Not so grand a bargain

I haven’t written in a while, but I promised Z that I’d start up again. I think a good way to start is to talk about Robert Wright’s New York Times op-ed from Saturday, which bothered me in a lot of ways.  The title is “A Grand Bargain Over Evolution,” and the goal is to propose a “common ground” between science/atheism and religion over evolution.  Very little that he says is actually wrong, but all of it is missing the point.  He proposes that the religious concede that evolution is fact.  He then points out that many believe evolution is a process that is bound to yield intelligent beings with an idea of morality.  He says that atheists should concede that this realization of moral sense being built into a natural process can reasonably be seen as evidence that the universe was created by a supernatural being who wanted those laws of morality to be known.

My biggest problem is with the idea of a “bargain” in the first place.  I have no problem with a bargain in the sense of agreeing to disagree.  I can easily reach that kind of understanding (and do)  all the time with individual people.  I also have no problem with (and very much support) the idea of a political compromise, where government stays out of the religion-atheism debate and guarantees the right of everyone to make the decision for themselves.  I am not, however, okay with the idea of a bargain over the facts.  If I claim the sky is blue, and you claim it is red, we don’t decide to just split the difference and agree that it’s purple.  You don’t bargain over what is true.  You debate and give logical reasons and do research and try to figure out what the real answer is.  This article asks us to believe something because it’s a nice middle position.  I have trouble any time I’m asked to believe something for any reason other than that it’s probably true.

Wright also makes it clear that he does not fully understand the atheist argument, which is surprising considering that he just wrote a book on the history of religious belief.  He states the grand compromise he proposes this way:

Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.

Of course the idea of a “higher purpose” is compatible with scientific materialism.  Atheists believe in morality, after all.  I am not sure why he thinks this is a concession.  He makes himself a little more clear later on:

[Atheists] could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism.

I have never seen even the most extreme and combative atheist fail to concede this.  A creator-only god is logically compatible with any scientific evidence that could ever be produced, and this is fully conceded by atheists.  In fact, even a much more active god is logically compatible with all scientific evidence that could ever be produced.  You want to believe God created humans in their current form?  Fine.  You just also have to believe that God created fossils of various early humanoid species in such a way as to create an apparent link between them and other early apes.  It seems to me like a really strange thing to believe, but it’s not logically inconsistent.

The point atheists make is that, while the religious view is logically consistent, there’s no reason to favor it over the non-religious view.  We have every reason to believe that logical consequences of the laws of physics govern the events we see around us.  Sure, those could be explained by any one of thousands of different possible religious beliefs, but why would we choose to believe any one of these supernatural explanations over any other, let alone over the simple straightforward explanation we can see in the world every day?  Atheists don’t claim to disprove religion—they just claim that given the existence of these numerous logically consistent worldviews, the one that doesn’t posit the existence of a random supernatural being without any evidence of its existence is the one that is most reasonable to hold.  Wright never even references this argument, and it’s hard to convince people to change their minds when you can’t even prove you understand what they already believe.

  • email
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook

August 24, 2009 · Written by
Tags: , , ,

Comments

Leave a Reply