Is Steve Fuller anti-religious?

Mar 31, 2006 Alun Politics, Science 1 Comment Antiscience, Creationism, Religion, Steve Fuller

Is the per­son on the left non-existent or anti–exist­ent? Photo by TheAlieness►GiselaGiardino

I’m not act­ively look­ing for people to argue with, how­ever PZ Myers has drawn my atten­tion to an essay by Steve Fuller on Chris Mooney’s book The Repub­lican War on Sci­ence, which is eccent­ric. There are many bet­ter cri­ti­cisms of the art­icle than I have time to write. There’s not a huge desire to think about it fur­ther though, because, if Steve Fuller is right, then his own art­icle is over 8000 words of anti-religious polemic.

The reason I come to this con­clu­sion is from this passage:

Just as the ACLU helped to drive a wedge between the teach­ing of sci­ence and theo­logy, the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute would now drive a wedge between the teach­ing of sci­ence and anti-theology, or ‘meth­od­o­lo­gical nat­ur­al­ism’ as it is euphemist­ic­ally called.

When I’m writ­ing a lec­ture on some­thing like mech­an­ics I leave God out of it because it’s not neces­sary. I also leave cus­tard out for the same reason. In this sense sci­ence is athe­istic (and acus­tardic) because there’s an absence of gods. But I didn’t see it as anti-religious (or anti-custard) because it doesn’t have any­thing to say on the exist­ence of Gods (or cus­tard). Fuller argues that this isn’t merely an absence of super­nat­ural agency – the action of leav­ing Gods out of explan­a­tions is inher­ently anti-religious.

It’s a fas­cin­at­ing way to live a life. When I heard Read­ing drew 1:1 at Leicester the only con­clu­sion I came to was that Read­ing were going to be pro­moted to the Premier League. Now, thanks to Steve Fuller, I know I really should have asked what role gods had in all of this. The announ­cer merely said Leicester one, Read­ing one. By leav­ing out gods from story, fol­low­ing Fuller­lo­gic the announ­cer was clearly attack­ing the pos­sib­il­ity of the exist­ence of super­nat­ural agents.

Sim­il­arly in his art­icle, at no point does Steve Fuller credit any super­nat­ural being for the inspir­a­tion for this work. I had thought it was simply because it wasn’t rel­ev­ant to the issue, but it would appear that by omis­sion Steve Fuller is try­ing to drive a wedge between theo­logy and the social status of sci­ence. By refus­ing to accept gods as the source of his work Fuller is pla­cing it in an entirely athe­istic con­text. It’s the work of a man rather than the divine and thus open to error. At this point I should men­tion this text is being guided by the spirit of Mer­lin, the happy pig and pre­sum­ably is reli­giously sound by the rules of Fullerlogic.

The obvi­ous error is that Fuller doesn’t under­stand what athe­ism is. His wedge ana­logy only works if you think athe­ism is a form of belief and as I read at Be Lambic or Green “Athe­ism is a reli­gion like not col­lect­ing stamps is a hobby and bald is a hair col­our.” It is an absence of belief. It’s a privat­ive. As a res­ult its often widely applic­able. The recipe books in my local book shop are all athe­istic. The only time you have to sac­ri­fice a chicken is when you make Chicken en croute. You can then add your own reli­gious mean­ing to it by serving it at a wed­ding or funeral. Using the recipe does not com­mit you to a life of god­less­ness. Sim­il­arly a sci­ence without gods as agents does not com­mit you to a life of god­less­ness. The Law of Grav­ity may be athe­istic, but it’s still a use­ful thing to know if you’re plan­ning to build a cathed­ral. Unless it’s a cathed­ral ded­ic­ated to Saint Wayne, pat­ron saint of rubble.

It’s would be wrong to say all sci­ent­ists are reli­giously neut­ral. That’s clearly not the case. But athe­ism is a philo­soph­ical pos­i­tion and is not syn­onym­ous with sci­ence. Obser­va­tional evid­ence shows this is clearly not the case as there are people like Simon Conway-Morris with deeply held reli­gious con­vic­tions. If you’re a fun­da­ment­al­ist you could argue he’s not a proper Chris­tian, but his reli­gious belief clearly shows he’s cer­tainly not an atheist.

There’s more I could say, but people like Dr. Free-Ride say it bet­ter. There’s also no real point because the argu­ment simply isn’t rel­ev­ant. Fuller isn’t going to have much use­ful to say on how I work and he’s not being taken ser­i­ously in the courts, so he’s a not a press­ing issue. I thought the essay looked like it could have been inter­est­ing, but it’s so poorly based in any evid­ence and the con­cepts so woolly and ham­fis­ted “…at least in the US, the bal­lot box more reli­ably removes sub­op­timal politi­cians than peer review iden­ti­fies sub­op­timal sci­ence.” that it has no last­ing attraction.

The only real note of interest is his belief that omis­sion of reli­gion from reas­on­ing is action against reli­gion and the obvi­ous omis­sion of any reli­gious found­a­tion to his own essay. Steve Fuller would appear to be far more anti-religious than those he would criticise.

Or altern­at­ively he could just be a bit con­fused about science.