Nic Tamzek

THis has come up in the Dawkins Attacks!! thread, but I didn't want to distract too much from the curriculum-related discussion that came up there.

I think Ruse here has a pretty reasonable view on the science and metaphysics of people like Dawkins, and may be better at striking the right balance than those of us trying to express the idea that we love much of Dawkins but also think he sometimes goes overboard on the metaphysics.

I'm posting the article here...discuss amongst yourselves:

PERCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE:
Is Evolution a Secular Religion?
Michael Ruse*

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/conten.../299/5612/1523

{Rufus: Edited to just give the link.}

Clutch

Parts of that are interesting, Nik -- thanks. But I just don't get this one quasi-critical point Ruse that tries to make.

The "alternative to religion" claim is either a claim about the intentions and psychology of the particular people who apply the notion of evolution beyond the biological, in which case Ruse neither has nor could hope to have evidence for it, or it's a claim about the social or structural similarities between that application of evolutionary theory and religions in general, in which it just seems transparently false.

Ruse has started to verge on the production of meaningless soothing sounds, as his most recent niche in the analysis of creationism. "There's good and there's bad in it... well, not really bad, but sort of all the same... but I couldn't tell you why... anyhow, can't we all just get along?"

Nic Tamzek

I think Ruse is arguing the former, and he would say that all you have to do to figure out the "psychology and intentions" of these people is to read what they write.

No, I think Ruse is just trying to distinguish atheism vs. Christianity from evolution vs. creationism. E.g. his book Can a Darwinian be a Christian?

FWIW, I went to a Ruse talk once and one of the official discussants argued that Ruse was putting too much of the "blame" on Huxley. I think this critique may have some merit, Huxley did go after Biblical literalism and the New Testament on occasion, but he also invented agnosticism, which pretty much said that atheism and theism fell into the same trap. And IIRC Huxley argued that human progress came about by rebelling against the evolutionary processes that produced us, not by emulating those processes.