The increasingly ill tempered debate between scientists and religionists has become a bum fight – an unedifying tragicomedy offering some guilty laughs for bystanders. Here we see Dawkins applying his knee to the Papal groin for something he didn’t say while down the alley Monsignor Carrasco affords the Nobel committee a taste of asphalt for recognising a man who has made millions of people happy and, no doubt, added to the Catholic flock.
Now in a bitchy article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the usually estimable Carlin Romano has tried to use a cripple as a punching bag for poking his tongue at God. And Romano has emerged from the encounter with his credibility damaged.
Eschewing Jesus’ advice to turn the other cheek, (the most selectively applied of Christian maxims), Romano has risen to Stephen Hawking’s recent baits that philosophy is dead as it hasn’t kept pace with science, which alone can explain the universe, and that it isn’t necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
But Romano has not just risen to the bait, he’s leapt from the still waters of religious reflection, performed a few unbecoming epistemological contortions in flight, and impaled himself on Hawking’s twin barbs.
Once the smooth surface of his prose has been scratched, his response is a combination of nastiness, contradictions and illogicality. Most clearly, Romano demonstrates the futility of the debate. The two sides aren’t even playing by the same rules.
Romano is a Fellow of the John Templeton Foundation which he spruiks as specialising in prodding believers and nonbelievers to discuss things in a civilized way. However, with his next breath he refers to Hawking’s statements as an “ex cathedra squawk” – a combination of sarcasm and, as he’s referring to a man with a mechanical voice, tactlessness (at best).
Elsewhere, he refers to Hawking’s smugness, sarcastically to Hawking’s “media echo chamber”, the media’s portrayal of him as a genius and that “a genius, presumably, must be right about anything. Especially if he managed to sell nine million copies of a book.”
Miaow! Do we detect a twinge of jealousy, perhaps, Romano?
The main criticism of Romano’s article does not concern his incivility but his attempt to dupe the reader into thinking that there is a philosophical “antidote” to Hawking’s claim that only science can explain the universe.
In doing so he invokes Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stephen Toulmin, the latter of which he claims “inoculated us against the naïve view that science shows God does not exist and is irrelevant to cosmology”. Us? Perhaps Romano means “me”. And where is the claim that science shows God does not exist? Indeed, one page earlier Romano quotes Hawking as saying, that “one cannot prove that God doesn’t exist.”
For that matter, what does Romano mean by “cosmology”? Is it the same as Hawking’s meaning? If Hawking only refers to the modern meaning of the science of the origin and development of the universe and Romano to the ancient meaning of holistic theories of the order the universe not confined to science, then they are using different linguistic tokens. They are speaking different languages.
At least Romano allows Toulmin to speak on this, noting that in ancient times, “Toulmin pointed out, cosmology meant more than how the universe mechanically operates. Rather, it captured the Greek notion that the entire world ‘forms a single, integrated system united by universal principles’”.
This is the point. Romano, Wittgenstein and Toulmin are speaking from the perspective of a “‘traditional world picture’ [that] happily combined ‘an astronomical, a teleological and a theological picture’”. Hawking is not. But that doesn’t stop Romano from seeing a dispute when there isn’t one. Sure, Hawking started it (this time) but for Romano to rush into the melee, head down, windmilling his arms when there is no fight isn’t smart - particularly when the first casualty is his credibility.
After a bit of Hawking bashing, Romano settles into his work by offering what he describes as a thumbnail of what Wittgenstein and Toulmin “taught us” about religion, science, and cosmology. Again, he presumes to speak for “us”. He also informs us of what we were “taught”. Their arguments are not described as such, nor presented as but one perspective. Rather they are lessons learned – truths told. From this point, all Romano tells us of the thinking of Wittgenstein and Toulmin is taken as (ahem) gospel truth and, therefore, anything inconsistent with it is treated as incorrect per se.
One might be tempted to say that geniuses (for that’s clearly what Romano thinks they are), must be right. Especially if there are two of them and they’ve been elevated by their one man media echo chamber. But that temptation should be resisted.
The thumbnail is the real start of Romano’s problems. One paragraph in we’re informed that Wittgenstein’s God is beyond human understanding. That’s convenient.
Once that cat is out the bag there follows a flurry of felines:
“‘Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it gives us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! … through thick and thin.’” (Wittgenstein) This is a defensive position religionists quickly turn to under pressure (though increasingly it’s used offensively) - my belief is above criticism or parody precisely because it is a belief.
“‘If I am to be really saved – then I need certainty… and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what my heart, my soul needs, with its passions… not my abstract mind.’” (Wittgenstein) No comment required there.
“In contrast to his enormous respect for truths of religion that cannot be said, but only acted on, Wittgenstein displays little appreciation for science’s hard-won descriptions of physical reality.” (Romano) Just read that again! And Romano accuses Hawking of having a closed mind by ignoring philosophy of science developments! Here he lauds Wittgenstein for believing in the notion of truths of religion but for rejecting science’s descriptions of physical reality – notwithstanding that they’ve been hard won.
“Wittgenstein in his later work sought to preserve ‘the integrity of a non scientific form of understanding’”. (Romano quoting Ray Monk, biographer of Wittgenstein)
Is any further evidence required that the physicists are riding a spaceship to one part of the universe while the philosophers are being lifted by angels to another? Well, one more can't hurt.
“For Toumlin, ‘human candor should also lead us to admit that matters of faith are intellectually unprovable and accordingly uncertain’”. (Romano quoting Toumlin) But a few pages earlier Romano quotes Hawking as saying just that.
Perhaps this is what Romano is saying - keep your hands off our version of cosmology, Professor, and play with you own. It’s just a pity it took him eight pages of self defeating twaddle to inadvertently achieve it.
In a recent article, a visiting fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex raised the spectre of the universe being by design but not by God’s. Upon reading that, two things came to mind. First, please don’t let Carlin Romano read it.
Second, if these designers ever revealed themselves in this universe, it’s a good bet that the scientists would shake them by the tentacles.
The religionists would prostrate themselves.
And both would claim they were right all along.
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