Varieties of Atheism in Science: A Review

[00:00:01]This video is going to be a book review of this book, Varieties of Atheism and Science, by two sociologists, Ecklund and Johnson. A bit of a backstory is I got this book as a review copy from an academic journal a few years ago. I didn't get the book review done within um a year or 6 months, whatever it was before I got an email from the book review editor saying they had discontinued their book review section in their journal and I no longer had to do the review. So, uh while absolved of that responsibility, I still thought I should do a review of this book and so I read it and enjoyed it and this is going to be my review. The book was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press and I've included a link for it below if you're interested. It is a sociological work. So it focuses on interviews and data gathered through those interviews as well as surveys that the sociologists did surveys with,93 uh scientists in the United Kingdom in the United States who were atheists as well as in-depth interviews with 81 scientists who were atheists to understand better their atheism in the background of the book. And I think part of the motivation for the book is the fact that for the last 20 years or so, the popular perception of a of of science has been deeply impacted by the relationship between science and the new atheists, particularly in the rhetoric of people like Richard Dawkins in particular, a highly esteemed scientist, at least highly esteemed in some circles, and ostensibly a science educator who also has consistently maligned relig religion, treating it as delusional, absurd, irrational, etc. And so that has perpetuated and cemented in the minds of many people this warfare model or conflict model of the relationship between science and religion which I think is a crude inaccurate model which really dates to the work of Dixon and Draper two pmicists of the late 19th century but does not in any way accurately communicate or describe the complex interreationship between science and religion and I think that is in the background of what uh Eklund and Johnson want to accomplish in this book is to give people a more nuanced understanding of how atheism is expressed uh among scientists.

[00:02:31]So the book categorizes the nature of the atheism and belief that the scientists they interview they categorize it into three different groups. what they call modernist atheist scientists.

[00:02:44]And the modernist atheist scientists, including people that are like Richard Dawkins in mindset, sort of more dismissive of religion, perhaps contemptuous of religion, uh, and really tending to gravitate toward this conflict model of the relationship between religion and science. But then they also say there are other groups.

[00:03:06]The two other groups that they look at are what they call culturally religious atheists. So these are people who are atheists but who for various reasons still participate in religious communities. For example, it may be through marriage or it you know they may be married to a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim and then they still have participate in the religious life of the community. It could be because they themselves just still find meaning and fulfillment. a certain aesthetic appeal or a sense of belonging to their participation within religion. And so these people in contrast to the first group are not dismissive of religion or contemptuous of it. They have a general respect for it uh even to the extent where they to some degree still participate in religious communities and religious identity. And then the last group are the group they call culturally uh or sorry spiritual atheist scientists. Um these are atheists who still themselves maintain some sense of spirituality perhaps not in align with some traditional religious perspective like Christianity or Judaism or something like that but rather they cultivate their own sense of spirituality and they can do that in various different ways for example through looking at the pursuit of scientific knowledge itself as a sort of sacramental act. So this act of grace in our liinal existence and contingency in the universe and how we can continue to search and seek to know more about the universe and finding meaning and purpose in that.

[00:04:42]Um one one crit criticism I have of the book in terms of these three categories is that the categories are inevitably going to overlap with one another. So for example, this third category of the spiritual atheist um does overlap with the first group of the modernist atheist or certainly it can overlap because I think of somebody like Richard Dawkins interestingly as both of these or Carl Sean would be another great example of someone who exhibited both of these in the sense that they had a very strong dismissiveness toward traditional religion.

[00:05:23]But they also had an openness toward new senses of seeking spirituality. Uh viewing science itself and knowledge in the universe with a sort of quasi sacramental or spiritual liinal existence. Maybe viewing the universe as the the mysterium tremendum mysterium tremendum with which they interact something like that sense of encounter with something beyond oneself in conventional religion. Um so when you look at the way that Carl Sean talked waxed on poetically about the pale blue dot in the universe right we are on this pale blue dot uh when he talked about the the absolute grandeur of the universe famously in the cosmos the series which I still remember watching on PBS 45 years ago. When you think about that, that is somebody who is very much that spiritual atheist mindset and yet also is very much the modernist atheist. So the categories tend to blur into one another.

[00:06:26]Taking that as a caveat, I still think this general typology of having the sort of modernist atheist, the you know religious atheist or they still participate in organized religion to some degree and then the spiritual atheist. I still think that is a helpful framework for just illustrating the diversity of disbelief and of conviction among atheist groups. One other concern I had is the way that they talked about the the concept of nealism. Now I don't recall the exact statistic but it was over 50% over 50% of the atheists they surveyed they described as neihilists.

[00:07:03]Uh but I think that I I don't agree with their use of the term nealism which essentially they were viewing nealism as meaning that there is no absolute objective meaning or purpose written into the universe or something like that that human life is not objectively meaningful and purposeful and if you take that position then you are thereby a a nealist but that's not the way I understand nealism I understand nealism to be the rejection of any meaning or purpose at all. So, a nealist literally says though there's nothing nothing matters. And there are many people who kind of go between the horns of this dilemma between objective meaning and nealism by saying, well, there is subjective meaning, there is meaningfulness for you or meaningfulness for me. Maybe there's not some objective sense of meaning, but we can each find meaning and purpose in our own lives.

[00:07:59]Now you may not find that subjective conception of meaning to be satisfactory but it doesn't follow that the person is thereby a neilist because a neist is somebody who's rejecting any sense of meaning or purpose even the subjective kind and so when you look at it that way I don't think 50 plus% of atheists are atheist scientists are nealists um but rather it would be a much smaller percentage they also interestingly talk about um scientism and how most of the scientists that they interviewed were dismissive of scientism, which is important because I think a lot of people have this conception today that uh scientism is really really widespread among the hard-nosed atheistic scientist. They cite some examples. I think they talk I think they talk about Eio Wilson. I I'm pretty sure they cite uh the philosopher Rosenberg um and others [snorts] who are sort of these very blunt scientistic views that all reality essentially is described by the sciences or all truth that can be known is only known through the sciences something like that. Um and they note that most of the scientists that they interviewed and surveyed did not take that view. they did believe that there was knowledge to be had and there was at least subjective meaning to be found outside of science. Another thing is that was interesting about the book is when they asked the scientists they interviewed to define science. There was an enormous diversity in how to define science. And interestingly, it was while I think it was still a majority that referenced a conception of the scientific method as the means by which science was defined, it wasn't as large a percentage as I would have thought. It was something like 58% or something appealed to the scientific method as the means by which science was defined. Uh others were said things like, well, I know what science is, but I don't know precisely how to define it. I sort of know what I'm doing in the lab, right? But I don't know how to give sort of an overarching view of science which was interesting. I mean and it's not s shouldn't be surprising these are what is science is in fact a philosophical question right it's a question for the philosopher of science whereas the scientist is the person in the trenches doing the work in the same way that you can be the timekeeper uh at an event and not be able to define the nature of time right you could be like Augustine saying well we know what time is until we try to define it and it was interesting to see there is that uh sort of lack lack of clarity or ambiguity as to how to define uh science itself as a discipline.

[00:10:50]Okay, I'm just going to say a few other things as I wrap up this interview. Um so one thing that was interesting was they uh through their interviews identified that there were some scientists, some atheistic scientists who found their view of reality, their worldview very satisfying. Uh there were others, a minority, but there were others who indicated they experienced depression uh often linked to questions of meaning and purpose. Uh one individual said, quote, "I've actually struggled with depression for quite a number of years and sort of why am I alive has come up a lot. I've never found an answer. I just don't know, but I'm here and have to believe there is a reason to wake up every morning." Uh and then they go on.

[00:11:33]So now the interesting thing there is they're they're noting that there's just scientists, atheistic scientists have different responses to their own worldview. Some do struggle with depression. Others and the majority do not. The majority live satisfying what they would describe as satisfying welladjusted lives. This is interesting to me because certainly it it goes against something of of that simplistic apologist mindset that wants to say, well, there's no such thing as an intellectually satisfied atheist or something like that. Well, I mean, empirically, there do seem to be many people like that, even if some are depressed. And of course, you can also find depressed Christians.

[00:12:19]So um just be careful about trying to say oh make sweeping judgments about a particular group or another one or another group. Now they also one of the things that they note in the book is and that they're trying to address is I think I alluded to this earlier is that there is a lot of prejudice against atheists in society. And of course, I wrote a book talking about this um is the atheist my neighbor where I talk about uh prejudice against atheism which is very widespread within the Christian tradition sadly.

[00:12:55]Uh and so they talk about one research article from a few a few years back. I'm just going to quote them on this. They said American people who are interviewed uh judged uh intuitively judged a wide variety of enormously immoral acts including serial murder, consensual incest, necroastiality, and cannibalism as representative of atheists, but not of 11 other religious, ethnic, and cultural groups. Even atheist participants judged immoral acts as representative as more representative of atheists than of other groups.

[00:13:33]These findings have been replicated crossnationally.

[00:13:36]In other words, it seems like there continue to be very widespread prejudices against atheists even among atheists or within the atheist community itself that atheists will somehow be more likely to be involved in things like serial murder, consensual incest, necroastiality, and cannibalism. Like what?

[00:13:59]And I think that's part of the motivation for writing this book is to really challenge those kinds of prejudices uh and to help people to appreciate that not every atheist scientist is a Richard Dawkins um example exemplar who's just dismissive of and contemptuous of religion or Christianity or whatever. Uh the last thing is they close the book um with some suggestions about how religious communities can have more meaningful interactions with science, including having dialogues with atheistic scientists in their religious communities. Invite an atheistic scientist into your community and have a dialogue. And and I think that that's a great idea. In fact, at the end of my book, Is the atheist my neighbor? I had a suggestion exactly like that. I said that Christian churches should invite local atheists from local atheist groups to their church just to have a night of dialogue, not to have some apologetic outreach event to try to win them over, but just have a conversation of mutual understanding. And actually, I've uh when I was promoting that book, I actually did that at my church. we had an a host of myself and an atheist in an open dialogue and so I thought that was very meaningful.

[00:15:23]So anyway, um I very much enjoyed varieties of atheism and science. I wouldn't say there was anything in here that really surprised me. Well, there were a few things actually. Yeah, like like the lower level of scientism among atheists, atheistic scientists that probably surprised me. But uh most of the things here I kind of am aware of. But it is also very helpful to just see the data behind it uh from two trained sociologists and also there the book is full of a lot of great quotes from atheists through the in-depth interviews with 81 people just kind of sharing their views with a lot of nuance and so um very much worthwhile reading. I've linked the book below if you'd like to check it