The Confessions of a Sceptic

I am a materialist, a reductionist, a naturalist, a Darwinian. On the
religious-belief scale, I am somewhere between Richard Dawkins and Dan
Dennett. Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, David and Goliath, Virgin birth,
water into wine, Resurrection, Trinity, transubstantiation,
consubstantiation, any other sub- or super-stantiation   you name it, I
don t believe it. So what s a nice guy like me doing in company like
yours? Believe me, there are days when I ask myself that question!

The cynic would say that I m here because I do rather well out of you.
Last year I was awarded a Templeton Bookwriting Prize of $100, 000, and I
d be a liar if I didn t admit that that has gone down very nicely in the
Ruse household. If you add the fact that many years, as participants in
the annual IRAS conference, we have had a free or cheap family holiday on
Star Island, off the coast of New Hampshire   absolute paradise and no one
ever bugs me about going to chapel   then the answer seems obvious.
Indeed, the answer sometimes seems so obvious to me that I get seriously
worried about whether I am compromising my personal and professional
integrity. My good friend and former student Jim Brown, of the University
of Toronto, has just written an op-ed piece for the major journal Science,
in which he accuses those who take Templeton money of doing the work of a
people with (what he deeply believes is) a false and dangerous agenda. I
am not sure that he wrote it just with me in mind, but I confess that
although I m pretty good at not selling out to God, there are days when I
fear that I am a master at selling out to Mammon.

Yet, having now made a Moral Rearmament-type public confession of my sins
(sorry, I am not about to follow it up with a confession of my private,
personal, sexual practices), let me try to tell you what the
science/religion interaction (to use a neutral term) means to me and why I
find it a vital part of my existence and why, despite the bewilderment of
my good secular friends, I intend to keep chipping away at it. As always,
trying to tell you what I believe and why I do as I do is really an
exercise in trying to tell myself what I believe and why I do as I do. And
none the worse for that. As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not
worth living. (At a purely pragmatic level, I am a full professor with
tenure, and that means that I can believe and do what I damn well please
and that is precisely what I intend to do. As it happens, even my most
religion-hostile chums tend to put my obsessions down to personal
idiosyncrasy, to my childhood training, which as you are about to see is
perfectly true.)

I see three intellectual reasons for my involvement in the
science/religion
debate, and one social reason. This last is probably the most important of
all, and I am happy with this. As a child, I was raised a Quaker and the
love and care -- not to mention the intellectual stimulation   I received
within the Society of Friends, from my parents and from their
coreligionists, has truly been the greatest and most formative factor in
my life. I say to people like the eminent evolutionist George Williams,
who tells me that the only good advice he ever got in his Catholic
childhood was the direction to the front door, that it is really difficult
to hate Christianity if you grew up in the kind of loving and intellectual
atmosphere as did I. Twenty years ago, after I appeared as an expert
witness for the ACLU in the Arkansas Creation Trial, I came increasingly
into contact with Christians working on science and religion   the
Lutheran Philip Hefner, the Anglican Arthur Peacocke, the Catholic Ernan
McMullin, the Presbyterian (at least, in affiliation and practice) Ursula
Goodenough, and many more   and I can truly say that in the kind of
community and love and zest for ideas that I have found there, I have
recaptured something of what I had in my childhood and that I think is a
genuinely precious part of being a human being. I appreciate deeply that
these people find in me a fellow traveller, even if I am not sure that I
am on a journey to anywhere or that I want to arrive should there prove to
be a destination.

I am going to make a dreadful confession and tell you that -- although
this is a very different kind of interaction and relationship -- I like
the Creationists, the very people against whom most of my time and
creative energies are directed. I like arguing with Phillip Johnson and
love his fund of funny stories and his wicked comments about all of my
sacred idols, I think the Young Earther Paul Nelson holds beliefs which
make him as nutty as a fruitcake but that he is a real sweetie despite
(because of) that, and I have a huge admiration for Duane Gish. He could
not be more wrong in my opinion, but someone who has served his Lord with
the energy that he still shows at seventy eight (and who treats his
opponents with such courtesy) is a man for whom at an important level I
have great respect.

Now, what about the intellectual factors? First, I am a historian and
philosopher of science. I work on evolutionary theory, the past and the
present. I know   said he, with his usual modesty   a lot about my subject
and I have the ability to communicate to others. That is my job and I
think it is a privilege and an obligation to be both a scholar and a
teacher, and to use one s talents if one has them. (Goodness, didn t
another teacher about two thousand years ago make a similar point?!) I
think evolutionary theory   Darwinian evolutionary theory   is one of the
truly great discoveries of all time, and surely shows that, whether or not
we be made in the image of God, we sure as hell are a lot more than grubby
little primates. We are beings with the power to peer into the mysteries
of nature and to wrench from our surroundings answers and understanding of
an almost transcendent kind. I think we should pass on to our children not
just the knowledge but the methods, and I think that those who oppose this
because of some ludicrous religious beliefs   let us be blunt, some
non-traditional, American, Protestant, Biblical literalist beliefs   must
be fought with every ounce of energy that I have. That for me is a sacred
obligation, and you can take that in any way that you like. I am a real
Calvinist when it comes to the inherent worth of scientific knowledge.

In order effectively to fight the good fight, I have to know about the
science/religion relationship, so at once I have a professional reason for
my interests. But this takes me right to my second factor, namely that I
have become increasingly convinced that neither my fellow scientists (and
philosophers) nor the theologians who stand with me against the
Creationists do a very good job. At least they make some fundamental
mistakes in their thinking. (I told you that I was modest and that it is
just as well that I have tenure.) With respect to my fellow scientists,
especially with respect to my fellow Darwinians, the intensive study that
I have done of evolutionary theory and its history   reported at length in
my Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology, and at
less length in my Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social
Construction?   has convinced me that in one major respect the
Creationists in their criticisms are absolutely right. They complain that
Darwinism is no less a religion than is Creationism (or Intelligent
Design, to use the trendy modern equivalent). In many respects, I now
think that this is true. People like Richard Dawkins use Darwinism as a
skeleton on which to hang all sorts of ethical and other directives, and
have the theory as a kind of background metaphysic no less than the
Archbishop of Canterbury has Christianity as his background metaphysic. I
do not think that Darwinism has to be treated like a religion   it can be
science and no more   and I am not sure that treating Darwinism like a
religion is always a bad thing (although it is not my way   I did not give
up Christianity to take up another religion, secular or otherwise), but I
think this is what happens and we do ourselves and others a disservice to
deny or ignore this.

On the other side, I think that far too often the religious who would
reconcile science and religion give up too quickly on modern science and
philosophy. Scared that Richard Dawkins and company may be right, they
wimp out on real hardline Darwinism and embrace some soft alternative like
complexity theory or some other nonsense. Entirely typical is Ian Barbour
(for whom I have a huge amount of respect) in a recent issue of this
magazine who was calling for a non-reductive, holistic science and so
forth. He wants to get away from the atheistic science of the
evolutionists and find some place for faith.

Folks, it just isn t going to happen! Modern science is reductionistic
molecular, hardline determinist (in the sense that includes quantum
theory), blast-it-to-bits-and-take-it-down-to-the-basic-units
decompositional   and it is going to stay that way. The Human Genome
Project was no mirage. So you had better learn to live with it. But why
not live with it? Embrace it and make it a strength of your
science/religion interactions? In my recent Can a Darwinian be a
Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion I try to show how
one might make a start on this. Take, for instance, the venerable problem
of evil (the theodicy problem). One of the traditional solutions is to
argue that God could not do the impossible and that the creation of this
earth and its denizens necessarily had to incorporate physical pain
without fire and burning, how could you have heat and food and knowledge
of the dangers? But the Darwinism of Richard Dawkins, of all people, adds
to this argument! Dawkins is so far a Darwinian that he argues that only
natural selection could produce the complexity of life. But how do you get
natural selection? Through a struggle for existence, with all the pain and
suffering that that entails. In other words, Dawkins himself at his most
Darwinian shows how his science actually supports one of the traditional,
theodicy-explaining arguments. What more could you ask?

My point is that, for understandable reasons, too much of the
science/religion dialogue is weakened by a failure to see the points and
strengths of those who stand in opposition. If nothing else, I do think I
can help here, because both socially and intellectually I have more
licence and ability than most to wander from the trenches of one side
across the no man s land and down into the trenches of the enemy. There is
a lot of good work going on today on the science/religion relationship,
but there is a lot of prejudice and fear and ignorance and denial. I can
and do work to reduce this. (Admittedly my style is wont to create more
problems than it solves. There have been times when critics have been
incandescent with rage. A recent review of one of my books accused me of
being everything, from a toady to a bore, and a failure in between. But
who, other than my mother, ever said I was perfect?)

Which brings me to the third and final factor motivating me in my
engagement with the science/religion interface. Although I have no
religious belief, and frankly am not sure that I want any, I do see work
to be done. I have got to try to articulate an alternative, Darwin-based
picture. In the lingo of philosophers, I have got to develop an
evolutionary epistemology (theory of knowledge) and evolutionary ethics
(theory of morality). This I have tried to do in several books, notably my
Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy. And this
really has led me to be modest. For all that we humans have made wonderful
discoveries   evolution and its mechanisms at the top of these discoveries

  we do not and cannot know everything. We are mid-range primates, with
the abilities to come down out of the trees and live on the plains   as
scavengers basically. But adaptations to go into the garbage and offal
business do not guarantee that we can peer into the deepest mysteries.
Ultimately, therefore, the answer to life is not Richard Dawkins s
confident atheism or the Archbishop s confident Christianity, but a true
awareness of ignorance and mystery. An awe of the unknown. Many years ago,
the great evolutionary biologist J B S Haldane put it well. Our only hope
of understanding the universe is to look at it from as many different
points of view as is possible. This is one of the reasons why the data of
the mystical consciousness can usefully supplement those of the mind in
its normal state. Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only
queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and
heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and
theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt
that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in
heaven and earth than are dreamed of or can be dreamed of, in any
philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must
be my excuse for dreaming.

My father, who died a few years ago, was born in 1913 in Wales, although
he lived most of his life in England (where I was born and grew up until I
emigrated to Canada at the age of 22). As a child, he worshipped in the
Church of England and sang in the choir, giving memories which he always
cherished. As a young man, having left school at fourteen, he became
something of a self educator, through discussion groups and so forth, and
like so many in the 1930s he turned to communism and went to Spain to
fight in the Civil War. Disillusioned, the Second World War found him a
pacifist and a conscientious objector. This brought him into contact with
Quakerism, and after the war he and my mother became members and hence my
own childhood experiences. My mother died in 1953, and somewhat on the
rebound my father married a woman from Germany whose family were committed
anthroposophists, followers of the German seer (and much else) Rudolf
Steiner. It was this that now caught my father s attention and commitment,
and for many years he was a bursar at a Steiner (Waldorf) school in the
south of England. But towards the end of his life, having worried himself
silly for many many years over religion and commitment and the meaning of
it all -- and I have not mentioned the other fads and fancies which
engaged him, from Russian existentialism to the Indian sage Krishnamurti,
with some Transcendental Meditation thrown in along the way -- he found
that it all started to fade away into nothing, and he ended as a rather
gentle sceptic, with a peace of mind that had hitherto evaded him. God
for some strange reason, we Ruses seem to have a stern Presbyterian deity,
somewhat like my late headmaster

no longer threatened and scared him. If there is nothing, then so be it.
If there is something, then so be that also. That for him, and for me
also, is what being humble is really all about.