It’s an article in The Humanist titled “Why Science Is Not in Conflict with Religion”…but its whole point is that religion is completely wrong. It argues that the existence of an interventionist deity is a question of science; it mentions that religions make scientific claims all the time.
All religions, particularly the “big three” Abrahamic religions, make claims about the natural world that clearly fall under the purview of one or more fields of science.
I’m reading the whole thing and agreeing with it, and wondering how they’re going to argue themselves out of this discussion of major conflicts to deny the existence of a conflict, and they sort of do, at the end.
Science will continue to advance. Predictions will be made and conclusions drawn, many that are accurate but others that will be in need of revision as further evidence is compiled. Humans will continue to gather information about every aspect of the natural world, and if findings don’t correspond with or support religious beliefs, as has happened throughout history, then the theists do themselves and humankind a disservice by denying objective evidence. The scientific process is neutral; it is objective and seeks only to discover new information, and thus is not in conflict with any entity besides itself as it self-corrects and achieves greater accuracy over time. If there is indeed a conflict, that conflict was fabricated by those whose agenda is driven by subjective beliefs and who fight to preserve positions that are no longer tenable in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Oh. There’s the problem. Science is objective and neutral and just plain true, therefore it’s not in conflict with mere subjective beliefs.
I’m sorry, you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to simply declare that your position is ultimately the correct one, that your authority is the universe itself, and therefore you aren’t really conflicting with anything that matters. This is a kind of bland scientism that obliviously steamrolls right over the issues in question.
There clearly is a conflict when a majority of Americans believe in a divine authority as the cause of the entire universe, and claim the authority of a supreme being greater than the universe as the source of their information. Waving that fundamental assumption aside as irrelevant because Science is not a valid way to address the question. The points the author brings up are valid, and they may refute the existence of a deity, but do not refute the existence of a conflict.
Anyone who is at all involved in science also knows that there isn’t simply a truth laid out in a clear path before us. We struggle within science to figure out what’s true, so it’s unfair to pretend it’s obvious what’s right in a conflict outside of science. Do the work. There is no shortcut.
It’s as if two fighters climb into a ring, and the referee looks them over and announces that A is 5 pounds heavier than B and has a longer reach, therefore this fight does not exist and A has won it. There are no victories by fiat, and you’d better realize that we really are in a battle here.
Science is based upon materialistic monism, whereas religion is dualist. That’s as big a conflict as there can possibly be.
I forgot to add that there’s no evidence to support dualism that is more than hearsay or faulty interpretation.
I like to think of science not as truth, or even correct, but as self-correcting. Which religion is not.
wcorvi (#3) –
Occasionally, religion self-corrects. But it’s only ever as historical revisionism (i.e. “We always believed A, B and C…!”). And only to keep the collection plate full (re: views that are no longer socially acceptable outside the religion).
What is “based upon” supposed to mean here? If “dualism” (or supernaturalism) were true, then would the sciences be unable to study it? If dualism were true, doesn’t that mean at the very least that there’s still a “material” side of the equation that can be well understood, with which the non-material side is in some way interacting?
What I don’t want to hear is a rant about how it’s always going to be logically possible for some religious person to come up with whatever wacky ideas they like…. If that’s indeed some sort of a basis of science itself, a feature of it and not just a way of expressing opposition to a religious person’s false or confused or intellectually disreputable claims, then what is the factually correct thing to say about science? You couldn’t learn about the world if there were souls or other supernatural stuff? Does that sound like the right thing to say? If there were souls, then the world (at least that aspect of it) must be such an utterly chaotic and incomprehensible mess that no systematic study of it is possible? Why would anything like that need to be the case, and where did you get your evidence to support this idea?
I do not see conflict as a necessary part of science or religion but it certainly exists.
The Abrahamic religions are especially prone to conflict and most of what they claim as being true is not supported by scientific evidence. I am not sure that there is not some none dogmatic religion that is not incompatible with the scientific understanding of existence but I do not see why there could not be.
Aggressive conflict does not seem to be a part of science but history does offer plenty of evidence of aggressive conflict in the history of the Abrahamic religions. In that sense science is not in conflict but science is in profound conflict with dogmatism of all kinds and that is a direct challenge to them!
uncle frogy
PZ:
Yes, we are, and those pickled in religious thought aren’t about to leave the battlefield.
From the quoted article:
To which PZ says:
Or as Bronowski put it, science is not a looseleaf notebook of facts.
consciousness razor @5:
My own view is that Science is a story we very human scientists have put together that organizes what we hope are objective facts in a way that leads to as few conflicts as possible among those facts. But the facts themselves have already been put together in that same way.. which is why the philosophers of science say that those facts are “theory laden.” Science is not neutral — it favors consistency and comprehensibility.
So what about the theory of souls? If they don’t interact with matter, then we can provisionally say they, in turn, don’t matter. Even dark matter and dark energy interact with the matter we are familiar with to some small degree — that’s why they do matter.
So souls, or ghosts, must interact with matter if they are to be any concern at all. So the conjecture is that there are many conscious beings (or at least one) that interact with our material world to perform things according to an agenda that is, by definition, inconsistent or in conflict with a story that considers only material forces.
Now, under those conditions, try to design a controlled experiment. Concerning anything. Good luck doing your analytical chemistry with ghosts (holy or otherwise) adding a little spiritual boost to certain samples to make them appear friendly to an agenda that is unknowable to anyone but the ghosts. Who ya gonna call?
Yes, I would say that the existence of such a theoretical non-material interfering entity would make science, as a human endeavor to build stories consistent with material evidence, impossible, or at least unlikely to succeed in producing anything more consistent than do the thousands of faiths that do posit the existence of such entities.
So is that the kind of world we live in? One with a Holy Ghost, or one with a fleet of friendly capricious Caspers? There’s always a chance. But every time science succeeds, the chance of that kind of entity being part of the story gets ever smaller.
Now, how do you educate the public about such a conflict? I once had the opportunity to ask Carl Sagan how philosophy of science might be included in K-12 science education. His answer: “My plate is full.”
This seems to be a good place to point out that this fuckin’ nonsense has surfaced again:
Eucharistic Miracle Confirmed in Poland.
See, it is too Jesus! Wheat turns into bloody tissue, so there!
Razor @ 5, there is no good reason to presume that dualism or supernaturalism is true. And if there were any evidence for it, then it would become amenable to scientific study, up to the point where magic took over from rational enquiry.
I can’t respond to your second paragraph because I don’t understand it, & I can’t spend any longer trying to work it out. (I’m working on the basis that you’re a monist.)
Wow Caine,
that sure is one heck of a miracle.
IANA Catholic, but I assume they do have some procedure for dealing with consecrated Host that becomes contaminated. Plopping it in a jar of water and observing it for several months is not what I would have thought it to be, though.
My mom had this little quirk where she was forever trying to get avocado pits to sprout. She would poke three toothpicks into the pit and then rest the assemblage on the rim of a jelly jar filled with water, which she would then put on her kitchen window sill. The pits never sprouted, but the jars DID become filled with a green slimy mass. I always assumed that was just algae, but hey! maybe it was the body of Martian Jesus!
moarscienceplz:
Supposedly. The article mentions they rejected one from Utah, because the ‘red matter’ was mold. It’s not stopping them from declaring the others to be bloody tissue. Bloody tissue which matches magical bloody tissue from 1,300 years ago no less.
The idea with the water is that it’s the only way to properly dispose of a consecrated host. They don’t talk much about why consecrated hosts are found in the street and stuff.
I think you could understand it by starting at the beginning and attempting to answer my first question. What does it mean to say science is “based upon” materialism, if that’s not really something which is necessary for it?
Let me give an analogy or two. Biology in some sense requires biological things. If those didn’t exist, then biology would be the study of a certain kind of non-existent entity, in which case biology wouldn’t be in a position to explain stuff about the world of existing things. This obviously doesn’t make it non-scientific: other sciences don’t require biological things in this sense, and there’s no basic assumption that all of the sciences must be about biological things or that the world must consist entirely of biological things.
For a reductionist like me, the situation is somewhat different for physics: physics is about the motion of matter, and the claim is basically that every fact about the natural world reduces to material objects moving around as described by our best physical laws. If you have some factual state of affairs about the economy or human psychology or whatever it may be, then there is some physical analysis of that situation, because however else you may want to think about it, the economy, etc., consists of matter in motion. Of course there’s no guarantee that a physical analysis must be more useful in every case than some other kind of analysis (indeed, we have ample experience that it isn’t in many cases), but we simply haven’t a priori ruled it out as impossible, that’s all.
Now, we’re almost back to where we started. This kind of reductionism does not entail that non-physical entities like souls or gods or what-have-you, if they did exist, could not be studied by physics or some other kind of science. If they did exist, there is no need to assume that they must have no effect on the natural world, so even physically there very well could be some fact about how matter moves due to its interactions with the non-physical stuff. Perhaps, in that sort of a world which isn’t like ours in so many ways, there would also be some other non-physical way of studying it scientifically (we could have some other kind of access to the information besides “looking” at how things move around). But the fact is simply that in the actual world we happen to have, there are no non-physical things to study (at least we don’t have good evidence of them), not that we couldn’t have a scientific understanding of them if they existed. It’s not the case that science dogmatically and for no coherent reason assumes in advance that religions are false, supernatural things are nonexistent and can’t be studied, and so forth. You just have to be a little more thoughtful or careful when you’re trying to make very general statements like that, because they can very quickly give people the wrong impression.
That’s incredibly, incredibly wrong.
I see consciousness razor beat me to the punch. Let me add this.
> How not to attack Intelligent Design Creationism: Philosophical misconceptions about Methodological Naturalism
> (final draft – to appear in Foundations of Science)
> Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke, Johan Braeckman
https://sites.google.com/site/maartenboudry/teksten-1/methodological-naturalism
Let me also respond to this:
Imagine that tomorrow magic comes back to the world, ala Shadowrun. 4/5 of humanity transforms, permanently, into other creatures, such as orcs, elves, dwarfs. Shamans and other spellcasters become commonplace and can cast spells through force of will. Corporations start hiring these spellcasters as part of their security alongside normal guys with guns.
In that kind of world, are you going to be a flat earth atheist? Are you going to deny the obvious facts right in front of your face? Presumably no. Presumably with that kind of irrefutable evidence, you would start to accept that magic is real, etc etc. On what basis would you make that conclusion? Obviously science, and more generally empirical reasoning.
In that kind of world, with that kind of evidence, science would confirm the existence of magic and elves. However, we don’t live in that kind of world. We know that there are no human shamans that can enter the spirit realm to bypass physical security to gain the secrets of mega-corps. We know this because of the evidence. As Boudry says, it’s not that science has nothing to say about the supernatural. No. Instead, science has everything to say about the supernatural – the existence of the supernatural has been falsified.