Hitchins your wagon to a star

A lot has been made of the death of the professional curmudgeon Christopher Hitchins.  He was one of the recent spate of public intellectuals who are also strident atheists.  For some reason, the public idolizes these guys as if they were rock or sports stars.  If it were all about entertainment, then one could respond according to his/her views about how much of that such stars deserve in any society with measured values.  Perhaps they bring pleasure, and that's worth more than so much else  in life that is rewarded less plentifully.

The strident atheists get ink and airtime because they are glib and claim that science proves their atheism, and they make a 'story' by using hyperbole to ridicule believers in standard religions.  Among other arguments, they point out how much damage has been done in the name of such religions, though perhaps without realizing the similar nature of their relentless anti-religion.  I have been reading Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, his classic WWII Russian-novel that's an analog of Tolstoy's  War and Peace.  Tolstoy was a communist of sorts, in the best share-the-wealth sense of the term, but his book was more about the rather mechanical forces that control human history than the Great Men to whom historians typically give all the credit.

Grossman's book is about the mechanical grind of evil and human cruelty, often perpetrated in the name of ideology, be it organized religion or its analogs in atheistic communism or fascism (or, we'd add, in sciences like Darwinian-based eugenics).  In a very angry and poignant chapter that I wish I could download and post to MT readers copyright free, Grossman argues that as soon as organized religion gains power it almost inevitably brings on evil, in the form of 'We are better than you!' which leads to 'We have to kill you in the name of Truth or Goodness!'  Secular ideologies, like Grossman's communist Soviet state, do exactly the same thing as Christianity and other major religions.

Grossman argues that goodness exists only when it has no power, in the lone or even anonymous individual acts of kindness, sometimes under the most horrendous of circumstances.  It's person to person, not organized and not implemented by states or churches.  It works because it has no power except kindness on its own, for its own sake, in the name of nothing higher or more grand than just a quiet helping hand.  Grossman has a point.

People  want certainty and to gang together with others who share the same certainty.  Scientists are no different in this respect (and, to the extent we develop weapons or create discriminatory ideologies, no better, either).  We want simple answers,  not complexity, even if complexity is Nature's reality.  The strident atheists reflect this:  in their own simplistic way they are surely right in pointing out the evils perpetrated in the name of theological religion, and the utter lack of any actual evidence for the organized theological belief systems.  It's hard to argue coherently with that, as Hitchins' debate opponents found out.  But the lack of evidence for religious truths doesn't mean that science can disprove religious assertions, nor certainly that they have any moral high ground from which to give their sermons.

The most scientists can do is to point out the rather empirically absurd aspects of so many beliefs. Given the vast coldness of the universe, our puny protoplasmic nature, and the mortal or worse evils perpetrated by those claiming to believe in versions of the Good, it is simply very difficult to be a serious scientist and hold to religions based on personal, loving Gods who care about our daily burps.  Or to think that there is any rational reason to believe that a system would be set up for us to suffer here for decades (or less) and then be transported forever to some wonderful peaceful place.  Nor how this Goodness could deliver a multiple whammy such as has just befallen some friends of ours, good people not deserving of such hits (Thanks, God, and Merry Christmas to you, too!).

It makes no actual sense but worse, tragically, too many believers have been, and are, willing to commit horrors on others in the name of their Goodness, whatever its particular brand, and not withstanding the actual good that many of the same people and organizations do. 

The world holds together logically with the kinds of explanations that science offers, no matter that we have gaps in our understanding.  It's frightening and depressing, perhaps, to think that science has shown us the nature of our frigid landscape.  But the coldness of harsh realities need not lead either to illusions or to harshness on our part.

Can we do better?  Can we hitch our wagons to some better star, of actual rather than imagined knowledge?  The star will take us so far, but no farther, than what human knowledge can deliver.  But we can accept the harshness of life and death, without using that to justify harshness or cruelty.  We know clearly, as we've tried to argue here on MT and in our book of the same name, that cooperation is pervasive in all  aspects of life, much moreso than competition.

We can take a different path, and argue that if all we have is here and now, and we're in it together, we should  share a wagon hitched to a brighter star than what's offered by strident atheists.  We may not be able to find scientific justification for such kinder behavior, but we need not search for it in the stars but in our own, individual, local instincts and feelings.

Even in a Darwinian world, the existence, after so many evolutionary millennia, of sparks of local kindness show that it is possible to act cooperatively rather than competitively, warmly rather than coldly.  If we can do this on a local level, why not on a more organized level as well?  Is that impossible, or is it just that, in societies usually organized around ideology, we haven't learned to do it yet?

We should be able to do this a-theistically, that is, without having to justify it by invoking a God or received sacred book as a justification--even if somehow they could be true.  But this is not the same as justifying any behavior on the grounds of the lack of evidence for such received truths, or on a belief instructed by atheism (or any other 'ism').  It is part of our individual nature, whether or not it can ever be at the core of our collective nature.

How evolution's hope evolved away

In the incoming tide (or was it an onslaught?) of science in the 18th and, especially the 19th century a few interesting things converged, with interesting if perhaps saddening impact on western thought.

In the dawning of the age of science, leading thinkers advocated a strongly empirical way to understand the world: through observation, what we now call science.  The widely held belief in this period, known as the Enlightenment, was that empiricism would reveal knowledge of the nature of Nature that would enable humans to engineer a better more perfect society--a Utopia.  This society would rectify physical needs as well social inequities.

At the beginning of this era, Newton's and Galileo's physics had powerfully showed that if based on observation rather than received doctrine or faith, the world followed natural law.  Natural laws unchangingly governed the universe: they dictated how the stars did, do, and would forever go 'cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity'.  That phrase is in Darwin's last paragraph in the Origin of Species (1859), but Darwin had anything but a static world in mind:  instead, he was the century's icon of unremitting, mechanical change.

Darwin's insights reflected, were influenced, enabled, and inspired by the advances in geology showing that, while not static, geological processes were very slow and sometimes cyclical.  As a famous founding article in geology by Hutton (1788) ended: 'no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.'

But Darwin showed that life on earth was changing in a gradual, but very different way: it was evolving, and from a beginning!  Darwin refined and reflected thinking by many others, who were suggesting general ideas about evolution, including about the evolution of life.  Many were relating scientific ideas about laws of change to society itself:  Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, and others were suggesting that society was as much subject to laws of Nature as the earth and life were.  This thinking about society, (and to some extent Darwin's thinking about life, and that of many of his contemporary evolutionists), included a strong sense of progress.  In ways resembling Enlightenment Utopian thinking, they saw society as evolving from primitive states, to civilization, and on towards some idyllic end:  life had evolved the noble brow of humans, and society would evolve to be more equitable.

These were all about material laws, and one might think they would drive definitive nails into the coffin of changeless, religious thinking, based as it was on received word rather than observed fact.  How on earth (so to speak) could anyone speak of 'Heaven'?  In fact, however, at the time many writers suggested that the progress in earthly evolution was leading to a perfected end-state, often envisioned as being 'with God' and that this march of progress was in fact ordained by God.

Alfred Tennyson

We are stimulated to write this post by yet another installment of our favorite radio program, the wonderful BBC4's In Our Time.  This was a discussion of Alfred Tennyson's poem In Memoriam, AHH.  At Cambridge, the young Tennyson met an exceptionally brilliant student, one Arthur Hallam.  They became extremely close friends.  The program discusses their connections, and one can easily explore this on the web, including, of course, this In Our Time episode.  Hallam valued the young Tennyson's poems and the two were intellectually compatible to an unsurpassable degree.  But then, suddenly, while traveling in Europe and at age 22, and without warning, Hallam died, apparently from an aneurism.

Henry Hallam

Tennyson was totally devastated by this news--indeed he never recovered from the loss.  Seventeen years in the making, In Memoriam was his long, mournful eulogy or elegy to this closest of close friends.  The poem is wonderful to read, and famous as can be (' 'T is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.'; 'Nature, red in tooth and claw.').  Its moving and palpable pathos, and its metric magnetism, cannot be equaled.  If you have not read it, you really should (but do it patiently, to absorb the incredible, relentless, desperate mourning).

Of British intellectuals, Tennyson was among the most interested in, and aware of, contemporary science.  In Memoriam was published in 1850, some years before Origin.  But evolution in life and geology were in the air, and others had been writing about evolution (in particular a book by Robert Chambers called Vestiges of Creation, 1844), and in the kinds of progressive terms we mentioned above.  The earth and its life were working out God's plan so that its perfecting creature--humans--would eventually be worthy of, and end up with, God.  The progress in society and in the more complex organisms on earth than had been here before, suggested that change was heading to a goal that the evidence made obvious.

This view--or hope--provided the only solace of Tennyson's mourning, and he could look to the science we've just mentioned to support that hope.  The earth was mechanical, cruel, relentlessly dishing out sorrow.  All here was temporary, all would disappear as streams 'Draw down aeonian hills/The dust of continents to be,' and those who once lived 'seal'd within the iron hills.'  As for species 'a thousand types are gone....all shall go.'  into the bowels of history!  If there was no way to really recover from the death of close friends, the relentless earth meant there was no way to escape from it, either.  Tennyson would never again shake Hallam's hand or hear his voice, at least not in this world.  But he consoled himself by writing that Hallam was a creature ahead of his time, 'a noble type, Appearing ere the times were ripe', and his disappearance may have been because he was too good for his time.  But if Hallam had been taken from him for the time being, Tennyson yearned and dreamt, hopefully, for the day they would be reunited in a perfected world.  There will come a 'crowning race....No longer half-akin to brute....to which the whole creation moves.'

The Rapture redux, in the raiment of science
For a while, especially before Darwin, one could do as Tennyson did, and absorb the factual realities of earthly change into the teachings of some aspects of  religion.  But as science progressed, and the implications of biological evolution were realized, it became less and less possible to see either real progress in how life worked, or to find any evidence of a march to a specifiable, much less seeable, end on the evolutionary horizon.  Eventually, the earth would burn up or burn out, and return to the unrelenting cold womb of space, and life would go with it.

How could someone who had absorbed the idea of change--even progressive change--have ever got the idea that there would be a end-point?  Well, if the 2nd law of thermodynamics says the universe is moving towards maximum disorder (called 'entropy'), or randomness of matter and energy, then why can't there be some biological or societal end-point?   The comparable point to entropy might be when there was no social inequality, or when the mind had reached the maximum perfection (that was called 'God').  It's a stretch, because in a sense it implies there's a maximum IQ for God's perfecting creatures to reach (maybe that's God's IQ?).  In any case, define it how you want, one can imagine, or invent, such states.  Still, there was no evidence for them--in life, or in society.

Darwin may have grudgingly agreed that there might be a God who started it all, but the clockwork mechanism of evolution provided no goal or endpoint for life, nor so far as we know did Darwin ever make any such suggestion.  And as science has worked it out over the subsequent 150 years, our understanding of life as the product of evolution has largely closed the coffin lid on such goal-headed views of life.  If one wants to believe in a theistic religion, an Omega state, an after-life, or a benevolent deity, we know that one must seek it in some non-material rationale: the scientific study of the material earth simply doesn't provide any empirical support for such views.  Except perhaps that 'intelligence' will lead to rapid human-induced extinction of our own and all other life....

Religion does, however, calm and solace people from seeing the world in its stark, remorseless reality.  In Memoriam expresses the value of such a view.   Tennyson's grief was so deep that he needed at least that hope to hold onto, even if tentatively and with doubt--'Believing where we cannot prove'.  Even today it is a poem to be read, and as discussed in In Our Time, one that has given solace to many persons weeping in the long, dark night for a lost loved-one:

 Tears of the widower, when he sees
  A late-lost form that sleep reveals, 
  And moves his doubtful arms, and feels
Her place is empty, fall like these.

Perhaps the often-strident and prideful Darwinian atheists should take some pause.  They too, and you, and we, will someday experience Tennyson's grief.  Illusion?  Maybe.  But there is more to life than science.

A warmth within the breast would melt
  The freezing reason's older part,
  And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd "I have felt."

Tennyson's is a view not to be frivolously dishonored, even if the evolution of the science of evolution has unremittingly evolved away from any such notions of progress towards an idyllic endpoint. Or, even, from wishful thinking.

The Greatest scientific discovery of all times (but naming no names!)

We said yesterday both that Creationist literal claims are clearly bunk and that many advocates for teaching evolution in the schools are not all that sophisticated about evolution. In the latter case, and certainly naming no names!, they may have a over-simplified idea of the role and strength of natural selection in evolution, or may not appreciate the subtle relationships between drift and selection, or have little idea about the sophisticated kinds of evidence coming out of molecular biology labs that so beautifully confirms evolution, and so on.

The blunt fact is that some of what we say in evolutionary biology, especially when dumbed-down for public or textbook consumption is also bunk. The proliferation of Just-So stories in evolutionary biology, even at the highest level, is extensive and well-known. So we're told confidently such things as that our body parts evolved 'for' such-and-such a purpose, and our physiological responses were selected 'for' a reason, and we have genes 'for' all of it.

In fact, anything that's here today can be given such explanations with little in the way of constraint much less testability. Nice, tight stories sell big!

Humility should have a deeper role in science and among us members of the Science-tribe. It seems unassailably true that life today is the result of a history. Darwinian selection also seems undeniably important, though there are other equally important evolutionary forces. And, humans really did come from terrestrial ancestors. We might hope to discover something that refutes such ideas, because it would be so energizing and exciting for science and the public alike! Alas, nothing suggests it will happen.

Still, who knows how much we don't know about life? What factors or forces might be as yet undiscovered but have an effect on biological change? What kind of real 'dark matter', that today is to us what, say, electrons or infra-red radiation were to Aristotle--or real dark matter to astronomists?

When we discuss the evidence for 'evolution', we should be humble enough to acknowledge that that word isn't so clear as it may seem. There are gaps in what we know, gaps in the fossil record, gaps in our theory (e.g., of how to predict phenotypes from complex genotypes, which we assume are causally connected, or how species evolve, or how to know when selection is acting, rather than drift).

We can't let Creationists cower us into asserting more than we know, or simply adopting a party line, as that would be a kind of victory of non-knowledge over knowledge. What sends us to work every day is the pursuit of what we don't yet know. There is likely to be a lot of that out there. It is hard to imagine something that would be so profound as to change our basic view of life as the product of historical evolution, much less anything that could convert us to a theologically literalist view. But we might discover things as new and exciting as the awareness that Darwin and Wallace brought to us about the nature of life. We should remain open to that possibility.

In fact, many scientists are atheists, some (naming no names!) so aggressively so that it is their way of hyping themselves and rolling in the book-sales and TV appearances. Of course, proving a negative is difficult, but science is not likely to prove, using its current set of principles, that God does not exist (even if He was just kidding about a 7-day creation). Many scientists are proud of their atheism, but let's not be hypocrites. And here is a warning to Creationists, who like to trash scientists for their views:

It is hard to imagine a scientist who would not crave being the one who discovered and could truly prove that the source of our hopes and dreams (naming no names!) really does exist. As the scientific discoverer of God, such a scientist would become the most distinguished human being in the history of our species. Darwin would be a puny dustman by comparison. The reason scientists don't take much to religious arguments is not that they'd not like to show them to be true, but simply, and perhaps sadly, because the evidence doesn't suggest that such a thing is even worth pursuing in science.

--Ken & Anne

The religion-evolution 'debate': such an egocentric waste of time!

We have tried not to get immersed in the so-called debate or controversy over evolution vs religion. But one can only bite one's tongue so much before being pushed over the edge. An op/ed piece by Robert Wright in today's New York Times did the trick.

This piece suggests that advocates of religion and atheism, in the context of evolution should back down and realize that they can both be right. The usual cast of 'experts' is cited: those in prominent academic institutions or who have written outspoken books or treatments of the subject, which the media seem to accept as evidence of their expert knowledge. But that's all bunk!

The debate or controversy (we'll save keystrokes by not continuing to use quote marks around the terms) is hot air, opinion masquerading as knowledge. The problem is simple, and except for details of new technical knowledge it has hardly changed an iota since it erupted right after Darwin's Origin of Species.

One can explain almost anything one wants, after the fact, by attributing it to evolution. This is especially true if you equate evolution to natural selection, which is a dogmatic, almost biblical kind of freezing of Darwin's 19th century thought into stone. Whatever is here today and appears organized (often equated to mean purposeful) is assumed to have been molded by selection, and since it's here and its current function is or can be guessed at, we can go further and equate that function to what was favored by selection over eons of time. Within this framework, you can then say that organisms have a purpose, a rationalized bastardization of the word that makes you seem sensitive to your (rational) religious audience. It's also a fake escape from what people really, in the eerie dark of night, mean by 'God', which has to do with solace, usually personified and able to interact in the world, such as by helping cure your ailing child.

The common alternative is to try to rescue real religion asserting that there is a God (no quotes here, because this is the real McCoy), a thinking personal being that (who?) started the world in motion using natural selection to produce His ultimate object, 'intelligent' beings (us humans, naturally, but why not also countless other species, why not even intelligent plants?).

Various views called deism, monism, and the like have God starting it all and then letting natural selection take its course. But it's trying to have your cake and eat it, too. For example, the rationalizer's 'natural selection' is nothing of the kind at all! Selection is, by nature, a sieving of randomly arisen variation via competition for reproductive success. But if God knew what would happen, then this is as much a sham as a movie or a rigged carnival game, since nothing is really random or competitive, it only looks that way after the fact.

Evolutionary psychology, the 'solution' to the religion/evolution debate, as argued in the NYT op/ed piece today, is basically bunkum squared (something we wrote about here, and David Brooks here), since it can argue just about anything you could imagine and if you can find it today you can make up a selective reason. Want the world to be cruel, to justify inequality like capitalism or the brutality of conflict? Easy! Survival of the fittest! Want to explain compassion, goodness, and even ideas about beneficent God? No sweat! Getting along is just a way of competing successfully! Want to explain even religion itself? Piece of cake! Make up a God gene, that produces neural illusions, and say that led its bearers to screw more successfully or be given resources (euphemistically called 'alms')!

Hey, these scenarios, couched in appropriately pious academic terms will make you seem deeply insightful, whether you want to appeal to the the religious, the uncertain, the militantly atheistic, or just sell books and be quoted in the Times. This is the bomb that Darwinism dropped on society. Its destructiveness persists after 150 years--and it's a 'dangerous idea' but not necessarily because it's true, but because after the fact evolutionary Just-So stories can always be constructed to have the appearance of being true--whether or not it is in fact true, which it may well be.

All sides in this debate are soaked with arrogance and hubris, often laced with intentional insult and cruelty, and they have been since identically vituperative, self-assured arguments first took place starting right after Darwin. The hubris comes from knowing you're right. It's instructive that no amount of data--and there's been a huge amount--can change either side's belief in its beliefs.

The blunt facts are that if you want to take a pure materialist's view, science is manifestly a powerful way to account for the world--at least for those aspects of the world that it can account for. Scientific knowledge eats away systematically at material problems, generating transformations of society (and huge fortunes) along the way. It makes many believe that the material world is obviously all there is.

On the other side, fear, hope, esthetics, and subjective experience lead many to believe there must be more. Call it God if you want, but you then have to fish around for His/Her/Its/Their properties, settling on what gives you the most comfort, more or less in the same way we choose the style of music we like best. As with natural selection, you can always post-construct rationales and reasons for your choice. But you're playing games with yourself (even if you're right, and there really is some sort of God(s), because you have no way to know if you are).

The experts are no such thing. They're like everyone else: they have opinions. They're working angles that they see in their interests to work. They enjoy their feeling of superiority (evolutionary psychologists can, we're sure, tell you why natural selection led us to be that way). Psychologically, God and Evolution play similar roles in the human mind.

This is not the time or place to try to go into the subtle aspects of the illusion of driving, Darwin-style, force-like natural selection (we do that in our book). But selection, which certainly seems to exist, is part of a spectrum with chance at one end and strong causation at the other end of that spectrum. Afterwards, what happened can always be defined as the result of selection, and seem organized in a way that even to evolutionists is described in designer-like terms that are perilously close to those of religion.

We humans like to be wise, we like to understand our world, we like self-comfort, we like media attention, and we like to be right! But in this case, it's all sound and fury signifying nothing. If you want to believe, go ahead and assert whatever makes you feel good about 'God'. If you want to disbelieve, go ahead and assert whatever makes you feel good about 'evolution'. If you want to have it both ways, you can do that too -- but only by suspending disbelief.

**Update** Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution is True has much the same argument, with a very patient discussion of Wright's specific points.

Eccentric atheist professors

Bridget Kendall interviews Marcus du Sautoy on the BBC World Service radio program, The Forum, this week, along with two other guests. A mathematician, du Sautoy now fills the post of "Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science" at Oxford, recently vacated by Richard Dawkins. He talks on the program about the intersection of music and mathematics.

When du Sautoy was appointed to the Professorship in March 2008, the media noted his many awards, his brilliance, his experience with the media, his eccentricity and taste for loud clothes and so on, but they almost invariably also noted that he, like Dawkins, is an 'avowed atheist'. This fact is included in his Wikipedia entry. But why is it considered to be relevant to his science?

Regular readers of this blog may remember our post objecting to the idea that Dawkins' atheism has anything to do with science. We continue to object. Perhaps eccentricity is truly a requirement for explaining science to the public, but du Sautoy's atheism can't have been informed by his work in mathematics and his atheism can't inform his math, so why do we need to know? And why is this relevant to--or is it misleading--a 'public understanding of science'?

Perhaps the idea is that, as an atheist, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science will object to creationism taught in the schools, surely a worthy cause (because creationism isn't any form of science). But it certainly isn't only atheists who object to creationism--anyone who thinks that explaining the origins of the diversity of life on Earth must be grounded in observation rather than undemonstrable faith will object, and this includes many believers, even those accepting the Bible as moral and essential truth, but told in allegory and metaphor.

The atheist/believer divide may be real, but it's social, cultural and political, not scientific. To be scientific, there must be experiments to prove that 'God' does not exist, whereas science is about things that do exist and can be analyzed as such. As a mathematician du Sautoy should know that conclusions follow from definitions, so how one defines 'God' must, for starters, be specified before one can be an 'atheist'. To show that some claim, such as a 6,000 year old Earth, is not consistent with the facts is a form of scientific statement. But that is about some particular story about God, not about God directly. Even further, the rules of mathematical deduction are assumed, and it has been shown that not even all mathematical truths can be proven to be true.

So, while a scientist may (as many or most do) believe that the empirical world is all there is, and may personally be an atheist (no matter how 'God' would be defined), that is a result of their personal experience and view, not their science itself. It is very misleading to think otherwise. To do his job, Marcus du Sautoy should perhaps ask how science could address such questions, if it can, and point out why current science is helpless to address the fundamental existence question as it has been posed. The fact that there is a long history of philosophers or even scientists (including Isaac Newton) who have tried to prove biblical truth through their idea of science doesn't change this. du Sautoy has many interesting things to say about mathematics, and his flamboyance may attract many readers to science and careers in science. But what he has to say about religion is not grounded in his scientific expertise, it's just his opinion.

The strident atheist scientists

The BBC has a 5-minute interview program and on May 16 their website aired such an interview with Richard Dawkins. Although a public figure, he is purportedly a professor of Public Understanding of Science, at Oxford. That is unfortunate, because he like many others in science these days (especially, evolutionary biologists) are cashing in on a kind of strident atheism that is a bad misrepresentation of science, just the opposite of what they should be doing.

Dawkins said in this interview, as he has elsewhere, that he doesn't believe in something for which there is no evidence. Therefore he says he shouldn't have to deal with God any more than with the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Of course, he has every right to doubt the claims of religion (or tooth fairies, or Santa Claus), or the literal truth of religions based on sacred texts that purport to relate to the real world. Many scientists, who spend their lives trying very hard to understand the world share his skepticism about the claims of religion and other 'mystical' kinds of phenomena.

But it's very bad science! We should be educating the public--and ourselves--as to what science as we know it is really about, not propagandizing our personal views on the world (or, at least, we should be clear that those are our views, and not based on science per se). The reason is quite simple, but we think just as important.

Science uses an array of methods to study a range of phenomena and has some semi-formal rules of decision-making (called the 'scientific method'). We agree, as a culture, that the principles of things like mathematics and our idea about logical reasoning are true. We agree on acceptable forms of measurement, data collection, data analysis for drawing both specific observational conclusions as well as generalizations (theories) about Nature. But therein lies the most important issue.

Dawkins and the professional atheists say that as scientists they don't believe in that for which there is no evidence. But what they really mean, and to give them credit may not even be aware of, is that they don't accept things for which there is no acceptable evidence. And that is a kind of tautology. Something is defined as 'true' (or, at least, plausible) if and only if it is within the realm of their kind of evidence.

There's nothing at all wrong with doing this, but it does make science an axiomatic system for viewing some particular aspects of the world. What is wrong is not recognizing that this is what they are doing. In fact, there is a great deal of evidence for religious claims--even if that doesn't legitimately apply to claims such as the Biblical fundamentalists make about young earth and intelligent design.

Hundreds of millions of people claim that they have had what scientists would call mystical experiences. Many say they communicate directly with God. Whether that's literally true or not is, in fact, beyond the scope of current science. The reason is that current science doesn't deal with, and many if not most scientists won't accept, such types of subjective, personalized evidence as evidence.

Science says it deals with the material world, but that communicating with God is not material, and therefore not real in the sense of materialism. But what is 'material'? Before the discovery of, say, electromagnetic radiation, we could not deal with unobservable aspects of it (like parts of the spectrum we couldn't see). Dark matter in space is another kind of example. We can't see it in the usual way, and only claim it's there because it seems to affect the pattern of radiation as it passes to us through the cosmos.

Once a phenomenon is discovered and can be measured, it becomes part of the 'material' world and joins the panoply of scientific causes. We can never know what things we don't yet know, and it is a kind of arrogance to assert that things we don't know by our chosen way-of-knowing aren't true--or that there is 'no evidence' for them.

We cannot challenge the atheists' skepticism about the often patently false material claims of religion. But it is badly misleading the public 'understanding' of science to present science as if it is the only way of understanding the realities of existence.

What we are saying provides absolutely no support for religious or other mystical claims! We cannot, and do not, imply that claims of personal contacts with God are true or even what 'true' would mean in this case. The mistake Dawkins and other strident scientist-atheists make does not in any way lead to the conclusion that Genesis may be true after all!

But scientists and the public alike should realize that science is a part of our culture, not something handed down to us from the outside (by whom? God??)! It is a particular, and hence limited, way of characterizing the world. In terms of manipulating the world, it is immensely powerful. And it does seem to provide ever-better accounts of what we see around us. But it is a system that is based on a set of accepted rules. Religion and its kin are in a similar way cultural phenomena.

To a hard-nosed scientist, the comforting claims of religion don't seem to ring true, and that can be a depressing thought, given the pain and suffering that clearly are part of reality. Atheism is easy to understand. It is easy to make the personal judgment that claims of speaking with God are illusions. But personal conviction is not the same as science, and not what science is all about. If you don't want to accept as evidence such claims, fine. But it's part of your assumptions. And that's what the public, religious or otherwise, should understand about the nature of science in relation to the nature of Nature.

Dawkins was asked in the same interview what is the point if he doesn't believe in God. His answer was that the point is to enjoy life, to live life to the fullest. This seems to us to ignore Darwin's own lessons, to further perpetuate misunderstanding, not further the public understanding, of science. Dawkins has been called "Darwin's Rottweiller" because he has written so much in defense of evolutionary thought, but within a Darwinian framework, the point, if there is one, is only to survive and reproduce. And that is not even a 'point', as if there was some sort of ordained purpose; instead, it's just the nature of life.

Anything else we make of life, our values, our sense of beauty and purpose, our beliefs and so on, is our own invention. It may be the most important aspect of our lives as we experience them, for sure. But it is personal, and does not reflect scientific knowledge and there is no reason other than celebrity gawking why the opinion about the point of life of a scientist as scientist, is any more meaningful than anyone else's view. Again, this is relevant to science only so far as the evidentiary and topical basis of science goes, which would say that Nature has properties, but doesn't have a 'point'.

If Dawkins had said that science doesn't tell us anything about the 'point' beyond the Darwinian framework, and that this is not an area where expertise of any kind at all has any bearing, and that what he can offer is his own view of life for those who might be curious about it, then he would have been doing his job to enhance public understanding.