am I reading too much into the sacred quality of his recitation? His first response regarding the lessons of this MacCready maxim was that kind of disdainful dismissal intended to convey the message that the teachings are obvious. Noticing that I was perhaps too dense to see even the obvious, he grabbed a copy of his book, Breaking the Spell, to quote the statistic in the context he sees it -- with a description of earth as thinly veneered with green and blue and man now holding the paintbrush.
It may seem that Dennett is simply referring to the obvious caution that man’s enormous ecological success coupled with unique consciousness militates for an ethic of stewardship. There is no small coincidence that this very idea is being used to crosspollinate liberal churches. But this mission to humanity, epitomized by the approach in both the sacred and secular contexts, attempts to draw much more than mild derivative truisms from postulates such as MacCready’s.
It provides cover for multiple maharishis touting their own versions of ecological Armageddon to advance emotionally supported ideas of substantive stewardship disguised as science. This goes back to the question of whether one can scientifically derive a correct MacCready ratio, or can really answer any such ‘balance’ questions scientifically -- given that value judgments are currently the only way to establish real world targets and that politically contrived economic dislocation is certainly the only way to compel society to observe it.
The MacCredy Maxim is essentially meaningless and untethered. Those who attempt to rein it in have used reindeer, juxtaposing it as explanatory of the plight of 29 Reindeer introduced in 1944 to St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea. The original herd grew to some 6000 in 20 years, but had disappeared only 15 years after that as a consequence of stripping the island of vegetation.
The inference one is supposed to draw is that the lack of predators and the monocultural bloom of reindeer on the island is equivalent to the lack of predators on the globe with respect to humanity and thus its vast ‘monocultural’ expansion. But, in terms of biomass statistics and any extrapolatory explanatory quality they lend to man’s place on the globe, vetebrate ratios are irrelevant. It is essentially a given that first world man has no vertebrate predators to speak of (there are outlier efforts by various sentimentalists and lifeboat ecologists to bring them back and rationality may ultimately lose out here) but the population bomb never went off.
To the extent that these qualitative phenomenon of isolated cases like the reindeer can be analogized usefully, relevantly and scientifically on a global basis, the domestic to wild vertebrate ratio is not implicated. Rather, one would look to the ratio of domestic vertebrate biomass to all other biomass over time (another matchbook calculation of dubious specificity, but since we're playing the game) in order to understand if man were somehow outstripping carrying capacity. Those ratios are far less sensational with man and his attendant domestic component amounting to little more than 1 per cent of the total. Little wonder that Dennett didn’t wish to bring up that comparison, as it does not affect the emotions in the same way.
The ultimate goal of securalists values is embodied in Lovelock’s call to worship the earth as Gaia. His ‘visionary’ conception is to view the earth as a life form, analogizing homeostatic happenstance to the processes of a living thing. Observations of emergent self-regulatory “feedback mechanisms” that keep the earth’s climate in the range that supports life are the basis of an ‘intelligent design for agnostics’ movement. As long as you view these processes as miraculous, it doesn’t really matter if you think god did it or not. But Lovelock’s proposition of the earth as an organism fails fundamental tests of the definition of life. Principally, there is no reproductive ability, not meaning there is no reproduction on earth, but of earth. Where are the baby earths it has spawned, or at least the evidence that it is the biological spawn of another?
Just because there is no evidence that the world is alive doesn’t mean it might not be so (although this is just the line that religion relies on). But proponents of Gaia theory suggest we replace scientific effort to discover life at a global scale with the belief that it exists. Of course the didactic derivative inferred by many promoting this concept reads that man is a parasite that has upset the correct balance of the organism, i.e., the earth is ill. These are articles of faith not science.
Simply because he is blind to the religious quality of his own ethics, doesn't prevent Dennett from usefully inquiring into religion’s grip. In fact his own beliefs essentially demonstrate the merits of a premise he advances, that religion evolves in a kind of institutional Darwinism.
He presented one possible evolutionary plateau as the "Creedless Moral Team". This would encompass everything from Amway to the growth of megachurches where Dennett sees membership as a matter of belonging to something larger than oneself, rather than a clear commitment to underlying dogma.
But, if the humanist ethical alternative is about submitting to contrived venn diagrams of natural phenomenon -- and not some methodical and logically defensible resort to analytical science -- then its moral foundation crumbles, even while its creed of earth worship remains. What Dennett offers is a Moral-less Creed Team. I won’t be joining.
Notes:
(1) The question was actually about Dennett’s analogy of religion to parasitic relationships, in particular to suicidal parasitism epitomized by the flatworm Dicrocoelium dendriticum whose metacercarial cycle is spent in brown ants. A few metacercaria lodge in the brain of the ant upsetting its instinctive behavior and driving it to the top of a blade of grass where it is likely to be eaten by grazing cattle allowing the parasite, if not the ant, to continue its life cycle. While this could be an obvious analogy to suicide bombers, for instance, whether religion as a whole can be taken this way was the question posed, given that the natural world is often characterized by symbiotic as well as detrimental parasitic opportunism.
Dennett seems to hold to the vacuum argument I set out, that going ‘cold turkey’ off religion would be a bad thing because the institution provides some useful functions. In this sense he concedes the argument of the questioner, but opens another. If religion has beneficial qualities in the real world, are its merits assessed less by reference to its superstitious underpinnings and instead by balancing the assets and liabilities it contributes to society, or to the success of individuals within that society?
Objectivists, who have been bequeathed a seething hostility to religion, have tried to parse emotional or spiritual responses to real world experiences, i.e., those that humanism tries to capitalize on to gain adherents, as different from sacred transport. Emotional concern for nature is really instinctive concern for protecting one’s survival. Emotional attachment, especially as in seeking a mate, is part of our reproductive wiring. If the means of it’s pursuit is not always cooly objective its ends are nothing less than our own Darwinian advancement. But if one can trace benefits to religion, then its spirtual or, in trite scientific idiom, unfalsifiable nature, is not in and of itself dispositive of its merits in human life.
(2) Visionary is certainly an adjective whose connotative fortunes have improved at the hands of secularists as they try to distinguish their clairvoyants from religious prophets. The first dictionary I bought in the mid ‘70s has as a first definition: “given to or characterized by fanciful or unpractical ideas, views, or schemes.”; and the word remains unredeemed in subsequent constructions in that publication. Today’s lexicography indicates that visionary is making a play for better consideration, with Miriam Webster placing first the more literal definitions, e.g. characterized by a vision; disposed to reverie and imagining, and then closing with the analogous cultural definition: “having or marked by foresight and imagination”.
Humans indeed are clever, and if eskimos have one hundred words for snow (there is some disagreement whether this is so, but even the most conservative linguists concede they have 2 words for snow, and I counted 97 on a web page proposing to list them all but have no verificiation of its authenticity), why not attempt to insert a semantic difference between visionary and prophetic. Of course religion also has a semantic reference for secular visionaries, false idol.
