Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, has recently published a book called Why Evolution is True, and started up a blog of the same name. He’s come out swinging in the science/religion debates, taking a hard line against “accomodationism” — the rhetorical strategy on the part of some pro-science people and organizations to paper over conflicts between science and religion so that religious believers can be more comfortable accepting the truth of evolution and other scientific ideas. Chris Mooney and others have taken up the other side, while Russell Blackford and others have supported Coyne, and since electrons are free there have been an awful lot of blog posts.
At some point I’d like to weigh in on the actual topic of accomodationism, and in particular on what to do about the Templeton Foundation. But there is a prior question, which some of the discussion has touched on: are science and religion actually compatible? Clearly one’s stance on that issue will affect one’s feelings about accomodationism. So I’d like to put my own feelings down in one place.
Science and religion are not compatible. But, before explaining what that means, we should first say what it doesn’t mean.
It doesn’t mean, first, that there is any necessary or logical or a priori incompatibility between science and religion. We shouldn’t declare them to be incompatible purely on the basis of what they are, which some people are tempted to do. Certainly, science works on the basis of reason and evidence, while religion often appeals to faith (although reason and evidence are by no means absent). But that just means they are different, not that they are incompatible. (Here I am deviating somewhat from Coyne’s take, as I understand it.) An airplane is different from a car, and indeed if you want to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco you would take either an airplane or a car, not both at once. But if you take a car and your friend takes a plane, as long as you both end up in San Francisco your journeys were perfectly compatible. Likewise, it’s not hard to imagine an alternative universe in which science and religion were compatible — one in which religious claims about the functioning of the world were regularly verified by scientific practice. We can easily conceive of a world in which the best scientific techniques of evidence-gathering and hypothesis-testing left us with an understanding of the workings of Nature which included the existence of God and/or other supernatural phenomena. (St. Thomas Aquinas, were he alive today, would undoubtedly agree, as would many religious people who actually are alive.) It’s just not the world we live in. (That’s where they would disagree.)
The incompatibility between science and religion also doesn’t mean that a person can’t be religious and be a good scientist. That would be a silly claim to make, and if someone pretends that it must be what is meant by “science and religion are incompatible” you can be sure they are setting up straw men. There is no problem at all with individual scientists holding all sorts of incorrect beliefs, including about science. There are scientists who believe in the Steady State model of cosmology, or that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, or that sunspots are the primary agent of climate change. The mere fact that such positions are held by some scientists doesn’t make them good scientific positions. We should be interested in what is correct and incorrect, and the arguments for either side, not the particular beliefs of certain individuals. (Likewise, if science and religion were compatible, the existence of thousands of irreligious scientists wouldn’t matter either.)
The reason why science and religion are actually incompatible is that, in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions. It’s worth noting that this incompatibility is perfectly evident to any fair-minded person who cares to look. Different religions make very different claims, but they typically end up saying things like “God made the universe in six days” or “Jesus died and was resurrected” or “Moses parted the red sea” or “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility.
But the superficial reasonableness of a claim isn’t enough to be confident that it is true. Science certainly teaches us that reality can be very surprising once we look at it more carefully, and it’s quite conceivable that a more nuanced understanding of the question could explain away what seems to be obviously laid out right in front of us. We should therefore be a little more careful about understanding how exactly a compatibilist would try to reconcile science and religion.
The problem is, unlike the non-intuitive claims of relativity or quantum mechanics or evolution, which are forced on us by a careful confrontation with data, the purported compatibility of “science” and “religion” is simply a claim about the meaning of those two words. The favored method of those who would claim that science and religion are compatible — really, the only method available — is to twist the definition of either “science” or “religion” well out of the form in which most people would recognize it. Often both.
Of course, it’s very difficult to agree on a single definition of “religion” (and not that much easier for “science”), so deciding when a particular definition has been twisted beyond usefulness is a tricky business. But these are human endeavors, and it makes sense to look at the actual practices and beliefs of people who define themselves as religious. And when we do, we find religion making all sorts of claims about the natural world, including those mentioned above — Jesus died and was resurrected, etc. Seriously, there are billions of people who actually believe things like this; I’m not making it up. Religions have always made claims about the natural world, from how it was created to the importance of supernatural interventions in it. And these claims are often very important to the religions who make them; ask Galileo or Giordano Bruno if you don’t believe me.
But the progress of science over the last few centuries has increasingly shown these claims to be straightforwardly incorrect. We know more about the natural world now than we did two millennia ago, and we know enough to say that people don’t come back from the dead. In response, one strategy to assert the compatibility between science and religion has been to take a carving knife to the conventional understanding of “religion,” attempting to remove from its purview all of its claims about the natural world.
That would be the strategy adopted, for example, by Stephen Jay Gould with his principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria, the subject of yesterday’s allegory. It’s not until page 55 of his (short) book that Gould gets around to explaining what he means by the “magisterium of religion”:
These questions address moral issues about the value and meaning of life, both in human form and more widely construed. Their fruitful discussion must proceed under a different magisterium, far older than science (at least as a formalized inquiry) and dedicated to a quest for consensus, or at least a clarification of assumptions and criteria, about ethical “ought,” rather than a search for any factual “is” about the material construction of the natural world. This magisterium of ethical discussion and search for meaning includes several disciplines traditionally grouped under the humanities–much of philosophy, and part of literature and history, for example. But human societies have usually centered the discourse of this magisterium upon an institution called “religion”…
In other words, when Gould says “religion,” what he means is — ethics, or perhaps moral philosophy. And that is, indeed, non-overlapping with the understanding of the natural world bequeathed to us by science. But it’s utterly at variance with the meaning of the word “religion” as used throughout history, or as understood by the vast majority of religious believers today. Those people believe in a supernatural being called “God” who created the universe, is intensely interested in the behavior of human beings, and occasionally intervenes miraculously in the natural world. Again: I am not making this up.
Of course, nothing is to stop you, when you say the word “religion,” from having in mind something like “moral philosophy,” or perhaps “all of nature,” or “a sense of wonder at the universe.” You can use words to mean whatever you want; it’s just that you will consistently be misunderstood by the ordinary-language speakers with whom you are conversing. And what is the point? If you really mean “ethics” when you say “religion,” why not just say “ethics”? Why confuse the subject with all of the connotations that most people (quite understandably) attach to the term — God, miracles, the supernatural, etc.? If Stephen Jay Gould and the AAAS or anyone else wants to stake out a bold claim that ethics and moral philosophy are completely compatible with science, nobody would be arguing with them. The only reason to even think that would be an interesting claim to make is if one really did want to include the traditional supernatural baggage — in which case it’s a non-empty claim, but a wrong one.
If you hold some unambiguously non-supernatural position that you are tempted to refer to as “religion” — awe at the majesty of the universe, a conviction that people should be excellent to each other, whatever — resist the temptation! Be honest and clear about what you actually believe, rather than conveying unwanted supernatural overtones. Communication among human beings will be vastly improved, and the world will be a better place.
The other favorite move to make, perhaps not as common, is to mess with the meaning of “science.” Usually it consists of taking some particular religious claim that goes beyond harmless non-supernatural wordmongering — “God exists,” for example, or “Jesus rose from the dead” — and pointing out that science can’t prove it isn’t true. Strictly construed, that’s perfectly correct, but it’s a dramatic misrepresentation of how science works. Science never proves anything. Science doesn’t prove that spacetime is curved, or that species evolved according to natural selection, or that the observable universe is billions of years old. That’s simply not how science works. For some reason, people are willing to pretend that the question “Does God exist?” should be subject to completely different standards of scientific reasoning than any other question.
What science does is put forward hypotheses, and use them to make predictions, and test those predictions against empirical evidence. Then the scientists make judgments about which hypotheses are more likely, given the data. These judgments are notoriously hard to formalize, as Thomas Kuhn argued in great detail, and philosophers of science don’t have anything like a rigorous understanding of how such judgments are made. But that’s only a worry at the most severe levels of rigor; in rough outline, the procedure is pretty clear. Scientists like hypotheses that fit the data, of course, but they also like them to be consistent with other established ideas, to be unambiguous and well-defined, to be wide in scope, and most of all to be simple. The more things an hypothesis can explain on the basis of the fewer pieces of input, the happier scientists are. This kind of procedure never proves anything, but a sufficiently successful hypothesis can be judged so very much better than the alternatives that continued adherence to such an alternative (the Steady State cosmology, Lamarckian evolution, the phlogiston theory of combustion) is scientifically untenable.
Scientifically speaking, the existence of God is an untenable hypothesis. It’s not well-defined, it’s completely unnecessary to fit the data, and it adds unhelpful layers of complexity without any corresponding increase in understanding. Again, this is not an a priori result; the God hypothesis could have fit the data better than the alternatives, and indeed there are still respected religious people who argue that it does. Those people are just wrong, in precisely analogous ways to how people who cling to the Steady State theory are wrong. Fifty years ago, the Steady State model was a reasonable hypothesis; likewise, a couple of millennia ago God was a reasonable hypothesis. But our understanding (and our data) has improved greatly since then, and these are no longer viable models. The same kind of reasoning would hold for belief in miracles, various creation stories, and so on.
I have huge respect for many thoughtful religious people, several of whom I count among the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. I just think they’re incorrect, in precisely the same sense in which I think certain of my thoughtful and intelligent physicist friends are wrong about the arrow of time or the interpretation of quantum mechanics. That doesn’t mean we can’t agree about those issues on which we’re in agreement, or that we can’t go out for drinks after arguing passionately with each other in the context of a civil discussion. But these issues matter; they affect people’s lives, from women who are forced to wear head coverings to gay couples who can’t get married to people in Minnesota who can’t buy cars on Sundays. Religion can never be a purely personal matter; how you think about the fundamental nature of reality necessarily impacts how you behave, and those behaviors are going to affect other people. That’s why it’s important to get it right.
And don’t tell me the bible’s claim isn’t to be taken literally, for if not then it is essentially meaningless.
This is a canard that’s trotted out all the time in these debates. It’s wrong. It essentially equates all of religion with fundamentalism, and Sean isn’t even doing that (or at least not doing it so obviously and ham-handedly). There are vast numbers of people who take meaning and inspiration from the Bible — or, for that matter, from many other works of human creativity — without having to believe that it’s supposed to be read as literally true.
Meredith @35 (excellent comment, by the way!) points out that Jesus himself, according to the stories we have, taught via parables. Was he insisting that each parable he told was the literal recounting of something that really happened? No. Yet, he thought that some might take some meaning out of the stories he told.
Yes, sure, perhaps the people who wrote the creation myths in the Bible (there are in fact two, in the first two chapters of Genesis) thought that they might be how it really happened — although, honestly, I wouldn’t even want to jump to *that* conclusion. But the story doesn’t become completely worthless as a story if we don’t read it as literal history now, just like any other myth or story. I mean, heck, Shakespeare didn’t intend for any of “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” when he wrote Shakespeare, yet that doesn’t stop Tom Stoppard from writing a great play, does it? We always add meaning and understanding to something as we read it in different contexts after the fact.
Rob, thinking that resurrections or other miracles might occasionally happen, even non-systematically, is (in my view) not good science. That’s why we disagree; not because I don’t know the definition of “God.”
I went to a Catholic university and took five semesters of religious studies and philosophy of religion; I know enough definitions of “God” to last several lifetimes. But if you’re speaking English to other native English speakers who don’t necessarily share your personal beliefs, it’s convenient to use the definition they do: “the one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe.” You can use whatever favorite definitions you like; nobody can stop you, but most people will misunderstand you.
I disagree heartily with those who would argue that science, or only approaching life from a scientific perspective is devoid of passion and emotion. Science is a method of understanding the world around us, but tells us nothing a priori about the way we experience the world (i.e. going so far as to separate “experience” from brain functions). On the contrary to what you say, I find that an accurate understanding of the world only adds to my pleasure. As the neuroscientist who studies the brains of people in love says, there is nothing in the reductionist viewpoint that subtracts from her own feelings of love – in fact to know that the brain patterns of people still in love after 60 years are the same as those who are just married makes it all the more beautiful. Applying “science” to our entire lives just decreases the chances that the conclusions we make are incorrect. Freedom would still be valued, even if we didn’t understand WHY we wanted it, we could say that it increases the collective happiness of people and was a good thing. We just wouldn’t get so worked up over meaningless disagreements.
(I guess this is a narrower version of TheRadicalModerate @20, but:)
Sean, I almost always love your posts, but every time you post about religion it drives me maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad. I get how you feel about religion and why you’re content to argue with the weakest (and by far most popular) versions of religious belief and dismiss everything else as epicycles, I really do.
But I don’t — and this is an atheist saying this — I don’t get it when you say things like “Science says: none of this is true.” These are nondisprovable statements — and if you want to point to an incompatibility between science and religion, that’s your incompatibility right there. It’s not just an incompatibility, it’s an incommensurability. The most science — or rational thought in general — can do in the face of a nondisprovable is say: “There is no good reason to believe this.” Any categorical statement of untruth in those circumstances is as much a leap of faith as an affirmation of truth would be.
You’re a very smart guy, so I assume this is not what you’re doing. But it sure looks like it. What am I missing? Have I been smoking too much Karl Popper?
Religions are not even compatible with each other so how can they be compatible with science? All religions contain a supernatural component.
A scientist will be inconsistent if they are also religious as how do they know what hat they are wearing when they are doing science? Does a religious scientist put one hat on when in the lab and another hat on when in a church? How does a religious scientist know to change hats at the correct time?
I have to disagree. I think religion and science are incompatible simply because one relies on faith, the ability to accept an idea base on little or no evidence, and one relies on evidence, and carefully structured logic using that evidence, to justify the acceptance of an idea. They are fundamentally incompatible in the way the practitioners view the world.
(Religious people can, and most certainly do, use logic and evidence in their everyday lives; however, to me most of them have accepted a incorrect assumption from the start. It’s akin to having a great proof that’s everywhere lid tight-except that it’s based on a faulty premise.)
“You are taking allegorical statements like “God made the universe in six days,” “Jesus died and was resurrected,” and “Moses parted the red sea” and conflating them with scientific fact statements.”
The historical fact is that no-one considered these to be allegorical until science started making
them look very unlikely. YOU say they are allegorical. Why?
Pingback: The Big Accommodationism Debate: all relevant posts « Why Evolution Is True
The idea that religion is, at its core, a category of explanation, including explaining the physical world needs to be examined deep and hard.
If I want to know something about science, I go to the experts – the scientists. If I want to know something about religion, I go, of course, to the masses of lay believers. It makes a lot of sense 🙂
I won’t bother with the citation, just read this because it is fun:
“…Bayle and Voltaire had their famous controversy precisely with respect to the possibility of a Nation of Atheists. However, the difficulty lay in conceptualising such a society: how, in
the absence of a conception of God, could such a Nation survive at all? Why would people keep the promises they make, if they did not fear punishment in the hereafter? How could a culture emerge in such a society, where people could never rely on each other’s word? Neither commerce nor industry would be possible; ruin and desolation would be the fate of such a nation of atheists.
Even here, the ground was prepared by the Christian missionaries. Almost a century before the famous debate between Bayle and Voltaire, the Jesuits were embroiled in a controversy with the Franciscan and Dominican orders about this issue. To these Christians, as well as the massive reading public that followed these disputes avidly for nearly a century, it was not a debate about a hypothetical society. Instead, it was about an old and civilized culture: China. The accumulating travel reports about the Africas and the Americas were suggesting that most of the native peoples there knew neither of God nor of the Devil. When the Christian missionaries met the Chinese culture, however, the issue took on an explosive form. The Confucian thought did not appear to
countenance either God or the Devil. If this ‘doctrine’ was native to the Chinese culture, how was the nation to be characterised before ‘Buddhism’ came there? The latter, a religion of the illiterate masses, was mostly written off as gross idolatry. What about the Confucian doctrine?
Fuelled partially by the rivalry between different orders within the Catholic Church (the Jesuits on the one side and the Franciscans and the Dominicans ranged on the other), and partially by the genuine need to understand an alien culture, the conflict and the dispute required the intervention not merely of Sorbonne but of the Holy See itself. (See the brilliant work of Kors 1990, which should be read as a correction to Manuel 1959, 1983.)
What was at stake in this discussion, which lasted a century, conducted both in the pages of the popular press and through scholarly tracts? Let me allow two Jesuit fathers from the eighteenth century to come forward and testify. The first is Louis Le Comte:
Would it not be…dangerous [for religion] to [say] that the ancient Chinese,
like those of the present, were atheists? For would not the Libertines draw
great advantage from the confession that would be made to them, that in
so vast, so ancient, so enlightened, so solidly established, and so flourishing
an Empire, [measured] either by the multitude of its inhabitants or by
the invention of almost all the arts, the Divinity never had been acknowledged?
What would become thus of the arguments that the holy fathers, in
proving the existence of God, drew from the consent of all peoples, in
whom they claimed that nature had so deeply imprinted the idea of Him,
that nothing could erase it. (Italics selectively retained.) And, above all,
why would they have gone to all the trouble of assembling with so much
care all the testimonies that they could find in the books of the gentile
philosophers to establish this truth, if they had not believed that it was
extremely important to use it in that way…? (Cited in Kors 1990: 171-172;
second italics mine.)
Almost a hundred years into this furious debate, Joseph Lafite wrote a tract summarising the discussion. Pleading the cause of the Jesuits, he warns his fellow-brethren to take heed:
One of the strongest proofs against [the atheists]…is the unanimous consent
of all peoples in acknowledging a Supreme being…This argument
would give way, however, if it were true that there is a multitude of nations…
that have no idea of any God…From that, the atheist would seem
to reason correctly by concluding that if there is almost an entire world of
people that have no religion, that found among other peoples is the work of
human discretion and is a contrivance of legislators who created it to control
people by fear, the mother of superstition (ibid: 177; my italics).
Lafite sought to “reestablish the proof,” as Kors emphasises (ibid),
“however, not against the arguments of any atheists, but against a whole
seventeenth-century tradition of his fellow learned Christians.”
—-
(The Heathen In His Blindness)
For this blog post, the title “The Atheist in His Blindness” may be appropriate. The blindness here is that Sean Carroll is accepting the Christian narrative of the world as a universal and correct description of human culture. The Heathen pretty much did the same.
The folks who are saying that “miracles might be rare” and such are missing a key point: namely, that science also works by “consilience” …
Furthermore, I have yet to find a religion (taken as a personal thing, anyway) that does not have at least one incompatible-with-science-view. Which is not to say they are *equally* guilty in this regard. Holding some sort of vague mind-body dualism is not as wrong as the stuff with the 6000 year old universe creationists.
Pingback: Latest Science Religion Links | The Intersection | Discover Magazine
Religion is more than what the wacky right wingers in America or the bearded priests in Iran make it out to be. You should open your eyes to its inner meaning, that is, a psychological map to higher state of consciousness, instead of ranting about obvious things such as the incompatibility of fundamentalism with science.
What you call religion has nothing to do with religion. Don’t use intellectual arguments on a black and white definition.
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that science and miracles are incompatible? It seems to me that it is possible to have a religion with no claims of miracles, even if in practice this is usually not the case. Let’s say someone believes that there is a God, by which I mean some sort of intelligent entity who created the universe and wrote down all the laws of physics and whatnot. (I realize that you, Sean, believe in existence extending back before the big bang, so perhaps it’s nonsensical to you to talk about “creating the universe”, but certainly science hasn’t conclusively determined there was a time before the big bang. Plus someone could perhaps conceive of a God who created all moments of time at once, but in just such a way that one moment is related to the next according to physical laws of how the world should evolve.)
Certainly you could say that there is no evidence for such a God, but that just means his existence isn’t a scientific conclusion, not that it conflicts with any accepted scientific conclusion. There’s no evidence that human beings ought to be kind to each other either (due to the well known problem of deducing “ought” from “is”), but that doesn’t mean a belief in the value of kindness conflicts with science.
Surely a belief in such a God would constitute a religion (especially if we tack on some rules about how this God wants us to live our lives), but as long as we don’t have him performing miracles, I fail to see the conflict with science. You could argue that someone shouldn’t believe in such a religion given the lack of evidence, but that’s a different sort of criticism than saying it is incompatible with science.
The issue is the role of traditions rather than logic.
What would Isaac Newton think of this blog ?
It is interesting to consider the influence puritans
had on science, as well as the other way around.
It seems crazy to think that billions of people are
going to read Hamilton’s Elements of Quaternions,
or study the classification of finite simple groups,
rather than reading Scripture. There are only so
many hours in a day to reconcile ideas, if they can
be reconciled – since when is that any different than
classical physicists not wanting to wrestle with
Einstein and Bohr ? It is a messy and multi-generational
process. It is also unavoidably political. We got rid of Kings
by arguing that ‘the only king is Jesus’ . Oh gee, that is not
politically correct. Does anyone think that a nation of
tenant farmers would build Fermilab ? Some thought that
illiteracy was a good thing, and sought to preserve it.
I wonder how far Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens would get
if people were illiterate.
My athiestical credentials are having been sent home from
sunday school on the first day with a note to my mother –
I had asked why we have to cover our eyes while Sister Mary
drew a circle to represent the perfection of God. But credit
where credit is due. In the big picture my complaints were
small potatos.
@89:per
True, though in the context of American and Iranian societies, one cannot easily dismiss the influence of those “wacky right wingers” on issues concerning science.
Revelation is revelation whether you call it “God” or a “higher state of consciousness.” What your claiming to be religion is no more logical or scientific than that of the “wacky right wingers” and makes about as much sense.
Of course it has. Claiming otherwise is being as wrongheaded as those Christians who say that they are not religious but in a “relationship with God.”
tacitus @68 – What you say about the “Matrix universe” is only true if the simulation is both perfect and neutral. I’m not going to speculate here about its perfection, but I think that you can say something about its neutrality. A “neutral” matrix universe is one run much like the watchmaker or clockmaker deities of the enlightenment – just set up the physical laws, establish initial conditions, and let it run. However, there is no guarantee that the simulation would be neutral, in other words, that the entity or entities doing the simulation might not intervene in various ways. You could even make arguments to say that intervention is likely and so that the interventionist simulations would dominate the neutral ones, implying that we are highly likely to be living in an interventionist matrix universe. I am not saying that I believe in any of this, but these arguments can be made.
You will, no doubt, note the similarity between living in a nterventionist matrix universe and the world-view of many religions. I am going to go out on a limb here and predict that, as science continues to advance, there will be matrix universe religions, or existing religions will evolve in that direction. Why would God create the universe with dinosaur bones in the rocks ? That sounds highly arbitrary and unlikely, but saying that the simulation had to begin with a consistent set of initial conditions sounds much more scientific and reasonable.
I would not count on the inability of religion, and the religious impulse, to accommodate itself to the advance of science and technology, and this is just one of the ways that I could see that happening.
Interesting commentary … but it should have been titled, “Evolution and Christianity are Not
Compatible.”
Since there is NO empirical science supporting evolution, evolution needs to be referred to the religion of Humanism http://www.americanhumanist.org/Who_We_Are/About_Humanism/Humanist_Manifesto_I
@93:Marshall
A Matrix simulation with an interventionist administrator is no more discernible from reality than a neutral one (unless that administrator deliberately decides to come clean to those inside the simulation, but that’s changing the rules of the game).
After all, what would be the difference between a Matrix manipulation and a miraculous intervention from God? None that I can see — we would still have no way to distinguish between reality and simulation.
I don’t know about the possible rise of Matrix religions. There is something fundamentally unsatisfying about the thought that we’re being manipulated and (in a way) deceived by another finite being (even if they are God in our simulated Universe).
“Religion” is an awfully broad catagory. Do all forms of religion make objective claims about the world? I know people who take religion as a kind of poetry–an aesthetic experience where content is subordinate to form. But this raises the question of whether poetry is compatable with science? I’m not trying to be cute. As a writer of fiction and poetry, this is a serious question, and one not altogether unrelated to science and religion. (A brief digression: one can, with care, define what sciene is–or at least distinguish what is and is not science. ‘Religion’ is impossible to define–given the extraordinary range of behaviors, customs and beliefs most would agree to be ‘religious.’ Unless one more stictly defines what is meant by ‘religion,’ the question makes no sense at all).
But.. .my real question: is content in the form of propositions about the world aesthetically weak if not compatable with scientific understanding? If not, why not? What is the difference between aesthetic and ‘religious’ propositions? Walter Pater believed that all art should aspire to the condition of music: a powerful romantic idea, but realizing that idea in art that involves language is problematic. You’ve blogged here about how science is represented in films. Is a deliberate misrepresentation of a scientific priciple an aesthetic flaw as well? Why? Why not?
Arun, 86;
That is an interesting historical insight. It goes further in examining how science and religion do co-exist and conflict in the same society, than facile denunciations of miracle claims. Those claims do serve an obvious social function, as a form of mental indoctrination, or rite of initiation into the group. Sean is a very focused and mentally disciplined individual, so maybe there is a personal quandary being played out, possibly trying to reconcile the rigor of his Catholic upbringing, with the rational worldview it has lead him to. He might consider advancing a more nuanced inquiry, given the depth of his knowledge of both.
Personally I think relativism, as the basis of morality, isn’t given proper credit. The dictum of doing unto others, as you would have them do unto you, is moral relativism at its most basic. If I weigh my actions against God, it is a matter of how I and my particular sect defines God, but if I weigh my actions against the rest of reality, then it pushes back in a very fundamental fashion. Karma is that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Good and bad are the elemental binary code of biology, the attraction of the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental, not just some conflict between the forces of light and dark.
If science really wants to replace religion, it has to do more than just serve as a foil for reactionaries.
Hi Sean,
I think the most contentious claim you made is
As SA states in 14 the particular events with Jesus and Moses science has very little to say. I wanted to add a little more to that. You have claimed that an answer like “a sense of wonderment of the universe” should not be called a religion as it has the potential to confuse people. Instead you want to reserve the term for supernatural occurrences. But if you take this view, don’t you require that “miraculous events” counter the laws of the natural world? The reason that Jesus being resurrected is a religious claim of the supernatural is that the laws of the natural world (presumably) say such an event is impossible.
[Of course, one is quickly lead into arguments about “natural laws” (which are presumably unchanging) and the “laws of science” by which I mean our current best approximation to natural laws. It can reasonably be asked if we could ever find a supernatural event, as we find events that violate the laws of science all the time which we then use to make better laws of science. The best description I could have for a supernatural event is one in which repeatable experiments give a consistent outcomes except in very rare and isolated cases.]
I don’t actually believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and I do agree that we are giving religion a lot more “wiggle room” than we would give almost any other subject confronted with evidence. But I feel that the idea of miracles as being an exception to natural law does undermine the idea that science says particular miracles did not happen. So I think that the accommodation argument is slightly better than you have presented them here.
Sean says:
“Rob, thinking that resurrections or other miracles might occasionally happen, even non-systematically, is (in my view) not good science.”
Wrong, it is simply not science at all. Science requires reproducibility, which is not the case with one-off things like miracles. Science cannot say anything about miracles if the results are not traceable by evidence that can be investigated in the here and now. To say that thinking that miracles might occcasionally happen is not good science confuses science with philosophy (i.e. methodological naturalism equals philosophical naturalism, which is not true). And if you say that science encompasses all reality, then this is not a scientific statement either, but a philosophical one as well.
To believe that a good scientist must assume philosophical naturalism (the natural world is all there is), instead of just following methodological naturalism (always search for natural causes in your work) is wrong. Certainly, all religious scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, would disagree with such a belief.
“Those people believe in a supernatural being called “God” who created the universe, is intensely interested in the behavior of human beings, and occasionally intervenes miraculously in the natural world. Again: I am not making this up.”
When you talk about Religion you aren’t talking about the dictionary definition, you are talking about Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. I believe in a God but I don’t believe in the supernatural like ghosts. I believe God should be defined through science and math.
That being said when you lump all religious people into a stereotype how is it any different than sexism, racism etc? If you hate Christianity, Islam and Judaism, take on THOSE religions and stop blaming religion as a concept.