Globe and Mail: What possessed you to immerse yourself in the roiling waters of the science-religion wars?
Marilynne Robinson: I happen to be deeply interested in science and religion, so well disposed toward them both that the idea that they are natural adversaries has always bothered me. And I am fascinated by the idea that civilizations generate a hum of insight, invention, disputation, affirmation and controversy, each one like a great mind engaged with its own preoccupations. So for me, attentiveness to these “wars” is attentiveness to the unfolding of human history. That said, the issues that emerge in any culture can be profound or vacuous, brilliantly articulated or dealt with crudely. Science and religion are both profoundly important to our culture, so the integrity of the conversation around them is important as well.
G&M: What determined your approach?
MR: I think of Absence of Mind as a critique of a prevailing curriculum, which is the actual basis for the world view that in the context of this controversy is called “scientific.” These new-atheist writers carry forward an elderly tradition of polemic against religion which predates modern science and has always been and still is dependent upon positivist notions of rationalism and of the nature of physical reality. So I approach the subject as a problem in the history of ideas.
G&M: Despite the assault of science on religion, it's only in apparent decline in the West and seems to growing in reach and, indeed, fervour in much of the rest of the world. How do you account for this?
MR: Has science in fact assaulted religion? Or is it only that the prestige of science has been appropriated in order to make an argument against religion appear authoritative? Somehow it seems to have been accepted by people on both sides of the question that religion stands or falls on the literal truth of one reading of Genesis I. It could as well be argued, for those who attach importance to such things, that the Genesis account is surprisingly consistent with the Big Bang, with the emergence of life in progressive stages, and with the remarkable phenomenon of speciation. But these questions only seem important because the actual substance of religion, the thought and art that have made it the great germinative force behind civilization, are not consulted by people on either side.
G&M: You suggest that some of the new atheism is a reaction to militant religious fundamentalism, especially in Islam, but also in other religions. Can you expatiate a bit?
MR: Certainly militant fundamentalism has given a great assist to all religion’s hostile critics. Human beings are what they are, and they tend to take things to extremes. This is true of science as well as of religion. All the world's most appalling weapons are the creations of scientists. The implications of cloning, surveillance and any number of other facts of contemporary life that are entirely the work of scientists remind us of the excesses of which science has proved itself capable. Those who idealize science dismiss these expressions of it as somehow beside the point, and this is alarming, since it means that they are refusing to acknowledge the extreme gravity of the issues with which science confronts us. This is not a criticism of science as such. I wish only to point out that what is scientific is not therefore rational.
G&M: You seem to fault the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett for a failure of imagination, for failing to grasp complex individual behaviours of the sort that had us thinking about gods, or first causes, to begin with. Though they do construct stories, they're stories that seem to discount subjective experience in favour of an overarching master narrative. Is this a novelist's criticism of the scientific mind?
