There’s a new accommodationist piece on the BBC’s website called “Can religion and science bury the hatchet?” It’s written by Caroline Wyatt, the Beeb’s Religious Affairs Correspondent, and of course the answer to her question is “YES!”
When reader Jim sent me the link to her piece, his email was headed, “There’s £700,000 down the drain then”, and that refers to the springboard for Wyatt’s piece: a substantial “Science and Faith Grant” given to the Church of England by—surprise!—the Templeton Foundation. Here’s what it’s for:
Churches are being encouraged to talk about the relationship between science and faith through a project backed by the Church of England.
The Templeton World Charity Foundation has awarded £700,000 to a three-year Durham University programme which aims to promote greater engagement between science and Christians.
Churches will be able to apply for grants of up to £10,000 for “scientists in congregations”, and more than 1,000 people training for Anglican ministry will be offered access to training and resources on contemporary science and the Christian faith as part of the project.
The programme will be led by the Rev Professor David Wilkinson, Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University and an astrophysicist, with Professor Tom McLeish, Professor of Physics at Durham University and the Bishop of Kingston, the Rt Rev Dr Richard Cheetham.
You can hear Wilkinson’s justification for the project here. Remember that £700,000 would, if donated to UNICEF’s Tap Project, provide clean water to children for 20,0000,000 days (54,800 years).
Well, Templeton is clearly still on the “unite faith and science” path, despite its lip service to pure science. And Ms. Wyatt is down with the project. Her article, which I find rather discursive and muddled, instantiates four misconceptions about the relationship between religion and science. Here they are:
1. There’s no conflict between religion and science. A lot of secular accommodationists, including the historian of science Ronald Numbers, as well as organizations like the National Center for Science Education, like to promulgate this idea. When there seems to be conflict, as in the case of Galileo v. Pope, or creationism vs. science, they fob that off on either “distorted religious beliefs” or, in the case of Galileo, as “a more nuanced conflict that really involves not religion, but politics and personalities.”
The fact is that, as I claim in The Albatross, both science and religion make claims about the cosmos (“God is a hypothesis,” as Shelley said two centuries ago), so they are competing to describe reality. But only science has a way to actually find out what’s real. That’s the true conflict between the two areas.
Wyatt argues against that:
But the real narrative of a conflict between science and religion was developed in the late 19th Century, and has proved remarkably persistent – not least because it makes for lively debates on TV, radio and the internet.
And, get this:
“The old distinction that science is about facts and religious belief is about faith is far too simplistic,” says Prof Wilkinson.
“Science involves evidence, but it also involves skills of judgement, and skills of assessing evidence.
“After all, you only have a limited amount of evidence to base your theory, and you have to trust your evidence – which isn’t far from being Christian.
“It doesn’t involve blind faith – and indeed religion is not good religion if it is simply based on blind faith.
“Christianity has to be open to interpretation about its claims about the world and experience.”
For Prof Wilkinson, the two are absolutely not mutually exclusive.
That’s outrageous! Seriously: trusting evidence is close to what Christians do? Well, maybe—so long as the evidence is either nonexistent or confected! If you look at how science and religion regard evidence, you’ll see the huge gulf between those disciplines. For one things, religion is ridden with confirmation bias, while science has procedures to eliminate it. The fact is that Christianity is indeed based on blind faith, for there’s simply no credible evidence that any of its claims—souls, heaven, God, afterlife, Jesus’s divinity and resurrection—are true. You must have blind faith to believe that stuff.
2. Religion can contribute to science—and to our understanding of reality. This is more than just Gould’s idea that science and religion are complementary, with science helping us understand the universe and religion dealing with morals, meaning and values. No, Wyatt’s interviewees tell us that religion can help science:
Prof Wilkinson became a Methodist minister after training and working in theoretical astrophysics on the origin of the universe.
“Many of the questions that faith and science posed to each other were fruitful,” he says.
Galileo’s ideas were condemned by the Church“For many different folk both inside and outside the church, science and religion don’t have a simplistic relationship – and the model that says science has to be pitted against religion doesn’t explain the history of a very interesting interaction.
“Today, many cosmologists are finding that some questions go beyond science – for example, where does the sense of awe in the universe come from?”
Actually, the question of where our sense of awe comes from—not just awe about the cosmos, but about music, art, paintings, a loved one, and so on—is a scientific question. If it is ever answered, it will be by not by religion, but by neurobiology and evolutionary biology. Invoking “God” or “religion” as an answer is bogus; it’s equivalent to asserting that “God gave us the sense of awe” and leaving it there. That’s like saying “Fairies gave us a sense of awe.”
Ditto for “where did religion come from?” That’s a question of history, psychology and sociology, whose answer is probably irrecoverably buried in the strata of history. It’s not an answer to say, “God gave us religion.”
Here’s another way religion is supposed to help science:
3. Religious scientists help advance science, ergo God. First, Wyatt gives us a list of religious scientists, to wit:
Living scientists with religious beliefs
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, Unitarian Universalism
Sir Colin John Humphreys, physicist, president of Christians in Science
Ahmed Zewail, 1999 Nobel Prize for chemistry, Muslim
Simon Conway Morris, palaeontologist, Christian
Martin Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, astrophysicist and former chairman of the Royal Society, churchgoer who doesn’t believe in God
But for every one of these I could provide two or three atheist scientists, for there are more atheists scientists (especially among accomplished scientists) than religious scientists. Would it be helpful for the BBC to provide a list of “Living scientists who don’t believe in gods” to show us that science is furthered by nonbelief?
And here’s the old canard that justifies religion because some scientists who advanced the field believed in God:
That sense of wonder is echoed by Catholic priest and particle physicist Father Andrew Pinsent, who worked at the Cern laboratory.
. . . Moreover, two of the most important theories of modern science, genetics and the big bang, were both invented by priests.”
[Pinsent] says that as a particle physicist, he was always impressed by the discovery of “beautiful patterns and symmetries in nature, mathematics at a deep level, and the extraordinary properties of light”.
“These discoveries cannot, in themselves, be used to construct a formal proof of the existence of God, but they do evoke a sense of wonder to which a religious response is natural,” he says.
Yes, Mendel made the first formal investigation of genetics, and Lemaître posited the Big Bang, but most of the geneticists and cosmologists who subsequently advanced the field were nonbelievers. And besides, there’s no rule that religious scientists, of whom there are many, can’t have good ideas. But I deny that the vast majority of those good ideas have anything to do with religion. Did Mendel cross his peas as a way of worshiping God? Nope—he was an educated man and was simply curious. As far as I know, and I may be wrong, Lemaître posited the Big Bang as the starting point of an expanding universe, and decried attempts to use it as evidence for God’s creation. In fact, I just found confirmation of that on Wikipedia:
By 1951, Pope Pius XII declared that Lemaître’s theory provided a scientific validation for Catholicism. However, Lemaître resented the Pope’s proclamation, stating that the theory was neutral and there was neither a connection nor a contradiction between his religion and his theory.[19][20]
4. Finally, NOMA. After arguing and quoting people about how science and religion can help each other, Wyatt ends by quoting someone who undercuts all that, but in a problematic way:
James D Williams, lecturer in science education at the University of Sussex, says: “Where we have issues, they generally revolve around people trying to reconcile science and religion or using religion to refute science.
“This misunderstands the nature of science.
“Science deals in the natural, religion the ‘supernatural’.
“Science seeks explanations for natural phenomena, whereas religion seeks to understand meaning in life.”
“In my view, science and religion cannot be integrated, that is, science cannot answer many of the questions religion poses and, likewise, religion cannot answer scientific questions.”
So we’ve come full circle: Wilkinson says science is like Christianity, while Williams says it’s not. They’re both partly right, in that both areas make claims about reality, but only science has methods to test which answers are right. Williams, however, is wrong in claiming that religion is not interested in natural phenomena but only in “meaning”; many theologians have criticized that NOMA-ish argument.
And indeed, religion can’t answer scientific questions, but religion can’t answer religious questions, either! Religion addresses plenty of questions, but can’t answer any of them. If it could, the diverse and often conflicting answers coming from different faiths wouldn’t exist. All religious quests would end up with the same answers. Thank Ceiling Cat that there’s only a single brand of science!
I’m continually puzzled why Britain, which is so much less religious than the U.S., in some ways coddles faith even more lovingly. Almost all the vociferous atheists who are Anglophones are from America (Dawkins is an exception, and I count Hitchens as part American), and many of the religious accommodationists, like Polkinghorne, Rees, and Conway Morris, are Brits. I provisionally conclude that the British dislike of attacking religion is based on their tradition of being polite and nonconfrontational. Americans, on the other hand, are loud, brash, and don’t respect authority!
Terrific article!
I wonder if this is completely a bad thing. To some extent, it will mean teaching science, right?
Uh oh. Alarm bells go off in my head now whenever I see the emphasized word. I wonder which narrative – does this mean history, or some story the author has created to suit an agenda?
Yeah but we have some evidence, which is where it counts. It is far from being Christian, since Christians aren’t basing their beliefs on the quality of evidence science relies upon.
These scientists contributed to their disciplines despite their religious beliefs, not due to them!
Yes, Jerry, the Brits just don’t like going after religion: I can only think of Nick Cohen and Douglas Murray, the neo-con.
It drives me crackers. x
Brit comedians seem to enjoy taking the piss. Many are quite openly atheist, and quite antagonistic towards religion (and damn funny too). So, there’s hope at least.
On the other hand, perhaps I was too hasty. Maryam Namazie, of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, Marie Walters (Irish), Stephen Law. Hell, given the personal danger he puts himself in, I’d give Maajid Nawaz an honorary badge of secularity.
Yes, the anti-theist space in Britain is in comedy. But I have noticed that even such ones with secular kudos like Stewart Lee, the librettist of ‘Jerry Springer: the Opera’, and incidentally a big fan of my group, stop short at going after Islam. x
They probably can’t afford body guards.
“Stewart Lee… stop[s] short at going after Islam.”
Really? Buy a copy of his “How I Escaped my Certain Fate”, which contains transcripts of several of his stand-up routines. Have a look at the footnote on p220-21 to see why this is not true. Also a routine pp286-292 about his being asked by a muslim woman to leave a weight-watchers’ session so there wouldn’t be a man present when she removed her head covering in order to get weighed.
I stand corrected, Graham. I have not seen the references you provide. I interpret Stewart’s routines more as a meta-comedy about the public discourse than as direct criticisms of Islam and of course he’s funny so what he does it up to him.
My interpretation derives from the language which he shares with the BBC newscaster’s lingo. In his 15th March Observer piece, he calls ISIS, like the Beeb does, ‘so-called Islamic State’ more than once. This is a phrase designed to give the impression that ISIS is not Islamic. I can’t see any reason to call ISIS ‘so-called’ except to exculpate Islam. x
Comedian: Dara Ó Briain: “Put them in the sack!”
Philosopher: Anthony Grayling; not as strident as Dawkins, but just as uncompromising: “You might as well say, ‘Fred did it.’”
Scientist: Peter Atkins; not a great debater, but very strident: “It’s not arrogant if you’re right.”
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Plenty of British comedians like to take the piss out of religion – Billy Connolly, for example.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4f6_1393176756
I’m a big Billy Connolly fan from way back – nearly 40 years. Lots of good lines in this link – “Never trust anybody who’s only read one book … how did you think they were gonna turn out?”
David Aaronovitch occasionally, if the fancy takes him, Evan Harris(GP and former Lib Dem MP) is excellent, the unbearable Kate Smurthwaite, Andrew Copson occasionally, Stephen Law, again occasionally.
Douglas Murray, in spite of my admiration for his clear-mindedness on Islam, is less concerned with religion generally – in fact I’ve never heard him criticise the idea of religion, and he was one of the opposition speakers in a debate with Dawkins about the value of religion a couple of years ago.
Jerry’s right though. Criticising religion is regarded as mean and nasty by a lot of British people, I think partly because belief has been seen as ineffectual and a bit pathetic for so long. People see Dawkins as kicking a wounded puppy.
This mindset hasn’t budged an inch with the rise of violent Islamism – it’s actually become more entrenched, as it’s combined with the taboo about criticising minorities and mutated into something much darker. Now you’re not just a bully for criticising religion, you’re potentially a bigot.
Kate Smurthwaite? Unbearable?
I dont believe that because Im not an idiot.
So strident!
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If you want to continue being irritated by stupid articles that are apparently in favor of undermining science, Scientific American has two recent bl*g posts that’ll get your dander up, one called ‘Everyone, Even Jenny McCarthy, Has the Right To Challenge “Scientific Experts”‘ from the Cross-Check bl*g by John Horgan and another one, by the same pandering journalist, called ‘Can Faith and Science Coexist? Mathematician and Christian John Lennox Responds’. So, not surprising to anyone who ever clicks over to Sci-Am, but yes, god and science are good buddies, and a barely literate former playmate’s “feelings” about vaccines are just as valid as a Doctor or Scientist! Hooray! Now I don’t have to waste my time reading all those big science books I bought, I can just read bits of the bible and do an internet search on MMR and autism and I’m as qualified as a Doctor with a PhD!
and as side note, the only reason I read (un)Scientific American is for the wonderful Darren Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology bl*g and Alex Wild’s Compound Eye. The rest is pretty crap most of the time.
Oh no, not Horgan again! Did you HAVE to tell me that?
Yes, Tetrapod Zoology and Compound Eye are great, though. Real science, not woo or mushbraininess.
She has the right to challenge. She has the corresponding responsibility *to change her mind* when the experts show how she’s wrong. This is where things go off the rails, as that latter step never happens.
If Christians stop basing beliefs on faith, traditions, the Bible and other theologians then there wouldn’t be a problem. I agree with Lemaître that science is neutral. Science has only conformed to Christianity when there have been threats and bribery made towards the scientists. Religion has not stopped conforming to science and still has quite a lot of catching up to do. Science helps to discover more and Christianity becomes more metaphorical.
The work generated by Templeton money always seems to be an exercise in cherry picking. Here are some scientists who are in Christianity, therefore no conflict, don’t mention the conflict. It shouldn’t be too difficult to do a similar Project Steve and cherry pick scientists with a certain taste in music for example. Cherry pick some scientists who listen to heavy metal and show the same relationship of metal music inspiring scientists and science inspiring heavy metal.
Check out Nightwish’s forthcoming Endless Forms Most Beautiful, featuring … Richard Dawkins!
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Cheers, they’re a lot of fun. I had no idea Dawkins would be involved in something like this, I’m excited to hear it. They’ve already released a song called Sagan (which wont be on the album) which was great to listen to.
The explanation for why so many British Christians hold to the accommodationist view of science & religion may stem from their religion-steeped-in-authority cultural framework, where the head of state (the Queen) is the head of their official Church of England, and religious instruction is still part of public school curricula. In a traditionalist “what’s your background” culture where people still ask “what does your father do?” when meeting, it may not be all that surprising that British religious scientists carry some baggage with them that they are as reluctant to give up as gay Andrew Sullivan his own Catholicism.
It’s no coincidence that bright minds that arrive at the accommodationist stance manage to do it for both their religion and the science. Polkinghorne is a fine example, never really thinking through the peculiar crannies of his own Christian religion’s history (including recent iterations like Young Earth Creationism in America). People who can whittle down the odd spots of their religion can do likewise for the implications of natural science, as Polkinghorne is sort of an evolutionist while sort of liking design argumemnts while sort of dismissing YEC antievolutionism. You can accommodate a lot with such a porous net.
Remember too that many Christians are utterly oblivious to what’s going on in cognitive science, where antievolutionists waxing on “mind” & “consciousness” as divine mysteries pay no attention to neuroscience work on those very areas (I’m documenting this in my “Troubles in Paradise” anticreationism project, tracking what science literature does or doesn’t get cited by antievolutionists along the way). So it is relatively easy for them to imagine that these issues are off in the safe zone they have staked out for their proprietary religious turf.
Scientists believe crazy things all the time when it is out of their area of expertise or is separate from their scientific work.
Plenty of Nobel prize winners went on to show how crazy they were.
Tons of intelligent people believe in crazy or disproved things. That is probably true of pretty much everybody on Earth.
I would much rather see that kind of money going towards promoting compatibility between religion and human rights, than science.
“…but religion can’t answer religious questions, either!”
Actually the Templeton Foundation would be better off trying to bribe Prof Ceiling Cat not to say things like that anymore.
I think the reason Brits tend to be less confrontational with religion is because religious people are so much more quiet over here. We don’t like to talk about religion or politics unless it’s with close friends or we’ve been drinking.
Many of us Brits went to Church of England schools, they emphasis that religion is very personal, mostly just stories to live a good life and all that boring stuff. We grow out of when we get to college or uni and are just left the opinion that religion is for quiet old people and no one else cares. We get a few nutters and they are usually countered by some other loud nutters, we tend to avoid loud people and the overly smiley and charismatic types (unless they’re doing circus tricks or playing with puppets).
All of our good comedians all tend to be agnostic atheists or are at least critical of religion.
right con.
…where does the sense of awe in the universe come from?
As if that is proof of any higher being. Just because someone experiences awe in the face of the unfathomable universe doesn’t prove anything about the existence of god(s). Also, ancient people had a different sense of awe than modern people do. The root of their awe was fear of the unknown which turned into spurious beliefs and superstitions and made up stories to give meaning to their ignorance. To me, the sense of awe comes from the minimal understanding I have of the universe juxtaposed to the absolute vastness of space and time. I’m in awe of the reality, not in the superstition that god created it all for me.
My sense of awe has greatly increased since I became an atheist. Reality is far more amazing than, “God did it”.
No, the only reasonable and informative explanation for where our sense of awe comes from is that it comes from “Awe,” an Essence which is not made out of or from anything but which is Awe itself, in its Being, a pure and primary source which grants us a sense of awe through its power of Awe acting upon and through us, detected through a special sense of awe we have within us which is used to detect Awe.
See? Only spiritual explanations really satisfy us so completely. They’re truly Awe-full.
“Awe” is the essence made by combining the elements of air, water and earth. Obviously.
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So, what does “awesome” mean? Somewhat possessed of awe? Moderately awe?
No, no, no. It’s a two-tone signifier of awe: G♭- E♯ (Siler)
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An enharmonic semitone like G♭- E♯ sure would be full of awe. So full, one might even call it awful.
You may be familiar with some basic music theory, in which we have names for various intervals: perfect, major, minor, augmented, diminished, and so on. Yours is a perfect example of a demented second.
b&
This is a good example of why I’m always envious of musicians – I cannot even begin to “picture” what the notes mentioned sound like – together or otherwise. (Though if I were at a piano I’d eventually be able to pick them out.)
I mention this also because there’s a stupid analogy I’ve heard about us who are tonedeaf – namely that the nontheistic are “godblind”. I can hear some differences, use a spectrograph, etc. for the musical example – not so for the supposed deity stuff.
Spraying a thin patina of divinity on nature doesn’t cost much in terms of parsimony (forget integrity)and they all get to keep their jobs.
This idea that science benefits from religion because some scientists are religious doesn’t make logical sense. It’s like saying science benefits from pink hair dye because some scientists dye their hair pink (which one of NZ’s better scientists does). If religious scientists used faith to test their hypotheses rather than the scientific method, and that provided more accurate results, then it would be an argument. But, of course, religious scientists use the same methods as atheist scientists – ones that produce verifiable, repeatable results.
Therefore, religiosity (and hair colour) are completely irrelevant. Religion only becomes relevant if it causes someone to deny accepted theories (like evolution) in favour of something taught by a particular religion (like creationism), at which point it is clearly incompatible.
So religion is either irrelevant to science, or it harms it; it cannot help.
The usual (pretty good) standards of journalistic impartiality and fact-checking at the BBC do not apply to “religious affairs” correspondents/editors.
Apart from the obvious fact, noted by Professor Coyne, that Ms Wyatt egregiously omitted to mention that the Templeton-sponsored accommodationist view is taken by a small minority of eminent scientists, the article:
(a) fails to mention that the squalid project “Scientists in congregations” was not introduced first at Durham University, as it has been running at my own University (St Andrews) for at least one year;
(b) fails to point out that the debasement of British Universities at the hands of the TF has now reached the point where it is considered acceptable that fairly respectable state-funded institutions simply disburse cash from the TF directly to “local churches”. I tried to question the legality and indeed the morality of such schemes, but you can guess the response.
The British, as with all things philosophical, scientific, logical, itellectual out grew religion quite some time ago. We recognise it for what it is. Horse shit. Come on USA, catch up would you!? You get so het up over this nonsense, just laugh in the face of religion and before long it will subside into the heads of nutters and conmen only. 🙂
Historian-in-training here. Religion comes from a lack of understanding of the universe. People just made God up as an explanation. It also helps to exercise control over the environment – or so the religious think. Rain dances, oracle of Delphi, religious sacrifices for a good harvest/war, examining the entrails of goats to read the future… Apparently, we humans don’t like coincidence and we prefer bad explanations to good explanations.
In the 17th century, science came along. Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Christiaan Huygens, Kepler, Pascal, etc. Scientists dismantled the omnipotence of God. The earth was no longer the centre of the cosmos (Galileo) and disease was not the result of God’s wrath (Van Leeuwenhoek) and miracles did not exist (Baruch Spinoza).
In the 18th century, deism emerged as a solution to the problems that christianity faced. Perhaps God had created everything and then decided to sit back. Due to the religious wars of the 17th century, some people were very critical of religion and the role played by clerics in those wars (Voltaire). One could criticize the people running the church (Erasmus, Praise of the Folly), but one was not allowed to attack God because that was the foundation of the church and the foundation of the divine right of kings.
So that’s where religion comes from. An explanation for natural causes. Except islam. Islam is just a divine excuse for murder and theft, built on the foundation of already respected religions like judeism and christianity. Mohammed’s revelations often conveniently served his short term political goals. When Mohammed needed the Meccans as allies, he acknowledged their gods. When he no longer needed them, those verses were removed and the Meccan gods belittled. Some of those revelations were later removed from the koran (when they were no longer politically expedient) and are called ‘the satanic verses.’
I could tell and nuance a whole lot more, but I fear I might break Da Roolz! with such a long post.
“After all, you only have a limited amount of evidence to base your theory, and you have to trust your evidence – which isn’t far from being Christian.”
Is ones faith stance relevant when contemplating jumping off a precipice? Hmm, perhaps it is, since there not being an unlimited amount of testing of and evidence for gravity, and gravitation being “only a theory.”
Science can, indeed, be of great benefit to religion. Of course, religion wouldn’t survive the application of science, but that would still be of great benefit to religion.
b&
This comparison shoots them right in the foot.
Science “trusts” the evidence until there is reason not to. It’s strictly provisional. This isn’t at all the same as a trust grounded in faith.
Religious faith involves a moral commitment to believe certain facts as you were following virtues or values. If you change your mind you’ve broken a promise. You gave up; you failed. You didn’t try hard enough to see where the fact was true but YOU had the problem.
In science a failure to change your mind is a failure. You’re not supposed to play this sort of game.
As for “blind” faith, I’ll grant that religion is usually based on evidence. That doesn’t help their case. It’s based on poor evidence, unconvincing evidence, and evidence that fails to stand up under scrutiny and persuade skeptics. If it did meet this criteria, it wouldn’t be called “faith” now, would it?
In order to have the same kind of credibility and honesty as the method of science, it’s not enough that Christianity is open to “interpreting” its claims. So what? Anyone can do that — come up with excuse after excuse which saves a bad hypothesis. Christianity would have be open to refuting its claims and considering real alternatives.
That it cannot do, because do that and it’s no longer Christianity.
“So we’ve come full circle: Wilkinson says science is like Christianity, while Williams says it’s not. They’re both partly right, in that both areas make claims about reality, but only science has methods to test which answers are right. Williams, however, is wrong in claiming that religion is not interested in natural phenomena but only in “meaning”; many theologians have criticized that NOMA-ish argument.”
Of course religion is interested in natural phenomena, the problem is, it is trying to understand those natural phenomena through its not-knowledge and magical thinking, see Pope Francis’s embracement of exorcisms of mentally ill people as but one example.
In Britain (or England, anyway), religion is like an old, incontinent d*g: it’s embarrassing, and it makes a mess, but we grew up with it and don’t really have the willpower to put it down. And we use newspapers to clean up the mess.
Nice!
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Reblogged this on The Invisible Atheist and commented:
Another excellent article from Why Evolution is True which is worth sharing.
If Lord Rees is a ‘churchgoer who doesn’t believe in god’, is that really a religious belief? (This is a rhetorical question. The answer is clearly ‘hell no’.)
The fact that Tim Berners-Lee is a Unitarian Universalist says exactly nothing about his religious beliefs.
According to Wikipedia, he’s a non-believer who joined the church because he thought it would be a congenial environment for his kids. UU religious education is promoted as inoculation against unreasoning faith.
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Someone should write a book about the incompatibility of science and religion.
It’s a surprise no-one has, in fact. But I have faith.
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In fact, I do believe, our prayers for such a book will soon be answered.
b&
How unsurprising that the religious domain is alleged to include feelings (“sense of awe”), “meaning in life”, the “supernatural”, “claims about the world and experience”, and a “relationship between science and faith”.
Sooner or later, religion is the same as quackery, alternative medicine, overzealous conspiracy theories, and myriad forms of bullshit. Almost all of it boils down to human exceptionalism: human capacity for reason and “trust”, human feelings, the meaning of life for humans and the grand theatre they call “the world”, the human link between the natural and the supernatural, matter and mind, brains and souls, physical things and experiences, facts and wisdom, head and heart, animal and human, ape and angel, earth and spirit, science and religion. All quackery and superstition sooner or later end up at the same place: dualism.
Humans are special because, as well as the physical, they have something more, something fundamentally different. That’s human exceptionalism and dualism combined.
It’s not the only route to insane ideas, but it’s a very popular and easy one. After all, when you’ve got an alternative reality in parallel to physical reality – i.e. reality – then you can come up with almost anything if it sounds vaguely plausible.
I wonder if being awarded the Templeton Prize was any cause of chagrin for Rees? More cash than the Nobel for simply attending church as an atheist-scientist? My guess is he would have preferred the Nobel for nowt. He is on record as saying that science and religon cannot have a constructive dialogue, but that did not count against him. His church-going showed him to be an accommodationist of sorts, for Templeton, and that’s what Templeton is a temple of. As an atheist he is a rare and therefore prize bird in the Templeton flock of prizewinners.
John Templeton’s prize pre-dates the appearance of the new atheists, which seems odd. It increasingly seems as if every dollar dished out by Templeton, is intended to dent the impact of a handful of atheists on religious folk.
People like Wilkinson may have the dosh to organise and proselytise for accommodationism amongst the faithful, but they are being forced to run awfully hard to stand still, when it comes to dealing with the public impact of Dawkins et al.