There’s a movement afoot to frame science/religion discussions in such a way that those of who believe that the two are incompatible are labeled as extremists who can be safely excluded from grownup discussions about the issue. It’s somewhat insulting — to be told that people like you are incapable of conducting thoughtful, productive conversations with others — and certainly blatantly false as an empirical matter — I’ve both participated in and witnessed numerous such conversations that were extremely substantive and well-received. It’s also a bit worrisome, since whether a certain view is “true” or “false” seems to take a back seat to whether it is “moderate” or “extreme.” But people are welcome to engage or not with whatever views they choose.
What troubles me is how much our cultural conversation is being impoverished by a reluctance to face up to reality. In many ways the situation is parallel to the discussion about global climate change. In the real world, our climate is being affected in dramatic ways by things that human beings are doing. We really need to be talking about serious approaches to this problem; there are many factors to be taken into consideration, and the right course of action is far from obvious. Instead, it’s impossible to broach the subject in a public forum without being forced to deal with people who simply refuse to accept the data, and cling desperately to the idea that the Earth’s atmosphere isn’t getting any warmer, or it’s just sunspots, or warmth is a good thing, or whatever. Of course, the real questions are being addressed by some people; but in the public domain the discussion is blatantly distorted by the necessity of dealing with the deniers. As a result, the interested but non-expert public receives a wildly inaccurate impression of what the real issues are.
Over the last four hundred or so years, human beings have achieved something truly amazing: we understand the basic rules governing the operation of the world around us. Everything we see in our everyday lives is simply a combination of three particles — protons, neutrons, and electrons — interacting through three forces — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. That is it; there are no other forms of matter needed to describe what we see, and no other forces that affect how they interact in any noticeable way. And we know what those interactions are, and how they work. Of course there are plenty of things we don’t know — there are additional elementary particles, dark matter and dark energy, mysteries of quantum gravity, and so on. But none of those is relevant to our everyday lives (unless you happen to be a professional physicist). As far as our immediate world is concerned, we know what the rules are. A staggeringly impressive accomplishment, that somehow remains uncommunicated to the overwhelming majority of educated human beings.
That doesn’t mean that all the interesting questions have been answered; quite the opposite. Knowing the particles and forces that make up our world is completely useless when it comes to curing cancer, buying a new car, or writing a sonnet. (Unless your sonnet is about the laws of physics.) But there’s no question that this knowledge has crucial implications for how we think about our lives. Astrology does not work; there is no such thing as telekinesis; quantum mechanics does not tell you that you can change reality just by thinking about it. There is no life after death; there’s no spiritual essence that can preserve a human consciousness outside its physical body. Life is a chemical reaction; there is no moment at conception or otherwise when a soul is implanted in a body. We evolved as a result of natural processes over the history of the Earth; there is no supernatural intelligence that created us and maintains an interest in our behavior. There is no Natural Law that specifies how human beings should live, including who they should marry. There is no strong conception of free will, in the sense that we are laws unto ourselves over and above the laws of nature. The world follows rules, and we are part of the world.
How great would it be if we could actually have serious, productive public conversations about the implications of these discoveries? For all that we have learned, there’s a tremendous amount yet to be figured out. We know the rules by which the world works, but there’s a lot we have yet to know about how to live within it; it’s the difference between knowing the rules of chess and playing like a grandmaster. What is “life,” anyway? What is consciousness? How should we define who is a human being, and who isn’t? How should we live together in a just and well-ordered society? What are appropriate limits of medicine and biological manipulation? How can we create meaning and purpose in a world where they aren’t handed to us from on high? How should we think about love and friendship, right and wrong, life and death?
These are real questions, hard questions, and we have the tools in front of us to have meaningful discussions about them. And, as with climate change, some people are having such discussions; but the public discourse is so badly distorted that it has little relationship to the real issues. Instead of taking the natural world seriously, we have discussions about “Faith.” We pretend that questions of meaning and purpose and value must be the domain of religion. We are saddled with bizarre, antiquated attitudes toward sex and love, which have terrible consequences for real human beings.
I understand the reluctance to let go of religion as the lens through which we view questions of meaning and morality. For thousands of years it was the best we could do; it provided social structures and a framework for thinking about our place in the world. But that framework turns out not to be right, and it’s time to move on.
Rather than opening our eyes and having the courage and clarity to accept the world as it is, and to tackle some of the real challenges it presents, as a society we insist on clinging to ideas that were once perfectly reasonable, but have long since outlived their usefulness. Nature obeys laws, we are part of nature, and our job is to understand our lives in the context of reality as it really is. Once that attitude goes from being “extremist” to being mainstream, we might start seeing some real progress.
Sean,
Thanks for this post. I think you are most likely posting to the choir, however.
I can only speak for myself, but I do have a science background (including a Physics PhD). Since I was 14, I’ve never felt the need for religion. For me, it doesn’t explain, enrich or affect my experience.
But from the neuroscience/psychological side of things, one sees stories in the news or Science News that there may be an evolutionary component to religion and hears stories about deeply religious people having different neurological responses to belief than those of us who don’t feel the same way. (Yes, I realize I’m invoking rather anecdotal evidence instead of hard citations). But if this is indeed true, then this is a fight that can’t be won.
I don’t understand when people say that they love God or love Jesus, but I don’t doubt that for them it is a real experience. The romantic in me thinks that love trumps rationality every time.
DaveH: “Maybe just maybe there is no clear dividing line between life and non-life…”
Are you saying that a zygote is not alive?
@13. GodzillaRage
“And to my right (and top), I see ads for the Templeton Foundation.” -install Adblocker in Firefox
@42. MT-LA
“Science has made no inroads into morality. As far as I can tell, this is still the exclusive realm of religion.”
Well you obviously know nothing about Secular Humanism. Science itself cannot directly address morality because as we all know, you cannot derive the ought from what is. This does not mean that morality is the exclusive preserve of religion. Secular Humanism addresses the questions of morality from a purely naturalistic standpoint and examines the evolution of moral values over time.
The question is whether or not one subscribes to E. O. Wilson’s view that it is “the only worldview compatible with science’s growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature”. Personally I take a moderately compatabilist approach, but I agree strongly with Sean about the attempt to marginalize incompatiblist “New Atheists” as extremists. Indeed the term “New Atheists” is deliberately used as part of a propaganda campaign by organized religion and its’ supporters to attack any criticism of religion by secular humanists.
I think you meant to say Philosophy rather than religion. I’m unsure as to what religion has to teach us about morality, esp given the vastly conflicting moral values espoused by the religous.
The extraordinary evidence would be non-requirement of such a being in the rules which we understand, as many have pointed out.
Well yeah, but the accomodationists are the ones who are saying people like Coyne and PZ should shut up. Bear in mind that many accomodationists are atheists themselves. The “New Atheists” are just criticizing, they’re generally not saying people should shut up. Arguments should speak for themselves.
Yeah, but that’s the same argument “sophisticated theologians” will make when pressed about the silliness of an interventionist God, and when one turns away, they’re back at the pulpit preaching about miracles and resurrections. The vast majority of people believe in a religion that makes truth-claims about the universe. As long as a religion pretends to be a source of knowledge about reality, it’s incompatible with science. They’re two completely opposite ways of knowing, and only one actually works.
The methods themselves are opposite to each other, never mind the claims.
Of course no one operates like that. But that doesn’t say anything, except that we are good at compartmentalizing. Also, believing that science is the only route to truth is probably not rigorously scientific, but there’s one fundamental hint that it may be: it’s the only method that works.
Doesn’t the “cosmic religion” of Einstein and Spinoza count as a viable religion in your book, Sean?
To me it seems that one can have deep spiritual feelings about nature without believing anything unscientific.
“MT-LA: As far as I can tell, [morality] is still the exclusive realm of religion.
– I think you meant to say Philosophy rather than religion”
I think you meant to say Philosophy, bad US sitcoms, Saturday morning cartoons, everyone and everything. But mainly Saturday morning cartoons. Particularly He-Man.
Interesting perspectives.
The relevant bits I’d like to add to the discussion are:
“Absence of proof is not proof of absence.”
Also, I wonder what the scientific explanations are for (per Plato) “Beauty” and “Good”. I wonder if they’re some combination of neurology, game theory, or something ineffable? Of course, “ineffable” doesn’t lend itself to “Truth”, or the scientific method.
By the way, I’ve personally witnessed non-replicable instances of things not explicable by monistic theories of the mind. Since it involves one-time events (e.g. deaths of particular people), I can’t present it as anything more than apocryphal, but I can state it as a claim for observations of one-time events (which you’re free to discount, of course).
[BTW, if you care, it involves someone seeing and describing a deceased co-worker to me whom they’d never met, late at night in a particular place which no longer exists (because it’s been torn down for new construction). They described details they couldn’t have known even seeing a photo of the deceased, and in fact they didn’t even know the person had passed until I told them. I see no possible way of replicating this experiment, so it seems to fall outside the boundaries of science.]
In my perhaps naive view, I don’t think science will be able to explain things that are not subject to the scientific method.
Did we really detect a magnetic monopole on Valentine’s day in 1982? Or an ET signal on August 15th of 1977?
Am I naive to think these are still open questions?
@ Paul #52,
Is it not clear that I reject the notion of an objectively fixed beginning to a “new human life”?
Great post Sean! Thank you!
@50. DaveH Says:
“How do you make meringue? Egg whites and sugar. Maybe some cream of tartar. Should we say you might need a magic ingredient to make meringue? Should we say we don’t know we don’t need a magic ingredient?
Well, it’s the same with living creatures. We know how they are made, and
there’s no magic ingredient.”
Well, you forgot very important thing, that you are the one who make meringue, without you, they are not going to be done, and you are not an ingredient for meringue.
The same for God, he is not an ingredient for the universe, he is the one who made or created the universe
I don’t see any scientific evidence that contradict there is a creator for our universe, on the opposite the fine tuning of constants to produce our universe and our life call for his existence, I don’t know how some people call believing in him is a myth.
@61
the meringue argument given byDaveH was about conscious experience after physical death, not God.
Since you mention it, though, let me rephrase the argument in a way that applies to both:
Thoughts, whether yours or God’s, are a complicated and very specific sort of thing. As such, if you posit the existence of thoughts in situations where there is no evidence for it, you are almost certainly wrong. There is no evidence that thoughts exist outside of physical brains. In particular there is no evidence for thoughts associated with the origin of the universe or with people who have died.
Lack of parsimony is a valid scientific reason for rejecting a hypothesis.
I think that we don’t know why there are three dimensions of space and one of time is relevant to our everyday lives. (The question certainly has some possibility of being connected with quantum gravity, so quantum gravity might be more relevant to our everyday lives than we expect.)
Why drag global warming into it? Especially since you can’t tell science from politics.
Yes, the global climate keeps warming slightly, it has been warming since the last ice age and it’s nothing unusual. Climate always changes. There is no solid evidence to back the assertion that humans are the primary drive behind this particular change, there is no evidence that current change is in any way unprecedented and no evidence that we can meaningfully affect climate even if we halted all CO2 emissions.
All the evidence for climate hysteria is based on climate models which have never been proven to correctly predict climate. And on top of that all the catastrophic predictions require positive feedback which is also just a hypothesis.
No one should take climate models seriously until they are shown to correctly and reliably predict climate on the timescale of decades. So for not a single climate model has passed such a test, they cannot even postdict past climate!
From scientific point of view global warming is nothing but a plausible hypothesis.
Here is an excellent summary by William Happer, professor of physics at Princeton discussing it in more details:
http://globalwarming.house.gov/files/HRG/052010SciencePolicy/happer.pdf
Sean you are overestimating your own capacity for rational thinking, you attack religious people but at the same time your global warming stance clearly shows that you are just like them a member of a faith based enterprise. There is simply no solid evidence behind climate models just as there is no solid evidence behind bible. None of the models correctly predicted past climate or almost zero warming in the last decade just as none of the bible prophecies came true. Yet your belief is unshaken, you are a sheep manipulated by Al Gore and the likes just as religious people are manipulated by clergy.
I think part of the problem is that it’s impossible to address the question whether science and religion are incompatible unless you’ve explained what you mean with religion (I assume that everybody agrees on what science is). I am one of those folks who think they are compatible in the sense that there’ll always be things we can’t explain with what we know, so you can put your god into what we don’t know. Consequently, god’s place has become a little tighter in the last 2000 years. Clearly, stuff of the heaven/hell, god-works-wonders-if-you-pray-hard-enough etc is nonsense. It’s somewhat of a mystery to me how people can bring themselves to believe these things. It is also abundantly clear that people who shift their god into the unknown are sitting on a sinking boat and their god is getting more and more useless every day. But if they’re willing to confine their believes to where there’s still places for believes, that’s for all I can say compatible with science.
In any case, I think one of the main reasons why people join religions is social cohesion. Church members care for each other, they organize events, they have shared traditions and – if you belong to a widespread religion – you’ll find people you have something in common with easily and all over the world. Especially in countries where the government’s social support is poor, people turn to churches for charity and support. That’s no surprise, and there isn’t anything wrong with it. It’s actually very beneficial for the society. Problem is of course that more often than not it comes with missionary fever and fundamentalist arguments. I think if you want people to let go of religions you’ll have to offer them some alternative to what churches offer today.
Knowing the rules doesn’t automatically mean that you know the implications of those rules. As far as I know, we are nowhere near of understanding the complete dynamics of our little planet. Correct me if I’m wrong. Did I miss that memo?
Sean you say … “I understand the reluctance to let go of religion as the lens through which we view questions of meaning and morality. For thousands of years it was the best we could do; it provided social structures and a framework for thinking about our place in the world. But that framework turns out not to be right, and it’s time to move on.”
You have this tendancy to lump all religions together. Not all religions are the same, they follow different creeds, codes and cults. You need to examine each one and determine what is right and wrong about each of them before you can make statements like that.
But then I would like to challenge this view you have from a Catholic perspective. Don’t you find it remotely odd that the four warnings against adopting contraception as published in Humanae Vitae and re-iterated in John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, namely a lowering of moral standards, increase in infidelity, lowering of respect for women and government coercion to use reproductive technologies, have all come true?
This is just one example. In my opinion the moral guidance offered by the Catholic Church works.
A sonnet on physics? how about this?
Existence Extant
We are merely a shower,
Condensed creation unclouded.
Hundred thirty seventh’s power
Foaming structure enshrouded.
Entropic decision,
Magic fractional form.
Constructs to precision,
Planks of relative norm.
Hottest heat from sublime,
Cooled now coldest of cold!
Gritty sand flows of time,
Now forever grow old.
Seen seer of sight,
Thinker entire from thought.
A consciousness borne,
Existence from naught.
Humanism unleashed,
Skeptics wink and then nod.
With knowledge increased,
We’ll be good without god.
Outbreak of creativity?
Innocently derived?
Just a silly soliloquy?
Or, finally, wisdom arrived!
a humble attempt to merge cosmology and consciousness in an ode to relative reality
Seems to me that those who try to hold onto both science and religion at the same time tread a fine line. Anyone who has tried this runs into the situations where there is something that can’t be true in both realms.
When that happens, faith usually trumps science. Or more commonly, eyes are closed and we move onto an easier topic.
To me, what camp you belong to is almost entirely determined by which side you choose when there is uncomfortable disagreement.
Great post Sean. Despite your disagreement with Sam Harris about “ought” and “is”, I think you are basically making the same point he is, about approaching these hard questions with reason, not faith. So maybe you and he are not so far apart.
I love that the argument in favor of religion immediately pushes itself to the limits of our knowledge regardless of where those limits are. Something’s making a noise and I can’t see it?
Must be God.
No, turns out it’s a cat.
Oh, well then that volcano blowing up is God.
No, turns out it’s just seismic pressure and plate tectonics.
Ok, but where did the volcano come from? Hm? Yeah, that’s God.
Sorry, turns out it formed billions of years ago with our solar system according to the rules of physics we’ve discovered.
Damn… But, but what about all this life? Surely it’s too complex and mysterious to have been without a heavenly design–
I’m gonna stop you right there; we found out species change according to natural selection as a process of evolution. Also, amino acids and basic RNA can come together randomly with the introduction of energy. Sorry man, I know it must be hard to—
Hold on Heathen! If the universe started, who started it?!?!
Well, we don’t know yet.
Ha! Proof that God exists!
No, clearly if all these things you’ve claimed to be God haven’t been God, you must realize that the likelihood that there is a God is incredibly small. You have to… Don’t you?
PROOF THAT GOD EXISTS! *end scene*
Ian, are you saying that non-Catholics have all succumbed (and just recently, too) to all the ills brought on by contraception, but that all Catholics have not? Or are you just succumbing to the recency illusion?
And I have a little trouble with “the moral guidance offered by the Catholic Church works.” It seems to me, given the well-known moral problems within the church hierarchy itself, that that statement is very hard to defend. I also have a little problem with the idea that Catholic policies have anything to do with preventing a lowering of respect for women; indeed, just the opposite appears more accurate to me.
As many have said, all religions aren’t the same (though I disagree with Havok who says various world religions have “vastly conflicting moral values”), so I can speak only about Christianity.
In #41, Mike says “In each and every case religion has been forced to concede ground, albeit reluctantly.” I disagree. Take one of the great Creeds, the Apostle’s Creed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostles_Creed) or the Nicene Creed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_creed). These statements of belief have not changed in nearly 1,700 years (or more). Where are the scientific experiments which have, or can, disprove these beliefs? How has science disprove that God is the “maker of heaven and earth?” Explaining how the universe works doesn’t say anything about how it was created. How has science disproven that on “the third day he rose from the dead?” This is a historical statement, not a scientific one. Saying that we have no evidence that people rise from the dead now doesn’t answer the question of whether one person rose from the dead 2000 years ago. Are the statements in the Bible unreliable? Only if you start from the position that miracles don’t happen, therefore anyone who says they saw one is either delusional or lying.
Finally, some have said that the ‘appeals to authority’ be reference to many believing scientists don’t prove anything. I agree that the fact that some scientists are religious doesn’t prove that science and religion are compatible. But I think it is pretty good evidence that it’s an open question on which reasonable people can disagree. I’ve recently read Sean’s book, and he is careful to explain situations where there are competing views among scientists. Why not do the same here?
The trouble is it’s all just wasted breath isn’t it? – Those that think science and religion are compatible generally think this because they themselves are religious, and want to be able to justify their beliefs.
This is typically the situation with scientists that are religious. I would imagine in most cases they will have inherited their religion from their parents, and thus will have been religious prior to being scientific. Later, having acquired a scientific background they are faced with a choice:
(i) Reject their religion on the basis of their scientific understanding
(ii) Try to reconcile their religious beliefs with their scientific understanding
(iii) Compartmentalise the 2 and forget about the fact that they are contradictory viewpoints
In my experience, nobody that has gone for options (ii) or (iii) can subsequently be persuaded to go for option (i). There’s simply no point talking to them about it.
“Don’t you find it remotely odd that the four warnings against adopting contraception as published in Humanae Vitae and re-iterated in John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, namely a lowering of moral standards, increase in infidelity, lowering of respect for women and government coercion to use reproductive technologies, have all come true?”
I find it odd that anyone would claim this:
1) lowering of moral standards is poorly defined: that said, most statistics I’ve seen indicate crime rates in the US and violence worldwide are down since the widespread introduction of birth control in the 60s. The same years have seen the end of segregation in the US, the end of apartheid in south africa, and the fall of the berlin wall.
2)Statistics on this one are hard to collect, but rest assured infidelity is nothing new.
3)This one is so obviously false I won’t even bother with it.
4)Government coercion against reproduction dates back at least to ancient Sparta, where city elders threw unhealthy male infants off of a cliff. The natural method for controlling population (famine) was extremely common until recently. Most modern developed countries already have a low birth rate with no government coercion in this regard anyway.
Basically, the pope named a bunch of bad things that have always happened and predicted that they would continue to exist after the introduction of birth control. As far as prophecy goes, that’s right up there with “there will be turmoil in the middle east.”