De Novo

I’ve taken issue with Richard Dawkins before, not for his work as a scientist, but for his attempts at evangelizing the benefits of science to an audience he doesn’t really understand using philosophical tools he doesn’t quite have mastery of.  Meet Rev. Michael Dowd, a man who promises to make up for all of Dawkins’ shortcomings:

In 1981, Michael Dowd would have counted himself among the millions of conservative Christians who blame Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the idea of a godless, purposeless universe for the moral decline of society. That year, as a freshman at Evangel University in Springfield, Mo., Dowd felt a rush of indignant anger in biology class when the professor held up a textbook that taught evolution. As he stormed out of the classroom, Dowd could not have imagined that he would come to view evolution as a spiritually inspiring idea that religion must embrace.

In the years that followed, Dowd shed his more conservative views and served as a pastor in the liberal United Church of Christ. Today he calls himself an evolutionary evangelist. For the last six years, he has traveled across North America with his wife, Connie Barlow, in a van that displays an image of two fish kissing each other — one labeled Jesus, the other Darwin — explaining to conservative and liberal congregations why understanding and accepting evolution will bring them closer to spiritual fulfillment. The religious advantage to embracing the evolutionary worldview, Dowd says, is that it explains our frailties, our addictions, our infidelities and other moral deficiencies as byproducts of adaptation over billions of years. And that, he says, has a potentially liberating effect: never mind guilt; once we understand our sinful ways, we can get past them and play a conscious role in the evolution of humanity.

(from the New York Times)

Such an approach raises a variety of questions:

• Isn’t this just “Intelligent Design 2.0″?  No.  It’s actually the exact opposite of Intelligent Design, which cloaks religion in the vestiments of science.  While religion makes a poor basis for scientific understanding, science makes an excellent basis for religious understanding; Dowd offers to replace what Dawkins merely seeks to tear down: many people in religious communities are attached not only to their beliefs but more importantly to their traditions, communities, and vague sense of meaning and purpose that the trappings afford them.  It may be easy for some atheists to trivialize these things, but atheism will never make inroads or even win respect among such communities until it shows a capability to offer a mature sense of community amongst laypeople (not merely practicing scientists).
• Why call the Universe “God”?  Why not just throw out the term “God” altogether?  This is along the lines of Dawkins’ fallacy that religion is merely a virus, to be disposed of by reason.  Others have argued that religion is as much an inherent feature of the human mind as language; while the particular form of religion may be heavily influenced by culture, the religious experience/impulse is built out of hardwired features of the human brain that can’t simply be erased.  Giving a religious framework for appreciation of science helps to address this feature, rather than antagonize it (akin to “fighting sin” vs. understanding and addressing the causes of human behavior).

Take a look at Dowd’s “promises” for a sense of the scope of what he’s attempting here.  I don’t expect that his ideas will be embraced very soon by the more biblical-literalist wing of the religious community, but his approach undercuts the (already naive) claims by fundamentalists that evolution presents a universe controlled by randomness, without purpose or meaning, and shows a way to establish morality and value in the universe described by science.

To be secular, one need do nothing more than live in perpetual opposition to the unsubstantiated claims of religious dogmatists. Consequently, secularism has negligible appeal to the culture at large (a practical concern) and negligible content (an intellectual concern)…. Criticizing religious irrationality is absolutely essential. But secularism, being nothing more than the totality of such criticism, can lead its practitioners to reject important features of human experience simply because they have been traditionally associated with religious practice.

…It is an empirical fact that sustained meditation can result in a variety of insights that intelligent people regularly find intellectually credible and personally transformative. The problem, however, is that these insights are almost always sought and expressed in a religious context. One such insight is that the feeling we call “I”—the sense that there is a thinker giving rise to our thoughts, an experiencer distinct from the mere flow of experience—can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. Our conventional sense of “self” is, in fact, nothing more than a cognitive illusion, and dispelling this illusion opens the mind to extraordinary experiences of happiness. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one’s optic blind spots.

[Free Inquiry editor Tom] Flynn condemns my book simply because I have found no better words than spiritual or mystical to denote this rarefied terrain. As Flynn concedes, I took great pains to distance myself from the unfortunate associations these terms carry in our culture, deluded as it is by absurd religious certainties. Still, Flynn felt that my caveats were insufficient, and he would have had me employ words like “meditative” or “attentional” to describe the experience of human consciousness shorn of the illusion of the human ego. The problem, however, is that there is a kernel of truth in the grandiosity and otherworldly language of religion. It really is possible to have one’s moment-to-moment perception of the world radically transfigured by “attentional” discipline. Such a transfiguration, being both rare and profoundly positive, may occasionally merit a little poetry.

– Sam Harris (from the article Rational Mysticism)

Sam Harris is conventionally associated with New Atheists Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens, so his language can be a bit inflammatory; nevertheless, the tension of an internecine debate within the secularist community (on how to address the human spiritual experience) lurks quite close to the surface here.

A recent TED talk by mycologist Paul Stamets on the importance of allying with fungal life to propel human interests; you can watch the video here.  He addresses “mycophobia”, fear of fungi, which manifests itself as dismissal of or mistrust of fungal agents, notably “magic mushrooms”; his talk, however, focuses not on psychedelics but rather on the importance of mushrooms in processing hostile environments (sterile rock beds, fields contaminated by oil waste, etc.) in preparation for life.  I’m lucky to live in the PNW; a quick jaunt into the woods underscores just how fundamental mycelia are to life.  (Via 3quarksdaily.)