EO Wilson and Religion (Famous Athiests)

A recent review of EO Wilson's newest book, From So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books outlines his attitude towards religion in the form of a careful review of Wilson's Bible - the principle works of Darwin. It seems religion has little to do with science, and therefore has little to do with anything and lays out his current point of view...

some choice bits...

1) Scientific Humanism

"Both of these worldviews, God-centered religion and atheistic communism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more radical worldview, scientific humanism. Still held by only a tiny minority of the world’s population, it considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled. It is the commonality of the hereditary responses and propensities that define our species. Having arisen by evolution during the far simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 percent of its existence, it forms the behavioral part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called the indelible stamp of our lowly origin."

It's been Wilson's point of view for some time is that biology is the paradigm of choice, the lens through which human beings will see their world in the 21st century. Its probably true that biology will replace physics, as the scientific paradigm of thought, but Wilson takes things further, imagining a world where other sorts of ideas are simply not needed:

"To understand biological human nature in depth is to drain the fever swamps of religious and blank-slate dogma. But it also imposes the heavy burden of individual choice that goes with intellectual freedom."

It seems such a movement requires a central text, hearkening to an origin of the thought that will guide us through to the promise of biology, and so Wilson and Richard Dawkins have both released their own guides to reading Darwin's four books.

Along the way Wilson does bust some myths in this book...I think that its fairly clear that Darwin is not the same devout Christian as some hold him to be. From Darwin's Autobiography:

“Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox,” (Darwin) wrote much later in his autobiography, “and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality.” His later drift from the religion of his birth was stepwise and slow. Still on H.M.S. Beagle during its circumnavigation of the globe (1831–1836) he came to believe that the “false history” and reports of God’s vengeful feelings made the Old Testament “no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.” The miracles of Jesus seemed to him to suggest that people living at the time of the Gospels were “ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us.” The growth of disbelief was so slow that Darwin felt no distress. In a striking passage of his autobiography he expressed his final and complete rejection of Christian dogma based solely on blind faith:

"I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.

And that is a damnable doctrine." - Charles Darwin

But look further down the page and we see Darwin's conclusion (after a fairly concise analysis of the religion and science conflict):

"But then arises the doubt -- can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as the possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such a grand [theological] conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.

I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic."

(The Autobiography of Charles Darwin)

The argument in that section is the same one you can have in a college dorm or a bar in most of the world today. Darwin explains some sort of selection for belief in God, but more to the point he decides that the question of God is left inconclusive, a slightly different attitude than Wilson's.