Lumping Together

A correspondent of Andrew Sullivan’s on us religious folk:

People seem to need figures like bin Laden, Koresh, Hubbard, etc., so they can point fingers and proclaim them to be religious fanatics or "wackos". It makes the average moderate Christian/Muslim/Jew/Hindu feel better about their faith. As if the suspension of scientific thought that they exercise has absolutely nothing to do the extremism that is built on the same principle.

Well, possibly. But it seems like atheist polemicists need bin Laden et al even more, so they can make grand gestures linking all people of faith to violent extremists. He continues:

I am not trying to lump everyone into the same group here, I'm just attempting to explain how a scientist views this general line of thinking as major threat to society [sic]. The slippery-est of slopes.

This sort of comment is a dime a dozen these days: look, I’m not saying that all religious people are violent nutcases. It’s just that there’s this principle, you know, the “suspension of scientific thought”, that leads both to Mother Teresa and to Osama bin Laden, and that’s why we have to be so vehement in opposing the superstitious hordes.

One thing I’d like to see stop is the identification of a kind of strict philosophical naturalism, of the sort that rules out the possibility of all “spooky” entities – gods, angels, and the like – with “science”, or “scientific thought”, or whatever. At the very least, the fact of there being very good scientists who profess religious beliefs ought to rule out that sort move.

It becomes especially irritating in the case of Sullivan’s correspondent, where there is an appeal to authority involved: look, I’m a scientist, and this is “how a scientist views this general line of thinking.” No. You’re a scientist committed to both the impossibility of the supernatural, and to the inherent dangerousness of religious belief. Neither of those commitments can be derived from “science”. Indeed, I would argue that the former is a logical error, while the latter is a result of a superficial reflection upon evil and how evil actions can be justified from within widely varying traditions and communities of belief – including explicitly atheistic ones.