Ricky Gervais on atheism

Courtesy of Daring Fireball, a quietly provocative piece blogged in the Wall Street Journal. "Provocative" because something entitled "A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I'm an Atheist," published just before Christmas, is all but guaranteed to kick up some dust. (There are 1,122 comments as I type this, and the piece is less than twenty-four hours old.)

(I suppose the timing of its publication, and the "holiday message" preface, could be the work of a puckish Journal editor instead. I'd love to know one way or the other.)

In general I'm in full sympathy with Gervais, though I'll dispute him on one point:

Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence - evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along.

Anthropomorphizing science is, as Greg Graffin among others has argued, highly misleading and creates mistrust among nonscientists. "Science" is not an actor, it is a pursuit, a pursuit of human beings who don't always live up to the high standards science requires. Most of the time they do, but nobody's perfect.

Even Einstein once allowed a preconception of how the universe worked to influence his judgment. He came to regret including a cosmological constant in his original general relativity equations because he later recognized his motive had been to preserve a static universe, which he preferred over the idea that the universe changes over time. That cosmologists later resurrected the constant doesn't change the fact that Einstein introduced it for a reason that was not justified by the evidence then at hand.

So as a proponent of science, I wish people like Gervais would stop making statements about it that create an aura of infallibility. The vast majority of people aren't scientists and therefore take science on faith (distasteful though that may be for scientists to hear), so claiming an easily-disproven infallibility just gives people a reason to believe that science isn't the best way to explore the world around us.

That's my only quibble with Gervais' otherwise well-written essay. Let me close my own thoughts on it by quoting his simple refutation of the tired and offensive notion that virtue rests exclusively on religious, and specifically Christian, foundations:

Forgiveness is probably the greatest virtue there is. Buts [sic] that’s exactly what it is - ‐ a virtue. Not just a Christian virtue. No one owns being good.