No, it’s not a repost from this site, so you haven’t read it already, and yes, Slate does pay contributors, so they’re not taking advantage of me. At any rate, they’ve just published a short essay I wrote on why science isn’t based on faith.
The claim that science and religion are both grounded on faith is, of course, a staple of accommodationists and religionists. It’s a way to suggest a comity between science and religion that involves dragging scientific facts down to the level of religious “truths.”
Slate gave it a nice illustration, too:
I like my last line:
So the next time you hear someone described as a “person of faith,” remember that although it’s meant as praise, it’s really an insult.
Subscribe.
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Read it this morning. Great piece! It’s concise and clear, and I hope it will be read by some of my Christian friends who continue to claim that I’m no different from them when it comes to “faith.”
Nice point and nice article. I guess my deft prose in The Flat Hat has kept you inspired all these years. (Joke.)
Checking out WEIT is always a great time as long as I skip the cat stuff. Good on ya.
Great, compact article.
I would take issue, though, that we don’t have faith in reason. Reason is the basis for all decisions, and to say that we would reject reason if it didn’t lead to correct results is itself an act of reason. If reason is wrong, then we’re all screwed.
Even faithheads rely on reason; they offer rationales to reject reason and accept faith, which is itself an appeal to reason, although reason poorly executed.
I think JAC’s point is less ‘meta’ than you make it out to be. We can imagine a world in which prayer is answered immediately, clearly, and accurately. Where you pray “where are my car keys?” and a voice answers “under the left couch cushion.” Or where you pray “what causes disease?” and a voice booms out “tiny organisms that live in/on your body.”
In such a world, scientists would not ignore revelation as a means of understanding. We’d use it. We don’t use revelation in the real world simply because it doesn’t work. Likewise, we use reason because it appears to work – but in the above hypothesized world, we probably would rely on it a lot less, because revelation would be a faster, cheaper, and less error-prone method of gaining the same understanding.
So, we don’t have faith in reason in the religious sense. We don’t treat it as some inviolate principle of some never-changing authoritative methodology of science. We treat it as a tool. We conclude it works through experiece using it. Like the germ theory or evolution we may have very strong empirical reasons to trust it (have ‘faith in it’ in the other vernacular use of the word), but also like those two theories, our use of resaon is – in principle – tentative and open to revision should new evidence about it’s effectiveness relative to the effectiveness of other tools arise.
“I think JAC’s point is less ‘meta’ than you make it out to be.”
Could be. Perhaps he’s just referring to the scientific method or empiricism.
It makes no sense to talk about using revelation in place of reason since, in the absence of reason, we would be unable to act upon the revelation (why would I look for my car keys where the heavenly voice told me to unless reason persuaded me that I should do so?). In the broader picture, how could we ever determine that reason was unreliable, since reaching that conclusion from any set of circumstances would necessarily involve the use of reason? Postulating the inefficacy of reason is simply a game ender.
If you include basic induction as “reason,” then yes you can’t do much without it.
However, the point remains that the more developed methodological system we call science which sits atop that is a tentative outcome of applied induction, and that outcome could be different in the future should new evidence arise which indicates there is a more efficient way of invention and discovery.
IOW we would use revelation instead of science if it was inductively supported better than science was. But it isn’t, so we don’t.
Reason as a term is very hard to pin down. In the widest sense – the sum of all our abilities to make sense of things – then we obviously have no alternative.
Reason, in the more colloquial sense – things have to have a definite position, there has to be a beginning and and end to everything, something can’t appear out of nothing, and so on and so forth – this sort of reason, mathematicians and physicists among others learn to question at all times.
Fantastic!
I’ve never quite understood how any intelligent person could think religious faith and the so-called faith we have in aspects of science are in any way similar. It’s nice to see such a succinct takedown of a stupid idea trotted out by otherwise intelligent people.
Congrats on not only writing a great article but not being exploited in the process 🙂
I liked this bit:
Yes, once again, Diana, you have chosen precisely the sentence I most admire — This is such a strong statement.
P.S. – I would NOT have used the example of treating strep with pencilin. With more and more bacteria becoming resistant to more & more antibiotics, I would have used “the right antibiotic” in place of a specific one. SCIENCE has demonstrated, however, that Penicillin IS the appropriate antibiotic for Anthrax – it was not necessary to prescribe Ciprofloxacin for it, a drug many generations down the road from the optimal treatment. (Anthrax spores & does not develop resistance as swiftly as other bacterial pathogens.) That choice made a fortune for the drug house which has the patent on the very expensive Cipro, because it meant an UNscientific enthusiasm for demanding Cipro to treat every infection, including viral illness.
We are currently observing an interesting phenomenon in the domestic animal world.
Several antibiotics, including penicillin, that bacteria had become resistant to and were no longer being widely used for several years are now again efficacious. I have observed this myself with a couple of bugs. I’m now using stuff, that we abandoned twenty years ago, with good results. Interesting. L
Per Johns Hopkins Antibiotice Guide:
All group A strep are susceptible to penicillin. The preferred treatmeant for bacterial pharyngitis (Amer Heart Assoc, Am Acad Peds, IDSA Med Letter): PCN – benzathine penicillin 1.2mU IM x 1 or penicillin VK 500mg PO twice daily or three times a day x 10d.
Good stuff – beautifully succinct. AND the Slate people realized that this is a website not a bl*g!
Now could you write a second article explaining that atheism is not a faith either?
🙂
Thank you jerry. If there is one thing that drives me batshit crazy is people telling me that evolution is a faith based dogma. I have to explain to them the difference between a pile of evidence and zero evidence.
A most excellent read. Please keep posting in Slate. There once was a time when I had wished you would publish in HuffPo, if only to cast the light of evidence based reason into the shadowy world of woo over there. I have since realized that I was wrong. This is much better.
Great article.
This equivocation with the word “faith” is one of their most frequent weapons. They trade on the reasonableness of having hope, trust, or confidence in the secular sense and pretend that this virtue can now be applied to religious faith — with its commitment to a conclusion and its confusion between fact and value.
Make them notice the distinction. I have “faith” the sun will rise tomorrow? I have “faith” in my doctor? I have “faith” that my car is in the garage even when I can’t see it?
Hey, let’s play a game. Let’s consider what it would be like if I had a RELIGIOUS faith in these things — believed that they were true as if I was believing in God.
If I open the garage door and don’t see my car — then it’s still there in a “spiritual” sense. I wasn’t wrong to think it was in there.
If my doctor suddenly runs amok in a hospital ward with a machine gun and grenades, then yes, this is a “struggle”– but I still believe she did what was best. I still wasn’t wrong to have confidence in her capabilities.
And if tomorrow I get up and there is no sun and the entire world is going into a major hysterical crisis — then I CAN STILL see the sun… in my heart.
Looks like I’m just never wrong. Neat trick, that.
Faith in religion actually turns into faith in one’s own self — when you follow it down. Thinking of this as “humility” is an even better trick.
Agree. I have yet to meet anyone who disagrees with God or finds God disagrees with them. On the contrary: God’s values always coincide with those of the believer. How about that!
Oh my gallium. You just won the interwebs for the whole next week, dude. This comment is going to be stolen shamelessly and used frequently!
Dr. Coyne, this is a forceful article, but as a fellow atheist and a philosophy major, I have a suggestion regarding one of your points.
Specifically, you wrote:
“The orderliness of nature—the set of so-called natural laws—is not an assumption but an observation.”
This is certainly a more reasonable position than the religious view that we take existence of the laws of nature on faith. However, it is open to an objection, because we do not directly observe the uniformity of nature. What we observe when we look around is lots of different things behaving in lots of different ways, and no two events are ever exactly the same in any specific respect. We do not observe the law of gravity floating around in a Platonic heaven, but rather lots of different things obeying the law of gravity in lots of different ways. (This is how theists like Richard Swinburne get away with using the laws of nature to argue for the existence of God – laws of nature in the Platonic sense would indeed be so weird as to be evidence that God exists.)
So, in my view, there is a deeper justification for the scientific method which simply says that there are no laws of nature. The laws of nature are abstractions we draw from observed particular things. The universe is not orderly, but rather scientists create order in their minds.
If you read this, thank you, and I hope you’ll consider my reasoning and do what seems right to you on this issue. Thanks for being a great advocate for atheism.
So according to your penultimate paragraph, “laws of nature” = “abstractions we draw from observed particular things.” Thus one phrase can be substituted for another. Which one is the most readable and makes the most sense to use for a general audience?
There’s such a thing as shorthand, you know.
You may be right. I’m comfortable leaving this stylistic concern to Dr. Coyne’s judgment about what a general audience will understand.
That part is reasonably accurate.
That part is just not accurate at all. If it were we would not be able to model phenomenon. Using your example of gravity, the affects of gravity are the same, to a very high degree of precision indeed, in every event of any kind in which gravity is a detectable factor, that has been appropriately observed.
There are patterns in reality whether they are codified by scientists or not.
I have to agree. Contra William, I’d say that the universe IS orderly. What scientists create is a mathematical or linguistic description of the order they observe. Sometimes its a really good description, sometimes not so good. But the orderliness is out there. If it were merely internal, there would be no reason to expect different people to converge on the same mathematical descriptions of what they experience.
And those patterns are one meaning of the phrase “law of nature”.
That there are some is a presupposition of scientific research, one which is confirmed every time one is approximately found.
“There are patterns in reality whether they are codified by scientists or not.”
Yes! And some scientists spend their entire careers seeking, studying, and attempting to explain those patterns. We’ve already seen examples from physics and biology posted above. I’ll pick something more obvious: Crystallography, anyone?
I’m still waiting for a Christian apologist to explain to me who, exactly, it is that stacks the gumballs so nice and neat in the gumball machine.
b&
I suspect God will be the answer. God is always the answer.
What is a commonly used English noun that has no apparent referent?
God IS the answer!
🙂
What is yellow and dangerous?
Hi, darrelle.
We model phenomena by observing them, then omitting their differences and describing the relevant similarities between them. As I understand it, this is done by specifying a range within which the phenomena are similar to one another. So we might construct a model of a falling object on a computer, and be able to apply it to real world objects because the real world objects’ measurements fall within the ranges required for the model to apply. The model does not have to be exactly the same as the thing being modeled.
This applies to the example of gravity because the measurements that you describe as “the same to a very high degree of precision indeed” are only similar to one another within a specific (and very small) range of measurement specified by the scientists. They do not stay exactly the same no matter how precise you make the measurements – you have to perform an act of abstraction to arrive at the similarity.
But suppose science did conclude that gravity’s effects can be measured down to any conceivable scale of precision and found to be exactly the same. That is certainly not the case with the vast majority of laws of nature. For example, the generalization to which this blog is devoted, evolution, certainly never manifests itself twice in exactly the same way. Human evolution is different from horse evolution, which is different from whale evolution.
Eh, I think you’re mistraking the map for the territory.
And you’re also overlooking the probabilistic nature of nature. To pick another example from physics…given a pure lump of some radioisotope, you cannot even in principle predict when any particular atom will decay, or at which time a decay will occur. But you can predict, with overwhelming certainty, the time at which half of the atoms will have decayed. You can’t tell which atoms will be in which half, of course, but you’ll know with as much certainty as that the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow that, to within whatever degree of precision your equipment is capable of, 50% of the sample will have decayed after a certain period of time.
I think you’ll find that Evolution is not dissimilar. It predicts big patterns, but not specifics.
And the same with climatology. We can predict trends over a long period of time, but, if you wanted to predict what the temperature will be at the base of the flagpole on top of the White House ten years to the minute from now, you’d need to have some very wide error bars on your prediction.
…and the same with amazing numbers of other scientific fields….
Cheers,
b&
Kinda off topic…where was I just reading about Korzybski and the map is not the territory? Was it recently brought up on another thread here? Or is this one of those weird cosmic convergences that makes people believe in ghosts and shit?
If it was here, it was on a thread I haven’t been paying attention to….
b&
I think you may be unintentionally moving the goalposts. The issue you started discussing was whether the universe is “orderly.” Now you seem to be saying that it’s not perfectly uniform in terms of behavior at every scale. But so what? Local atomic disorder gives rise to the predictable and ‘orderly’ pressure of a gas. Nuclear decay disorder gives rise to half-lives that are so ‘orderly’ that we literally run spaceships and trust the fire safety of our homes to its orderliness.
IOW you seem to be making perfection the enemy of the good. IMO the universe doesn’t need to meet such strict standards as you seem to support to be considered orderly.
Hi, eric.
My position would be refuted if, hypothetically, we found a law of physics that holds at every scale of measurement. However, we have not found any such law of physics. My point in saying that most laws of nature don’t hold at every scale of measurement is just to point out that the Platonic standard for laws of nature isn’t tenable as a general account.
Once again, physicists aren’t Platonists.
That we don’t have a single equation that holds equally well for single electrons and black holes doesn’t mean that there’s some sort of woo-ish discontinuity between the two. Empirically, we know for an unquestionable fact that the electrons and the black holes are perfectly regular, and we know for an equally unquestionable fact that everything between is equally regular.
Just because we don’t have a single equation tying the two together doesn’t invalidate the fact that the regularity is absolutely unquestionably there. It just means that we don’t fully understand the nature of that regularity — though, to be sure, we’ve got a damned good handle on most of it.
Cheers,
b&
Conservation laws seem to.
But that’s irrelevant. There are hierarchies of pattern-within-pattern-within-pattern, etc.
Observation includes direct and indirect observation. I don’t think the wording is quibble worthy.
F=MA…
E=mc^2
And many others.
Just sayin’. Might want to take a basic physics course before making that claim again.
Hi, Kevin.
My position is consistent with there being laws of physics. It just asserts that the laws of physics are abstractions we draw from observed entities rather than intrinsic features of nature.
For example, it is well known that F=MA is only valid within certain ranges of size and acceleration. It is not a Platonic universal that holds perfectly no matter how precise you make your measurements. This does not mean that the law is false, but only that it holds within a specific context delimited by our evidence rather than in all conceivable contexts.
You’re again overstating things.
The Relativistic version of Newton’s Second Law works perfectly fine at classical scales; it’s just way more precise than you need. And the same applies to the Quantum Mechanics versions; they, too, work just swimmingly at classical scales but, again, are overkill.
One of the big problems in physics is that Relativistic equations do not apply at quantum scales and vice-versa; however, this is universally understood by physicists as a lack of proper understanding of the mechanics of the universe, not as some sort of wiggle-room in the universe itself.
Your arguments distill to nothing more than a classic “god of the gaps” one. Just because we don’t have the precise answer nailed down doesn’t mean that the real answer is somehow completely inconsistent with the parts of the answers we have that are nailed down.
Cheers,
b&
Hi, Ben Goren.
One problem with identifying the laws of physics with “the precise answer” is that it implies that we don’t know any laws of physics. We have to either agree that answers that are only precise down to a certain scale of measurement count as laws of physics (my position), or wait indefinitely for science to discover generalizations that meet our a priori Platonic criteria.
Eh, you’re again distorting the picture.
There’s no a priori Platonism at work in physics.
Relativity in particular has been confirmed correct to the limits of our testing apparatuses, and those limits top out at more nines than you can shake a stick at. There is reason to suspect that relativity will continue to test perfectly up until our apparatuses are themselves limited by the universe’s own limits.
The story is very similar at both classical and quantum scales as well.
The conclusion is that the universe is, indeed, regular, and that our physics is an accurate (though not necessarily always precise) model of that regularity.
As we continue to push the boundaries of our knowledge, we may well (indeed, hopefully) revise our models. Of particular interest is the reconciliation of quantum and relativistic mechanics. However, we know with certainty as absolute as that the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning that anything new will reduce to what we already know.
b&
I agree that the laws of physics we know are confirmed to extremely high degrees of precision, but this seems consistent with both of our positions. That is, it could be that there is a Platonic ideal which physics is converging on, or it could be that physics is simply specifying narrower and narrower ranges for the measurements of the laws of nature, with no terminating ideal at the end of the process.
How is this a problem?
Yes, our theories and laws are tentative and we may have to wait indefinitely to reach the really real ultimate never to be improved upon laws of nature.
What you seem to be complaining about is uncertainty in scientific knowledge. But the fact that its uncertain is not evidence that we are merely codifying human-internal perceptions that have no external reality. This methodological limitation in our inductively based reasoning
does not support your alternate hypothesis. At best, its neutral to the ‘external vs. internal’ question. But I would argue that it’s not even neutral; the fact that an enormous variety of investigators and different investigative techniques converge on the same conclusions is an indication that those conclusion represent something ‘out there’ in the world, and do not merely represent internal, idiosyncratic perceptions of the world.
That convergence of multiple disparate disciplines on the same answers is really important. We see that we can match up biological molecular clocks with tree growth with ice cores with radioisotopes with “fossilized” records of astronomical events with magnetic pole reversals with…
…and none of that would be possible if they weren’t all fundamentally connected to the same underlying and regular reality.
Cheers,
b&
You seem to be contrasting the view that the laws of nature represent external reality with the view that the laws of nature conform to our cognitive faculties. But it could be both! The laws of nature could be a representation of reality as processed by a human mind. On this view, there is no problem explaining why different investigative techniques converge on the same conclusions, because they are describing the same reality. However, there is also no suggestion that the laws of nature are independent of our means of perception – external reality exists, but the laws of nature that it operates by do not exist until we abstract them from the evidence.
So what if we don’t know any to 100% precision? We know *approximately* what they are to very great precision in many cases. (And less so in others, etc.) This is why Bunge recommends as a “problem” in one of his textbooks to use the theory of errors to critique subjectivism.
Nice piece, Jerry; short and to the point. I like your last line, too.
It’s a good effort. But I’m afraid you’re never going to make it as a journalist. I noticed two references to Prof. Dawkins but not a single appearance of the words strident, militant or fundamentalist. You have much to learn.
(But on a more serious note, great article! It’s well structured, simple to follow, and yet, forms a systematic and comprehensive take down of the intended target. Anyone can follow your arguments. And many will be left frustrated by their inability to find flaws in its steps. I predict the inevitable criticism will avoid tackling your actual points — although, granted, that’s probably a banal prediction.)
Wonderful article.
You take as your jumping off point a comment in Nature that for those who dont know the mathematics, accepting the existence of the Higgs is a matter of faith. Was the author really suggesting this is equivalent to religious faith? Perhaps thats apparent in the rest of the article but it seems me that it need not be. I accept the Higgs on faith- faith that worldwide physics community knows what its doing. But its a faith tempered by that fact that all science is provisional and theres a good chance ‘Higgs theory’ is incomplete and a non-zero chance its outright incorrect.
I’ve had people tell me that Stephen Hawking is handing out religion just because they don’t understand the science.
The provisional nature of science isn’t necessarily a difference here (one can find prophets who change their minds constantly, people who convert from one religion to another, etc.).
I think Sastra explains the distinction well above. “Faith” in the existence of the Higgs boson means trusting someone else to accurately assess evidence and honestly report the results of that assessment. To modify one of Sastra’s examples, it’s like trusting someone when they tell you that your car is in your garage. You haven’t evaluated the evidence, you’re trusting someone else to have done so and reported honestly. Faith in the strict sense is seeing for yourself that the car is not there–and still believing that it *is* there. It’s the difference between believing something for which direct evidence isn’t available to you and believing something in opposition to the evidence available to you…
Great job! Nice way to start the day!
(Yes, I did get up a bit late.)
I agree with the entire article, although I must say that the last sentence does not follow from the body of the article. The body points out the differences between faith and evidence and reason-based belief, but makes no judgement about them. So the last sentence, although provocative and fun (for those of us who agree with it), comes out of the blue.
I agree. Imagine someone coming from Slate’s larger audience reaching that remark and stopping to think: “Whoa!” – Nothing in the preceeding leads up to this. Hitting an apparent non-sequiter weakens the appeal of the whole piece.
Nice essay. Bet it gets the “shrill, militant atheist” label for the last statement, though…
Second comment, from what I can see.
Great article Jerry. This misunderstanding comes up a lot when I’m talking to believers.
Great article. No.5 most read right now on Slate.
Yes, this exactly — that rationalism and naturalism are conclusions based on observation, not a priori presumptions. And any time you want to check those conclusions, it’s trivial to do so and the results are uniformly conclusive.
I only have a bit more “faith” in rationalism as I do that the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning. Should I ever have reason to doubt the latter conclusion, all I have to do is get up early enough and observe it again for myself. Same thing with the acceleration of gravity. Almost everything else in physics or chemistry or biology or astronomy or the like up until the past few decades I could also re-verify for myself with minimal trouble (and all the significant bits I did verify many years ago in school). I’m never going to personally re-verify the discovery of the Higgs, but there’s an incredibly taut web of trust that is integrally woven with the parts I have verified for myself that I have no reason to doubt the crew at CERN.
Contrast that with religious faith, that an amazing magic man did amazing magic things in a backwater corner of the Roman Empire a couple millennia ago (and which nobody noticed until at least a few generations later), and that a modern not-quite-as-amazing magic man in a funky costume can reanimate the original amazing magic man by chanting a magic spell over some stale bread and cheap wine. And all that’s really, honestly true, even though it’s no different from all these other equally-silly fantasies that everybody, even the fantasists, agree that are so totally made up that you’d have to be bonkers to take them seriously.
Um, yeah. Whatever.
Cheers,
b&
They are conclusions, but also premises for the next iteration. Not only are the findings of scientific research in the narrow sense part of the background for futher discovery and investigation, but also the metaphysics and epistemology we learn along the way by “what works” (it isn’t that simple, but it is sort of puttable that way). This is where the history of science is both valuable and potentially misleading; method changes over time as we learn better what to do. So we can learn from our *methodological* errors, as well as those related to “domain specific factual assumptions” (e.g. that water is/is not an element, etc.)
Absolutely. We’ve built a very solid foundation upon which we can continue to build in a way that makes everything stronger. Knowing that we don’t need to waste time on contradictory claims, or claims of violation of conservation, or that sort of thing means that we can devote our efforts to questions that actually are significant.
b&
Beautifully written piece, Jerry. I will be using quotes from this piece for years to come in my reasoning with my family as they continue to question my lack of religious faith and my insistence on scientific evidence.
It probably doesn’t help that I recently moved to the south where religion reigns supreme.
Great essay! Hits several nails on their heads!
Oh dear. I made my comment in the wrong place…but, having grown up in the South, I do sympathize with you, Randy Rose.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smartphone
+1
A++, Jerry.
I think that it’s a misconception to say that religious people are expected to accept “unchanging and dubious religious claims” without thinking critically about them. Deuteronomy 18:22 gives people a firm mechanism to evaluate claims by religious speakers.
“If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed.” -Deuteronomy 18:22 (NIV)
I would guess that many believers, like me, frequently depend on reason to evaluate religious claims… starting with the “does it come true?” test. While I do depend on others in many ways (including some people who have been dead for over 1,000 years), the Bible doesn’t allow me to listen to somebody whose claims can be shown to be bunk.
Does that mean that you by default believe in preachers/prophets until their claims have been debunked by reality?
…and since the whole notion of a guy walking on water, raising the dead, and resurrecting his own self from the grave has been proven to be bunk …
What was that again?
Jesus said the end of the world would arrive within a generation which it clearly didn’t, so the Lord had NOT spoken and Jesus was speaking presumptuously. Someone should alert the pope.
I’m not sure you’ve thought through your position here. Are you sure you want to go with that?
You really ought to read the book from which this web site takes its name. There exist mountains of evidence that there were no Adam and no Eve, and there was no great flood and Noah & his relatives did not repopulate the earth. Implied by WEIT and tons of other evidence are the falseness of virgin birth, resurrection, etc., etc.
As Jerry’s very nice article makes clear, what is called “faith” when we assume that claims of Higg’s boson are correct (even if we don’t understand the physics that makes the claims comprehensible to us) is that the physicists making the claims have well-earned reputations of backing up their claims with solid evidence – i.e., what they say works. Since so much of the Bible is demonstrable baloney, it follows that it is only reasonable to assume that most of the rest of the Bible is baloney too, even if we don’t have specific evidence to demonstrate each specific claim is wrong.
You’re actually being overly generous in your description of the Bible.
More accurate would be to indicate that it is an ancient faery tale anthology, and makes no pretenses otherwise. It has significantly less historical fact than Harry Potter (which does, after all, reference real places and people and events) and, what historical fact it contains is there only as a plot device for verisimilitude, same as with any other work of fiction.
That so many people mistrake such palpably, painfully obvious (and childish) fiction for fact reflects no so much on the original authors as those deluded enough to even attempt to take any of it seriously.
Cheers,
b&
But you can’t ask “does it come true” of most religious doctrine. How does one wait to see if the Trinity “comes true”? The virgin birth? The sinfulness of homosexuality?
So what’s your test for most doctrine?
The test from Deuteronomy is pretty unimpressive. It essentially says “You win some, you lose some. If it comes true, it was from god. Yeah, that’s the ticket.” How does this test discriminate a true prophecy from a good guess?
If a person claims to be saying stuff that they heard from God, you treat the whole body of the stuff they said together.
Something with a clear “must happen before…” time, like “you will be healed of leprosy if you bathe seven times in the river” has got to be true now or else the person’s whole body of work gets thrown out.
So the prophets use the verifiable signs to show why anybody would listen to their unverifiable, or not quickly-verifiable, prophesies.
By the way, prophets as individuals are not always pro-Israel… Balaam as an example; but it was clear God was pro-Israel.
“Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up” – James 5:13.
Well, you can cross James off the list of people who speak for the Lord, because that stuff just doesn’t happen. I spent decades praying myself and decades more watching people pray and never is anyone healed. That’s just not how the world works.
“You wouldn’t go to a shaman or a spiritual healer for strep throat—unless you want to waste your money.”
I like how you slipped this little sentence in and slid on by before anyone could splutter their objections. Nicely done.
Superb piece, worthy of preservation. Kudos!
Didn’t take long for the pedant brigade to point out the variability of light speed in different mediums, and immediately chalking it up to ignorance (instead of charitably assuming the prose was shorthand for variability of light-speed, all else except place being equal). The boobs should’ve been here a few days ago and seen the post on precisely this topic.
The small edit “in a vacuum” would probably suffice to keep the pedants at bay…
Oh yeah? Well anybody who knows ANYTHING about physics, unlike YOU, knows there’s no such thing as a perfect vacuum. (although my Hyla comes close.)
No, it wouldn’t. Pedants are fractal.
When Dennett says that to the layman faith in science and faith in religion are similar, this is only true on the level of the ordinary guy-on-the-street’s faith in a community of alleged experts.
But the faith in the religious community should be eroded by an awareness of the !*process*! by which truths are decided and adjudicated. Moreso than specific beliefs, it is the !*processes*! of how science is done and how theology is done which is the area of conflict IMO.
I’ve often said that “faith” is the dirtiest word in the English language.
Really well done Jerry! 🙂 And I linked to it from your site.
Love your writing — looking forward to the new book!
Jerry, you could do much much worse than writing in Slate. It is by far my favourite webzine. Very left-leaning, even by European standards.
Meanwhile you’re moving up in the world of Horsemen of the Atheistoclipse :). Look at all these publications on Tinterwebs! You’ll be as famous as Richard, Sam, Hitch and Dan one day…
If anyone is interested, the comments section of the Slate article is worth a visit as well.
I hate how they’ve sort of buried it now where you have to take some extra effort to get there.
Isn’t it amazing that an institution as old, huge, and “learned” as Religion is using a word game for an argument?
Yes!
Don’t suppose I could prevail upon the author to give a short explanation on why something that is a theory can also be a fact ( germ theory, theory of gravity, evolution etc)? I really want to hit back at the scientifically ignorant ,but don’t quite have the chops to do so myself.
This might be what you need.
A FACT is something which has so much supporting evidence the to deny it would be perverse. So it’s a fact that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning. It’s possible that the earth could stop rotating at midnight or that the sun will explode in the next few hours, but since we have no evidence that those things are imminent, it would be perverse to deny tomorrow’s sunrise.
A THEORY is a very well tested explanation for how something happens. (An explanation that is still in the process of being tested is called a Hypothesis.) The Germ Theory of Disease explains that many diseases are caused by the body being infected by specific micro-organisms. At first this was just a hypothesis because the germs were hard to detect, but there have now been so many cases of particular germs being found in the bodies of people suffering from particular diseases, and of people being cured of the disease once the germs were destroyed, that no sensible person would deny that germs cause diseases. (Also, in many cases we know the precise mechanisms that the germs use to attack our bodies.)
The Theory of Evolution is BOTH a Theory and a Fact. We have lots and lots of evidence that it has happened (fossils, geographic distribution of species, comparing DNA sequences of species thought to be closely related), so it is a fact that it happens a lot. And scientists have tested how it works with artificial breeding, placing populations in stressful environments to see how their gene pools change over time, and predicting the features of undiscovered fossils and then FINDING fossils that match the predictions. So it is also a well-tested theory.
*An explanation that is still in the process of being tested is called a Hypothesis.*
Actually, it would have been better if I had written “An explanation that has been only thinly tested is called a Hypothesis.” The TOE is still being tested every day, but it has such a massive body of evidence already supporting it that it’s pretty much inconceivable that it would be overturned in any significant way.
The first thought for me is Evolution As Fact and Theory, by Steven Jay Gould.
It’s simple:
“Theory” has more than one definition.
It can mean a hypothesis, or guess, often based on at least some observation: “I have a theory about this…”
But it can also refer to the abstract framework that holds many *facts* together and explains their relationship with each other: music theory, gravity, evolution, etc…
I always feel the conversation has already gone off the rails if you’re talking about ‘theory’ vs ‘fact’. It often means that someone is trying to argue about an idea, evolution say, without actually addressing, you know, the idea and the evidence for or against it. It’s just another form of argument form authority… if we can establish that scientists have confidence X, checkmate. This is a bad way to argue and is not what scientists themselves do. They use words like “theory” and “fact” rather loosely because it’s not relevant to doing science. No one devotes any energy to identifying the scientific facts versus the scientific theories versus the scientific hypothesis. There is no procedure for elevating something from one level to another. Rather, actual science is done by addressing specific claims and specific bits of evidence that bear on those claims. So if the topic is evolution, one would better spend your time trying to enumerate why anyone would think it was a good explanation for the patterns we see in biology than trying to argue about whether it is a ‘fact’ or a ‘theory’, which is a mugs game all around. The scientifically ignorant can best be illuminated on the specific bits of evidence. If you want a friend to come to see it as something very likely to be true, educate them on biology. Evidence for evolution is everywhere. Mimicry, for example, can be seen in any backyard. Watching a nature show, why do male lions eat cubs born to other males? Why are there penguins? I mean, really. Flightless birds, that’s a kicker, and living off where no one would see them to boot. They serve no purpose. Of course, from the view of evolution, they are there because they can be. There is nothing more to it than that.
There is a similar problem that comes up when people get embroiled trying to demarcate science verses pseudoscience. Once again, this is an attempt to argue wholesale without addressing specific claims. You could spend a lot of breath trying to convince someone that astrology is a pseudoscience and not a science, but you’ll probably have more success and get more to the point to just take specific claims and discuss those. Venus affects your personality you say? How? What is your evidence? What we know about Venus is that it’s light reaches us, and it’s gravity. We can compute how much of each and estimate it’s potential impact compared to, say, a mouse scampering under your bed. And so on. But trying to argue that “astrology is a pseudoscience and not a science” is just going to be a mess.
Also see
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html
The equivocation regarding the word “faith” is easily rectified. Simply use the word “faith” when you are describing a belief that is not based on evidence and use the word “trust” when referring to a belief based on evidence and experience.
Examples:
He has “faith” that there is a god. (Belief in god despite lack of evidence).
I “trust” that the sun will rise in the morning. (Trust is based on astronomical evidence and past experiences of sun rising).
Dr. Coyne:
Let me add my vote to the many who have posted here about what a great piece you’ve published in Slate; with them, I agree that it is concise, yet covers all the salient points in a highly useable and readable manner. Bravo!
I enjoyed your Slate essay, and have two quick comments. First, you might be interested in Bertrand Russell’s nice article on the difference senses of “belief” when used in religious sentiment versus science, which parallels your parsing of “faith.” Second, “faith” aside, I keep coming back to the point that Tylor made in the 19th century: religion, he argued, is about the supernatural. Religion isn’t necessarily about “faith” or conviction or passion. It’s about the supernatural. Any time scientists are accused of believing in science in a way that seems to resemble faith in religion, I point out that science believes in the material world, not in a supernatural one. That’s the really big difference, whatever our faith in either.
Great piece, Professor!!
A good read. Thanks, Jerry!