Let’s start with a definition. A “review of a book review” is my review of a book review I’ve read about a book I haven’t read. It’s not that I’m too lazy to read books. I read lots of books, sometimes several a week, but with 400,000 new titles published in the U.S. every year, I can’t possibly read them all, and neither can you. I go into libraries and cruise the new-book shelves, looking for something interesting to read. I also pick up reading ideas from book reviews in magazines and other sources. It’s reader’s triage, if you will. When I post a review of a book review on this blog, I’m like a bird dog going on point: I’m alerting you there may be something in the brush worthy of further investigation.
So it is with my review today of Jeffrey Taylor’s review in The Atlantic of Jerry Coyne’s “Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible” (Viking, 336 p., May 2015).
You can always find excuses to not read a book. Because this is a new book, you can’t buy a used copy for a penny + $3.99 shipping, as I often do, and I realize Amazon‘s price of $16.17 will be a dealbreaker for some. (The public library is your fallback position if you’re in this situation.) For many others, lacking time to read everything out there, even good stuff, is the decisive factor. This book is not oppressively long like Pinketty’s Capital In The Twenty-First Century, but I noted a discrepancy between the length given by Taylor (262 p.), and the publisher, Amazon (336 p.), and King County Library (xxii, 321 p.); I wonder if Taylor made a typo?
No matter. While a 336-page book is more work to read than a 262-page book, the real question is whether it’s worth reading at all. In making that analysis, a typical starting point for me is to look up the author’s credentials. From Wikipedia:
“Jerry Allen Coyne (born December 30, 1949) is an American professor of biology, known for his commentary on intelligent. A prolific scientist and author, he has published dozens of papers elucidating the theory of evolution. He is currently a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution. His concentration is speciation and ecological and evolutionary, particularly as they involve the fruit fly, Drosophila. He is the author of the text Speciation and the bestselling non-fiction book Why Evolution Is True. Coyne maintains a website also called Why Evolution Is True.”
In other words, he’s an outspoken scientist with an agenda with a chair at a prestigious university, which is okay, I guess. It’s a safe bet he knows more about this stuff, at least from the scientific angle, than Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) does. Inhofe is only a Republican politician and businessman with a high school diploma (Inhofe’s claims to have a B.A. in economics from U. of Tulsa are controversial; see story here), so what does he know about science? He’d probably answer that he doesn’t need to, because God is on his side.
The science vs. religion debate is as old as burning heretics at the stake (which is what happened to a lot of early scientific-minded thinkers who tried to challenge religious orthodoxy), if not older. Countless books and articles have been written about it. What does Coyne bring to the subject that’s new? The undeniably strong sway religion holds over culture creates a temptation to “accommodate” people of faith by arguing that science and faith don’t overlap, in that “science concerns itself with … the physical universe, while religion is interested in spiritual matters, and the two therefore cannot be in conflict.” The problem, of course, is that religion does conflict with science when religious beliefs cause people to reject scientific findings (e.g., the “intelligent design” vs. evolution conflict); and these conflicts matter when they spill over into the public policy arena. Coyne, unlike those who try to mediate between religion and science, takes sides. Needless to say, he’s on the side of science.
Coyne’s response to a broad swath of the U.S. faith community’s rejection of science is pugnacious. He strikes back, using facts and logic as his weapons. According to Taylor, Faith versus Fact “could serve as a primer for nonbelievers wishing to present their case to the faithful as well as an aid for doubters struggling to resolve theistic dilemmas for themselves.” This is looking at Coyne’s book as a selling tool for atheism. But, as Taylor himself notes, atheists can’t win converts from among the faithful with logical arguments, because their faith is an impenetrable wall: “Science might be based on … rational thought …, but the roots of religion lie in something much more incalculable, and thus much harder to counter.”
Taylor ends his review with that sentence, leaving unanswered this question: If religionists reject logic and fair debate of issues, why bother to argue with them? Because, of course, the real objective of such arguments is not winning converts but winning over the undecideds. Each side is trying to enlarge its power at the ballot box, and that has consequences for all of us at the point where it gets translated into state and national policies.
And also because the influence of religious beliefs on social behavior can’t be ignored. While many people quietly hold their religious beliefs, others act on them. Today, in Afghanistan, three girls were severely injured by an acid-throwing attack as “punishment” for attending school, according to CNN. In countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan, conservative Muslims are intolerable of female literacy, and some of them are willing to kill and injure to enforce their religious beliefs.
This is the 21st century, but in today’s America, it’s still possible to get elected to the U.S. Senate by declaring that global warming is a “hoax” because God says so, and “proving” it by taking a snowball from a cooler and brandishing it on the Senate floor. Let us hope and pray our country won’t elect a president on that platform, or a promise to replace science teaching in our public schools with religious instruction.
I’m one of the thinkers who want to know the truth about where we came from and how we got here. Plus, why tithe 10% of your income to the Mormons, Catholics, or Baptists to stay out of Hell, if there’s no Hell you can go to? In which case, the money is better spent on books. You can never have too many books. The problem is finding the time to read them.
Even if you don’t have time to read Coyne’s new book, it takes only a few minutes to read Taylor’s review of Coyne’s book. You can find the review here.
Photo: Sen. Inhofe’s snowball moment