So why are so many scientists religious? The obvious and most intellectually satisfying explanation of this is not difficult to identity. It is well known that the natural world is conceptually malleable. It can be interpreted, without any loss of intellectual integrity, in a number of different ways. Some read or interpret nature in an atheist way. Others read it in a deistic way, seeing it as pointing to a Creator divinity, who is no longer involved in its affairs. God winds up the clock, then leaves it to work on its own. Others take a more specifically Christian view, believing in a God who both creates and sustains. Others take a more spiritualized view, speaking more vaguely of some life force. The point is simple: nature is open to many legitimate interpretations. It can be interpreted in atheist, deist, theist and many other ways—but it does not demand to be interpreted in any of these. One can be a real scientist without being committed to any specific religious, spiritual or antireligious view of the world. This, I may add, is the view of most scientists I speak to, including those who self-define as atheists. Unlike dogmatic atheists, they can understand perfectly well why some of their colleagues adopt a Christian view of the world. They may not agree with that approach, but theyre prepared to respect it. Dawkins, however, has a radically different view. Science and religion are locked into a battle to the death. Only one can emerge victorious—and it must be science. The Dawkinsian view of reality is a mirror image of that found in some of the more exotic sections of American fundamentalism. The late Henry Morris, a noted creationist, saw the world as absolutely polarized into two factions. The saints were the religious faithful (which Morris defined in his own rather exclusive way). The evil empire consisted of atheist scientists. Morris offered an apocalyptic vision of this battle, seeing it as being cosmic in its significance. It was all about truth versus falsehood, good versus evil. And in the end, truth and good would triumph! Dawkins simply replicates this fundamentalist scenario, while inverting its frame of reference. It is a hopelessly muddled reading of things. It ultimately depends on an obsolete and now abandoned historical reading of the relationship of science and religion. Once upon a time, back in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was certainly possible to believe that science and religion were permanently at war. Yet, as one of Americas leading historians of science recently remarked to me, this is now seen as a hopelessly outmoded historical stereotype that scholarship has totally discredited. It lingers on only in the backwaters of intellectual life, where the light of scholarship has yet to penetrate. The relationship between science and religion is complex and variegated—but it could never conceivably be represented as a state of total war. McGrath A, McGrath JC The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Decline of the Divine (2007, IVP Press) p 45-46
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 06:17:41 +0000
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