Of Richard Dawkins, Straw Men, and Scientific Religion

I just read Ethan Zuckerman’s summary of a Richard Dawkins talk attacking religion. It’s a classic straw man deception: mischaracterize the opposition, then demolish the mischaracterization. You should probably click on over and read it before you read the rest of this post.

(Go on, it’s not that long.)

For the record, I’m Catholic and very serious about it. I’m also a trained and practicing scientist with a Ph.D. in Physics. I was raised atheist, and converted while in graduate school because Catholicism made too damn much sense not to agree with. This was no sudden Road to Damascus conversion, but a long, careful, suspicious, examined, intellectual decision. (To mimic the star of one of Dawkins’ anecdotes, “I was wrong for 26 years.”) And I find no irreconcilable disagreements between modern science and Catholic theology; they talk about different things. Apparent incompatibilities usually arise from a flawed understanding of one or both.

I apply the same rigorous standards to knowledge of both the material and spiritual worlds, because they’re two sides of the same coin, and they’re both just dimensions of “what is”. The primary difference is that one can build a decent model of the material world by looking only outwards, but must look into the human psyche (one’s own and others’) for evidence about the spiritual.

Science is just “best practice” thinking. It should be applied to everything that’s worth knowing, because thinking is the only way anything is ever known. You get the evidence, the clues, wherever you can find them.

That means I subject beliefs — my own and other people’s — to challenge and scrutiny. It also means I have the humility to admit that finite minds will never completely understand the natural or supernatural worlds. All understanding is just a “working model”.

Contrary to Dawkins’ characterization, “faith” does not mean closing one’s ears to evidence or argument. That’s “denial”. Faith is having the guts to bet something you care about on the partial understanding you’ve got, even though you don’t have all the answers. And faith means accepting challenges to your beliefs with confidence that those beliefs will either be strengthened or corrected.

It is regrettably true that a great many religious believers refuse to examine their beliefs analytically and impartially. It is also regrettably true that a great many unbelievers make the same mistake.

(David Weinberger pretty much pegs Dawkins.)