Art History and the New Atheism

You might say that David Hart's most recent engagement with the New Atheists (First Things May 2010) is more of the same, but this is merely because the most recent output of the New Atheists (50 Voices of Unbelief) is, well, more of the same.

I came away from the [latest] drab assemblage of preachments and preenings feeling rather as if I had just left a large banquet at which I had been made to dine entirely on crushed ice and water vapor.... What I find offensive about that is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel.

The feebleness of contemporary atheism is particularly lamentable because "skepticism and atheism, are, at least in their highest manifestation, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions," imbued - at their best - with genuine offense at the injustices of religion, having "something of the moral grandeur of the prophets - a deep and admirable abhorrence of those vicious idolatries that enslaves minds and justify our worst cruelties." But none of that is on offer today. (Pomo popularizer Pete Rollins may be seeking a "third way" between Christianity and Atheism, but Hart understands that we haven't yet been dignified with a serious other end of the pole.) The New Atheists seem unaware that Nietzsche long ago chided their scientism as the "the most pathetic of all metaphysical nostalgias." They fail to fathom the cost of their creed:

They do not dread the death of God because they do not grasp that humanity's heroic and insane act of repudiation has sponged away the horizon, torn down the heavens, left us with only the uncertain resources of our will with which to combat the infinity of meaninglessness that the universe now threatens to become.

At any rate, Hart does encounter one somewhat original maneuver in the 50 Voices of Unbelief, that being A.C. Grayling's argument from art history. Responding to the "No Christianity, No Renaissance art" argument, Grayling announces that "an Aphrodite emerging from the Paphian foam is an infinitely more life-enhancing image than a Deposition from the Cross." Hart finds here a nearly Nietzschean moment of clarity, and then responds:

Ignoring the leaden and almost perfectly ductile phrase "life-enhancing," I, too - red of blood and rude of health - would have to say I generally prefer the sight of nubile beauty to that of a murdered man's shattered corpse. The question of whether Grayling might be accused of a certain deficiency of tragic sense can be deferred here. But perhaps he would have done well, in choosing this comparison, to have reflected on the sheer strangeness, and the significance, of the historical and cultural changes that made it possible in the first place for the death of a common man at the hands of a duly appointed legal authority to become the captivating center of an entire civilization's moral and aesthetic contemplations - and for the deaths of all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the ancient order would never have accorded them.

Grayling might also be aware of the Virgin Mary, a figure who both purifed and assimilated the pagan beauty of the Paphian Aphrodite long ago, as the churches erected in her honor just outside of Paphos attest.

Atheism in 10 Easy Steps!

PREFACE: Begin with the medieval arrangement, a God radically transcendent from yet still present to the world, paired with Aristotelian physics that encouraged close observation and exact language about that world.

Amos Funkenstein (our guide in this fascinating process) explains. He suggests that "the question of how God exists 'in things' encapsulate[s], more than any other theological issue, the dialectics of divine immanence and utter transcendence." God's attribute of omnipresence "had to be guarded from pantheistic interpretations, but also from elimination by excessive emphasis on God's being nowhere. It had to be safeguarded against both too literal and too allegorical readings" (49).

Regarding Aristotle, Funkenstein suggests Foucault was wrong -

The seventeenth century did not initiate the demand to exchange 'similitudes' for exact comparisons. Aristotle's philosophy of nature - which became, with due changes, the physics and biology of the Middle Ages - was as committed to an unequivocal language of science as any of the seventeenth or eighteenth century biologists quoted by Foucault (35).

However, Aristotle's scientific precision occurred within a diverse, purposeful universe with many different natures, as opposed, for example, to the homogenous, pantheized Universe of the Stoics (the perfect backdrop for magic and astrology), or to the chance-driven Universe of the Atomists (37-41). The nature-deifying Stoics, and the purposeless Atomists, needless to say, were incompatible with the Christian doctrine of an omnipresent, providential God.

Preliminaries having been established, let the journey to atheism begin:

STEP 1: Think like a Nominalist. In other words, eviscerate mystery by requiring "univocal" [exact] language about God and the world. Funkenstein puts it plainly: "Thomas's doctrine of analogy did as much to restrict the medieval sense of God's symbolical presence as it did to promote it" (55). The Nominalists, however, "aimed at an absolute transparency of the language of every science... [they] had to reject the doctrine of analogy because they had already desymbolized the universe (as well as history) almost completely" (57-58). In short, Nominalists were guilty of epistemological greed. They wanted too much. They preserved knowledge about God, but at the cost of rationalizing his attributes.

STEP 2: Homogenize Matter. Contra Aristotle, the Renaissance turned multiple natures into "nature", and replaced forms with forces. The "animated universe of many natural philosophies in the Renaissance was homogenous in the sense that the absolute distinction between celestial and terrestrial matter was eliminated and the number of elements reduced to two or less" (67). This is not to say that Aristotelian physics was necessarily correct, but that the homogenization of matter (which is not correct either) had peculiar consequences. Nicholas of Cusa, turned the tradition of negative theology toward not only God, but nature. "The boundlessness of the world, though strictly speaking incomparable with God's simple, absolute infinity, is nonetheless an image of it, an analogy... the world is a contracted God (66). Other Renaissance thinkers - most not nearly as pious or subtle as Cusa - went further. They used nature's new homogeneity to return to the universe of the Stoics and Atomists. Telesius, for example, posited a universe with "no trace of goals, of a grand design." Aristotelian focus on detail continued, but without the accompanying teleology. [Incidentally, the Copernican revolution was, according to Funkenstein, not necessarily indebted to this shift (69-70).]

STEP 3: (not necessary, but very helpful) Stop believing in the Real Presence."Did the Reformation," asks Funkenstein, "help God to regain a body?"

Christian fears of pantheistic doctrines derived not only from the fear of deifying nature, but, more specifically, from the fear of diluting the meaning of Christ's particular, selective, real presence in the Host as managed by the priestly hierarchy. Protestant theology lost this fear. Even in its doctrines of the sacraments it could pursue, to the extreme, the utterly transcendent or utterly immanent image of the divine, claiming in either case it is true to the Scriptures. To Zwingli (and to Karlstadt and others earlier) the words 'This is my flesh' carried a symbolic meaning only... Luther's preference of the doctrine of consubstantiation over the doctrine of transubstantiation, though it relied on a minority tradition in Scholastic thought, may have been informed by the new sense of nature... Luther could never acquiesce to the strong locative sense of the real presence... The communion is only the occasion at which Christians are instructed by the word of God where to concentrate on finding Christ's presence [which is everywhere at all times]. Protestantism had much less to fear from pantheistic inclinations than Catholicism (70-71).

STEP 4: Merge steps 1 and 2.

Only in the seventeenth century did both trends converge into one world picture: namely, the Nominalists' passion for unequivocation with the Renaissance sense of the homogeneity of nature - one nature with forces to replace the many Aristotelian static natures. Protestant theology may have acted at times as a catalyst to the fusion. Once both ideals of science converged, the vision of a unified, mathematized physics could emerge, in which Euclidian space was the very embodiment of both ideals. Now, and only now, a clear-cut decision has to be made as to how God's ubiquity - to which the Lutherans added the ubiquity of Christ's body - had to be understood; to decide whether God must be placed within the universe, with or without a body, or outside of it (72).

The temptation of an embodied God (the heretical version, not the incarnate one) is now very near.

STEP 5: Think like Rene Descartes. That is, fuse your theological and physical arguments, and consider the constancy of God an actual law of physics. Cling to a residual medieval sense of God's transcendence, but exploit God's causality to the extreme (116), and good luck with the mind-body problems that will ensue.

STEP 6: Think like Henry More. While Descartes' Catholicism enabled him to grasp some aspects of transcendence, More's liberal Protestantism enabled him to go the whole way towards transposing panpsychism, even pantheism, into a "clear and distinct" Renaissance key (116). For More, God is a sort of "Spirit-in-Chief" "More admits, though not without initial hesitation, that [God] is extended; contrary to other spirits, however, his extension is infinite - it is space itself... More's concept of the divine amounts to the concept of a harmonious sum total of all mechanical and purposive forces in the universe. Such a God could not but be reasonable" (80).

STEP 7: Think like Spinoza. Slowly, after initially rejecting the idea, Spinoza would sign onto the embodied God as well, but this time without More's hesitations. Descartes' two substances - mind and matter - is thereby reduced to one: "In the Cogita, [Spinoza] seems to opt for one cognitive substance only, of which souls are presumably just so many modificatons" (83). Hence, Descartes' mind-body problem is solved, at the cost of pantheism. Why does God love us? For Spinoza, because we are a self-conscious portion of God, and "God loves himself with an infinite love" (Ethica 5 prop. 35, 1:266).

STEP 8: If you're not willing to go all the way toward pantheism with Spinoza, just Think like Newton. That is, demand the same level of clarity from Scripture and theology as you would from mathematics, and use God to explain the parts of physics you don't yet understand. As Newton "took God's spatial omnipresence more and more literally, he could burden God, the source of all power, with its conservation and mediation" (94). Furthermore, "Newton maintained that space and time are explicatory predicates to God's omnipresence and eternity, since these attributes should be understood literally and unequivocally... Space is indeed a sensorium Dei, a 'sense organ' of God" (94). Like Descartes, Newton had enough residual Christianity to keep from fully somatizing God, but the "new ideals of unequivocation and homogeneity" made this extremely difficult to avoid. The "God in the gaps" had been invented, a god waiting for advances in science to work him out of a job.

STEP 9: Let simmer, stir occasionally. Most of the hard work now is already done. A god who is

describable in unequivocal terms, or even given physical features and functions, eventually became all the easier to discard. As a scientific hypothesis, he was later shown to be superfluous; as a being, he was shown to be a mere hypostatization of rational, social, or psychological ideals and images... Once God regained transparency or even a body, he was all the easier to identify and to kill (116).

All that remains is to witness this god's "slow philosophical death - from Kant through Feuerbach to Nietzsche..."

STEP 10: Now, effortlessly fall in line with a supposedly "scientific worldview." Congratulations! You've arrived at the lockstep, group-think atheism based on the most basic of theological errors, and bound to the kind of Newtonian physics outmoded by contemporary science long ago. Here's a summary of the process:

The medieval sense of God's symbolic presence in his creation, and the sense of a universe replete with transcendent meanings and hints, had to recede if not to give way totally to the postulates of univocation and homogeneity in the seventeenth century. God's relation to the world had to be given a concrete physical meaning (25).

Science and this kind of god can't help but be at war, because they dwell on same turf.

ADDENDUM: Should one wish to avoid this process, simply refrain from STEP 1. Understand that one cannot understand normative Christian theology, which has long posited that God is spatially and temporally unfathomable. Brad Gregory, in a very fine article on the matter at hand, put it this way:

A radically transcendent God would be neither outside nor inside his creation. He would not hover beyond the universe (or multiple universes) at unimaginably enormous distances of billions of light-years. Rather, if real, such a God could be wholly present to everything in the natural world precisely and only because he would be altogether inconceivable in spatial categories. Divine transcendence would thus be not the opposite but the correlate of divine immanence. So too, God in this sort of view would be neither temporally prior to nor a cosmic observer of sequential events as they unfold, as if an extraordinarily remote cause of the Big Bang some fourteen or fifteen billion years ago were merely an updating of Voltaire's deistic watchmaker. Rather, God could be fully present to all events and every moment in time precisely and only because he would be altogether inconceivable in temporal categories. Divine eternity would then not be the opposite but the correlate of divine providence. [Accordingly] if God is real in a traditional, non-univocal way, then all legitimate religious language about God as God would have to be metaphorical in its intention and interpretation... This is the point of the apophatic discursive tradition in Christian theology, exemplified in the writings of the Cappadocian Church Fathers. It would then be a mistake born of dubious metaphysical assumptions to except or demand that God be rendered conceptually, linguistically, or scientifically accessible - as God is in the univocal metaphysics that underpins the "scientific worldview" (503-504).

So does one avoid the "natural vs. supernatural zero-sum game" between science and faith. "The findings of science," writes Gregory, "tend toward atheism only if one's theological conception of God presupposes [as in STEP 1] a univocal metaphysics" (507).

Thinking like that, however, would require one declaring independence from the self-imposed tutelage of the modern intellectual context traced above.

The Music Delusion

Unable to withstand the bracing logic of the new atheism, soon religion will be eliminated completely. It may then be time to consider the next frontier, to expose another phenomenon that has outlived any evolutionary purpose it might once have had: Music.

Certainly you've heard them blather, perhaps you were once one yourself: those sentimental, simple folk who claim that music "moves" them. To explain this supposed pleasure they point to empirically unsubstantiated "feelings." Conveniently, they insist that the measurement of this stimulation is beyond the reach of science. (Are they not grateful for antibiotics?) A further indicator of their quackery is the repeated insistence that "words cannot express" musically generated contentment. Are words, the traditional avenue of intelligent human expression, too difficult for these self-professed "music-lovers"? When will they have the courage to realize that music, better still, "music" does not even exist?

Science tells us that what primitive cultures once referred to as "music" is in fact the manipulation and arrangement of measurable sound waves. Sorry folks, so much for that "ineffable" symphony. The effect "music" has on the human organism, we now know, is a side-effect of this sound wave manipulation which, like most things, can be traced to the mating urge.

Yet why is our culture still so bound by what science has finally explained? "Music" departments persist in colleges and universities worldwide. Huge sums of money are wasted on its performance and "appreciation." A massive, corrupt industry duplicates this "music" to perpetuate its effect on common people, most of whom are ignorant of its evolutionary explanation.

It is bad enough that "music" fills concert halls and stadiums the world over, but often we brights are forced to listen to it even against our will, in cars, elevators, malls, grocery stores - it's everywhere. Courageous individuals without a sensibility for the appreciation or performance of "music" have in the past been unfairly stigmatized as having a "tin-ear." But modern science has vindicated our perspective, so here's a more accurate way label to label us: Just plain smart.

It's time for those of us who know "music" is superfluous evolutionary waste to finally be heard. The survival of the species may depend on it. You recall that supposedly innocuous "drummer boy?" Yeah right. More like "war boy." How many more armies will be inspired by this "music" as they march into battle to rip our delicate world apart? How many more politicians will use this "music" to rally ignorant masses to their ends? The stakes could not be higher. Science has finally pulled back the curtain on this tired phenomenon; bravely holding that curtain open may be the only thing that keeps our world intact.

Psychologizing Atheism

When I first came to Princeton I worked at a coffee shop, where the village atheist (of which there are a few), explained to me over the whir of the milk frother, that my faith was something that could be fixed. With the proper counseling, he repeated week after week, I could be made to see that it was all a psychologically motivated illusion. But couldn't, I wondered, the same be said of him? With the proper counseling, couldn't he be made to see that his atheism was a mere illusion that could be psychologically explained?

It was just a thought though. Never would I have expected that an NYU-tenured experimental psychologist would venture to verify the theory, as Paul Vitz does in this talk, expanded upon in the above book. Socialization-theory may claim to explain away religion, Vitz admits, but it can also ably explain its abandonment by upwardly mobile individuals seeking to get ahead in a secularized society. Freud's Oedipus complex, Vitz relates, does a much better job of explaining why someone would be an atheist (projected patricide) than a believer. Then come the atheist case-studies:

1. David Hume's father died when he was two.
2. Arthur Schopenhauer's father committed suicide when Arthur was sixteen.
3. Ludwig Feuerbach's father left the family to live with another woman when Ludwig was just thirteen.
4. Sigmund Freud's father was a coward and sexual pervert who was a painful embarassment to the family.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche's father died when he was four.
6. Jean Paul Sartre's dad died before Jean Paul was two.
7. Albert Camus' dad died just before Albert was born.
8. Russell Baker's father died when Russell was five.
9. Madalyn Murray O'Hair tried to kill her father with a kitchen knife.
10. Albert Ellis' father abandoned the family early on.

And those are just the famous cases. Vitz complements such accounts with other powerful examples culled from his experience as a prominent psychologist. He understands that ad hominem arguments are not arguments, but also that the above pattern is difficult to ignore. He refuses to generalize, his tone is professional, and most importantly in such sensitive cases, compassionate.

I thought I'd check the theory out, and wouldn't you know, Daniel Dennet (the Snark hunter) fits the bill. Not that one needs to go there to dismantle his ideas, but his father died in an unexplained plane crash when Daniel was five years old.

The God Delusion Delusion

Maybe the Nobel Prize went to his head. By the end of his career, Erwin Schrödinger, one of the most accomplished scientists of the last century, started saying science had, well, boundaries:

"I'm very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient.. gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all that is really important to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight, it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God or eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains but the answers are very often so silly that we're not inclined to take them seriously"

That quote is listed here (or if you prefer audio here), along with other scientists who understand the limits to their expertise.

But still, walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble, and there it is - the shiny silver book that claims to disprove God. But simply put, intelligent people are failing to take The God Delusion seriously. So I'd better post about it again before it becomes as dated as peg-leg jeans

Not that I would disregard my earlier advice, that religious people shouldn't bother themselves with debunking Dawkins. This of course because people with no overt claim to faith seem to be doing a fine job of it already. First professional Marxist Terry Eagleton went to town at the London Review of Books. Now biologist H. Allan Orr over at Fundamentalist Christian Weekly, I'm sorry, I mean the New York Review of Books does the same: Continue...

"Dawkins has written a book that's distinctly, even defiantly, middlebrow... The vacuum created by Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought must be filled by something, and in The God Delusion, it gets filled by extraneous quotation, letters from correspondents, and, most of all, anecdote after anecdote.

One reason for the lack of extended argument in The God Delusion is clear: Dawkins doesn't seem very good at it. Indeed he suffers from several problems when attempting to reason philosophically. The most obvious is that he has a preordained set of conclusions at which he's determined to arrive.

...the fact that we as scientists find a hypothesis question-begging - as when Dawkins asks 'who designed the designer?' - cannot, in itself, settle its truth value. It could, after all, be a brute fact of the universe that it derives from some transcendent mind, however question-begging this may seem. What explanations we find satisfying might say more about us than about the explanations. Why, for example, is Dawkins so untroubled by his own (large) assumption that both matter and the laws of nature can be viewed as given? Why isn't that question-begging?

...though I once labeled Dawkins a professional atheist, I'm forced, after reading his new book, to conclude he's actually more an amateur. I don't pretend to know whether there's more to the world than meets the eye and, for all I know, Dawkins's general conclusion is right. But his book makes a far from convincing case.

The most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. This is, obviously, an odd thing to say about a book-length investigation into God. But the problem reflects Dawkins's cavalier attitude about the quality of religious thinking. Dawkins tends to dismiss simple expressions of belief as base superstition. Having no patience with the faith of fundamentalists, he also tends to dismiss more sophisticated expressions of belief as sophistry...

...the result is The God Delusion, a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins's book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they're terminally ill?).

...his modus operandi generally involves comparing religion as practiced - religion, that is, as it plays out in the rough-and-tumble world of compromise, corruption, and incompetence - with atheism as theory. Fairness requires that we compare both religion and atheism as practiced or both as theory. The latter is an amorphous and perhaps impossible task, and I can see why Dawkins sidesteps it. But comparing both as practiced is more straightforward. And, at least when considering religious and atheist institutions, the facts of history do not, I believe, demonstrate beyond doubt that atheism comes out on the side of the angels. Dawkins has a difficult time facing up to the dual facts that (1) the twentieth century was an experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came before.

The God Delusion is not itself a work of either evolutionary biology in particular or science in general. None of Dawkins's loud pronouncements on God follows from any experiment or piece of data. It's just Dawkins talking."

Well it is silver though. And shiny! Maybe I should end on a positive note. Said R.R. Reno, "Give me the ardent atheism of Richard Dawkins any day over the pseudo-mystery and easy spiritualism of Paul Tillich."

Biologists Gone Wild

For those interested, here are a few more clips from David B. Hart's review of Breaking the Spell entitled Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark (available in the current First Things). To take Dennett's cue of the biological analogy, reading Hart is one way of developing immunity to the new atheism's very old line or reasoning - a mental virus called materialism.

Continue...

The essential vaccine can be obtained in these two paragraphs:

"Of course religion is a natural phenomenon. Who would be so foolish to deny that? Religion is ubiquitous in human culture and obviously constitutes an essential element in the evolution of society, and obviously has itself evolved. It is as natural to humanity as language or song or mating rituals. Dennett may imagine that such a suggestion is provocative and novel, and he may believe that there are legions of sincere souls out there desperately committed to the notion that religion itself is some sore of miraculous exception to the rule of nature, but, in either case he is deceived.

For one thing, it does not follow that, simply because religion as such is a natural phenomenon, it cannot become the vehicle of divine truth, or that it is not is some sense oriented toward a transcendent reality. To imagine it does is to fall prey to a version of the genetic fallacy, the belief that one need only determine the causal sequence by which something comes into being in order to understand its nature, meaning, content, uses, or value."

Then there is the claim that Dennett is himself quite religious:

"When Dennett proposes statistical analyses of different kinds of religion, to find out which are more evolutionarily perdurable, he exhibits a trust in the power of unprejudiced science to demarcate and define items of thought and culture like species of flora that verges on magical thinking. It is as if he imagines that by imitating the outward forms of scientific method, and by applying an assortment of superficially empirical theories to nonempirical realities, and by tirelessly gathering information, and by asserting the validity of his methods with an incantatory repetitiveness, and by invoking invisible agencies such as memes, and be fiercely believing in the efficacy of all that he is doing, he can summon for the actual hard clinical results, as from the treasure house of the gods."

The review is also not without a few ripostes:

"Using The Bellman's maxim, 'What I tell you three times is true,' is not alien to Dennett's method. He seems to work on the supposition that an assertion made with sufficient force and frequency is soon transformed, by some subtle alchemy, into a settled principle. And there are rather too many instances when Dennett seems either to clumsily to miss or willfully to ignore pertinent objections to his views and so races past them with a perfunctory wave in what he takes to be their general direction - though usually in another direction altogether.

There is his silly tendency to feign mental decrepitude when it serves his purposes, as when he pretends that the concept of God possesses too many variations for him to keep track of, or as when he acts scandalized by the revelation that academic theology sometimes lapses into a technical jargon full of obscure Greek terms like apophatic and ontic. And there are the historical errors, such as his ludicrous assertion that the early Christians regarded apostasy as a capital offense.

In the book's insufferably prolonged overture, he repeatedly tells his imaginary religious readers - in a tenderly hectoring tone, as if talking to small children or idiots - that they will probably not read his book to the end, that they may well think it immoral even to consider doing so, and that they are not courageous enough to entertain the doubts it will induce in them. Actually, there is nothing in the book that could possibly shake anyone's faith, and the only thing likely to dissuade religious readers from finishing it is its author's interminable proleptic effort to overcome their reluctance."

Finally, and most importantly perhaps, there is Hart's parting advice:

"If Dennett really wishes to undertake a scientific investigation of faith, he should promptly abandon his efforts to describe religion in the abstract and attempt instead to enter the actual world of belief in order to weigh its claims from within. As a first step, he should certainly - purely in the interest of sound scientific method and empirical rigor - begin praying. This is a drastic and implausible prescription, no doubt, but it is the only means by which he could possibly begin to acquire any knowledge of what belief is or what it is not."

Evolutionary Bi-ALL-ogy

The humanities are doomed. Hence I've decided to forego a career in art history. Hitherto my training has been a waste. Instead I will surrender the discipline to biologists, clearly the only field capable of commenting with authority on any subject. If, as the new atheism so persuasively claims, evolutionary biology is able to make perfect sense of a subject as complex as religion (explaining it by inventing the idea of "meme" which, because it's scientific, must be incontestible), how far away can biology be from explaining all facets of human experience and aspiration? The only smart thing to do is to abandon future biological sub-fields now. I eagerly anticipate forthcoming works that will account for masterpieces by genetic necessity alone, providing the long overdue biological take on Raphael, Rembrandt and Matisse.

But just as I was about to sign away my humanities graduate stipend to the biology department - what seemed the only honest option - I ran across David Bentley Hart's review of Dennet's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon that gave me doubts about what seemed an inevitable course of action.
Continue... Hart writes (in the current First Things),

Evolutionary biology is a science that investigates chains of physical causation and the development of organic life, and these are all it can investigate with any certainty. The moment its principles are extended into areas to which they are not properly applicable, it begins to cross the line from the scientific to speculative. This is fine, perhaps, so long as one is conscious from the first that one is proceeding in stochastic fashion and by analogy, and that one's conclusions will always be unable to command anyone's assent. When, though, those principles are translated into a universal account of things that are not in any definable way biological or physically causal, they have been absorbed into a kind of impressionistic mythology, or perhaps into a kind of metaphysics, one whose guiding premises are entirely unverifiable...

In the end, the most scientists of religion can do is to use biological metaphors to support (or, really, to illustrate) an essentially unfounded philosophical materialism. When they do this however, they are not investigating or explaining anything. They are merely describing a personal vision and will never arrive anywhere but where they began...

If one proceeds in that fashion, all one can ever really prove is that, with theories that are sufficiently vacuous, one can account for everything (which is to say, of nothing).

And so I began to wonder if perhaps I should stay in my chosen field after all. Maybe science explains some things well, and other things poorly. If the new atheism's account of religion was suspect, perhaps their pending account of the rest of the humanities was suspect as well. I kept reading:

The [new atheism's] task of delinieating the phenomenon of religion in the abstract becomes perfectly hopeless as soon as one begins to examine what particular traditions of faith actually claim, believe, or do...

Dennett is conscious of this 'hermeneutical objecton,' but he truculently dismisses it as an expression of territorial anxiety on the part of scholars in the humanities who hear the invasion of their discipline by little gray men in lab coats. His only actual reply to the objection, in fact, is simply to assert yet more stridently that human culture's 'webs of significance' (in Clifford Geertz's phrase) can be analyzed by methods that critically involve experiments and the disciplined methods of the natural sciences.

Well, if Dennett going to resort to italics (that most devastatingly persuasive weapon in the dialectician's arsenal), I can do little more than shamelessly lift a page from his rhetorical portfolio and reply: No, they cannot. This is not a matter of territoriality or of resistance to the most recent research but of simple logic. There can be no science of any hard empirical variety when the very act of identifying one's object of study is already an act of interpretation, contingent on a collection of purely arbitrary reductions, dubious categorizations, and biased observations. There can be no meaningful application of experimental method. There can be no correlation established between biological and cultural data. It will always be impossible to verify either one's evidence or one's conclusions - indeed, impossible even to determine what the conditions of verification should be.

Does Hart mean that success in a laboratory does not instantly translate into success in all cultural, anthropological, and spiritual fields of inquiry? Maybe there is a reason to stay in the humanities after all. Furthermore, how nice to see the hermeneutical complexities of postmodern theory marshaled to unmask the new atheistm's conceit.

Guess I'll stick with art history. Maybe, taking a cue from the new atheists, I'll even begin to use its methods to account for science, interpreting molecular structures based on what we know of 14th century German altarpieces!

No, that would be inane.

Atheist, Agnostic, Christian

Atheist or agnostic I am not. Why? Among other reasons, because neither perspective, it seems to me, makes the best sense of reality; I have therefore strapped myself to the church's mast that I might refuse such siren songs.

Do atheists and agnostics still have good insights to offer? Of course, insights which - should they be true - Christianity can ably absorb.

"The very nature of a true philosophy relatively to other systems is to be polemical, eclectic, unitive: Christianity was polemical; it could not but be eclectic; but was it also unitive? Had it the power, while keeping its own identity, of absorbing its antagonists, as Aaron's rod, according to St. Jerome's illustration, devoured the rods of the sorcerers of Egypt" (Chp. 8)?

Why yes, Mr. Newman. Christianity did so absorb the insights of other philosophies and faiths - and still does.

And while I tried to make a case below that any truth in atheism is in fact absorbed by the Christian faith, I'd thought I'd do the same (again) for agnosticism. Wrote Patrick Henry,

"Things do not proceed [in orthodox Christianity] in an uncluttered, straightforward way. On the contrary, argument is constantly getting tripped up in the tangled underbrush of paradox, and it might almost be a general rubric for oikonomeia [God's dealing with creation] that any assertion which forces the mind out beyond what it would normally accept is probably true" (Church History, vol. 45, No.1 p. 23).

Example?

"He who cannot be contained is confined within the Virgin's womb; he who is beyond all quantity becomes three cubits high; he whose position cannot be designated stands and sits and reclines; he who is beyond all place is laid in a manger; he who is before all time reaches the age of twelve; he who is without form is seen in the form of a man; he who is incorporeal takes a body and says to his disciples: 'Take, eat, this is my body'" (Patrologia Graeca 99.332B)

That brilliant quote from St. Theodore (translated by Henry). Can anyone really understand the mystery that the Advent season prepares us to celebrate? Not if you're a Christian - you can only confess and adore a mystery beyond knowledge. Therefore perhaps only a Christian can be a genuine agnostic (lit. without knowledge); while at the same time, possessing the greatest knowledge of all.

Aaron's rod - it's still hungry. Happy Advent everybody.