Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Speaking the Language of Evangelical Christians and Scientists, in one book

A year ago or so, I read a scathing review by Sam Harris of Francis Collins's The Language of God. Because Sam Harris writes with immense intellectual weight, I was convinced that Collins might just be another Christian crackpot, probably in the Lennox, Polkinghorne mold. Having seen Lennox deliver a broadside against Richard Dawkins and atheists that was completely unwarranted and been repulsed by his arrogant manner, not to mention his presumption that everybody shared his definitions of familiar concepts simply because he could spout them, (reviewed in this blog) and finding Polkinghorne so often completely baffling because he speaks academese, not English, I expected Collins to have little that an atheist could respect.

How wrong I was.

While most of Collin's arguments for belief have gaps large enough for a small truck, there is no doubt he is both an accomplished scientist and a pleasant person. He writes in that languid, comfortable prose so typical of Americans, especially Southerners - inviting and lucid. On matters scientific, he honours science by first stating the accepted orthodoxy, then explaining in depth where the topic is within his expertise and then refers the reader on when the going gets too deep for the layman or his area of expertise. On matters theological, he defers to Lewis, Augustine, Bonhoeffer and Polkinghorne; possibly a path that will earn him no friends amongst Christians in US.

This is a book for believers. If Collins is right and nearly half of the US has such contempt for science that it mindlessly adopts YEC (Young Earth Creationism), then the urgency of expounding a view where science and religion can share a space at the table cannot be understated. From my atheist point of view, better a believer with an unremarkable delusion but a deep respect for science, than a zealot for Christ who rejects science as a matter of course.

Unlike Richard Dawkins, Collin's style remains accessible, requiring little 'unpacking'. This makes it easier to read and understand, but ultimately unsatisfying as an apology for evolution. Dawkins' methodical exposition of evolution in Greatest Show on Earth is perhaps the limit that a non-scientist can go in delving into evolution and is brilliantly explained; both books have a key role in assigning YEC to the side-show, Collin's for believers and Dawkins for all of us.

I am tempted to consider Collin's faith as about as superficial as his atheism probably was; not a particularly well considered position. He finds spiritual satisfaction in Christian  faith and dogma mostly because this happens to be the first stop in his spiritual journey. It is a kind of lazy faith; so long as I regurgitate the gurus, I'm fine. In an America so deeply polarised by religion and secularity, his search for spiritual fulfilment and subsequent discovery of evangelical Christianity are almost inevitable, but unforgivable.

Some elements of Collin's science are a little disappointing. The first is in his manipulation of probability to suggest a premise in the case for theism. Probability is a funny animal - like the law it can be a complete ass or incredibly useful. It can tell us quite plainly what the outcome of a set of events is likely to be - on this grounds, none of us would, rationally, gamble on anything. Gambling is, quite simply, the abandonment of the rational logic of probability.

Yet, I can deal you 52 cards and they fall out in an order, the probability of which occurring again is so ridiculously small that you could effectively call it 'never' without exaggeration. But there you saw it, in front of you. The fact is that a large enough series of historical events makes probability an ass and of no use whatsoever in determining whether the past is how we thought it to be. Only forensic evidence and possibility, expressed in the degree of 'reasonable doubt', can be deployed in our search for a truth now lost forever to us.

Thence, although the critical parameters of the universe may seem so unimaginably well tuned, this is qualitatively no different to noticing that all the Aces came out of the pack in the first 4 cards, an event, in rough terms, equally as likely as them appearing anywhere else in the sequence; but incredulous to us. The fine tuning of the universal parameters draws a conclusion that any card sharp could articulate and suggests a divine presence no more than irreducible complexity suggests a designer.

It is these chasms of contradiction into which Collins seems happy to fall that diminish both this book and his stature. You can't confidently rail against ID as God-of-Gaps-ism while propping up your faith on an identical premise. In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins quotes Shakespeare's Hamlet:

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.


Noticing a pattern does not suggest an author of that pattern any more than clouds create weasels. The private explanation of that pattern must be objectively tested by discussion with others to see if they see the same and then, if authorship is proposed, evidence must be brought to support this proposition. If Shakespeare's authorship of his works is controversial with texts less than 500 years old, how much more uncertain will we be of authorship at the beginning of time?

This and many similar gaffs convince me that Collins is an able and methodical scientist, a lousy theologian and a mediocre debater. Amongst the flawed arguments are:

Argument from incredulity. "I can't believe that altruism could arise out of natural selection, therefore it must be an indicator of God." (contradicting his own objections to ID that irreducible complexity does not infer a designer). At best, his scientific arguments suggest more work to be done on explaining altruism, work that is well underway, not a potted hypothesis involving God.

Argument from private experience. "I had an amazing experience which I attribute to God." Not only is there a wide range of alternative supernatural 'explanations' but science has already established quite clearly the psychological mechanisms of awe and pleasure. Private experience may be genuinely awesome for Francis Collins, but quite pedestrian to someone living that experience daily or unremarkable to a researcher. Context is everything. Such is life.

Argument from authority. "Lewis says this and it sounds amazing, therefore it must be right." Lewis is unable to conceive of a cultural or social genesis for the 'words of Christ'. He rather stubbornly insists on a culturally skewed explanation based on the notion that Jesus Christ had private thoughts, unrelated to his context, and these must fall into the empircal category of insane or divine.

No matter that Jesus was a Jew, no matter that people speak the expectations of others, no matter the vast chasm of history uncertainty across which we examine Jesus's words, no matter the attribution of modern prejudice. No, Lewis insists on that wonderful propaganda tool of simple binaries typical of the "you are with us or against us" brigade. Because it is simply a stupid argument, it does not lend any credence to Collin's proposition that the historical Christ is a signpost to God. Of all Lewis's arguments, this is the weakest and Collin's falls into a deep hole by repeating it.

Argument from definition. "I label this human tendency Moral Law; therefore it exists." Following, again, the unfortunate logic of Lewis, Collins names human behaviour that he has judged moral as the Moral Law, oblivious to the fact that he himself has learned morality at the feet of his fellow Americans, his (atheist) parents and his (predominantly atheist) peers and it is this that he brings to the definition of what he considers favourable behaviour. 'Moral Law' is, at best, a loose category. Its efficacy in either guiding daily life or pointing to a being with an absolute version of morality is entirely questionable.

Argument from extrapolation. "If I observe cause and effect, it indicates that a universe requires an ultimate cause." One wonders why a scientist would fall into this hole. Collins is well aware that cause and effect are intrinsically bound up with concepts of time and space - entropy, gravity and the single direction of the universe towards a singularity are the bread and butter of physics. How then do we get to argue for their existence outside of time and space, the natural sphere in which they are fundamental, when the very import of this proposition is to show that the natural sphere is largely irrelevant to that 'outside'?

Illogical argument. At times, Collins simply lapses into illogicality. The belief in the supernatural is supposed to be simply accepted; but we later build a probability argument premised in that acceptance. More, the supernatural is meant to interact with the natural in a way that, by Collin's reckoning, cannot be natural (infrequent miracles, extraordinary idealised love), yet is perceptible via natural means.

I tried hard to make Collins argument work. In the end, I think he falls into a trap I call the Internet 2.0 trap. At one stage, when the Internet was truly a rubbish tip and was as slow as granny's progress up the stairs, half-smart corporations tried to invent an independent Internet - a parallel network. Of course, the moment that their Internet 2.0 was joined to the Internet via a portal, it immediately became the Internet, with no sensible identity of its own. Internet 2.0 was simply a set of nodes of the Internet.

The supernatural (whatever that is) is clearly a fantastic concept until such time as it clashes with the brutal hand of the natural. Supernatural events, such as resurrections, only become accessible within natural parameters and then, of course, become subject to the same exposure as natural events, where, in 100% of the cases, they are exposed as fraudulent. James Randi's money is safe.

As the practising atheist that I am, Francis Collins is my friend. In contrast to Sam Harris's objections, I can find nothing about Collins that would preclude him from holding a high office in science. The fact that his faith is delusional and inconsistent is of no greater import than any other common delusion such as the hope that my property will grow in value or that, despite aging, I am attractive to young women.

A man's particular version of a particular delusional mindscape may never participate in his scientific endeavour and for me to factor it in is simple prejudice dressed up intellectually. It leads to a dangerous conclusion that perhaps a man's skin colour might equally stymie his judgement in such a position. This is neo-conservative claptrap and Sam Harris should walk a mile to dissociate himself from it if he wants credibility amongst liberal America and liberals across the world.

Should Collins uncharacteristically declare that he supported a motion to make the human genome patented to the Vatican because it was God's intellectual property and they were the stewards of his IP, then I would be alarmed not by his faith, but by his singular rejection of the social role of science.

What was most dangerous about George Bush's faith was not that he allegedly followed the advice of an imaginary friend who spoke to him in answer to prayer, but that he followed the advice of dangerous ideologues who used his religion to gain access to his attention. Time to expose neo-conservatism and its relationship to the kind of fascism that World War 2 attempted to suppress, rather than become fixated on any particular person's version of a common delusion.

In my mind, the war on oppression is much more important than the war on terror. Science and scientists are pivotal in the battle to end disadvantage. We atheists must rejoice that we at least have someone "on the inside" who is prepared to defend so passionately the very science upon which we premise our disbelief. Francis Collins is an affable, if somewhat dillish, ally and it behoves us to recognise this book as at least something that might bring half of the population of the world's most powerful country to again embrace science and support funding for those much needed research and science based practical programs, as that most celebrated of agnostic Americans, Bill Gates, is doing.