Although I’m an admirer of the anticreationism work of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), I’m not a fan of their pervasive accommodationism. They not only have a “faith project” designed to show that science and religion are compatible, but their writers and employees regularly defend the view that science and the supernatural are compatible because science cannot deal with the supernatural. That, of course, is bogus: what else are tests of the efficacy of prayer, or tests of ESP and telekinesis, but science dealing with the supernatural? The thing is, I think the NCSE people know this, but are espousing an untenable position that nevertheless allows them to avoid offending the religious supporters of evolution. I’d prefer that they say nothing about religion, and I find it unseemly for a scientific organization to coddle superstition and delusion.
But I digress. What I wanted to bring to your attention is a review that the NCSE commissioned for “NCSE reports” from philosopher Maarten Boudry, a review called “The Relentless Retreat: God in the Age of Science.” The book at issue is Religion and the Science of Origins by Kelly James Clark, described by Boudry as a “philosopher and Christian apologist.” Both Boudry’s review and the Amazon review (just below) show the book to be a long exercise in accommodationism, the claim that science and religion are totally compatible:
Religion and the Sciences of Origins critically discusses issues in religion and the sciences of origins in both historical and contemporary contexts. After developing options on the relationship of science to belief—conflict, separation, and integration—the book treats three historical events: the scientific revolution, the Galileo affair, and the reception of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Special attention is paid to the influential yet misleading myth of the warfare between science and religion. The book examines theoretical issues—chance and purpose, the evolutionary psychology of religion, the relation between mind and body (and neuroscience and free will), and the relation of God to the good. After discussing God and the big bang, the book concludes with an analysis of evolution in the Muslim and Jewish traditions. The book, which assumes no prior background on the part of the reader, offers insights into the crucial past and into the most heated current debates surrounding science and religion.
I’m not sure that the NCSE knew what it was about when it asked Boudry to review the book, for if you know his writings (and I’ve highlighted several of them on this site), you’ll know that he has little patience for accommodationism. And that shows in his review, which he’s published in advance on his website.
Here are but a few of Boudry’s arguments in his longish but highly readable review:
- The claim of accommodationists that “God is not a scientific hypothesis” is untrue. As Boudry shows in his review (and I show at length in my book), God is in many ways a scientific hypothesis. Boudry:
“Clark’s claim that “God is not a scientific hypothesis,” however, plays on an equivocation. To be sure, the God ‘hypothesis’ does not look much like, say, the nebular hypothesis of the formation of the solar system. It did not arise from careful empirical investigation of nature, and religious believers who endorse such beliefs do not do so tentatively and after carefully examining the available evidence. A less polite way of saying this is that believers tend to be intransigent and dogmatic. In that sense, indeed, God is not a scientific hypothesis. But all that is irrelevant for the conflict view: belief in a supernatural Creator amounts to a scientific hypothesis in the sense that it has testable empirical consequences, is amenable to scientific investigation, and would make a genuine difference for science if true (Fishman 2009). That is precisely the heart of the conflict thesis: because it makes factual claims about reality, religion encroaches on the domain of science and is vying for the same explanatory domain, even if does not remotely look like science. To think that God is ‘not on the scientific radar’ (p. 6), as Clark does, just because theism did not emerge as a result of the hypothetico-deductive method, is a category mistake.”
- The claim of accommodationists (and the NCSE) that science has nothing to do with the supernatural is wrong. (Boudry’s written a lot about this claim, as have I in The Albatross.) Here’s a bit of Boudry’s argument:
“Clark is fair in at least one regard: in reconciling science and religion, he provides equal disservice to both. The most important distortion of science in this book, which is unfortunately also promulgated by high-profile scientific organizations such as the NCSE and the AAAS, is that science is by its very nature [is] restricted to natural causes and explanations, and must remain studiously neutral on questions about the supernatural. God can never fail as a scientific hypothesis, or so the doctrine of methodological naturalism claims, because he never entered the scientific arena in the first place. He may or may not exist, but science has no say on the matter. I think this is a politically convenient fiction, which does not survive philosophical scrutiny and historical analysis (Edis 1998; Boudry, Blancke et al. 2010; Fishman and Boudry 2013). It has also backfired, because it creates the impression that science has unfairly excluded God (see the ID propaganda movieExpelled) from serious consideration. The Intelligent Design (ID) folks had a field day with that one.
The doctrine of “methodological naturalism” is just one among several straitjackets that Clarke wants to force science in . . . “
Indeed, and read the review to see more about why supernatural claims often fall within the ambit of science.
- Clark’s claim that the “conflict hypothesis”—the view that religion and science are not in conflict and never have been—is bogus. Clark, like many accommodationists—most prominently Ronald Numbers—likes to argue that the Galileo affair had nothing to do with religion, and so it’s unfair to use it as an example of faith/science conflict. Numbers and Clark are wrong, and their recasting of the Galileo affair as being really about politics, personal animosity, or even (as Clark maintains) as “a conflict about science versus science” is simply self-serving and unscholarly.
- Accommodationists who reject science as a way to test the supernatural regularly use it anyway, and make science-based arguments for God. One of them, of course, is the argument that the constants of physics are “fine-tuned” to allow human life, and that there’s no explanation for that save God. They thus try to have it both ways. But when dealing with the science, they don’t behave like scientists, for there’s no empirical result that could, for these folks, argue against the existence of God. I particularly enjoyed Boudry’s dismantling of these views, and want to give a long excerpt:
“’Intelligent design,’ a modern-day heir of natural theology, may be discredited in the eyes of most theologians, but cosmology may still leave a number of gaps in the fabric of the cosmos for God to fill up. According to the ‘fine tuning’ arguments that are currently in vogue, the fundamental physical constants in our universe seem to lie within a very narrow range, outside of which the cosmos would not be conducive to the formation of matter and solar systems, let alone be hospitable to intelligent life. Surely this is a sign of God’s providence. However, even if we grant that life is viable only within a certain range of physical values, which is a premature conclusion at this point, there are plenty of natural explanations on offer for this appearance of fine-tuning (Carroll 2012). In the multiverse model arising from string theory, for example, the constants of nature vary from one place to the other, and the existence of certain life-conducive regions is a matter of sheer happenstance. Clark is aware of this possibility, and although he spends a whole chapter on fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God, at the same time he is already hedging his bets and anticipating the next retreat: if one of the multiverse models of the cosmos should be borne out, and fine-tuning arguments would go out of the window, this, too, would count in favor of theism: ‘God in his goodness may indeed have created everything – every possible kind of thing in the universe. … The multiverse might be the ultimate expression of divine goodness and creativity.’ (p. 205). So either God, in his loving providence, has created one universe carefully tailored for life, or in his infinite profligacy, has created a whole plethora of worlds, the finely-tuned and the messed-up ones alike. Either way, praise be unto Him! This ‘Heads I win, Tails you lose’ approach to theology betrays a desperation to maintain a cherished belief at any cost, regardless of the evidence. Note also that by invoking the fine-tuning argument, Clark is tacitly conceding that evidence is in fact relevant to the God question – thereby undermining his claim that God is not a scientific hypothesis.
In science, this kind of reasoning would be met with ridicule, but for theology, being ”another way of knowing”, different rules seem to apply.”
This is all music to my ears, for I have made similar arguments. Boudry and I are in fact in almost total agreement on the relationship between religion and science, and we’ve just co-authored a paper that touches on this issue. It’s been submitted to a philosophy journal, so I can’t discuss or describe it, but if it’s accepted I hope that Massimo Pigliucci will at last grant me a modicum of street cred in philosophy.
Boudry, a Belgian, writes in the tradition of Herman Philipse—a philosopher who uses his training and knowledge of science to argue against the compatibility of these disciplines. This is a refreshing change from those philosophers and historians of science (many of them atheists) who for reasons beyond my ken abandon their criticality when it comes to religion. But go read Boudry’s book review. I like it, but don’t know if the NCSE will.
Thanks to Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia, Boudry now has his own personal Wikipedia page, which you can see here. His age is given as 30 but he looks 16. He thus has many years left to dismantle the pretensions of accommodationism.
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I certainly hope Pigliucci will acknowledge your contribution, especially given that he and Boudry have co-edited a book on the demarcation problem and pseudoscience.
Thirty is the new sixteen, or so I’ve been told. But that essay most emphatically is not the angsty lucubrations of a teenager, even if I’m sure some apologist will attempt to paint it as such.
b&
I had to laugh at the “His age is given as 30 but he looks 16.” Looking back at my own pictures when I was 30 and I think the same thing. I think this is in the (sexagenarian) eyes of our host kind of a thing…
Boudry doesn’t really look 16. Someone who really was 16 would spot that in a minute.
As I get older and older, the “young” tend to blur together. It’s a natural tendency. I remember visiting at a nursing home when I was in my early 40’s and being asked by one of the residents if I “was still in school.”
This I suppose is the flip side of when we were young and “middle-aged” meant “26.” At 16 I could see and appreciate the extreme distinction between 16 and 30, but as far as I was concerned anything over that was a blur. How old is Mr. Smith the English teacher? 40? 50? 70? Yeah, one of those, probably.
And poor Mr. Smith is only 38.
One of the great benefits of a career in a university has been that most of the people around me never age: they’re students in their 20s, energetic, optimistic, positive, and determined. The faces change (and I miss some of them a lot), but the community stays the same, with that same great vibe.
…and the flip side of that is that it gets harder to be sure of the decade of older people…I’ve known people in their 60s whom you’d swear were in their 80s and vice-versa.
Still jars me when people my own age refer to themselves and / or us as, “middle aged.” When the hell did that happen? Though, in one case, somebody only one year older than me seems like he’s overdue for AARP eligibility….
b&
I was 47 the first time a kid at the checkout gave me a Senior Discount without asking. And I took it.
By far and away the most self-evident of Boudry’s claims is the third: that religion and science have in fact been in conflict in the past. It’s a straight forward historical claim, not dealing with any issues in philosophy of science or philosophy of religion. I am almost willing to suggest acknowledging this is a litmus test of the honesty of the rest of one’s argument.
(Folks like Karen Armstrong have claimed that in earlier eras like Galileo it is much harder to !*separate*! [disentangle] religion and politics, but IMO that leads in many ways to the opposite conclusion that they want to draw!!)
In fact, the early “scientific philosophers” such as Thales of Milete, Anaximander and Anaximenes, were viewed with suspicion by local authorities because their views conflicted with the existing superstitions (popular religions) used to control and dominate the masses. (Shamefully, Plato agreed with this idea.) 2000 years later, with Galileo, things were not different.
“Plato agreed with this idea” – thus throwing Socrates under the bus too.
I should perhaps clarify I don’t get as incensed by accomodationism as our web host Jerry Coyne does, but accomodationism as a lead in to Christian apologetics is to me more disconcerting.
Kudos to both Jerry and Boudry.
The philosophical legerdemain involved in removing God from objective inquiry (philosophical or scientific) is the happy confusion between fact and value beloved of both the sophisticated theologians and ordinary believer. If no scientific evidence could ever count for or against the existence of God even in principle, then “God” gets to comport among values, virtues, and preferences. Just as there is nothing which would make you value evil over good or prefer rap music to Beethoven, faith gets to be one of those things which are chosen rather than “compelled” in the very same manner.
What rot. People believe in God for reasons. Bad reasons, certainly, but they didn’t wake up one day and notice the beauty of God. They enjoyed the beauty of a sunset and inferred the existence of God. Observations and experience combined lie behind the explanation — a proposed explanation which might be wrong even if yes, there are sunsets and yes, we feel that they are beautiful.
In The God Delusion Richard Dawkins paid some attention to this sly little game of ‘heads I win; tails you lose.’ He hypothesizes a situation where God suddenly chooses to reveal itself through strong, consistent, extraordinary evidence … and scientists accordingly bend their knees in acknowledgement and reverence. “It’s true after all!”
Under those circumstances does anyone imagine that the theologians (sophisticated or otherwise)would drag out their accomodationist scorn and say something like “Oh pish, this means nothing. Science cannot address the divine. No evidence can possibly count one way or the other. Off your knees, ignore it all.”
No. We — and they — know damn well that they’d be crowing in triumph. “Told you so.”
There is no logical necessity for having “faith” that God exists. That’s an immunizing strategy, an evolved protection against the reasonable demand for good, convincing evidence and argument. With all God’s omnipotence, does He find it impossible to be more obvious? Do even the rocks have more power than God?
Gods are like roaches. They are always in the darkness and scatter when the illumination of Science shines. So all deities will never be found because they will always be hiding in the unknown, or not yet known.
Agnosticism was founded to not sound so harsh as Atheism is. It is also fence sitting. And it is also giving benefit of the doubt to the said believers where as Atheists want proof, so they don’t give them any such thing.
So far the idea of a deity, “god” means “to call a deity”, seems more a biologically based behavior for survival purposes. But like any trait for survival should the environment change too much it will be a detriment. So far it is very good at survival. Too good because over population and loss of resources are moving to collide big time on planet Earth. So such urges to create, construct, and organize under such beliefs can become dangerous on a much larger scale than we have now.
Great review. Lots of good lines, but I particularly liked this one: “From reading Clark, you would almost believe that the Holy Inquisition was an early and exemplary model of academic peer review.” Love it.
That was a very good line. This fellow may be young but he is very good and easy to understand. He also put the question right out there – Is there a single proposition in the bible that is non-negotiable? Also, that his patience is limited, a very good ending.
Boudry has a website with a number of his writings, including his 2011 PhD dissertation from the University of Ghent “Here be dragons: Exploring the hinterland of science”. It’s https://sites.google.com/site/maartenboudry/.
It is only with cognitive dissonance that one can reconcile science and faith.
Agreed. Science and religion are only compatible to the degree of cognitive dissonance one can tolerate. A lot, it seems, for some.
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Mistake? This sentence
“Clark’s claim that the “conflict hypothesis”—the view that religion and science are not in conflict and never have been—is bogus.”
does not make sense to me. Shouldn’t it be “are in conflict etc”?
No. Clark is the accomodationist. His “conflict hypothesis” is that there is none.
Yes, I agree the syntax is messed up but the intended sense is clear from context.
Clark claims that the “conflict hypothesis” is false. Boudry shows that Clark’s claim is bogus.
What a well-written essay, cutting right to the substance behind the smoke Clark blows.
I liked Boudry’s enumeration of formerly inviolate scriptural claims no longer seen as compatible with Nature by modern science: “… the young age of the Earth, the Flood, the miracle stories, the existence of Adam and Eve, the garden of Eden, the special creation of humans, the virgin birth, the Resurrection of Jesus…”
As one follower of Brian put it, “All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?”
I also like how he dismisses the argument that “God had to speak to [his creatures] in their own language.” This is what I was taught as a kid: “Genesis talks about ‘days’ of creation because people back then couldn’t understand ‘millions of years.'” If a modern 8-year old can grasp “Dinosaurs lived millions of years ago,” so could an adult, even one living thousands of years ago.
I like the idea that God is a scientific hypothesis. I’ve never heard that explanation before and find it a very compelling argument against God’s existence.
I would also like to add that Boudry has a better handle of written English than most people who were born into the language…including myself! lol
See Victor Stenger’s God : The Failed Hypothesis.
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Thanks for the link…more reason to reason.
There is this video by Sean Carroll on the same
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew_cNONhhKI
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The plausibility of the “we can’t test the supernatural” idea seems to me to come from a fairly straightforward bit of sleight of hand.
Perhaps we can’t test pure supernatural claims – claims about a supernatural world and nothing else – but the thing is, almost all actual supernatural claims are hybrid – they’re partly about the natural world, too. “God created the world” claims something about God and something about the world. So we can look for evidence for and against from the “world” end.
Yes, “supernatural” means “above nature.” If we assume, for the sake of argument, that God created the universe, then the only thing that can be really described as “supernatural” is God Himself (Herself/Itself/Themselves–does that cover all the bases?)
Therefore, EVERYthing God created is natural. If, for example, angels, ghosts, ESP, Heaven, miracles, etc. exist, then they are no more supernatural than rocks are–they are just a part of the natural world that we don’t understand yet. If we define “supernatural” as “beyond scientific understanding” as one dictionary I consulted does, then diseases, the weather, eclipses and so on USED to be supernatural. Obviously, the weather, eclipses and the rest can be scientifically studied, and so could miracles–if they existed.
This was supposed to be a reply to Henry Fitzgerald’s comment at #15, which is why it starts with “Yes.”
The preferred form is, “s/h/itself.”
b&
This is a really tricky issue, epistemically-speaking, for theists as trying to argue compatibility with science tends to either take away the ability to make meaningful statements about God, or it requires breaking down the compatibility when it suits (like in the case of miracles).
On the first issue, if all observations are compatible with God, how can we know God had a hand in anything. What can it mean, for example, to believe that Jesus was God-incarnate, or that the bible is God’s Word? The problem is trying to talk about such things without breaking the compatibility. Did God intervene in the universe in any way? If so, then that’s a breakdown of compatibility. If not, then how can we know there’s anything theistic going on at all?
On the second, theism requires God’s intervention (otherwise you have deism at best), so there has to be a way for God to do something. If religious experience really has a God communicating, then that has to involve some form of violation of how we know the world to work. Just as if Jesus really was born of a virgin, or if Moses really did receive the 10 commandments from God – these would have to constitute violations of the scientific order of things. The compatibility at that point becomes that science and religion are compatible for all the times God doesn’t intervene, which isn’t really that compatible at all.
I tend to think that what theists mean by compatibility is that they don’t necessarily have to reject any given scientific theory in order to be a theist. Which is trivially true.
“Although I’m an admirer of the anticreationism work of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), I’m not a fan of their pervasive accommodationism.”
I was a member of the NCSE since their very inception. However, when they decided to become an active part of the Belief System Industry I dropped my membership and haven’t looked back.
That is great stuff!
One thing that they get right is that science cannot deal with the supernatural. But that’s only because the supernatural doesn’t exist. Science does not put restrictions on the natural, that is the game of religion. Any confirmed observation that religion would deem supernatural would simply be a natural observation under science. If that’s not a core conflict, I don’t know what is.
Any typical definition of the supernatural includes some sort of assertion that it falls beyond the grasp of science. That, however, is where science thrives, encroaching upon the space just beyond its grasp. There is no supernatural and I challenge anyone to provide an example of an observation that would qualify.
Apologist Hall of Shame candidate:
Galileo, it should be borne in mind, had the foolhardy idea of being born in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, when the Catholic Church had grown anxious about dissident views.
Aw, that poor church. Science is just so impolite.
Did the NCSE know what it was about when they commissioned Boudry? I don’t understand. How could this happen?
Delicious review from an anti-accommodationist perspective. So what’s going on?
Other philosophers have made this claim previously: Philip Kitcher and Mario Bunge, to mention two.