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Toronto
Star
May 23, 2005. 01:00 AM |
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Just give me
that old-time atheism!
Salman Rushdie
"Not
believing in God is no excuse for being virulently anti-religious or
naïvely pro-science," says Dylan Evans, a professor of robotics at
the
University of West England in Bristol.
Evans has written an article for the Guardian
of London deriding the old-fashioned, "19th-century" atheism of such
prominent thinkers as Richard Dawkins and Jonathan Miller, instead
proposing a new, modern atheism which "values religion, treats science
as simply a means to an end and finds the meaning of life in art."
Indeed, he says, religion itself is to be understood as "a kind of art,
which only a child could mistake for reality and which only a child
would reject for being false."
Evans' position fits well with that of the American philosopher of
science Michael Ruse, whose new book, The Evolution-Creation
Struggle,
lays much of the blame for the growth of creationism in America — and
for the increasingly strident attempts by the religious right to have
evolutionary theory kicked off the curriculum and replaced by the new
dogma of "intelligent design" — at the door of the scientists who have
tried to compete with, and even supplant, religion. A staunch
evolutionist himself, he is nevertheless highly critical of such modern
giants as Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson.
Evans' "Atheism Lite," which seeks to negotiate a truce between
religious and irreligious world views, is easily demolished.
Such a truce would have a chance of working only if it were reciprocal
— if the world's religions agreed to value the atheist position and to
concede its ethical basis, if they respected the discoveries and
achievements of modern science, even when these discoveries challenge
religious sanctities, and if they agreed that art at its best reveals
life's multiple meanings at least as clearly as so-called "revealed"
texts.
No such reciprocal arrangement exists, however, nor is
there the slightest chance that such an accommodation could ever be
reached. It is among the truths believed to be self-evident by
the followers of all religions that godlessness is equivalent to
amorality and that ethics requires the underpinning presence of some
sort of ultimate arbiter, some sort of supernatural absolute, without
which secularism, humanism, relativism, hedonism, liberalism and all
manner of permissive improprieties will inevitably seduce the
unbeliever down immoral ways. To those of us who are perfectly
prepared to indulge in the above vices but still believe ourselves to
be ethical beings, the godlessness-equals-morality position is pretty
hard to swallow. Nor does the current behaviour of organized
religion breed confidence in the Evans/Ruse laissez-faire attitude.
Education everywhere is seriously imperilled by religious attacks.
In recent years, Hindu nationalists in India attempted to rewrite the
nation's history books to support their anti-Muslim ideology, an effort
thwarted only by the electoral victory of a secularist coalition led by
the Congress party.
Meanwhile, Muslim voices the world over are claiming that evolutionary
theory is incompatible with Islam. And
in America, the battle over the teaching of intelligent design in U.S.
schools is reaching crunch time, as the American Civil Liberties Union
prepares to take on intelligent-design proponents in a Pennsylvania
court. It seems inconceivable that better behaviour on the part
of the world's great scientists, of the sort that Ruse would prefer,
would persuade these forces to back down. Intelligent design,
an idea designed backward so as to force the antique idea of a Creator
upon the beauty of creation, is so thoroughly rooted in pseudoscience,
so full of false logic, so easy to attack that a little rudeness seems
called for. Its advocates argue, for example, that the sheer
complexity and perfection of cellular/molecular structures is
inexplicable by gradual evolution. However, the multiple parts
of complex, interlocking biological systems do evolve together,
gradually expanding and adapting — and, as Dawkins showed in The
Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe
Without Design, natural selection is active at every step of this
process.
But, as well as scientific arguments, there are others that are more,
well, novelistic. What about bad design, for example? Was it really so
intelligent to come up with the birth canal or the prostate gland?
Then,
there's the moral argument against an intelligent designer who cursed
his creations with cancer and AIDS. Is the intelligent designer also
amorally cruel?
To see religion as "a kind of art," as Evans
rather sweetly proposes, is possible only when the religion is dead or
when, like the Church of England, it has become a set of polite
rituals. The old Greek religion lives on as mythology, the old
Norse religion has left us the Norse myths and, yes, now we can read
them as literature. The Bible contains much great literature,
too, but the literalist voices of Christianity grow ever louder, and
one doubts that they would welcome Evans' child's storybook approach.
Meanwhile religions continue to attack their own artists: Hindu
artists' paintings are attacked by Hindu mobs, Sikh playwrights are
threatened by Sikh violence and Muslim novelists and filmmakers are
menaced by Islamic fanatics with a vigorous unawareness of any kinship.
If religion were a private matter, one could more easily respect its
believers' right to seek its comforts and nourishments. But
religion today is big public business, using efficient political
organization and cutting-edge information technology to advance its
ends. Religions play bare-knuckle rough all the time, while demanding
kid-glove treatment in return.
As Evans and Ruse would do well
to recognize, atheists such as Dawkins, Miller and Wilson are neither
immature nor culpable for taking on such religionists. They are doing a
vital and necessary thing.
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie is the author of The Satanic Verses, Fury and
many other books.
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This page was last updated: 2 June 2005.
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