Noted atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett was spreading his ‘gospel’ at Harvard recently, i.e., his new book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Dennett opened ironically by embracing naturalism, a religion rooted in natural phenomenon. He even encouraged donations to the lecture’s sponsor, the Center for Naturalism. This immediately brought to mind what might have been the reaction if, say, Exxon Mobil, had sponsored a lecture by Pat Michaels, a noted skeptic of global warming.
It is striking the extent to which secularists, the driving force behind the modern skeptical movement, are themselves insular to skepticism. If you are willing to stand up and be counted as a vocal critic of superstition, then anything you believe is presumptively rational.
This little backslapping between Dennett and a former student who runs this center is just the tip of the iceberg of the inextricable links between skepticism and the push for a humanist ethic. There is a yin and yang quality to this fact. It implicitly concedes that banishing religious arguments from political discourse leaves a vacuum of values. Ironically, this makes a paragon of philosophy like Dennett an empirical rather than philosophical skeptic.
Meanwhile, empiricists like myself find themselves philosophical skeptics, doubting that there is an absolute truth. This isn’t to say that a reasonable, if fallible, understanding of right and wrong cannot be derived in the human sphere. But I think it decidedly suspicious that atheists always set themselves up as the new moralists – as Pink Floyd aptly observed: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. Paul Kurtz, chairman of the skeptical humanist confab Center for Inquiry (CFI), attempted to slay this rhetorical dragon thusly.
“Pope Benedict XVI … declar[ed] that “secularization” and “relativism” were leading to a breakdown of “the moral order.” … [CFI] pointed out in response that secular morality has well-established principles and values and that its ethical judgments are amenable to rational criticism and modification—unlike absolute theological codes…”
I decided to test this distinction by questioning the derivation of Dennett’s ethics. He had slipped seamlessly from ‘breaking the spell’ of religion to casting his own, citing an analysis by Paul MacCready (noted for the design of successful human powered flight) that found the pre-agricultural human biomass footprint was 1/10th of 1 per cent of the vertebrate population whereas the current ratio is 98 per cent human related, i.e. humanity itself plus domestic vertebrates.
This postulate seemed to perfectly crystalize the false dichotomy offered by naturalism, humanism, secularism, you-name-itism, that purports to replace religion with scientifically derived values. Secularists argue that MacCready’s maxim is testable, while the resurrection, creation and other articles of faith fail such testing, or defy it altogether.
That is vaguely true, so far as it goes. But when you look at the scientific propositions advanced by secularists as useful in daily life, they have a decidedly qualitative rather than quantitative precision. Vertebrate biomass is a natural phenomenon, but establishing a pre-agricultural zoological census is informed speculation at best. Even positing a current ratio is modeling more than counting. But the larger point is, even if you gain some consensus on historic or contemporary ratios, this says nothing whatsoever about the correct ratio.
The unifying thesis behind this kind of science, chosen as important by secularists, is essentially a retelling of the fallibility of man – what, after all, is so different between their outlook and the idea of the forbidden fruit. Advancing these sensational natural phenomenon is designed to create gnawing doubt that man’s pursuit of technology and industry in the furtherance of economic society can be considered objectively good.
How does enlightenment thinking, that fueled western civilization’s progress along these now ‘suspect’ lines, figure in secularist attacks on the status quo. It might seem counterintuitive for scientists to decry the society resulting in no small part from the enlightenment. But humanist gurus like E.O. Wilson demur, arguing that the enlightenment simply is not complete because modern man has not submitted to the authority of science in the social realm. What a coincidence, that the value system striving to replace religion on the cultural side, has a plan to take over government as well – holism takes on a new meaning.
But, back at the lecture, suppose that one simply concedes the obvious: that the human component, as a percentage of the vertebrate total has changed significantly since the inception of agriculture. Does this lead to any moral rules?
Taken at its purely empirical level, it would seem that humans are the fittest. Indeed, even if The Origin of Species is your bible, a reasonable choice at that, the Genesis idea of dominion doesn’t seem to have been a myth at all. Taken as a metaphor or a parable foreshadowing man’s place in the world, you could certainly call its authors visionary forerunners to Darwin.
Some folks take Genesis literally, which is probably no sillier than believing what Lester Brown and Paul Ehrlich have to say. I have the perspective of believing in no sense what the Bible says. It is a historical novel. It has both a literary and superstitious staying quality that I suspect won’t be supplanted by similar less sweeping efforts, e.g. the Da Vinci code, the Population Bomb or Earth in the Balance. Certainly tomes of the latter genre gerrymander anecdotes of natural phenomenon into secularist books of Revelations.
But is this how Dennett views MacCready’s credo on vertebrate ratio? His first response regarding the lessons of this MacCready maxim was that kind of disdainful dismissal intended to convey the message that the teachings are obvious. Noticing that I was perhaps too dense to see even the obvious, he grabbed a copy of his book, Breaking the Spell, to quote the statistic in the context he sees it — with a description of earth as thinly veneered with green and blue and man now holding the paintbrush.
It may seem that Dennett is simply referring to the obvious caution that man’s enormous ecological success coupled with unique consciousness militates for an ethic of stewardship. There is no small coincidence that this very idea is being used to crosspollinate liberal churches. But this mission to humanity, epitomized by the approach in both the sacred and secular contexts, attempts to draw much more than mild derivative truisms from postulates such as MacCready’s.
It provides cover for various gurus touting their own versions of ecological armageddon the opening to advance emotionally supported ideas of substantive stewardship disguised as science. This goes back to the question of whether one can scientifically derive a correct MacCready ratio, or can really answer any such ‘balance’ questions scientifically — given that value judgments are currently the only way to establish real world targets and that politically contrived economic dislocation is certainly the only way to compel society to observe it.
Simply because he is blind to the religious quality of his own ethics, doesn’t prevent Dennett from usefully inquiring into religions grip. In fact his own beliefs essentially demonstrate the merits a premise he advances, that religion evolves in a kind of institutional darwinism. He presented one of the possible evolutionary plateaus as the “Creedless Moral Team”. This would encompass everything from Amway to the growth of megachurches where Dennett sees membership as a matter of belonging to something larger than oneself, rather than a clear commitment to underlying dogma. But, if the humanist ethical alternative is about submitting to contrived venn diagrams of natural phenomenon — and not some methodical and logically defensible resort to analytical science — then its moral foundation crumbles, even while its creed of earth worship remains. What Dennett offers is a Moral-less Creed Team. I won’t be joining.
