At the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips celebrates castrates castigates lightly prods Richard Dawkins in an incredibly informative article. No, not very informative about the subject at hand, but about the author’s own perverse postmodernist view of reality and how best to go about explaining it. Oh yes, just let me whip out my enzyme and it’s time for some Monday Madness.

Let the dicing begin.

Arrogance, dogma and why science - not faith - is the new enemy of reason

Our most celebrated atheist, the biologist Professor Richard Dawkins, has briefly turned his attention away from bashing people who believe in God.

Yes, the “angry atheist routine”: criticize religious institutions and beliefs, and you’re bashing people. Wait… no.

Instead, he is about to bash people who subscribe to ‘new age’ therapies which he says are based on ‘irrational superstition’.

In a TV programme to be shown later this month, Dawkins looks at a range of ludicrous therapies and gurus, including faith healers, psychic mediums, ‘angel therapists’, ‘aura photographers’, astrologers and others.

Ludicrous, check.

Not surprisingly, he is horrified by such widespread irrationality, not to mention an exploitative industry that fleeces people while encouraging them to run away from reality. He is right to be alarmed.

Horrified, check.

What previously belonged to the province of the quack and the charlatan has become mainstream. The NHS provides funding for shamans, while the NHS Directory For Alternative And Complementary Medicine promotes ‘dowsers’, ‘flower therapists’ and ‘crystal healers’.

Quack, check.

Indeed, such therapies aren’t the half of it. Millions of us are now eager to believe that the world is controlled by conspiracies of covert forces, for which there is not one shred of evidence because such theories are simply bonkers.

Not one shred of evidence, check! Yes, Melanie Phillips is on the right track, one of the sure signs, as she notes, of ideas that are “simply bonkers” are those that have no evidence for them!

Thus Press articles and TV documentaries seriously advance the belief that the 9/11 attacks on America were orchestrated by the U.S. government itself. Similarly, thousands believe that Princess Diana was murdered at the hands of a conspiracy composed of the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and MI5.

Bestselling books by the former TV sports presenter David Icke, who has announced he is ‘the son of God’, argue that Britain will be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes, and that the world is ruled by a secret group called the ‘Global Elite’ or ‘Illuminati’ which was responsible for the Holocaust, the Oklahoma city bombing and 9/11.

Illuminating. What do you make of these beliefs?

These trends are not just nutty but sinister. Thousands of cults now combine similar crazy beliefs with programmes to control people’s minds and behaviour.

Controlling people’s minds and behavior

Their techniques include food and sleep deprivation; trance induction through hypnosis or prolonged rhythmical chanting; and ‘love bombing’, where cult members are bombarded with conditional love which is removed whenever there is a deviation from the dictates of the leader.

Gotcha. No sleep deprivation, going into trances of any sort - oh rhythmical chanting simply cannot happen. Fasting, however, is a perfectly fine way to pass the time, along with making phone calls to the universe, and murmuring chanting. Totally different. Oh, what can Dawkins do to get back the conditional love of Phillips here?

Disturbing indeed. But where Dawkins goes wrong is to assume this is all as irrational as believing in God. The truth is that it is the collapse of religious faith that has prompted the rise of such irrationality.

No one like competition, I guess.

We are living in a scientific, largely post-religious age in which faith is presented as unscientific superstition. Yet paradoxically, we have replaced such faith by belief in demonstrable nonsense.

Demonstrable nonsense? Oh no, I am hanging on your every word to tell me, to demonstrate to me, with evidence, what do we believe that is nonsense?

It was GK Chesterton who famously quipped that “when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing - they believe in anything.” So it has proved. But how did it happen?

Anything goes. Postmodernism. So glad that the modernist Melanie Phillips is here to set us right.

The big mistake is to see religion and reason as polar opposites. They are not. In fact, reason is intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

1+1+1 = 1. Oops. Try again.

The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe - which, accordingly, provided the template for the exercise of reason and the development of science.

A man was made in a garden, and one of his ribs was turned into a woman, and a snake tricked them into eating an apple. It. Just. Makes. Sense.

Dawkins pours particular scorn on the Biblical miracles which don’t correspond to scientific reality. But religious believers have different ways of regarding those events, with many seeing them as either metaphors or as natural occurrences which were invested with a greater significance.

You see, this book is exactly and completely correct - it provides the basis for a rational and orderly universe. Somewhere in it. Dang, I left my copy at the library. Anyway, it is exactly and unequivocally true, except when it isn’t, and when it isn’t true, it is a metaphor. And the metaphor is true. And when it is neither of these, it is just a natural occurrence that people thought was really really cool. And that’s totally different from, say, a natural occurrence that Dawkins finds to be really really cool. This is Old Testament cool.

The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason. But our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is “true for me”.

Post-religious = postmodernist. Easy to understand. As soon as anyone divests themselves from evidence, and requiring it, there is no objective truth for you and “anything goes.”

That is because our society won’t put up with anything which gets in the way of ‘what I want’. How we feel about things has become all-important. So reason has been knocked off its perch by emotion, and thinking has been replaced by feelings.

Phillips, you see, cannot feel. Paralyzed since birth.

This has meant our society can no longer distinguish between truth and lies by using evidence and logic. And this collapse of objective truth has, in turn, come to undermine science itself which is playing a role for which it is not fitted.

Yes, our society, of which Phillips is a part, cannot distinguish between what is real and what is not by reference to evidence, like crystal-healers and such. Logic is useless. Wait…

When science first developed in the West, it thought of itself merely as a tool to explore the natural world. It did not pour scorn upon religion; indeed, scientists were overwhelmingly religious believers (as many still are).

When science first developed in the West Egypt, is thought of itself as a way to study the world and discover through observation and experiment. When it leaped forward in “the West,” religion poured scorn upon science. This means, then, that science put scorn on religion - this is known as the make-stuff-up principle. Some scientists also believe in astrology - which makes it totally chill. Superb logic!

In modern times, however, science has given rise to ’scientism’, the belief that science can answer all the questions of human existence. This is not so.

Yes, because scientists like Dawkins have never thought that aesthetics is a domain of philosophy, or that ethics is either. Dicky Dawkins, it seems, has never written on a philosophical topic (and recognized it as such), about, say, the definitions of terms, which is also a domain of philosophy, not science. Err…

Science cannot explain the origin of the universe. Yet it now presumes to do so and as a result it has descended into irrationality.

Science cannot? Or has not? Phillips has no need for trivial distinctions! She knows what she wants and nothing can get in the way. Lead on!

The most conspicuous example of this is provided by Dawkins himself, who breaks the rules of scientific evidence by seeking to claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution - which sought to explain how complex organisms evolved through random natural selection - also accounts for the origin of life itself.

Yes! If only Dawkins said that she would be totally right. Oh boy, won’t his face be red when he mistakes chemical evolution for Darwin’s theory of evolution, which came long before chemical evolution was coined. Phillips is spot-on to pre-empt him and respond to something he never said!

There is no evidence for this whatever and no logic to it. After all, if people say God could not have created the universe because this gives rise to the question “Who created God?”, it follows that if scientists say the universe started with a big bang, this prompts the further question “What created the bang?”

Phillips also has no need to use the gramatically-correct “whatsoever,” no, “whatever” does the trick. What created the bang? It could not possibly be self-created (I mean, she doesn’t believe in anything that is self-subsisting), nor could it be the result of a big crunch of a previous universe, nor a multi-verse like Leonard Susskind envisions as a result of String Theory. Least of all, it could never be something we haven’t discovered yet! It must be what pre-scientific nomadic folks believed. Must.

Indeed, if the origin of life were truly spontaneous, this would constitute what religious people would call a miracle. Accordingly, this claim in itself resembles not so much science as the superstition that Dawkins derides.

You see? when Dawkins believes that a really really cool natural event occurred, its a miracle. If its a miracle, it is a really really cool natural event. It’s different.

Moreover, since science essentially takes us wherever the evidence leads, the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research - which have revealed the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life - have thrown into doubt the theory that life emerged spontaneously in a random universe.

Yes! The RNA World concept is too hard to understand! Therefore, it is thrown into doubt, and not even mentioned! 50 years of DNA research has revealed something that I’m not going to bother to read because they seemed to mis-spell “DNA” as “RNA.” Silly scientists. Don’t they know that the universe is random, you can’t understand it! Boy, I was starting to think that the universe was orderly and rational. Because the universe is random, life cannot arise ex-nihilo. But if it was rational and orderly, maybe it could. But it’s not!

These findings have given rise to a school of scientists promoting the theory of Intelligent Design, which suggests that some force embodying purpose and foresight lay behind the origin of the universe.

Purpose and foresight. Exactly what the IDers say they cannot discover through ID. Just the design. She must have heard one of the other lectures, where “purpose” and “foresight” were plugged left and right. Rightly so. Because a deity with absolute power and ability simply cannot design a universe that inevitably results in the formation of life. That would be too much foresight.

While this theory is, of course, open to vigorous counter-argument, people such as Prof Dawkins and others have gone to great lengths to stop it being advanced at all, on the grounds that it denies scientific evidence such as the fossil record and is therefore worthless.

Well the trouble with evidence is it doesn’t always support your beliefs.

Yet distinguished scientists have been hounded and their careers jeopardised for arguing that the fossil record has got a giant hole in it. Some 570 million years ago, in a period known as the Cambrian Explosion, most forms of complex animal life emerged seemingly without any evolutionary trail.

And shortly thereafter, most of those died. Seemingly… that’s a great way to deny the fossil record! It’s not a lie, if, it seems that way to you, given how you feel! Wait, I thought you were talking about the origin of life? Well, hey, if its something that they are still working on in the lab, it’s all good!

These scientists argue that only ‘rational agents’ could have possessed the ability to design and organise such complex systems.

And only rational agents can make other rational agents. It’s turtles all the way down…

Whether or not they are right (and I don’t know), their scientific argument about the absence of evidence to support the claim that life spontaneously created itself is being stifled - on the totally perverse grounds that this argument does not conform to the rules of science which require evidence to support a theory.

Yes, the idea that science should require evidence is perverse! Perverse! Only a complete idiot would suggest that evidence is neccessary to reach a reliable conclusion and not think someone is bonkers, like Phillips did above. Wait…

As a result of such arrogance, the West - the crucible of reason - is turning the clock back to a pre-modern age of obscurantism, dogma and secular witch-hunts.

Going after Dawkins with logic all over the place isn’t a witch-hunt, umm…

Far from upholding reason, science itself has become unreasonable. So when Prof Dawkins fulminates against ‘new age’ irrationality, it is the image of pots and kettles that comes irresistibly to mind.

Wait a second. But she said… but I thought… but then she said… *kaboom*

No, she can’t be confused. She framed the topic so well. Science leads to irrationality, that’s just what we wanted to hear! She had me at “Richard Dawkins, has briefly turned his attention away from bashing people who believe in God”!! I knew she was on my side, but then, then, came, her reasoning. Let me see:

1. Religion leads to an orderly and rational universe.
2. Science was based upon that idea.
3. If it doesn’t have evidence, it is bonkers.
4. People believe in things without evidence.
5. Therefore, people cannot distinguish between truth and lies with evidence and logic (technically, the argument ends here because you’ve just denied logic, but lets continue)
6. If you believe in something because it doesn’t have evidence, you subscribe to an anything-goes post-modernist abandoned-religion irrationality.
7. Science demands evidence.
8. There is no evidence for ID.
9. Phillips really really really feeeeeeeels that ID is correct.
10. Therefore, SCIENCE’S DEMAND FOR EVIDENCE IS PERVERSE. PER-VERSE!
11. Therefore, Melanie Phillips is a post-modernist, believes that anything goes, and that science is perverse for demanding evidence. The universe is not orderly and rational, because evidence doesn’t matter.
    
12. Therefore, Melanie Phillips is Bonkers.

Isn’t it interesting, that in the reaction to science, creationists end up trying to suggest that science, with its “perverse” rules of evidence and logic, leads to a post-modernist view, when it is they who are being post-modernist and “anything-goes” about knowledge. Science and the enlightenment (which is big on science) is all about basing models of reality in evidence derived from that reality, in testable, predictive ways. The romantic movement was a response to the enlightenment, which was later overtaken by modernism, which returned to enlightenment values and then some. Post-modernism is the same backlash, a romantic movement, concerned more with feelings and with a disregard for evidence, because every way we construct reality is a social construction, anything goes! Few people really like post-modernism, despite that is has a few worthy insights. But the full-blown version of it, “anything goes” with regards to ethics, reality, evidence or none, is not too popular. So they try to paint science as being post-modernist, when post-modernism critiques science and says that science thinks of things as too objective.

I would like to note that Phillips is very confused. The IDers make a negative argument, saying, you don’t have enough evidence (pushing aside the stack of books) to say that Y evolved from X, so therefore G– poofed X into existence! The scientists respond, oh yeah, where’s your evidence for G– poofing X into existence? And they respond by saying, um, cuz you don’t have enough evidence to support your idea! (Logical fallacy alert: the excluded middle, aka the false dilemma) There is evidence for the common ancestry of living things, there is evidence for how life could have arisen through chemical evolution. There is no evidence for Intelligent Design - only negative argumentation against existing evidence for evolution.

The idea that demanding evidence for an idea is perverse, can only be described as, well, perverse.
This quote is golden:

“Whether or not they are right (and I don’t know), their scientific argument about the absence of evidence to support the claim that life spontaneously created itself is being stifled - on the totally perverse grounds that this argument does not conform to the rules of science which require evidence to support a theory.”

Look what she went and did - decried ideas that didn’t have evidence, and then turned around and declared that demanding evidence is perverse. Therefore, science is irrational. Re-read it if you really feel like it. It makes no sense. There is an objective reality, and in that reality, Melanie Phillips’s article above was a piece of Madness only fit for a Monday. Thanks for reading.