Collins v Dawkins
Terry Gross interviewed Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins on back-to-back episodes of Fresh Air this week. I’ll be anticipating PZ Myers’ response to the shows (and put a link if he posts one link and welcome Pharyngula readers–browse around, but be kind to a self-avowed religious humanist!), but in the meantime, here are the highlights from my perspective:
1. What do science & religion answer?
2. Can god be proven?
3. What is the role of evolution in all of this?
4. Dawkins and Collins personal background
One of the key differences between Dawkins and Collins is on whether science and religion belong to different spheres. Dawkins maintains that they answer the same questions: Both aspire to explain the universe, why we’re here, role of humanity. Universe with a god would be scientifically different than a universe without a god. Either there is or there isn’t a god–that’s a scientific question. On the other hand, Collins argues that science tries to understand how nature works, but cannot answer “critical” questions like why we’re here, what happens after we die, is there a god? It’s limiting, he thinks, to look only at science.
Obviously, the central split between these scientists is the existence of god. Dawkins views himself as religious in the “Einsteinian sense”–where “god” is shorthand for life’s mysteries, the awe of the universe’s richness, etc. But if we define god as “a supernatural spirit who created the universe and made up its laws”, he thinks god is highly improbable. He admits we cannot disprove god’s existence (Huxley’s orbiting teacup is an example of something else we can’t prove that Dawkins has mentioned before). Yet we can ask whether his existence is probable.
It isn’t, he says, because god would be what creationists call “irreducibly complex.” God himself would require a creator, or the series of processes which led to our existence. Further, theistic evolution is ludicrous because god is superfluous–he chose to create the world by a process that didn’t need him?
Collins, on the other hand, is a believer in theistic evolution. He agrees with Dawkins that it’s impossible the earth is 6000 years old (and he’s taken some heat from evangelicals over this view). He argues that god did choose to create the world through evolution, and that we can have evidence, although not complete proof, of god’s existence–like moral intuition and the fine-tuning of the universe. Morality, he says, is a “scandal” to evolution.
Dawkins, in contrast, thinks that we are moral because of evolutionary development which was previously limited to individuals who would reciprocate our altruism. It’s a left-over. For Dawkins, evolution is the clincher that shows god is an extra postulate, essentially a left-over from medieval thought and our willingness to believe things that make us happy. For Collins, evolution is the means god used to create the world–and yet evolution doesn’t give us the answers we crave.
What was interesting to me was the conversion stories of the two men–they’re really the inverse of one another, in a way. Dawkins grew up “mildly Anglican” and began to doubt religion when he became aware of pluralism, at about age 9. In his twenties, he converted back to Christianity because of the lure of creationism. It seemed that god must have created the universe. Once he encountered evolution, the last reason for him to believe in god disappaered. Collins, on the other hand, grew up unschooled in any religion, and was an avowed atheist until his twenties. In medical school, he began to see pain and suffering, for which he had no answer. He started to investigate religion and was converted after reading CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity.
Both Collins and Dawkins emphasize evidence. Collins cites Hebrews, saying that faith is the “evidence of things unseen”, whereas Dawkins believes faith is a psychological weakness, an unswerving belief despite lack of evidence. What they consider to count as “evidence” is a major source of disagreement between them, as well as what they count as “answers.” (Dawkins seems content that the universe owes us no meaning, whereas Collins found palatable answers to his questions about meaning through faith in god).