It’s early, I’m soon to fly to Chicago, and my head is a wee bit tight from overconsumption of the local bourbon (I recommend Blanton’s). More on the trip to Kentucky later. Here for your delectation are four letters that USA Today published yesterday about my science-and-faith-aren’t-friends piece. Three are negative, one not, and that’s fair enough given that a paper has to have “balance.”
I want to briefly highlight one because its claim that I made a philosophical boo-boo has also appeared at several places on the internet (see here and here, for example):
Interesting but flawed argument
Jerry Coyne delivers a bold perspective on the compatibility of science and religion. He argues that a scientific viewpoint is contradictory to, and clearly trumps, a religious world view.
However, in his zeal to argue his point, he creates his own internal contradictions. He states that the existence of religious scientists cannot be used to support the compatibility of science and religion, and yet later he states that the incompatibility of science and faith is “amply demonstrated by the high rate of atheism among scientists.”
Before Coyne can convincingly argue that science and religion are incompatible, he needs to take care of the incompatibilities in his own viewpoint.
Brent Metfessel; Eden Prairie, Minn.
I find this argument curious. My claim was that science and faith are philosophically incompatible. If there were to be evidence for such a philosophical claim, then it would not be that every scientist would be an atheist. Rather, we’d expect that scientists would tend to be more atheistic than the general public. This would reflect either their dawning Laplace-ian awareness that if one doesn’t need God to explain the world, then perhaps there might not be a God at all. Alternatively, people with a naturalistic and skeptical frame of mind would be drawn to science. (I think both are at work.) Either way, scientists would be a section of the population enriched in atheism.
And that, of course, is exactly what you find: atheists are much more common among scientists than among the general public. If you need find evidence for the argument about philosophical incompatibility, you look at groups using statistics— not single individuals.
There are individuals, like Francis Collins, who will be outliers. Saying that such individuals do not negate the claim of a philosophical incompatibility does not then prevent us from using statistics on scientists as a whole to demonstrate that incompatibility produces a tangible result in the real world.
The argument of people like Metfessel resembles this “logic” about the relationship between smoking and cancer: “You’ve argued that those individuals who smoke their whole lives and don’t get cancer prove nothing. But if you argue that, then you’re prohibited from using statistics to show that smoking causes cancer.”
I’m not sure that the philosphical (in)compatibility of the two approaches follows from how many scientists accept or reject religion.
The fact that most do reject it I think indicates that either the scientific method or the evidence is against religion (which is the case for both, IMO).
I have impression that Jerry is saying quite opposite, that indeed number of religious scientists follows FROM the existing philosophical incompatibility and not the other way. It looks that scientists or science oriented/interested people just are able to see this incompatibility more sharply than the rest of human population.
I recommend Pappy Van Winkle’s 20 Year Old Family Reserve. After several splashes of this brew, any philosophical inconsistencies will be readily erased. Seriously, if you can find it, you should have a taste.
Oh my goodness, that letter is pure nonsense. Here is an example: I think that no one disputes that being tall is an advantage in basketball; one could use the average height of NBA players as evidence. But every so often you get a relatively short basketball player (say, Spud Webb who was 5′ 6″) but that does NOT disprove the trend.
People don’t understand what a stochastic factor is.
Didn’t you state in your piece that the fact that scientists too can believe bunk only proves people can have two contradictory beliefs in their minds at the same time?
Seems that would readily explain any such inconsistency in the minds of scientists.
Also Deism is so pointless it might not be inconsistent at all. It could just mean that a 10th dimensional brane collision IS God for creating the universe or some nonsense. Pointless perspective not worthy of combating, I think.
Science is about finding the truth through research, evidence, bad theories and logic.
Religion is having the faith that they have the truth with no actual evidence.
Unfortunely both WILL NOT allow their mistakes to be shown.
Absolutely true, Joe. Guess that’s why I never heard about Jean-Baptiste Lamarck or Richard Goldschmidt.
Bullshit.
Cold fusion, anyone?
Funny, I seem to remember spending most of my time studying physics learning “failed” theories and the rest of my time studying physics learning why current physical theories are probably not correct or incomplete in some important and interesting ways. When I think about it, my entire scientific education was pretty much physicists telling me about the mistakes their predecessors made and how they’re trying to deal with them.
I’m guessing from your post that you haven’t actually received much of a scientific education.
So where’s your evidence? Or would you rather acknowledge having made a mistake?
Failed theories…Hmm.
Newtons Laws of motion does not allow for compression and expansion or stored energy being released.
Motion has the ability to compress energy and change it’s density which stores or releases energy.
Theories have to hold Newtons’ Laws up such as the moon slowing the planet and does not explain the suns expansion.
This has allowed other theories such as time travel, quantum physics etc. Which totally fall apart when adding rotation and solar motion. You need an EXACT point of distance when trying to find an exact point in time. BUT all objects are moving in space, so where can an EXACT triangulation be made? Our galaxy moves and rotates at 300km/sec. in space. Our planet rotates at 1669.8km/hr and revolves around the sun at 18.5 miles a sec.
Doing experiments in a lab with fixed points is easy, try that in space.
I am sorry. Dr Collins does not strike me as genuinely relgious. He is a politician. Like all of them, his actions reek of cynicism. To be blunt, he is an opportunist.
You do not discover religion until well into adulthood-and then you find it in a tripartite waterfall? Give me a break. If he lived in India and had political aspirations the waterfall would remind him of brahma, vishnu and shiva.
He claims to be an evangelical christian. As it turns out though, acceptance of evolution among this group is about the rarest among all denominations.
The writer of the letter may want to pay attention that even among the minority of biologists who are religious (Collins, Miller etc) most of them hold views that are highly unorthodox among their respective groups. Doesn’t this attest to the fact that modern biology and orthodox religion are not compatible?
Dr. Collins is like a lot of educated Christians; he might accept an isolated miracle or some “word salad” deity but that’s about it.
What’s your take on: His christian god had his daughter raped for him?
I think it is more problematic than isolated miracle or word salad.
They usually quote Isiah 55:8-9:
“Isaiah 55:8-9 (New International Version)
8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the LORD.
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Which means: “I don’t have to tell you.” It is their automatic out when they don’t understand something.
Same old “god is inscrutable” crap.
I never understand though, with this kind of attitude, what is the point in praying? What business do mere mortals have telling the lord of the universe how to run his creation?
“… he needs to take care of the incompatibilities in his own viewpoint.”
More bogus conflation. A common theistic debate tactic: treat reality as though it were a religious tenant.
Dr. Coyne, I don’t see how you don’t lose your temper when dealing with the general public. I made the mistake of linking this post to my facebook wall and explained “stochastic factors” and got this as a response:
“”Stochastic” means “follows a random probability distribution”; but if it’s random, how does it serve as evidence for anything?”
“….but if it’s random, how does it serve as evidence for anything?”
¡Double facepalm!
“”Stochastic” means “follows a random probability distribution”; but if it’s random, how does it serve as evidence for anything?”
How? Just lucky, I guess.
I’m so glad I took statistics.
I’m afraid Jerry is ignoring an alternative inference from the statistical association of atheism with science. Jerry seems to think that the only valid model is one in which the greater exposure to empirical evidence hugely increases the likelihood that one will reject religious explanations of the world for models based on the scientific knowledge gained since the enlightenment.
There is, however, an alternative way to view the same figures that, I think, addresses the same data and provides an elegant solution to the question of why levels of religiosity are so low amongst scientists.
God hates Scientists.
Isn’t it obvious?
Why else is it that the very act of performing a scientific experiment inevitably results in the acquisition of data that will cast doubt on some or other religious tale? And we know where doubt will lead us – to the questioning of other religious points and often the dismissal of the entire supernatural hypothesis!
But why should it be that scientists are the ones facing this problem. Why is it that accountancy students or business majors can feel safe that their studies produce individuals whose religious beliefs mirror those of the population at large and yet parents sending their daughter off to become a biologist must contend with the fact that qualified biologists have a 100-fold increase in atheism compared to their non-scientist peers! That’s a rate five times greater than the risk increase of smoking and lung cancer!
I think I can suggest a model where God is not, in fact, a sort of supernatural Che Guevara figure that leaps from the imagination of Chris Hedges and Terry Eagleton. What He is, is more along the line of a schoolyard bully who hates nerds. When scientists reach the pearly gates God will be there, ready to take our books and throw them into a muddy puddle. He’ll break our spectacles and get his mate, the devil, to drag us away to face the eternal wedgie .
Clearly God hates scientists.
He’s not too keen on philosophers either!
We can always count on you for the satire, Sigmund 😉
Satire?
I’ve already offered the hypothesis to Ophelia for the subject of her next book!
Awesome! 🙂
Som your thesis is that God deliberately makes them doubt? Like Pharoah? Or that He hates scientists so much that he inflicts them with more harm, therefore causing them to strike out at their Creator and deny Him?
Or did I just cause a schism and heresy?
Oh, try Calvin, who asserts somewhere that God will give the reprobate (those who are predestined to be damned) intimations of being saved so that they may despair the more and so deserve their damnation the more (despair being a mortal sin)… Faustus’s last great speech in Marlowe’s play dramatises this.
I’m inclined to the view that religion is, or can be, highly malleable. And that would suggest that it can be compatible with science.
The higher rate of atheism among scientists perhaps does not show incompatibility between religion and science. Instead, perhaps it shows that most scientists have disdain for the kind of philosophical masturbation involved in molding religion so that it fits with science.
I think you may have missed the point of Jerry’s article. Science and religion are incompatible not because religion often gets the wrong answer, but because of the way it pursues the question.
Religion and science are wholly incompatible as ways of obtaining knowledge. Science depends on testing and retesting ideas against objective reality, while religion rests on revelation and post hoc rationalization. Religion is only “compatible” with science in the way you describe when it scrambles to rearrange itself to comport with the findings of science.
Exactly right. At one time, it was heresy to claim that the Earth was not the center of the universe. One took that position at the peril of one’s own life.
Now, only the looniest of loons will declare geocentrism to be true on the basis of scripture.
Same with evolution. The preachers were the first to come out against the idea — but 100 years later, the Catholic church argues that there is no incompatibility with the model and a “god-directed” creation of humans. This is Miller-ism.
It’s religion that has to accommodate science, never the other way around. The loudest voices against scientific progress are the ones most-wrong about what the science shows.
The looniest of the loons are holding a conference in South Bend on Nov. 6th to contest exactly that. Don’t go to this web site unless you want your head to explode:
http://www.catholicintl.com/galileowaswrong/index.html
Are you sure that’s not satire?
Only one way to know for sure…but you’d have to attend the conference, and I would never ask someone to risk that much brain damage intentionally.
Religion is only “compatible” with science in the way you describe when it scrambles to rearrange itself to comport with the findings of science. Sure, that was my point about religion being malleable. One can mold religion so that it is completely compatible with science. But, then, religion is of no use to you except as an admission card into the club.
I see that, but my point was that that malleability is the entirety of why religion is not compatible with science. Religion rests on no empirical foundation. It can be twisted to fit whatever the zeitgeist demands. This approach to knowledge is completely at odds with science, which requires a commitment only to those ideas that find some basis in observable reality.
When I click to your home page, the second of the secular humanism videos starts playing automatically. Please stop it.
Slightly OT but Jerry’s article was apparently the inspiration for the latest Jesus and Mo web-comic…
http://www.jesusandmo.net/2010/10/15/easy/
Good choice on the Blantons!
The letter highlighted is wrong for the exact reasons Jerry explained. It’s is a perfect example of someone misunderstanding what they read, then accusing the writer of “contradictions.” It’s positively infuriating.
Let me guess; letter #2 is the positive response? Sounds luke warm to me, at best. Yeah, Jerry, when are you going to write that OpEd on what science and religion have in common? Shortest, essay, ever.
Recall Hempenstein’s note to Greg’s “Global warming and the flat earth” entry the other day? The Geocentrics conference in Indiana in November – plenty of ‘doctors’ on the list of speakers – but I wouldn’t give a farthing for the value of those doctorates. The point is they probably like to call themselves ‘scientists’ even if by any reasonable standard they are probably charlatans & religious up to their eyeballs.
As for outliers, perhap ‘out liars’ would be a better phrase?
But anyway, mover Kentucky & Scotland for we now have an English whisky from Norfolk – but it is expensive so although I bought a bottle I do not dare drink it!
http://www.englishwhisky.co.uk/home.html
I am going to respectfully disagree with your analogy.
If you make a clearly empirically verifiable statement such as “it is not compatible that a trained scientist can profess religion”, then your hypothesis is in fact refuted by finding a single instance.
If you make a vague statement about philosophies being incompatible, I do not think statistics prove anything becasue the hypothesis is not rigorously defined.
The statistical association between smoking and cancer proves nothing by itself. There has to be a scientific theory of the causal mechanism, which there is. The purpose of the statistics is to control for the random unobservable error variables What are the random unobservable error variables in your hypothesis?
To follow up, compatibility refers to some process that goes on in minds that allows people to reconcile different world views. If you are trained in science, I believe it is far more difficult to reconcile knowledge about the observable facts of the world and a belief in a supernatural god. But it clearly not impossible as evidenced by the existence of a few trained scientists who are religious. If your hypothesis is that recocniliation is more difficult for trained scientists, the statistics confirm your case. If you are arguing that it is impossible, then you have to explain Francis Collins.
You’re using a difference sense of compatibility than Jerry and the rest of us. Anyone can hold two contradictory ideas (good ol’ cognitive dissonance). Jerry (and us) are arguing that the very basis of scientific investigation/thinking and religion are not compatible – one relies on evidence, one doesn’t (in a nutshell).
No one that I am aware of argues that there can’t be religious scientists – that is a straw man put up by accomodationists.
The fact that one relies on evidence and the other does not means they are *different*, not incompatible.
If Jerry is saying science and religion are different, then no one can argue. But he is the one making a strong statement that they are “incompatible” here, so the onus is on him to provide a clear definition of the term. It is fine for him to say “I find science and religion incompatible and I cannot understand how anyone can.” But that is not a proof on anything. That is like IDers who say I cannot understand how such-and-such evolved and therefore it couldn’t have.
“But he is the one making a strong statement that they are ‘incompatible’ here, so the onus is on him to provide a clear definition of the term.”
This statement is actually true, so I’ll point out that Jerry has done so with some care here in the past (and Russell Blackford has also produced a long-ish essay on the same topic, working towards a similar definition).
However, most USA Today readers are probably not familiar with the WEIT blog — so including a link, or at least a mention of the nature of the definition, would probably have helped to allay these sorts of complaints.
More “spurious” than “curious.” 😛
Religious people can only accept one Truth. Something is black or it is white, it cannot be red, or black with white spots, or anything like that. It’s a bizarre assumption and I wonder if religion encourages such stupid notions or if it merely exploits them.
The letter writer is repeating the terms of the snide, superficial and sophistical (all this alliteration!)little attack on Jerry C’s piece by one John Pieret on his blog. The attack is obviously making its rounds among those who fondly believe in the compatibility of science and religion. In addition to making the argument presented above, Pieret asserts that ‘Everything Coyne says about the incompatibility of science and religion applies equally to the “incompatibility” of science with art and literature’ – the reason for this being that the ‘truths’ of the arts are presumably the same as the ‘truths’ of religion. But of course they are not – although one can certainly, by regarding religious texts not as so much religious and therefore inerrant as literary, learn the sort of literary ‘truths’ – perhaps we might call them ‘insights’ – from them that Pieret is (deliberately?)confusing with religious ‘truths’. Readers of Shakespeare do not, after all, suppose that unless they believe in the truth of what the Fool in Lear or De Selby assert, they will be relegated to some literary Hell where they will be forced to read the maunderings of, say, John Pieret for eternity. Nor do Shakespeare or O’Brien make any claim that their works present some sort of absolute truth, which is what Christians claim about the Bible – oh, yes, there are the metaphoricians, or morticians, who babble on about the metaphorical nature of religious belief, but Christianity stands or falls on the claims that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God, that he was resurrected after his crucifixion, and that he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
“one John Pieret” is a lawyer (IIRC) with a fancy for sophistry (IIRC). I can’t give examples here and now, but maybe the discussed ones suffice.
‘readers of Shakespeare and Flann O’Brien…’ Damn!
Jerry’s lung cancer example (& blueollie’s NBA analogy, @ #3) perfectly answer this supposed “contradiction,” IMO. Now if only USA Today would print today’s post.
While I don’t necessarily want to defend Jerry’s attackers in this matter, I think that there is an actual point from which at least some criticisms arise (though it is not at all clear that the attacks are well-grounded in that point).
I submit that the problem with the USA Today article as identified by some respondents, is a real problem. That is, the claim that “the incompatibility of science and faith [is] amply demonstrated by the high rate of atheism among scientists”, is a poor one, and is at best irrelevant to the issue at hand.
The problem with this sort of argument is that the incompatibility here at issue — sometimes referred to as ‘philosophical’, or ‘logical’ or ‘methodological’ — is _not_ an empirical one. Thus, the empirical truth that 64% of scientists are not believers is as much beside the point as is the fact that 36% are. Consider what was the case when all (or almost all) scientists were indeed religious: this incompatibility, being a logical one, obtained nonetheless even then, regardless of whether or not it was acknowledged or even recognized at the time.
Note that this is very much _not_ like the (perhaps similar-sounding) claim about the link between smoking and cancer. In that case one is dealing with empirical claims, and therefore empirical evidence (statistical or otherwise) is relevant.
But logical claims are not evaluated empirically. One does not evaluate “1 + 1 = 2” by going out into the world and testing how many times it is true or not: “one apple plus one apple is two apples; ok, one in the ‘yes’ column; one raindrop plus one raindrop is … one raindrop; ok, one in the ‘no’ column”, and then doing some statistical analysis of the results.
So also with the incompatibility of science with religion. Being a logical incompatibility, empirical evidence (either way) is just not relevant. The incompatibility would remain, regardless of whether all scientists — or no scientists! — recognized it. Thus, I would submit that claims like the one referenced above, about the rate of atheism among scientists, serve only to muddy the water on this matter.
You assert that without any evidence whatsoever. Between you and me, I’m weary of such theological claims, and on science in particular.
Coyne has provided (elsewhere, granted) plenty of empirical observations on what the incompatibility refers to. “Methodological” is a good term, since we observe that the method of science works to arrive at observable knowledge (facts and theories) while the inventions and apologetics of religion arrives at observable falsehoods (stories in conflict with said facts and theories, say the idea of “a creator” for species).
I myself test from nowadays available evidence that materialism is the observed monism from the consistency of tested theories and facts. This is an easily verifiable fact that was predicted in the 20th century and later sneaked up on the world by way of the prodigious scientific output since the 70-80s or so. (I don’t have the data handy, excuse me for the momentarily lapse of memory. I need to check when the test has enough data.)
Dualisms such as proposed by religions in the form of theism or deism can now be firmly rejected by the data at hand.
At the time most empiricists were religious they were natural philosophers, not scientists. Science in the form of methods on tests on predictive theories was a result of the work in the 19th and 20th century.
There was no pointed conflict between methods before that time. Religion used confirmation instead of testing, and so believed many empiricists that they were doing as well. (Often prompted by theological-philosophical ideas such as “inductionism”.)
I haven’t considered what that entails before. But you prompt me to look into the nicely dovetailing between this and the statistics which shows theists going agnostic and agnostics going atheist in higher ed.
The hypothesis is that it is the overwhelming amount of natural facts and theories that gives this observation, not the social environment as such. (Since you can’t herd atheists any more than you can herd cats.)
Your argument could lend support to that, perhaps there is a correlation from causation here. Thank you for the idea!
Actually, no. In my haste I erred, he states very clearly in the article the source of the problem (science works to get knowledge, religion works not for the same):
“But how can you be sure you’re right if you can’t tell whether you’re wrong?”
Then again if so I don’t see why you come with your metaphorical guns blazing and claim that it is Coyne, not you, who muddies the water!?
In any event, Jerry Coyne’s remark was surely directed against the woman (whose name I can’t remember) who actually conducted the survey about belief and non-belief among scientists and then made a lot of fuss, duly accepted by the media, about what a large percentage of scientists were believers, so all these tenuously philosophical and sophistical arguments are beside the point.
Which is true, but is not to the point. Consider if some preacher were to stand up in front of his flock tomorrow morning and say, “I’ve had a revelation! God has shown me that the universe is actually 15 thousand million years old, and that he worked to create humans via natural selection! Praise God!” Would this make his religion compatible with science? I hope that everyone’s answer would be ‘no’.
The reason for this is that the problem is not that religion’s claims to knowledge are incorrect (though they often are), but that religion’s method of evaluating such claims — ‘revelation’, to put it briefly — is incompatible with science’s method of evaluating such claims — ‘experiment’, to put it briefly. The methods are incompatible, methodologically, or ‘logically’, regardless of whether they might sometimes come to the same conclusion, because the ways in which they arrive at their conclusions are incompatible.
I would also submit that this is not merely trivial hairsplitting, because this incompatibility sits near the heart of the conflict over ‘accommodation’. Why isn’t it “good enough” that someone “believes in” evolution? I submit that the problem is that, if they do so because a priest tells them so, or because someone finds it in a holy book, then the person who “believes in” evolution (or whatever other scientifically-“compatible” conclusion) is, as they say, “doing it wrong“.
But somebody like Collins presumably comes to an understanding about the facts and mechanisms of the universe in the same way that a scientific atheist does. People like Collins probably base their interpretation of the metaphysical “meaning” of it all on their religion, whereas most atheists think there is no greater meaning beyond our scientific understanding. While I am of the latter persuasion, I cannot say there is an incompatibility in the former.
Neil, the response to your comment depends upon what you mean by ‘their interpretation of the metaphysical “meaning” of it’.
If this is some kind of truth or knowledge claim, then I would submit that there is an incompatibility, as such persons cannot be using a compatible method of evaluating truth and knowledge claims. If, on the other hand, this is meant as something like the ‘interpretation’ or ‘meaning’ one finds in art, then there needn’t be any conflict — but then one is no longer dealing with anything like the ‘religion’ of ‘[p]eople like Collins’.
What would “they don’t” look like? How could you tell that they were not using natural mechanisms? I propose that you cannot tell. The most you can say is that you don’t know how it works. That is not good enough to ascribe deistic status to the operator, in my opinion. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to conclude that they simply understand the nature of the universe or multiverses better than you do?
Wrong thread!