Confused Atheists

      After all, they are only human, even if recognized as accomplished scientists in various fields of research.  Still, if the report of The New York Times, “A Free-for-all on Science and Religion,” November 21, 2006, is accurate, then we must say they are confused.  The “free-for-all” occurred at a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, CA.  There the confusion so evident could be summed up in the declaration by Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in NY and adviser to President Bush on space exploration, that “Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.”

      This is exactly wrong.  Science is not a philosophy of any kind, whether of discovery or of obscurity.  Science has its marvelous discoveries, but not by the means of philosophy.  But a number of scientists cannot seem to keep before them this vital distinction:  they make proclamations of a philosophical nature by trying to use the authority of science.  Now every scientist has a right to wax philosophical, I suppose, as long as he makes it clear that he is using the data of science, but not merely that data, to try to answer philosophical questions.  (For philosophical study encompasses the whole of human experience.)  But at that point he is being a philosopher, of whatever ability, and his statements should not then be cloaked in the authoritative mantle of science. And if one is a scientist and also atheist, he most likely will have a strong tendency to draw atheistic conclusions – philosophical in nature – from the data of science.  As does Richard Dawkins, a biologist at Oxford, in his book The God Delusion, a position countered at the Salk forum by a scientist who knows his place and so spoke with some much-needed, cool clarity:  “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist and non-believer, insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

      And Dawkins is rather pompous.  Ideological even, evidenced in his “scientific conclusion” from his work of mapping and studying the human brain that there is no human soul.  Whether the soul and God exist are tremendously important considerations; Dawkins thinks so, since he spends so much energy in trying to debunk them both.  But he cannot disprove either by science.  He has to slip into the mode of philosophy, under the cover of science, to come to his conclusions.  Yet, at some level, he must be aware of what he’s doing, since he and others readily condemn the same mental movement of other scientists, working in the area of intelligent design, as a “philosophy of ignorance.”  It seems that Dawkins, et al, want everyone to play by their rulebook:  scientists can forge into the realm of philosophy only if it leads to atheism. 

      But again, these atheists are only human, and humans naturally want to philosophize.  One gets the impression, though, that their atheistic conclusions are not the result of philosophizing on the data of science and human life, but rather are a priori:  they approach their scientific research with an already decided philosophical viewpoint.  And this is because they are victims of their own scientism, the strange and scientifically improvable position of atheism shaped by their insistence that the only truth we can know is that which is a scientific conclusion.  The senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation, Charles L. Harper, also at the forum, nailed it when he chided this scientific ruse of atheism by “denouncing what he called ‘pop conflict books’ like Dr. Dawkins’s The God Delusion, as ‘commercialized ideological scientism’ — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.”

      Nevertheless, the great discoveries of science should fuel honest philosophical speculation that would strive for deeper understanding of the human condition.  But a comment by Dr. Steven Weinberg, a physicist, illustrates how scientism can strangle the life out of our philosophical impulse:  “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”  Now, philosophically speaking, how can anything that is comprehensible be pointless?  Perhaps, conjectures the thoughtful Socrates or Aristotle, Augustine or Aquinas, the point of the universe, at one level, is precisely to be comprehensible to man?  The very fact that the human mind, whatever its origin and essence, can, as the Catholic Church insists, potentially know everything that is, and that there is this strange, wonderful connection between the knowing mind and the also strange and wonderful knowableness of the universe – could this not be, as it has been in the past, the material for much fruitful thought… even if, horror of horrors, it just might begin to point to a Mind far more than man’s?

      Another wet-blanket of scientism was proffered by Francisco Ayala, an evolutionary biologist and former Catholic priest:  “If we think that we are going to persuade [people] to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother. People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”  Well, thank you very much for your kind consideration, but why not, rather, ask the pressing philosophical questions of how it is that man is such a being who wants “meaning and purpose in life”?  Where do these ideas of meaning and purpose come from?  If it’s all pointless and meaningless, then how do we even know that it is such?  And why is it that even the atheist scientist cannot live on the facts of science themselves and is moved to draw “meaningful” conclusions from their data, conclusions of a philosophical nature?   After all, I presume that Dawkins means something when he concludes from a color-coded brain mapping that there is no human soul.  But the more eager philosopher counters, Would you expect a soul to appear in a certain color?  How could a soulless being ever come to know that he is soulless?  Whence the idea of the soul and the human persistence in believing in it?  All this points to the stark fact that science is just not enough, not even for scientists.  Let’s just be honest about it.