Required reading for the day

Two things: the first is Sean Carroll’s discussion of what kinds of questions science can answer, and what the answers tell us about the universe.

And, without fail, the scientific judgment comes down in favor of a strictly non-miraculous, non-supernatural view of the universe.

That’s what’s really meant by my claim that science and religion are incompatible. I was referring to the Congregation-for-the-Causes-of-the-Saints interpretation of religion, which entails a variety of claims about things that actually happen in the world; not the it’s-all-in-our-hearts interpretation, where religion makes no such claims. (I have no interest in arguing at this point in time over which interpretation is “right.”) When religion, or anything else, makes claims about things that happen in the world, those claims can in principle be judged by the methods of science. That’s all.

Well, of course, there is one more thing: the judgment has been made, and views that step outside the boundaries of strictly natural explanation come up short. By “natural” I simply mean the view in which everything that happens can be explained in terms of a physical world obeying unambiguous rules, never disturbed by whimsical supernatural interventions from outside nature itself. The preference for a natural explanation is not an a priori assumption made by science; it’s a conclusion of the scientific method. We know enough about the workings of the world to compare two competing big-picture theoretical frameworks: a purely naturalistic one, versus one that incorporates some sort of supernatural component. To explain what we actually see, there’s no question that the naturalistic approach is simply a more compelling fit to the observations.

This is why religion is a failed explanation for the world. It just doesn’t line up with the evidence, at all.

Your second reading for the day is Dan Dennett explaining why we don’t even need religion as a social construct.

I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to cling to the Gold Standard to keep our currency sound. It was a useful crutch, but we’ve outgrown it. Denmark, according to a recent study, is the sanest, healthiest, happiest, most crime-free nation in the world, and by and large the Danes simply ignore the God issue. We should certainly hope that those who believe in belief are wrong, because belief is waning fast, and the props are beginning to buckle.

If religion has no useful explanatory power, and if we don’t need it to make our lives better and richer, why not just toss the whole ball of fluff out?

Ireland has a blasphemy law

And it’s a strange thing. It’s a law that slaps anyone who offends “a substantial number of the adherents of a religion” with a €25,000 fine — which is equal to most of my yearly salary, and also means I’m one of the few people that one could make a good case for having committed blasphemy. I guess I won’t be vacationing in Ireland any time soon.

Fortunately, some people are speaking out against the law, especially Atheist Ireland. Join in if you can, work to repeal this medieval nonsense.

Looking for some godless hymns?

Eric Jayne has put together a list of his top 30 atheist songs. It seems like it ought to be longer — to my mind, if it isn’t praising Jesus or any other supernatural entity, it’s an atheist song…which means just about every decent piece of music there is. (That is not to say, of course, that there aren’t any good religious songs — I’ve got a small collection of gospel music on my iPod that’s pretty darned lively).

Unscientific America and those awful atheists

To return to Unscientific America again, I hardly touched on chapter 8, where they express their dismay at those uppity “New Atheists”. I am not going to address his personal criticisms of me — there’s no point, you obviously know I think he’s completely wrong, and the uncharitable will simply claim my disagreement is the result of a personal animus — so instead I’m only going to address a couple of other general points that Mooney and Kirshenbaum get completely wrong. They plainly do not understand the atheist position, and make claims that demonstrate that either they didn’t read any of the “New Atheist’s” books, or perhaps the simple ideas in them are too far beyond their comprehension.

This is a basic one, from philosophy of science 101. There are several different ways to derive a naturalistic position. Mooney and Kirshenbaum sort of get it right, although I disagree with some of the details.

Modern science relies on the systematic collection of data through observation and experimentation, the development of theories to organize and explain this evidence, and the use of professional institutions and norms such as peer review to subject claims to scrutiny and ultimately (it is hoped) develop reliable knowledge. A core principle underlying this approach is something called “methodological naturalism,” which stipulates that scientific hypotheses are tested and explained solely by reference to natural causes and events. Crucially, methodological naturalism is not the same thing as philosophical naturalism—the idea that all of existence consists of natural causes and laws, period. Methodological naturalism in no way rules out the possibility of entities or causes outside of nature; it simply stipulates that they will not be considered within the framework of scientific inquiry.

Following this, he proceeds to damn the “New Atheists” for “collapsing the distinction” between methodological and philosophical naturalism, and argues that Dawkins is taking a philosophical position and misusing science to claim it “entirely precludes God’s existence.”

One big problem: we don’t. Oddly enough, this is one of the most common canards used by theistic critics, that we’re demanding a kind of philosophical absolutism, yet Mooney is an atheist. The “New Atheist” approach is firmly grounded in methodological naturalism; it’s an extremely pragmatic operational approach to epistemology that leads us to reject religious claims. None of us make an absolute declaration of the impossibility of the existence of a deity, either.

One strand of this view is simple empiricism. Science and reason give us antibiotics, microwave ovens, sanitation, lasers, and rocketships to the moon. What has religion done for us lately? We have become accustomed to objective measures of success, where we can explicitly see that a particular strategy for decision-making and the generation of knowledge has concrete results. I’m sorry, but faith seems to produce mainly wrong answers, and in comparison, it flops badly.

Now, now, I can hear the defenders of religion begin to grumble, there’s more to life than merely material products like microwave ovens — there’s contentment and contemplation and a sort of subjective psychology of ritual and community and all that sort of thing. Sure. Fine. Then stick to it, and stop pretending that religion ought to be a determinant of public policy, that it can inform us about the nature of our existence, or that it provides a good guide to public morality. Get it out of our schools and courthouses and workplaces and governments, take it to your homes and your churches, and use it appropriately as your personal consoling mind-game. And stop pretending that it is universal and necessary, because there are a thousand different religions that all claim the same properties with wildly different details, and there are millions of us with no religion at all who get along just fine without your hallowed quirks.

The other strand is reciprocity. We atheists and scientists have ideas that we are expected to explain and support with evidence, and we are accustomed to being jumped on with sadistic vigor if we fail to provide it. We merely apply the same methodological standards to religion. We do not insist a priori that gods cannot exist, we instead turn to all those people who insist that they do, and ask, “how do you know that?”

Would you believe that for all the fervor of their certainty, none of them have ever adequately answered the question?

There is no philosophical or metaphysical certainty on the part of us “New Atheists”, and we have no problem admitting it. Dawkins wrote it down forthrightly in his book when he scores himself as a 6 on a 7-point scale of atheism: “6. Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. ‘I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not
there.'” It’s genuinely remarkable how many people say they’ve read his book, and then walk away to claim that Dawkins says science “entirely precludes God’s existence.”

I agree entirely with Dawkins’ sentiment. I also turn it around to use an agnostic sentiment on religious interlocuters: “I don’t know for sure, and you don’t either, so why are you being so high-handedly specific in your claims that god was a Jewish carpenter, or his prophet was a polygamist with a flying horse, or that Ragnarok is imminent? Give me a method for evaluating your claims, tell me what rational reason you have to believe that, show me the evidence!” And then they don’t. I’m just supposed to have faith.

It doesn’t even have to be some weirdly specific, quirky bit of historical fiction — even the vague claims fail on epistemological grounds. How often have you been told that “God is love”? How do they know? What does it even mean? It’s just feel-good babble. If it makes you feel good to think it, go ahead…but please, let’s not have this standard of unsubstantiated wishful thinking be regarded as a useful contribution to philosophy, or science, or morality, or poetry, or social cohesiveness, or much of anything other than a trivial activity, like the twiddling of your thumbs that you do in idle moments.

Now notice: Mooney and Kirshenbaum are busily carping at these ghastly “New Atheists” for imagined transgressions against reason and the appropriate application of science, but what do they have to say about Christians who believe that crackers turn into Jesus in their mouths, or that a magical ensoulment occurs at fertilization to turn a zygote into a fully human being, or that children should be kept in ignorance about sex, or that woman’s role is as subservient breeder, or that using condoms to prevent disease is a violation of a divine dictate that the only purpose of sex is to have babies, or that people who love other people of the same sex deserve stoning, or at least to be unable to share insurance policies? Compared to the “New Atheist” insistence that remarkable claims about magic sky fairies ought to be regarded as patent nonsense, those can be rather destructive to society…and also negatively affect the acceptance of science. Rick Warren surely deserves as much condemnation as Richard Dawkins.

But no. The book is silent on the people who directly oppose science politically, culturally, in our classrooms, and on our radio and television. They aren’t the problem, I guess. If only we could clear away the distracting Atheist Noise Machine, train a generation of science journalists to stop bashing religion (as if they do now), and presto, the populace will obligingly stop shaking their angry fists at science and will lie back and accept that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, that the climate is changing and we need to take political action, and oh my yes, gay people can have their civil rights, too.

Oh, wait, I’m over-generalizing. They do say something about those people who believe in talking snakes, angels, and the power of mystic mumblings.

The American scientific community gains nothing from the condescending rhetoric of the New Atheists—and neither does the stature of science in our culture. We should instead adopt a stance of respect towards those who would hold their faith dear, and a sense of humility based on the knowledge that although science can explain a great deal about the way our world functions, the question of God’s existence lies outside its expertise.

Respect faith. Be humble. Pretend that all those beliefs are unquestionable.

Bull…oh, excuse me. Mooney gets rather pearl-clutchey when strong language is used. I shall restrain myself (and you commenters, too, please: I normally trust you all to cope with adult language without too much concern, but apparently a couple of authors with very delicate sensitivities will be reading this and counting your four-letter words).

Look, the only reason “the question of God’s existence” is in any way outside the domain of science is because it is such an amorphous subject that the believers will always rapidly move its definition beyond testability when pressed. However, they also claim that these deities had major material effects on the world — and most also claim ongoing, direct participation by their favorite god on their personal universe. Those are not beyond the realm of science! If absolute knowledge of this superbeing’s existence is out of our reach, we can at least easily push him/her/it/them back into a fairly tenuous connection with the world, to the point where they are irrelevant.

And if science can’t say a thing about the existence of gods, sweet jebus, Mooney, be consistent and admit that the jabbering, sanctimonious priests can’t either! Why we should respect their fairy-tales and complete lack of humility while you castigate godless science for relying on mere evidence is incomprehensible.

The essence of what Mooney and Kirshenbaum recommend in their book is that science must cut off its own balls, science must wear her corset cinched tight, science must not dissent from the masses, science must be obliging and polite, because that is the only way the public will accept it.

I rudely disagree.

There is nothing condescending about appreciating that almost every human being, even the most god-soaked, has a functional mind and that maybe they can actually learn about science and a scientific way of thinking that makes their myths untenable. There is nothing condescending about being uncompromising in our expectations and trusting that others can hear and think and express their own ideas. There is something deeply condescending about setting aside a big chunk of people’s experience and telling people that they should not question it.

Science is a sublimely human activity and a central part of the best of Western culture…and of every culture on earth that aspires to be something more than a collection of dirt-grubbing subsistence breeders, propagating for the sake of propagating. It’s what gives us the potential to reach beyond making do, that gives us the leisure and freedom to flower in the arts and explore the diversity of human experience. Even institutionalized religion itself is an incidental byproduct of the first clever dicks who thought to reroute the flow of a river to irrigate fields and led to centralization, urbanization, hierarchies of leadership, accounting, writing, and the whole avalanche of change that followed. It’s important. Mooney and Kirshenbaum know this; it’s what their whole book is about.

In order to be what it is, though, science must live. It’s a process carried out by human beings, and it can’t be gagged and enslaved and shackled to a narrow goal, one that doesn’t rock the boat. Imagine they’d written a book that tried to tell artists that they shouldn’t challenge the culture; we’d laugh ourselves sick and tell them that they were completely missing the point. Why do you think some of us are rolling our eyes at their absurd request that scientists should obliging accommodate themselves to a safe frame that every middle-class American would find cozy? They don’t get it.

Somehow, they think that Carl Sagan’s great magic trick was that he didn’t make Americans feel uncomfortable. I think they’re wrong. Sagan’s great talent was that he showed a passion for science. People made fun of his talk of “billyuns and billyuns”, but it was affectionate, because at the same time he was talking about these strange, abstract, cosmic phenomena, everyone could tell he was sincere — he loved this stuff.

Another example: Feynman. Watch the man, and what is the impression he makes? Absolute joy. He’s laughing at the universe. People love his lectures because he’s cocky and bold and doesn’t hesitate to show you where you’re wrong.

For a less openly abrasive case, how about E.O. Wilson? In his talks, he seems to be a soft-spoken gentleman who’s willing to concede quite a bit of respect to everyone — but read his work, and there’s a steely spine there, too, and if you get him talking about ants, you discover he’s cheerfully obsessive.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s prescription for improving the fate of science in this country is to train young scientists to be more media- and politics-savvy, to build a generation of cautious barometers of the public mood “capable of bridging the divides that have led to science’s declining influence.” And perhaps we could get more support for the arts if young artists were taught to favor bucolic photo-realism, if poetry was required to be in greeting card meter, and if all music was appropriate to elevators? We’d surely have a new renaissance if the NEA only funded art that a conservative senator would find inoffensive!

I recommend something different. Our next generation of great science communicators should be flesh-and-blood people with personalities, every one different and every one with different priorities, all singing out enthusiastically for everything from astronomy to zoology, and they should sometimes be angry and sometimes sorrowful and sometimes deliriously excited. They shouldn’t hesitate to say what they think, even if it might make Joe the Plumber surly. If you want to improve American science and the perception of science by the public, teach science first and foremost, because what you’ll find is that your discipline is then populated with people who are there because they love the ideas. And, by the way, let them know every step of the way that science is also a performing art, and that they have an obligation as a public intellectual to take their hard-earned learning and share it with the world.

Face the fact that some of us (but definitely not all of us) will be so smitten with this wonderful, powerful way of thinking that we’re going to follow our bliss and laugh at the hidebound ritualists who expect us to respect their superstitions, and at the prissy wanna-be moralists who demand bloodless conformity. You will not generate new Sagans by insisting on deference. You will not change a culture with a declining appreciation of science by demanding that scientists respect the beliefs of people who despise science the most. Mooney and Kirshenbaum single out the increasingly vibrant atheist sub-culture as something that needs to be muffled, and that’s symptomatic of the failure of their suggestions: what other ideas should be stifled lest they disturb American complacency? And shouldn’t shaking up that complacency be exactly what scientists do?

Dennett and evolutionary christology

All the cool kids are currently attending the big Darwin festival in Cambridge, which sounds like it has been a lot of informative fun. A couple of the sessions, though, are funded by the Templeton Foundation, which sounds much less fun. Fortunately, Dan Dennett has taken a bullet for the team and attended those meetings, and files a report on location — he describes it as “wonderfully awful”, with some exceptions. I wouldn’t mind listening to Pascal Boyer talk on religion, but the rest…I shudder.

Here’s his account.

I am attending and participating in the big Cambridge University Darwin Week bash, and I noticed that one of the two concurrent sessions the first day was on evolution and theology, and was ‘supported by the Templeton Foundation’ (though the list of Festival Donors and Sponsors does not include any mention of Templeton). I dragged myself away from a promising session on speciation, and attended. Good thing I did. It was wonderfully awful. We heard about the Big Questions, a phrase used often, and it was opined that the new atheists naively endorse the proposition that “There are no meaningful questions that science cannot answer.” Richard Dawkins’ wonderful sentence about how nasty the God of the Old Testament is was read with relish by Philip Clayton, Professor at Claremont School of Theology in California, and the point apparently was to illustrate just how philistine these atheists were–though I noticed that he didn’t say he disagreed with Richard’s evaluation of Yahweh. We were left to surmise, I guess, that it was tacky of Richard to draw attention to these embarrassing blemishes in an otherwise august tradition worthy of tremendous respect. The larger point was the complaint that the atheists have a “dismissive attitude toward the Big Questions” and Dawkins, in particular, didn’t consult theologians. (H. Allen Orr, they were singing your song.) Clayton astonished me by listing God’s attributes: according to his handsomely naturalistic theology, God is not omnipotent, not even supernatural, and . . . . in short Clayton is an atheist who won’t admit it.

The second talk was by J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, a Professor of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, and it was an instance of “theological anthropology,” full of earnest gobbledygook about embodied minds and larded with evolutionary tidbits drawn from Frans de Waal, Steven Mithen and others. In the discussion period I couldn’t stand it any more and challenged the speakers: “I’m Dan Dennett, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and we are forever being told that we should do our homework and consult with the best theologians. I’ve heard two of you talk now, and you keep saying this is an interdisciplinary effort–evolutionary theology–but I am still waiting to be told what theology has to contribute to the effort. You’ve clearly adjusted your theology considerably in the wake of Darwin, which I applaud, but what traffic, if any, goes in the other direction? Is there something I’m missing? What questions does theology ask or answer that aren’t already being dealt with by science or secular philosophy? What can you clarify for this interdisciplinary project?” (Words to that effect) Neither speaker had anything to offer, but van Huyssteen blathered on for a bit without, however, offering any instances of theological wisdom that every scientist interested in the Big Questions should have in his kit.

But I learned a new word: “kenotic” as in kenotic theology. It comes from the Greek word kenosis meaning ‘self-emptying.’ Honest to God. This new kenotic theology is all the rage in some quarters, one gathers, and it is “more deeply Christian for being more adapted to Darwinism.” (I’m not making this up.) I said that I was glad to learn this new word and had to say that I was tempted by the idea that kenotic theology indeed lived up to its name. At the coffee break, some folks told me my question had redeemed the session for them, but I would guess I irritated others with my persistent request for something of substance to chew on.

After the second set of two talks, which I was obliged to listen to since the moderator promised more responses to my “challenge” and I had to stay around to hear them out, there was another half hour of discussion. I did my duty: I listened attentively, I asked questions, and the theologians were embarrassingly short on answers, though one recommended David Chalmers on panpsychism–a philosopher, not a theologian, and second, nobody, not even Chalmers, takes panpsychism seriously, to the best of my knowledge. Do theologians?

The third speaker was Dr. Denis Alexander of Cambridge University, and he had some interesting historical scholarship on the varying positions on progress and purpose offered by thinkers from Erasmus Darwin-who had surmised that all life began from a single “living filament” (nice guess!)-through Darwin and Spencer and the Huxleys and on to Gould and Dawkins (and me). Particularly useful was a late quote from Gould’s last book (p468 if you want to run it down) in which he allowed, contrary to his long-held line on contingency, that evolution did exhibit “directional properties” that could not be ignored. The conclusion of Alexander’s talk was that it is nowadays a little “more plausible that it isn’t necessarily the case that the evolutionary process doesn’t have a larger purpose.” That is certainly a circumspect and modest conclusion. The fourth speaker was the Catholic Father Fraser Watt (of Cambridge University School of Divinity, and a big Templeton grantsman, as noted by the chair). He introduced us to “evolutionary Christology.” Again, I’m not making this up. Evolution, it turns out, was planned by an intelligent God to create a species “capable of receiving the incarnation”–though this particular competence of our species might be, in Watts’ opinion, a “spandrel.” Jesus was “a spiritual mutation, ” and “the culmination of the evolutionary process,” marking a turning point in world history. A member of the audience cheekily asked if Father Watt was saying that Jesus’s parents were both normal human beings then? (I was going to press the point: perhaps Jesus’s madumnal genes from Mary were the product of natural selection but his padumnal genes were hand crafted by the Holy Spirit!–but Father Watt forestalled the inquiry by declaring that he had no knowledge or opinion about Jesus’ parentage–something that his Catholic colleagues will presumably not appreciate.)

Afterwards I was asked if I had enjoyed the session, and learned anything, and I allowed as how I had. I would not have dared use the phrase “evolutionary Christology” for fear of being condemned as a vicious caricaturist of worthy, sophisticated theologians, but now I had heard the term used numerous times, and would be quoting it in the future, as an example of the sort of wisdom that sophisticated theology has to offer to evolutionary biology.

I had an epiphany at the end of the session, but I kept it to myself: The Eucharist is actually a Recapitulation of the Eukaryotic Revolution. When Christians ingest the Body of Christ, without digesting it, but keep it whole (holistier-than-thou whole), they are re-enacting the miracle of endosymbiosis that paved the way for eventual multi-cellularity. And so, dearly beloved brethren, we can see that by keeping Christ intact in our bodies we are keeping His Power intact in our embodied Minds, or Souls, just the way the first Eukaryote was vouchsafed a double blessing of earthly competence that enabled its descendants to join forces in Higher Organizations. Evolutionary theology. . . . I think I get it! I can do it! It truly is intellectual tennis without a net.

There is another Templeton session on The Evolution of Religion, with Pascal Boyer, David Sloan Wilson, Michael Ruse and Harvey Whitehouse. Dr. Fraser Watt, our evolutionary Christologist, will be chairing the session. It will be interesting to see how docile these mammals are in the feeding trough.

The second Templeton-sponsored session (at the Cambridge Darwin Festival) was more presentable. On the evolution of religion, it featured clear, fact-filled presentations by Pascal Boyer and Harvey Whitehouse, a typical David Sloan Wilson advertisement for his multi-level selection approach, and an even more typical meandering and personal harangue from Michael Ruse. The session was chaired, urbanely and without any contentful intervention, by Fraser Watt, our evolutionary christologist. (I wonder: should “christology” be capitalized? Ian McEwan asked me if there was, perhaps, a field of X-ray christology. I’ve been having fun fantasizing about how that might revolutionize science and open up a path for the Crick and Watson of theology!)

I learned something at the session. Boyer presented a persuasive case that the “packaging” of the stew of separable and largely independent items as “religion” is itself ideology generated by the institutions, a sort of advertising that has the effect of turning religions into “brands” in competition. Whitehouse gave a fascinating short account of the Kivung cargo cult in a remote part of Papua New Guinea that he studied as an anthropologist, living with them for several years. A problem: the Kivung cult has the curious belief that their gods (departed ancestors) will return, transformed into white men, and bearing high technology and plenty for all. This does present a challenge for a lone white anthropologist coming to live with them for awhile, camera gear in hand, and wishing to be as unobtrusive as possible. Wilson offered very interesting data from a new study by his group on a large cohort of American teenagers, half Pentecostals and half Episcopalians (in other words, maximally conservative and maximally liberal), finding that on many different scales of self-assessment, these young people are so different that they would look to a biologist like “different species.” Ruse declared that while he is an atheist, he wishes that those wanting to explain religion wouldn’t start with the assumption that religious beliefs are false. He doesn’t seem to appreciate the role of the null hypothesis or the presumption of innocence in trials. We also learned tidbits about his life and his preference–as an atheist–for the Calvinist God.

The power of nonsense

Forgive me, readers, but Madeline Bunting has raised up her tiny, fragile pin-head again, and I must address her non-arguments once more. Well, not her non-arguments, actually, but the same tedious non-arguments the fans of superstition constantly trundle out. She was at some strange conference where only people who love religion spoke and came away with affirmations of the usual tripe. It’s as if the “New Atheists” have provoked a counter-attack by critics armored in pudding and armed with damp sponges.

…the Archbishop of Canterbury was brisk, and he warned, “beware of the power of nonsense”. Science’s triumphalist claim as a competitor to failed religion was dangerous. In contrast, he offered an accommodation in which science and religion were “different ways of knowing” and “what you come to know depends on the questions you start with”. Different questions lead to “different practices of learning” – for example different academic disciplines. Rather than competitors, science and religion were both needed to pursue different questions.

We’re quite aware of the power of nonsense — and I agree that it certainly has a powerful draw on some people, from those who frolic with fairies to the Archbishop of Canterbury. That’s the frightening element of this whole argument, that people get sucked into spiritual fol-de-rol and think they’re suddenly deep and perceptive thinkers, and that waving a little fluff at the atheists will make them run away.

We often get this vague claim that religion is a different methodology and a different way of knowing things, and that judging religion as a science is a category error. Very well: different way of knowing what? What are these different questions that they are asking, how do they propose answering them, and why should we think these questions are even worth asking, and that their answers are valid? They never seem to get around to the specifics.

I mean, religion might well be the only avenue for addressing the question of how many bicycles are being peddled by angels right now, but that’s because it’s an irrelevant question that doesn’t affect our lives or the universe in any way, doesn’t have any way of being answered, and is built around imaginary referents, “angels”, for which we don’t even have evidence of their existence. But if religion is a way of knowing, how do they know what the answer is? What is their methodology? How do they verify their answers? Why is it that every religion, and even every individual within a religion, comes up with different answers?

That’s an example of a trivial question, but the same problems apply to the big questions central to their beliefs. How do we even know that we need redemption from sin? Is sin even a valid concept? They can’t answer these questions in an independently verifiable way.

Even when they try to get specific, they are hopelessly vague.

The second question from the audience – from the philosopher Mary Midgley – was what comes next? What both science and religion needed, argued Conway Morris was a more fruitful conversation. He raised the possibility that religion might be needed to help develop understanding into questions which have baffled scientists such as the nature of consciousness. The future of science is a series of imponderables, he concluded, and it may require a set of scientific skills “of which we have no inkling at the moment.”

I think the fruitful conversation we need between science and religion is more of a loud roar from the science side to silence the lies of the faithful. This argument that we need more input from religion comes almost entirely from those already committed to the superstition — personally, I think we could use entirely less babbling gobbledygook from the apologists.

But Conway Morris’s suggestion is pointless. How will religion help us understand the nature of consciousness? Having someone assert that it is the product of ghosts, spirits, or other such invisible manifestations from some non-place outside our universe is, it has turned out, a useless, unproductive, and old, dead hypothesis. Just to suggest that we may need new ways of thinking to approach a complex problem does not imply in any way that a very old way of thinking has some utility.

People like Conway Morris keep claiming that science and religion are not only compatible, but that both are necessary. I don’t buy it. I have two simple questions for those who claim that the two are complementary.

  1. What specific fundamental principles of your religion do you actually use in your science? I don’t mean just general ethical principles, because atheists also have those, but tell me something specific about how you apply your religion to science?

  2. Do you apply scientific principles to your religion, and do you do so consistently? Do you, for instance, test religious claims with experiment?

When you put it that specifically, most of the religious scientists I know would unashamedly and rightly say that no, they practice science in the lab or field without expectation of an intervention by Jesus to change the results, and that no, turning the skeptical tools of science against their faith would be inappropriate, or that god is not subject to our scrutiny. This is not compatibility. This is tergiversation. The only way they can claim compatibility is by pointing out that some individuals practice both religion and science, like Simon Conway Morris, but that says nothing, since people are damned good at encompassing contradictions.

For a terrifying look at what we get with religion, turn to this a review of Karen Armstrong’s What Religion Really Means. What a promising title! We godless atheists are always being told that we don’t really understand the depth of religion, so a book that promises to clearly state what it is sounds like a welcome addition to the debate. Until, that is, you read what she says it means.

She draws on 2,000 years of Christian theology and mysticism to demonstrate rich alternative ideas of the divine. Back in the 4th century AD, long before Wittgenstein and Derrida, Bishop Basil of Caesarea understood all about the limits of language, and stated them rather more clearly, too. “Thought cannot travel outside was, nor imagination beyond beginning.” God is, by definition, infinitely beyond human language. Earlier still, the Christian scholar Origen (185-254) discussed the “incongruities and impossibilities” in scripture. The fact that Dawkins et al think that pointing out the Bible’s imperfections undermine Jewish or Christian belief only demonstrates their ignorance of the traditions they presume to undermine. Of course it’s not meant to be understood literally, the early Christians seem to sigh across the centuries.

Armstrong further shows how even the words “I believe” have changed, and become scientised, to mean “I assert these propositions to be empirically correct.” Yet the original Greek pisteuo means something much more like “I give my heart and my loyalty.” In the gospels, she says, quoting the great German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus himself sees God not as “an object of thought or speculation, but as an existential demand”.

What a sodden pile of words rendered meaningless by the attempt to bloat their meaning.

Yes, we know that many rarefied theologians believe in a lot of airy nonsense, but let’s not pretend that the vast majority of Christians would not reject those claims out of hand — they are far more literal. Or, rather, they claim to be more literal, but actually hold a body of faith that is just as subjective, just as highly evolved and refined, as the set of beliefs held by the most opaque and obfuscatory theologian. There really isn’t much difference in the methodology of Rudolf Bultmann or Ken Ham — both are piling up the subjective bullshit as fast as they can shovel it, they are just using different conventions and different language tailored to their different audiences. It’s simply different…framing.

As an example of Bunting’s different way of knowing and different kinds of questions and different practices of learning, though, what do I learn from that slippery gemisch of pious protestations? One thing and one thing only: the power of nonsense.

I think we’ve all mastered that lesson by now. It’s time for the theologians to grow up and move on to questions with some heft and meaning, that are actually applicable to our lives and our culture.