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Ruse’s Atheism Book [EvolutionBlog]
I’ve started reading Michael Ruse’s book Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University Press earlier this year. Ruse is a philosopher at Florida State University, but he has turned himself into something of a crackpot over the last ten years. He’s edited two books with ID proponent Bill Dembski, has picked foolish fights with his colleagues, and has engaged in laughably over-the-top rhetoric towards the New Atheists. Most memorably, he once said in an interview: “And this is why I think the New Atheists are a disaster, a danger to the wellbeing of America comparable to the Tea Party.” In a later interview he confirmed that he meant this literally, and was not just exaggerating to make a point. I would think that such a statement simply places you outside the bounds of honest discussion. The Tea Party has taken over Congress and has a real shot at picking the next President, while the New Atheists have published a few books no one is forced to read and maintain a few websites no one is forced to visit. The former development seems like a bigger danger to the wellbeing of America than the latter.
That said, I was curious to see how Ruse does an atheism book. My view on the New Atheists is that the world is a better place for them, and that atheism is in a much healthier place today than it was before they published their books, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also think they sometimes make life too easy for their critics. So when Ruse’s book showed up in the New Books section of the university library, I quickly checked it out.
I’m only thirty pages in, but I’m not optimistic that it’s going to get any better. Here’s what he says about Galileo:
That Galileo ran into problems with the church because he endorsed Copernicus’s heliocentric (sun-centered) worldview does show that there were significant tensions. But the clash was never quite what later anti-religious zealots made it out to be. It occurred a hundred years after Copernicus, during the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholics were firmly shutting the stable door after the fleeing of the Protestants. It should never have happened, but students of the episode all stress that much of the problem was brought on Galileo by himself. To say he was tactless is a bit like saying Hitler had a thing about the Jews. He set out to rub the authorities the wrong way, and having been parodied as a near-moron in Galileo’s writing–writings in the vernacular so everyone could read them–it is hardly surprising that the pope reacted badly and strongly. (p. 20)
That’s pretty vile.
I’m sure Ruse intended his Hitler analogy to be funny, but it’s an obscene comparison. Hitler’s thing about the Jews was that they were evil and deserved to be genocided. Galileo just thought the Pope was wrong on a question of astronomy and made fun of him in a book. The equivalency is lost on me.
And the Pope did not just react “badly and strongly.” He had Galileo hauled before the Inquisition, which threatened him with torture and imprisonment unless he read the most humiliating recantation, and then sentenced him to life imprisonment anyway before later commuting the sentence to house arrest. I’d say that’s very bad and very strong.
But it’s even worse than that. The premise of Ruse’s argument is that Galileo’s tactlessness is some sort of mitigation for the Church’s actions. As he tells it, anti-religious zealots try to make the Galileo affair into a straightforward story of science vs. religion, but serious students understand that Galileo largely brought it on himself by being a dick. The modern version of the argument is that Charlie Hebdo had it coming for publishing offensive cartoons or that Salman Rushdie deserved what he got for being insensitive to Muslims. This is a pernicious and evil argument that amounts to an apology for terrorists, or, in the Galileo case, for an authoritarian religious institution.
The fact is that the Galileo story is exactly what Ruse’s “anti-religious zealots” say it is. It so perfectly expresses the conflict between science and religion that the most hard-core atheist could not have scripted it better. Galileo got into trouble not just because he advocated heliocentrism, but because he argued that scientific questions should be answered by science and not by scripture. That was anathema to The Church. Church authorities spent years lecturing Galileo on precisely what he was and was not allowed to say. They exercised near-total thought control over acceptable opinion at that time. What does Ruse think a conflict between science and religion looks like?
Of course, the revisionists in the “science and religion” industry tell it differently. They have concocted a story in which the Catholic Church positively loved science, with Galileo being a weird, easily ignored, aberration. But this is just nonsense. The Church did encourage certain systematic investigations into nature, because such investigations could further religious ends, but that is a far cry from saying they were supportive of science. Their attitude was that revelation as understood by the Church authorities was supreme, and that science existed only to service the needs of religion. Indeed, that is still their view, and it is one they would enforce today were they suddenly returned to the sort of power they had in the Middle Ages. And if that happened, would Ruse or his fellow apologists really be inclined to defend them against the charge of being anti-science?
I’ve relegated Ruse’s book to the status of bathroom reading. I’m still morbidly curious about what he has to say, but I doubt if the book is going to get any better.
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2015/11/14/ruses-atheism-book/
