Infidels!

Perhaps you’ve heard of the “New Atheism”. It’s profiled fairly well here. Theologically, it’s an argument that dates back at least as far as the Enlightenment: God doesn’t exist, and the only way to understand the world is through pure reason and scientific inquiry. Robespierre would have understood that argument. Darwin certainly would have. What makes it “new” is apparently that one must be as much of a supercilious, evangelizing asshole as possible while promoting it. It’s atheism sold with exactly the same insulting, hectoring rhetoric that James Dobson uses to push Christianity or Mahmoud Ahmedinejad uses to push Islam.

You may have gotten the idea that I don’t much like this movement.

I don’t like it for a number of reasons. First, the aggressive approach called for by people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is not just annoying, it’s polarizing. It posits that there is one absolute Truth in the universe, and that only those who share their views on religion (namely, negative ones) can understand that Truth. Anyone else is delusional, insane, childish, and stupid. It therefore eradicates the “live and let live” middle ground of mutual respect necessary for a pluralistic society, and instead frames the world as a war in which only one side can be victorious. In other words, it encourages religious identity politics. One only has to look at Baghdad or the West Bank to consider how well that situation can turn out.

I do not believe that politicized, prescriptive atheism can win a political battle here in the United States. Not in a country where 80% of the populace believes in God. But I absolutely fear what religious identity politics in this country could unleash. Even the minor prods of feminism and “non-traditional” sexuality have sent some Christians screaming to the ramparts, with our decades of Reagan/Gingrich/Bush policies as a result. Surely this migration would only swell in the face of a frontal assault. What would the impact of politicized atheism be? With pluralism renounced by atheist intellectuals and reactionary Christianity gaining a populist base, where exactly do religious minorities go? Where do free thinkers go? Where do you go if you’re neither an angry atheist nor a Christian fundamentalist? I fear that if Dawkins and Harris pursue their little rationalist jihad, terms like “theocrat” will move out of the realm of left-wing boilerplate and into reality.

But the most hilarious part of this whole movement is the idea that, having given up on the petty rivalries and unsolvable problems of religion, the world will finally bask in the serene absolute truth of Science.

I can understand why Harris might think this, but you would think that an academic bomb-thrower like Dawkins would know better. Dawkins has made a career out of shaking up the scientific establishment with new, controversial ideas. He almost single-handedly created a new paradigm for understanding genetics and evolution in “The Selfish Gene”, and was a proponent of honest sociobiology at a time when most scientists considered the field little more than a refuge for nostalgic colonialists trying to rehabilitate the White Man’s Burden. I am CERTAIN that he knows that the process of science, at least on the scale of an individual’s career, is often as acrimonious, bitter, and, yes, irrational as the inner workings of any obscure cult (including the famous Christian ones that get invited to the White House).

So, will science function as the popular face of this New Atheism? For science’s sake, I sure hope not.

I could (and probably will) write many posts on the politicization of science. Unfortunately, this tendency is not limited to the Bush Administration. Science, in our society, comes with a patina of authority that is very attractive to people who want to bolster their political views. In some ways this is a good thing – when the scientific process is applied accurately and intelligently to controversial theories, it will either destroy them or contribute to our greater understanding of the natural world. But when one is dealing with politically relevant studies there’s always a temptation to draw sweeping conclusions that don’t quite fit the data, gloss over complications or subtleties, and underplay important design weaknesses. Anyone who has read studies of human behavior or society has likely seen these problems with papers – particularly papers that happen to provide backing to a popular political view.

With the New Atheism in charge and proclaiming itself guardian of absolute truth, what happens to the rough and tumble process of scientific inquiry and argument? I don’t mean to imply that science is going to be proving the existence of God, but an ideology with this level of confidence is going to develop its own culture and assumptions about what is “right” or “wrong”. Over time, as with any political culture, these assumptions will become inviolable elements of identity (ask a conservative to critique market economics or a liberal to critique civil liberties for an example of this). Science, acting at its best, simply CAN’T do that. Saying “this must be true” is antithetical to the whole process. You never say that a theory or framework is “true” in science (at least not in good science). Instead, you say: “we believe this to be true based on the data we have at this time”. Scientific findings must always be provisional and open to speculation.

Science thrives on iconoclasts and independent thinkers – people who pursue wild, radical theories in absolute defiance of the established understanding. We venerate eccentric geniuses like Newton, Einstein, or even Dawkins, precisely because they were willing to challenge everything they were taught about how the natural world “really worked”. Any ideology that demands certainty will recoil in the face of this attitude. Indeed, we’ve seen this happen in the past: both the French Revolution and Bolshevik Revolution made absolute fealty to Reason a founding ideal, and both later reacted to radical ideas with astonishing brutality. And so, in this brave new world, what happens to the people who complicate things? What happens to the people who do good research that introduces complexities into, say, evolution? What happens to the growing number of people who are skeptical about string theory? What happens to people who provide a more complicated look at global warming? What happens to the researchers who either define or disprove the latest silver bullet theory to explain human behavior (whether it’s violence, sexuality, obesity, or whatever)? With certain ideas central to the political dogma of a ruling party, will science still be able to apply the kind of rational, objective evaluation that is the hallmark of the process? Given the tone of the philosophy’s leading lights, I sincerely doubt it.