Episode #199 of the Freakonomics podcast features media theorist Douglas Rushkoff waxing on the about the (im)proper relationship between atheism and scientific thinking:
The scientific idea I believe is ready for retirement is the atheism prerequisite, you know, the idea that the only way science can work is if we assume we live in a godless, meaningless universe. My name’s Douglas Rushkoff. I’m a professor of media studies at Queens College CUNY. The assumption that we live in a godless, meaningless universe makes people assume that reality kind of emerged from this Big Bang. And then time begins, as if everything that we know, everything that we think, everything from civilization, to consciousness to meaning are all emergent phenomena; that they’re all a result of matter doing various materialist things. And when I started to realize that much of science’s insistence on atheism was suspect was when I start hearing these folks talk about the “Singularity.” They have a narrative for how consciousness develops, that information itself was striving for higher states of complexity. So information made little atoms, and then molecules because molecules are more complex, and then little cells and little organisms, and finally human beings and civilization; all more and more complex homes for information. And now computers are coming, which will be even more complex than people, so information can just migrate from human consciousness into artificial intelligence, at which point the human species can just kind of fade away. And that’s when I realized, oh, they’ve created their equally mythological story for what’s happening with a beginning, a middle and an end, which is just as archaic, just as arbitrary as any of the religious narratives out there. And the irony for me is that it’s the most outspokenly godless of the scientists who fall most tragically in the spell of this story structure.
Now, I’m no high faluten media theorist, but it seems to me like Rushkoff has got almost everything pretty much back-to-front here. Scientists proceed on the methodological assumption that no one is supernaturally tweaking the results of their experiments because it is simply impossible for them to proceed otherwise. If you assume that gods, angels, demons, faeries, or ghosts may be conspiring to make the results of the Michaelson-Morley experiment come out the way it did, then we’re right back to wondering about the existence of luminiferous aether. A similar problem may be posed for every experiment confirming the theoretical predictions of special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and pretty much everything else that we’ve come to believe about how the world operates after extensively testing various theories. Moreover, assuming naturalism as a methodological approach does not require assuming that the universe is godless, much less meaningless. (And it’s patently silly to assume those two conditions are somehow related.)
As to all this nonsense about the singularity, it is unclear if Rushkoff gets what that is really about, either. Certainly it does not proceed from the notion that information itself has been “striving for higher states of complexity” from the dawn of time in some teleological sense. It is a simple matter of historical fact that biological neural networks have been increasing in complexity and capability for millions of years, and a matter of high probability that artificial neural networks will overtake them in the near future. Nothing archaic, arbitrary, or mythological about that.
