Telling Stories

The following is attributed to Archbishop Rowan Williams in a talk on theology and science delivered last night (I think). I am attempting to confirm this attribution by someone I know who I believe was at the talk last night. Here's the quote:

Both Neo Darwinism and Christianity are telling stories. Christianity acknowledges that fact, Neo Darwinism doesn't.

By Neo Darwinism the AB has in his sites the likes of Dawkins, Hitchins and Dennet. There's something right about what the AB says (if in fact he said it) and yet something not quite right, too. Dawkins is a very good scientist and when he's talking science, he's not telling stories. He's offering compelling scientific explanations of natural phenomena. It's when he stops doing science and begins to say silly things that have nothing to do with science and he fails to notice that he has ceased doing science that he is indeed telling stories and indeed fails to acknowledge it.

Christianity is a comprehensive story. It's not, I think, nor does it purport to be, a naturalistic explanation of things. Which is not to say that it's not an explanation of sorts. But it is surely a grand story and acknoweldges as much.

That's my take anyway. Yours?

The Atheist Delusion?

The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today secular faith
is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

That from a recent article in London's Guardian by John Gray which is sure to be of interest to readers of this blog. Gray argues in some detail for a point I tried to make here in Is Religious Identity the Enemy of Global Harmony? He takes on Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens and the religious despisers of our day and shows pretty convincingly how they both live off the capital of religious history and embody some of the worst
features of fundamentalist forms of Christianity and Islam, in particular. My favorite lines from the article are these:

Religion has not gone away. Repressing it is like repressing sex, a self-defeating enterprise.

Definitely worth a read. And I'd be interested to know what you make of it.

Honest When You’re Telling a Lie*

Over at Quintessence of Dust, my good friend Steve Matheson has posted an excellent piece on an outfit called “Reasons to Believe” and one of its spokesman, a guy named Hugh Ross. Now, for the record, I had never heard of RtB or Hugh Ross before Steve brought them to my attention some time ago now. What I like about this post of Steve’s, and about his response to a comment by someone called ‘jsbangs’ and about Steve’s entire blog is the care he takes to sort out issues, make useful and helpful distinctions and set the record straight about the biology and science often at issue in debates about faith and science.

In this particular post, Steve takes Hugh Ross to task for peddling what is fairly obviously misinformation and outright falsehoods. What I’m interested in, however, is something Steve and I have often discussed with respect to RtB; namely, when HR makes statements like this

The assumption that the non-protein-coding part of the genome served no purpose caused researchers to abandon study of its features for nearly three decades. Then a team of physicists made an observation that revived interest. They noticed that the quantity of "junk" in a species' genome was proportional to that species' degree of advancement.

is he lying? What he says is false. But Steve recognizes the difference between saying something false and lying. And he thinks HR is lying. But is he? I have my doubts.

When someone lies they intentionally communicate a falsehood with the intention to deceive their listener. Communicating a falsehood and intending to deceive one’s listener though necessary for lying are not sufficient. If they were sufficient for lying, then actors qua actors would be lying every time they take the stage or go before the camera. So too all who play poker and have ever bluffed and all those who have ever played basketball and pump faked their defender and then driven to the basket. So, you’re not lying unless you communicate a falsehood with the intent to deceive, but communicating falsehood and intending to deceive are not enough to make what you communicate a lie.

I’m interested in this HR character and his outfit RtB which, as best I can tell, are guilty of perpetuating falsehoods in their apologetic endeavor to defend the rational integrity of theism. There’s no doubt they are purveyors of falsehoods. But is HR, in Steve’s words, guilty of an “outrageous lie”? Is he guilty of “outright fabrication”? Fabrication maybe. Lying? I'm not so sure.

Lying is morally blameworthy. HR is culpable too it seems. But not for lying. He is to be blamed for carelessness in research, misunderstanding, misattributing, misstating and misrepresenting facts, not to mention for making stuff up. But I don’t think Ross is lying. I think he’d need to be first of all a biologist and second of all a competent biologist. A quick glance at his website reveals that he is neither. His BA is in physics and his MA and Ph.D. are both in Astronomy. So what's going on in the case of HR and RtB?

Here’s what I think is going on. I think the apologetic agenda of RtB partly accounts for what HR “finds” in his research. And when something he regards as especially advantageous to furthering the cause of RtB is “found” (like the non-coding DNA elements Steve mentions in his post) HR’s enthusiasm gets the better of him and leads him to say such wildly implausible things as that a “veritable frenzy of research” (which is false) followed on the heels of a discovery by a “team of physicists” (false and false—that the team was a team of physicists is false and that there was the putative discovery is false). But those claims, though false, do not amount to lies I think. They amount to something for which HR and RtB are morally blameworthy (such as those things I mention in the paragraph above), but not lying.

What do you think?
*I take this title from the lyrics of Wilco's Misunderstood, a great song off a great album (Being There).