Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Israeli MP blames quakes on gays, BBC, Feb. 20, 2008

An Israeli MP has blamed parliament’s tolerance of gays for earthquakes that have rocked the Holy Land recently.

Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, said the tremors had been caused by lawmaking that gave “legitimacy to sodomy”.

Israel decriminalised homosexuality in 1988 and has since passed several laws recognising gay rights.

Two earthquakes shook the region last week and a further four struck in November and December.

‘The God Delusion’ - The New York Review of Books, March 1, 2007

By Daniel C. Dennett, Reply by H. Allen Orr

In response to A Mission to Convert (January 11, 2007)

To the Editors:

H. Allen Orr, in “A Mission to Convert” [NYR, January 11], his review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and other recent books on science and religion, says that Dawkins is an amateur, not professional, atheist, and has failed to come to grips with “religious thought” with its “meticulous reasoning” in any serious way. He notes that the book is “defiantly middlebrow,” and I wonder just which highbrow thinkers about religion Orr believes Dawkins should have grappled with. I myself have looked over large piles of recent religious thought in the last few years in the course of researching my own book on these topics, and I have found almost all of it to be so dreadful that ignoring it entirely seemed both the most charitable and most constructive policy. (I devote a scant six pages of Breaking the Spell to the arguments for and against the existence of God, while Dawkins devotes roughly a hundred, laying out the standard arguments with admirable clarity and fairness, and skewering them efficiently.) There are indeed recherché versions of these traditional arguments that perhaps have not yet been exhaustively eviscerated by scholars, but Dawkins ignores them (as do I) and says why: his book is a consciousness-raiser aimed at the general religious public, not an attempt to contribute to the academic microdiscipline of philosophical theology. The arguments Dawkins exposes and rebuts are the arguments that waft from thousands of pulpits every week and reach millions of television viewers every day, and neither the televangelists nor the authors of best-selling spiritual books pay the slightest heed to the subtleties of the theologians either.

H. Allen Orr, A Mission to Convert - The New York Review of Books, January 11, 2007

Scientists’ interest in religion seems to come in waves. One arrived after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Another followed in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired by surprising revelations from quantum mechanics, which suggested the insufficiency of conventional physical theories of the universe. And now scientists are once again writing about religion, apparently provoked this time by the controversy surrounding intelligent design.

During the last year, a number of popular books on religion by scientists or philosophers of science have appeared. Daniel Dennett kicked things off with his Breaking the Spell (2006), an investigation into the possibility of a science of religion. Reviewing evolutionary, psychological, and economic theories of the origin and spread of belief, Dennett covered much ground but reached few conclusions. In the last few months, three prominent scientists—all biologists—have published their own books on belief. Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has given us The God Delusion, an extended polemic against faith, which will be considered at length below.

Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, Reply by Richard C. Lewontin, ‘Higher Superstition’: An Exchange - The New York Review of Books, December 3, 1998

Among the polemical lions of The New York Review, a few are by now (if truth be known) quite gone in the teeth. Richard Lewontin is one of the dentally challenged. Consider, for illustration, his obiter dictum on Higher Superstition, and thereby on us, its authors [NYR, October 22]. It and we are mocked as “naive” and “obtuse” for having dared to suggest that natural science is concerned with, and responsive to, the real world. (Advanced social thinkers, presumably, know better.) “Naive” and “obtuse” are odd charges coming from one who has for so long trodden the tortuous road of orthodox Marxism.

Nevertheless he must be serious in these derogations. Whether there is a real world or not, Lewontin does not doubt his own ability to know how things really are. And he has railed elsewhere against Higher Superstition, particularly in a review, a few years back, for the journal Configurations. He derided us there for choosing easy targets, for dealing with writers so foolish and insignificant as to be not worth refuting. We were also denounced for embracing the unspeakable—sociobiology.

Lewontin must have failed to notice, however, that a number of those simpletons and obscurities not worth refuting were members of the Configurations editorial board, or prominent fellow contributors to its pages. Presumably they didn’t notice, either. Even stranger was his failure to notice that Higher Superstition had nothing to say about sociobiology, favorable or otherwise. The only reference to it was in an endnote, added in proof, remarking that Andrew Ross (later to be a source of innocent merriment in connection with the Sokal hoax) is eager to defame E.O. Wilson in connection with sociobiology, but has nothing at all to say about Wilson’s powerful advocacy in aid of biodiversity and other ecological causes with which Ross likes to associate himself.

Lewontin, Survival of the Nicest? - The New York Review of Books, December 15, 2005

In Higher Superstition, a book remarkable both for its influence on the intellectual community and for its obtuse ignorance of the actual state of science, the authors told us that

Science is, above all else, a reality-driven enterprise…. Reality is the overseer at one’s shoulder, ready to rap one’s knuckles or to spring the trap into which one has been led…by a too complacent reliance on mere surmise…. Reality is the unrelenting angel with whom scientists have agreed to wrestle.[1]

Any reader who wants to test this charmingly naive view of science should immerse himself or herself in the literature of evolutionary biology. Indeed, the immersion does not have to be very deep before the currents and countercurrents of ideology can be felt tugging at one’s understanding. Unto Others, a collaboration between Elliott Sober, one of the founders of the modern philosophy of biology, and David Sloan Wilson, one of the most creative theoreticians in evolutionary studies, wades into this turbulent stream at precisely the point where so many other adventurers have been swept away: the problem of the origin of altruistic behavior. Can natural selection have made us genuinely cooperative and unselfish in pursuit of the greater good of the many, or is apparent altruism nothing but an artfully disguised version of every man for himself? Have Professors Sober and Wilson really collaborated in order to spread enlightenment, or are they engaged only in a bit of academic career building, each using the other as a tool of their separate ambitions?

Darwinism, born in ideological struggle, has never escaped from an intimate reciprocal relationship with world views exported from and imported into the science. No one challenges the claim that evolutionary theory has had a wide effect on social theory. It is a cliché of cultural history that the explanation of evolution by natural selection served as an ideological justification for laissez-faire competitive capitalism and the colonial domination of the lesser breeds without the law. Nor are these evidences only of the quaint naiveté of the nineteenth century. Social Darwinism has had a continuous and vigorous life until today. Only three years ago a leading publisher of psychological monographs produced a book by a professor of psychology at a first-rank Canadian university claiming that the evident moral and cognitive superiority of Europeans over Africans was a consequence of natural selection in a cold rather than tropical climate. All the Africans got out of their experience of the survival of the fittest were greater libidos and longer penises.[2] The slightest suggestion, however, that evolutionary biology has imported some of its conclusions from social theory and political prejudice will be greeted by incredulity and indignation on the part of scientists convinced of the intellectual autonomy of the study of nature. Even those who insist that they concentrate on the “internal” history of science agree that Darwin’s notion of the struggle for existence, and the consequent differential survival of those types with greater fitness for the struggle, owed a great deal to the economic and social theorists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Dugald Stewart and the Scottish economists; and they recognize that so-called “Social Darwinism” was a popular ideology long before the composition of the Origin of Species.

Richards and Lewontin, Darwin & Progress - The New York Review of Books, December 15, 2005

In his review of Michael Ruse’s Evolution– Creation Struggle and Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd’s Not by Genes Alone [NYR, October 20], Richard Lewontin offers typically insightful analyses of the conflict that has arisen between creationists and IDers on the one hand and evolutionary biologists on the other. As well, he offers salutary cautions about the application of general models of cultural change based on evolutionary theory. He may be quite right that a deep fear of meaninglessness urges many individuals to fly to higher, governing powers and to reject the Darwinian slough of chance. Though Lewontin seems to agree with Ruse that some scientists mount the pulpit in trying to extend evolutionary considerations into all corners of human life, he yet chides him for locating the nub of the dispute in two different notions of progress, that characterizing Darwinism and that endemic to the old-time religion—the one leading nowhere in particular, the other to the ultimate transformation.

Lewontin supposes that Darwin kept the ideology of progress from sullying his own theory. He offers as an index of Darwin’s freedom from taint the presumed fact that the word “evolution” (which in the embryological domain had been used to describe a predetermined unfolding) is absent from the first edition of the Origin. Well, not exactly. Rather famously the last sentence of the book hits the rhetorical high mark with “endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved.” Later editions do not shy from use of the noun form of the word, nor does the Descent of Man.

But more importantly, Darwin’s deeply ingrained sense that his theory explained progress in organisms permeates his text. In the first edition, he does not hesitate to say: “And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection” (p. 489). And elsewhere he affirms that “in one particular sense the more recent forms must, on my theory, be higher than the more ancients; for each new species is formed by having had some advantage in the struggle for life over other and preceding forms” (p. 337). The embryo of more advanced creatures, he believed (though couldn’t prove), displayed “a sort of picture, preserved by nature, of the ancient and less modified condition of each animal” (p. 338). In the Descent of Man, he had the task of explaining why the reprobate Irish seemed to be winning in the struggle for life by leaving more offspring than the virtuous Scots and English, certainly more progressive types. After analyzing the problem he concluded that since the profligate suffer greater mortality, perhaps natural selection had not been thrown out of gear. Darwin concluded that while progress was not inevitable or the result of any innate tendency, it was general and the somewhat chancy product of the manifold operations of natural selection. To render Darwin’s theory as bereft or antithetic to the notion of organic and social progress is to make him into a thoroughly modern neo-Darwinian, which he certainly was not.

Richard C. Lewontin, The Wars Over Evolution - The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005

1.The development of evolutionary biology has induced two opposite reactions, both of which threaten its legitimacy as a natural scientific explanation. One, based on religious convictions, rejects the science of evolution in a fit of hostility, attempting to destroy it by challenging its sufficiency as the mechanism that explains the history of life in general and of the material nature of human beings in particular. One demand of those who hold such views is that their competing theories be taught in the schools.

The other reaction, from academics in search of a universal theory of human society and history, embraces Darwinism in a fit of enthusiasm, threatening its status as a natural science by forcing its explanatory scheme to account not simply for the shape of brains but for the shape of ideas. The Evolution–Creation Struggle is concerned with the first challenge, Not By Genes Alone with the second.

A law contrived in secret - Haaretz, Feb. 21, 2008

Following 60 years since the historic error of not separating religion from the state, the government is now expanding the authority of religion in the judiciary. Instead of heading the opposite way and taking away from the rabbinical courts their monopoly in matters of marriage and divorce, the state is now granting them further decision making powers in civil matters.

According to the bill prepared by the ministerial committee on legislation, the citizens of Israel will not be able to choose what kind of court will deliberate their disputes on capital, property and contracts. Will they choose to be judged according to the law of the Torah, or according to the law of the Knesset? All this was contrived nearly in total secret in the prime ministers bureau, in order to please Shas, with the assistance of ministers Yitzhak Herzog and Ruhama Avraham.

This superfluous piece of proposed legislation is even being presented as an achievement to womens organizations, because it blocked a much worse bill. This distortion of the facts is nothing more than a rude spin.

Over the years, the rabbinical courts have taken upon themselves authority that had not been granted to them by law, and transformed themselves into arbitrators and judges in a variety of matters. Two years ago, Supreme Court Justice Ayala Procaccia ruled that the rabbinical courts are delving in areas that are beyond their authority. Since then, Shas tried to overturn that ruling and to anchor the practice already rejected by law, which would allow the rabbis to rule also on civil matters and not only on marriage and divorce.