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.
Science is a fabulous methodology for exploring all the stuff in creation (i.e., the Big Bang) and explaining how it operates, but is completely silent on where all the raw material for creation came from. And in that astounding silence is the fundament of all being, the mystery which some people call God, the Creator, etc., etc., etc. Studies indicate most humans (80%? I’ve lost track of the %) perceive the existence of this fundament. The remainder do not. Although the subject has been very poorly studied to date, there are indications this perception has a genetic basis. People who do not perceive the presence of a Creator/God go on and on and on and on brightly intellectualizing, assuring themselves that ~80% of the species is delusional. And I (who perceive the presence of a Creator/God as clearly as I perceive the existence of my arms and legs) just smile as I watch a spectacle comparable to someone genetically colorblind loudly asserting that there is no such thing as “blue,” all the artworks that purport to depict/use “blue” are a grand waste of our species’ time, the billions who claim to perceive “blue” are sad victims of mass delusion, and the mythical existence of “blue” merely adds unlikely and unnecessary complications to theories of physics, time-space, and the origin of the universe.
Thanks for this conversation.
In case you are interested, the United Church of Christ published a letter last year on the importance of religion and science engaging each other more intelligently. You can find it here.
Link to the letter on the left at the Pastoral Letter tab. Link to a sermon I wrote in response is in the main body of the text.
You are RIGHT.
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As usual, a fairly ridiculous and uninformed conversation about science and religion by someone based in Western religion and philosophy. Hence the need to defend the notion of faith and whether there is a God or not against science. Please. Can’t we get a bit beyond this?
Please read anything by Ken Wilber or even the Dalai Lama for that matter. American Buddhism in particular moved on from this conversation years ago. However, it requires a much more sophisticated understanding of what is the domain and truth claims of religious experience and what is the domain and truth claims of science. These two are not incompatible, just different
Organized religion, on the other hand, especially Western religion, which uses symbols of consciousness in a mostly unconscious way, is almost always a crock and highly dangerous to boot. (As they say in Buddhism, “If you meet the Buddha on the road – kill him.”) The whole notion of defending “faith” as something profound opens the door to all the crazies out there. It also stops a more profound spiritual evolution based on doubt, curiosity, and the need to personally verify received wisdom. Don’t trust. Verify!
Eastern religion has as much basis for its existence as western religion — i.e. nothing but feelings and hearsay. I will admit that having a dominant religion around that wasn’t so willing to control and proselytize would be much more palatable but, for the purposes of this discussion, it doesn’t make it any more true.
I’m fine with people wanting to meditate on the meaning of life and other existential matters, and I am sure that people could learn a thing or two from doing so, but let’s not pretend that that type of religion has any more validity behind it from a supernatural sense than any other.
Most anti-religionists I have encountered in these kinds of comment threads BELIEVE they are engaging in the rigorous parsing of ideas that accompany rational thought but completely fail to do so — I think of it as “faith-based rationality.” It’s just another flavor of “WE know what’s really true and YOU ARE WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.”
Yawn.
its not so much the incompatibility between science and religion, but science and the idea of a god; at least the christian version. After all, what was it that got Adam kicked out of paradise? Surely not Eve; a talking snake, c’mon. Actually, it was nothing more than pure unadulterated curiosity, and the innate desire to know. Apparently, Adam very quickly understood the importance of an informed, inquiring, mind and Eve as well, especially in how she would share the forbidden fruit of knowledge with him; first people?first sin?first scientists!
Science IS a religion but, religion IS NOT a science…
Seriously though, you will find that the two subjects of science and religion mesh quite well as soon as you take the BS out of religion and science finally comes to grips with the quantum relm, one day when my time comes I can ask GOD how he invented the torsion field….
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This argument is a pointless pursuit, unless the goal is to provide yet another avenue for people to eventually scream in all caps at each other.
The foundation science rests on is arguably made of facts, the purpose is to bolster the foundation. Likewise, religion is built on faith, and arguably, it’s purpose is also to bolster it’s foundation.
Somewhere in between are ethicists who crack heads of both camps.
If by incompatible you also mean that the combining of the two shows the worst of both, I agree. Gotta run, have to pay tithes to Gore via carbon credits or I’ll be damned to a lifetime of listening to Hansen pretend that he’s both a policy maker and an honest scientist.
raincrow, from your previous post, it’s plain you don’t know the difference between science and pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. I’m willing to listen to religious ideas, but they at least have to make some sense.
This is, I think, one of the clearest and most respectful of the postings which I have seen on my side of the current “accommodationist” debate which Dr. Coyne has sparked. Yet people write comments to tell us we misunderstand religions and/or hate them. All my close relatives are religious, tending towards the fundamentalist side of the spectrum. I was brought up hearing the same sermons and reading the same bible. A) I don’t hate my relatives and friends who are religious, and as for hating religion, its like soylent green – it’s people, just people. B) I understand calculus better than most of them – why am I necessarily the one whose understanding is limited?
If it is all allegorical, like Aesop’s Fables, then why all the mysticism? If religion claims special revelations unachievable to atheist thinkers, or miracles attributable to the requested intercession of supernatural agents, then it is unscientific (in this universe). If it is just allegory, then it is unnecessary. (I can read Mencken or Mark Twain instead.)
While visiting relatives a few years ago, I went to Sunday church with them. The adult Sunday School class was a taped presentation rebutting “The DaVinci Code”. The pastor asked the class what the consequences would be if the novel’s premise (that Jesus was a mortal man) were true. “Then I should be playing golf right now,” one of the flock replied.
I have three cable channels which are all that sort of religion, all the time (and more on Sunday). The deists so far have zero full-time channels, as do the atheists. When the deists and atheists have equal time, or the theists have better evidence, I will reassess my non-accommodationist view. In the meantime, being told that I am a hater who has dim understanding reinforces my view.
I still am confused about one thing, Sean. Virtually every
scientific result we take to be true these days has gone through a
very specific process of publication and peer review, along with
the formulation of *specific* hypotheses and their experimental
testing.
Why haven’t I seen the demonstration of the likely non-existence
of God go through this process? The scientific process is the gold
standard for the determination of truth in our day and age. And
it would be an important and highly cited result if it could be
convincingly made.
I suspect the main issue is that the theory of God has no specific
hypotheses that anybody agrees on in detail (and not in the trivial
way, say, that theories of galaxy formation don’t have any consistent
hypotheses, just because they are very difficult to formulate in a
testable way, but for deeper and more fundamental reasons).
However, whatever the issue, why should I take seriously what
a few armchair philosophers who happen to be scientists think
on this issue? Your opinions aren’t on par with other scientific
results, because they have not gone through the same process
of truth-seeking — that communal vetting — that real scientific
results have.
As a recent example, I can argue to my friends and family, that
yes, you should really believe that the land around Juneau is
rising — I can read a number of peer-reviewed articles about
it in JGR by otherwise well-cited researchers, and I can read those
articles and make [some] sense of their hypotheses and the tests
of those hypotheses. I simply cannot use the same tools (even
JGR, which seems like a relevant place to start!) to argue
that science has made it untenable to believe in God. Where’s
the documentation and the clear-cut test?
Scientists haven’t addressed the issue using standard scientific
techniques, so they oughtn’t claim that they have done so. We
should concentrate on public education about the scientific
process, and about things that we actually CAN state with
scientific certainty. Some of those things will conflict with what
some religions say. People can evaluate for themselves how
it affects their faith.
P.S. I guess there is no type of philosopher other than an
“armchair” one. Excuse the invective!
“Science and religion are NOT compatible” is a vacuous statement. There are many religions and many views of science. So, is the correct statement: “no science is compatible with any religion.” Well that’s not true, as the “science” of “intelligent design” could be compatible with a form of fundamentalist christianity. There is no consensus as to what is a TRUE science or a TRUE religion.
I prefer to look at it this way: A religionist believes in their own personal religion. That is, they believe their religion is TRUE. Well, equivalent religions that believe the same truths are really the same religion. So….no two different religions can both be true. That is, religionists believe all the religions are FALSE except theirs. I simply believe all religions are FALSE. Period. That is, out of all the things believed to be TRUE in a particular religion, at least one is FALSE.
In a way that is my “religion”: I don’t know what is the truth (about certain religious tenets, such as creation or the existence of the supernatural). But I believe that anyone who says they do know is lying.
Awareness based on the specifity of a species limits the individual but allows collectives to be aware of phenomenon that are not readily apparent. Group theory, common denominators of reference points or perspectives, and training allow us to “see” and “communicate.” Science and religion seek to accomodate the same goal; to perceive and understand the truth. Science and even religion are dynamic and constantly changing with respect to time. To say that religion and science can never be reconciled is arrogant, shortsighted, and foolish. The Cosmos is my “higher power” and accomodates everything in it rather nicely. The initial reference frame we share (knock on wood) is what validates a theory or claim as truth or natural law. Most theologians already make accomodations for extraterrestrial life including the Vatican, Jews, and Muslims. I’ve yet to meet a scientist who could predict based on his theory like Mozart composed sonatas. I’ve yet to meet a religious person who at some point or another didn’t adapt their beliefs based on uncontrovertable new information. Religion is based on theory just a much as science is even if the faithful are unwilling to admit it. Observe the religious person long enough and inevitably they change. Religion is the poor man’s science where your only instrument for discovery is the human body; what we feel often determines what you think about how you feel. I beleive that as our understanding of the human nervous system grows, our understanding of religion will be justified by science and that the discoveries along the way about the rest of the physical universe will help unify the two.
When people argue against using the example of using the supernatural beliefs to define religion, they are entirely missing the point of Sean’s argument. Are you saying that Southern Baptism is not a religion? What he means by messing with the definition of religion is confusing the reason any individual may participate with – which is exactly what you do by talking about belief in some vague higher power, or respect for tradition, or access to certain states of consciousness as religion. Those are personal reasons for adhering to a religion, but the religion itself is the set of practices and beliefs that the people share in common. From this point I think the rest of Sean’s argument follows quite clearly, so I have nothing further to add, except that from the point of view of us non-accommodationists it is precisely this this intertwining of beliefs and practices that is so pernicious. Science can very clearly say that much of religious belief is ludicrous, but because in practice there is so much emotion tied to it that people cannot even accept factual evidence in conflict with what they believe. This is a problem not unique to the religious mindset, just particularly embodied by it – perfected one may say.
@friberg: those statements were not originally intended to be metaphorical.
Everyone who’s trying to cling to the notion that science and religion are compatible is just proving Carroll’s point.
Topical article in Time a few weeks ago, by Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1902851,00.html
Takeaway; The meme is adaptable and profoundly tribal. What’s good for the group is God’s Word.
Well-articulated.
However, you must be careful not to generalize your connotation of the word ‘religion’ as its general meaning. There are billions of religious people whose religious beliefs are far from the world ‘was built in 6 days’ statement. As an example, Japuji Sahib, the main text of the Sikhs (disclaimer: I am not a Sikh), states how the nature of reality is mysterious, the unity in supreme reality etc. Zen Buddhism, which is a popular religion in itself, is far from the ‘Moses parted the Red Sea’ rhetoric and focuses on a person’s self-discovery through a system of self-questioning and meditation.
Religion is, depending upon cultures and countries and customs, a very differently understood word. A lot of the world’s major religions are more about meditation, self-understanding, and philosophical aspects of our existence.
When observer in science will become conscious this will connect science and religion.
yours Amrit Sorli
the question of whether or not religion and science are compatible makes as much sense as whether or not santa and science are compatible.
Deism is a great safety net for anyone who fears God and advocating it isn’t as likely to polarize people as much as the other two. It’s as logical as anything else we’ve hypothesized, yet doesn’t claim total knowledge of the subject, or even a capacity to acquire such knowledge.
If there is a creator, he probably knows quite well the physical laws that hold the universe together, so, as the architect of the universe he would be able to apply these laws to his creation. It seems more reasonable to fathom for the human mind than saying everything just “is”, or claiming all knowledge of the creation is explicitly covered in a book.
Ah, tacitus, so we enter a “my pub list is longer than yours” contest! I wonder how extensively you’ve written on scientific thought, experimental design, the philosophy and methodology of excluding/including data that is inconvenient to one’s hypothesis, etc.? I long ago grew tired of hearing the same old stuff from folks who claim to be educated and rationalist, then proudly exhibit blatant ignorance and dogmatism when it comes to matters of world religious beliefs/practices and science. I don’t pretend to be a sophisticated and thorough thinker when it somes to physical chemistry or plant physiology, or whatever your field of research is. Perhaps you shouldn’t pretend to be a sophisticated and thorough thinker when it comes to matters of religious faith. Maybe you need to get out a little more.