by Chet Raymo; Walker and Co., New York, NY 1998.
Reviewed by Carl Grant.
Raymo is a professor of astronomy and physics at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. He divides the world into two types of people. Skeptics, like himself, and true believers. Skeptics accept things on the basis of evidence and reason. Their conclusions are evolving and tentative. They tend to be optimistic, creative, and confident of progress. Skeptics are tolerant of cultural and religious diversity. True believers, for Raymo, seek simple and certain truths, provided by authorities that are more reliable than the human mind. They look for help from outside--from God, spirits, or extraterrestrials. They are repulsed by diversity, comforted by dogma, and see things as black or white.
As indicated by the subtitle, Raymo says he wants to reconcile science and religion. To do this both sides need to make some changes. Science must recognize the human need for a sense of connection, the importance of ritual, and a sense of wonder and poetry. Religion must cede to science authority to determine fact. Religion should also give up some superstitious holdovers from its intellectual infancy. Trifles such as a belief in God, free will, the objectivity of morals, life after death and the idea that there is a special meaning to existence. A Christian, for instance, need only jettison the essentials of the faith and embrace a thorough going naturalism, while maintaining poetry and a sense of wonder. My own sense of wonder is certainly engaged by the lunacy of the suggestion.
Before proceeding to debunk various irrational beliefs he offers a quiz to determine if the reader is scientific--skeptical--material or a true believer--hopelessly irrational. It is a 20 question true or false test. "I believe: 1. in a God who answers prayers; 2. astrology; 3. life after death; 4. angels; 5. ESP; 6. ufo's; and so on. I took the quiz myself and found to my chagrin, that with 9 trues, I am a hopelessly irrational true believer. I also applied a modified version of the quiz, allowing for their historical period, to Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton and was astounded by the results. None of them would qualify as a scientific materialist. Raymo uses the word science a lot, but leaves it unclear what he means by the term. Does it refer to all scientists, a consensus of "qualified scientists", the results of science, "naturalism", or a sort of reified entity. Two things he seems quite sure of are that it's good, and that he is eminently qualified to speak for it.
Raymo's debunking methodology is straight forward. Pick an easy target, the Jonestown cult, criticize it in depth, and then speak disparagingly about all religion, assuming it's the same. Another example, pick a particularly bad ESP experiment to critique and go on to assume ESP is bunk. I think of it as the Santa Clause technique. There's no Santa because: reindeer can't fly; chimneys are too narrow; and Santa would have to cover each house in 1 three millionth of a second. Therefore there is no God. His reasoning, if you'll forgive the overstatement, is filled with tacit assumptions. He assumes that philosophic materialism is true and is part of the scientific world view. He assumes that true believers, i.e. people who disagree with him, believe what they want to believe, and any belief that is optimistic is almost certainly false. That naturalists atheists agnostics etc. are the most objective thinkers.
Raymo claims to be a friend to both science and religion, but at every turn he undermines, what most of us would call religion. So what does he offer us? Science can help us with the "big questions". Who am I? Where did I come from" Why am I here? Could I speak to the manager? Oop's scratch the last one. The answers at first blush are not what we want to hear: We are staggeringly complex electrochemical machines. There is no ghost in the machine, no soul that will survive the bodies disintegration. Our bodies minds and consciousness evolved over hundreds of millions of years from primitive organisms. We are contingent throw offs of organic evolution. And why are we here? "We are here to make copies of our genes." Phew, for a minute I thought this was going to be depressing.
After the author had used the word skeptic or a variation 78 times, I stopped counting. Skeptics, we are told, accept things only with strong evidence. They hold their opinions tentatively, always willing to modify them on the basis of new evidence. They examine all assumptions, and are particularly wary of accepting things on authority or just because they are commonly accepted. With these criteria in mind, Raymo could serve as a model of what a skeptic should avoid. The average cult devotee could derive a great deal of hilarity at his incredible credulity. People such as Richard Dawkins, E.O. Wilson and Francis Crick, are treated as unimpeachable authorities. "Science" is first reified then deified. The book is very largely a compendium of tacit assumptions followed by evidence-free assertions about controversial questions. For instance the existence of ESP is treated as too silly for words, and in contradiction to the scientific point of view.
Here are a number of comments showing Raymo's take on parapsychology--study of ESP, etc. "In schools we teach kids astronomy, biology, chemistry, and physics; at home we follow private visions of astrology, creationism, health fads, and parapsychology. We live in the world six days of the week and out of the world on Sunday." (pg.266) and "Before we abandon skepticism for true belief, and turn to horoscopes, parapsychology, newa-ge superstitions, and religious fundamentalism, let me speak for science."
The only passage in the book and actual reason for rejecting parapsychology (pg. 45): "Such things as UFOs.or ESP cannot be ruled out a priori, however. I don't dismiss them quickly. The purported evidence has been subjected to exhaustive scrutiny: it is unconvincing." Subjected to scrutiny by whom, Larry, Moe, and Curly? Unconvincing to whom? Richard Dawkins? Jerry Lewis? A few reasons why the dismissal of parapsychology so hastily is the opposite of skeptical: 1. ESP phenomenon has been reported, in so far as we know, in every culture past and present; 2. Polls in the U.S.A. and other western countries show that a hefty majority of people not only believe in the phenomenon, but report it; 3. Third-world countries have even larger majorities.
For those who assume that the opinions of the common rabble carry no weight--an opinion that a skeptic should defend in depth--the only scientists whose opinion should be consulted are the parapsychologists. They are the specialists. All others are out of their area. The vast majority of parapsychologists accept ESP. If they aren't experts, no one is. The assumption that ESP is inherently unlikely is true only if philosophical materialism is true. The truth or falsity of materialism is a subject hotly debated by biologists, psychologists, philosophers, and neurophysiologists, at least 2 who are dualists are also Nobel laureates. If substance dualism were true ESP would not only be possible, but likely. If the mind interacts with the body, maybe there's some slippage allowing it to interact with other material bodies. Philosophical idealism would be another plausible scenario. Even if materialism were true ESP might still be possible. Charles Richet, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, was a materialist, who also conducted ESP experiments that were positive.
