January 08, 2006
Reasonable Heroes
Panda Thumber Timothy Sandefur profiles Jacob Bronowski, of whom I've never heard. Bronkowski was a WWII era renaissance scientist, with an acute ethical sensitivity, as demonstrated by the below snippet:
Bronowski explained why evolution was such a profound idea. Does not evolution simply reduce human nature to an accident, the interviewer asked?[Bronowski answered] "On the contrary, it is those who appeal to God and special creation who reduce everything to accident. They assign to man a unique status on the ground that there was some act of special creation which made the world the way it is. But that explains nothing, because it would explain everything; it is an explanation for any conceivable world. If we had the color vision of the bee combined with the neck of the giraffe and the feet of the elephant, that would equally be explained by the "theory" of special creation."
and later
And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into--into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny.
Bronkowski's observations bring to mind a young author who I recently stumbled over on CSPAN--Sam Harris (website, with book excerpt). Harris argues that our continued intellectual evolution will have to shed religious superstition and choose reason so that humans might survive as a species, just as chemistry 'evolved' from alchemy.
We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man. This is not surprising, since many of us still believe that faith is an essential component of human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally: (1) most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith ( e.g., strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience) that cannot be had elsewhere; (2) many of us also believe that the terrible things that are sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se but of our baser natures--forces like greed, hatred, and fear--for which religious beliefs are themselves the best (or even the only) remedy. Taken together, these myths seem to have granted us perfect immunity to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public discourse.
Religion isn't going away any time soon. But I often wonder if the United States' present-day religious resurgence isn't really a desperate last stand before an inevitable capitulation to reason.
Many people can harmonize the friction between Science and religion with relative ease, but not me personally. Science has made significant gains in recent years (for an entertaining summary of just how far evolution has come, listen to Dover trial expert Witness Ken Miller) and this may help explain the Intelligent Design movement's popular emergence--the necessity to refute has become that much greater with each scientific advance, so the resistance has formed accordingly.
Religious moderates can dismiss the biblical literalism that adherence to ID requires, but who is to say that the literalist interpretation is less valid than a moderate one? Neither make sense to me. Most religions are inherently and textually resistant to being defanged of their more insidious aspects. As long as religion remains a potent social force, moderates and fanatics will engage in a tug-of-war due to scriptural ambiguity. But under this model, moderates help impede reason by legitimizing superstition in a mainstream context, and enable fanatics by playing semantic footsie instead of embracing reason wholeheartedly.
But as the facts change, Reason will continue to accumulate and grow while religion struggles to reconcile the new facts. ID is an example of a significant, concerted, well-funded religious effort at both denying the facts exist, and changing the underlying structure which the facts are measured against. But how long can that last as new facts emerge? Or rather, at what point are those that ignore the new facts put at a biological disadvantage by their ignorance? (Some American Christians have perhaps instinctually recognized this danger, and have countered by committing themselves to natalism). (There is probably little biological disadvantage to disavowing science so long as that refusal is hypocritically selective, unlike, say, the Amish, who at least have the courage of their convictions, even if this practice hasn't spread their numbers across the globe, like say, the Mormons.) But as the facts change, the situation bears watching.
posted by scott pilutik at January 8, 2006 01:17 PM