There should be some kind of Constitutional amendment that puts up a wall between science and religion, just like the First Amendment that puts up a wall between government and religion. The incursion of religion into science is never helpful, and is often harmful. It has, for example, led to creationism. (I don’t object so much to the reverse incursion, since science has often disproven assertions of believers (creationism, Adam and Eve, the Exodus out of Egypt, and so on.) Maybe there should be a membrane that allows a one-way leakage of science into religion but prevents the reverse movement.,)
Here’s a new letter in Nature (click headline to access) noting not only the large difference in methodology between seeking “truth” in science vs. religion, but also using the high proportion of nonbelieving scientists (compared to the general public) as evidence for the incompatibility of the two areas. (Matthew sent me this to “cheer me up”.)
The link to the Conlon article is here, and that to the NAS survey is here.
I discuss in Faith Versus Fact how the more accomplished a scientist is, the more likely they are to be nonbelievers. For example, here’s a quote from page 12 of my book:
Finally, if religion and science get along so well, why are so many scientists nonbelievers? The difference in religiosity between the American public and American scientists is profound, persistent, and well documented. Further, the more accomplished the scientist, the greater the likelihood that he or she is a nonbeliever. Surveying American scientists as a whole, Pew Research found 33% who admitted belief in God, while 41% were atheists (the rest either didn’t answer, didn’t know, or believed in a “universal spirit or higher power”). In contrast, belief in God among the general public ran at 83% and atheism at only 4%. In other words, scientists are ten times more likely to be atheistic than other Americans. This disparity has persisted for over eighty years of polling
When one moves to scientists working at a group of “elite” research universities, the difference is even more dramatic, with just over 62% being either atheist or agnostic, and only 23% who believed in God—a degree of nonbelief more than fifteenfold higher than the general public.
Sitting at the top tier of American science are the members of the National Academy of Sciences, an honorary organization that chooses only the most accomplished scientists in the United States. And here nonbelief is the rule: 93% of the members are atheists or agnostics, with only the remaining 7% believing in a personal God. This is almost the reverse of the data for “average” Americans.
I then go on to discuss why accomplishment as a scientist is negatively correlated with religiosity. Two explanations immediately stick out, and I think both are at play in these results. But I’ll let readers think up their own reasons.
By the way, the same pattern is seen in UK scientists. A fuil 87% of the members of The Royal Society are atheists or agnostics, while about 49% of Brits believe in God. But I think that 50% would be quite a bit higher if you added Brits who “believe in a higher power”.
In Russia, Germany and China we witnessed enormous butcher’s bills charged by expressly anti-religious states claiming authority based on science proposed by intellectuals and propagated in universities. I’d lean towards striving to separate truth-based systems of thought – characterised by free speech and open debate – and power-based systems of thought based on suppressing those things. Perhaps that is the same thing as keeping religion out of science.
Russia only attacked religion because it was political. As soon as its political power was eliminated, the persecution stopped; many high-ups in Stalin’s circle baptised their children, and Stalin encouraged religion as an expression of patriotism during WWII.
Hitler was religious. He was on excellent terms with the Vatican, and his main heterodoxy was to want a more Germanic religion.
Mao Zedong rejected Christianity and Shintoism as tools of colonialism, but was perfectly happy with traditional religion.
Pol Pot pushed an extreme form of Buddhism, rather analogous to Boko Haram’s version of Islam, while professing atheism for political reasons.
All of these movements were cults and were essentially religious in character.
Hitler was not religious. I researched that topic not long ago.
To argue that Hitler was not religious is a red herring because the German people who committed and cooperated with Nazi atrocities were as religious as any other people in Christendom.
Please don’t pretend religion makes people kinder. It makes them cruel. If you disagree with that last sentence, consider: Adolph Hitler was responsible for the deaths of at least ten million people; Were he to burn ten million years in hell for each of those ten million people he would burn for one hundred trillion years, which is as nothing compared with the eternity promised the condemned; No one deserves such punishment, and yet believers foam at the mouth in anticipation of the suffering to be inflicted upon even young children born into the “wrong” religion.
Please don’t pretend religion makes people kinder. It makes them cruel.
This carries the cosmic implication of universal human rights – being for ‘everybody’ is effectively being for ‘nobody’. Religions are fantastic for building cohesive communities (Jewish diamond merchants efficiently trust one another with great wealth for instance) and makes them kinder to their in group, with tribal membership signifiers, etc, and ferocious to out groups (apostacy in Islam for example).
You’re implying things I never said. Where have I ever said anything remotely like what you’re accusing me of?
perhaps he wasn’t religious, but he most certainly used religion AND the church in his regime.
Yes that’s definitely true.
Doubtless we could have a long and fruitless debate over his views, which changed in a complicated way, but he was certainly not “expressly anti-religious” as in the original post and which prompted my comment. And he led a quasi-religious cult.
You seem to think I’m somehow defending Hitler. You couldn’t be more wrong.
Any time you beseech government to intercede on your behalf it becomes political.
I would rather see an amendment limiting congresses power to spend money.
I agree with you, even if that puts me at odds with the majority here.
The very nature of truth and scientific rigor is under real threat, but not so much from the Presbyterians.
It is all the woke Marxist beliefs and Maoist strategies that push all the various ways of knowing and personal truth as important contributions
And they do have a sort of religion, which they adhere to with fervor
I agree on the fundamental incompatibility between faith and science, but “religion” includes factual claims which, while usually false, could in theory be true if they stood up to scientific scrutiny.
I added the word “usually” here because there are often factual claims associated with religion which do no damage to the scientific world view if they happen to be discovered to be true — such as a reference in a holy writ to a flower assumed mythical which is found in someone’s tomb, or evidence of a sacred ancient kingdom. The general public tends to mix up that sort of thing with miracles as similarly “religious.” A constitutional amendment would therefore be assumed by both citizens and lawmakers to mandate rigid gatekeeping that would deny the existence of actual evidence for ideological reasons. That’s a problem.
And of course the usual suspects involved in pseudoscientific assertions about Biblical floods and Scripture-Predicted-Modern-Scientific-Discovery would have a field day with an “anti-religion” amendment, calling it evidence of preconceived bias and bigotry.
Religion needs to keep out of science when it doesn’t play by the rules — and by definition there’s always an element that refuses to play by the rules— but getting the law involved with permission to make new rules is I think a bad idea.
As millions of taxpayer’s dollars are beginning to flow into religious charter schools, and SCOTUS seems amenable to other types of incursions, it seems unlikely that a Constitutional Amendment would make a difference. We see that too many Americans are willing to allow the lines to be blurred. This is to a great extent a division between states. Additionally, the divisions in this country make agreement on any changes unlikely unless carried out by a coercive government. Pay attention!
There is, of course, the problem of demarcation.
Use the word ‘time’ and everyone knows about that to which you refer. If one tries to define it with an unambiguous expression, difficulties ensue.
The knowledge claims of mechanical philosophy — that is how I shall refer to your apparent meaning of “science” — are just as problematic. Indeed, start with “time.” Can you point to it? No. One may stipulate a useful mathematical construct — an algebraic dimension — to reason about witnessable phenomena. Does such utility for linguistcally competent reasoners demonstrate a substantive correlate for a mathematical construct? I would interpret any affirmative or negative answer as a belief.
The pragmatic character of practical problem solvers leads to the dismissal of such questions using rhetoric — almost universally in the form of logical fallacies. It is often difficult for me to read sites like this because there is so much irrational commentary. But, the useful gems are worth it. Physicists, for example, may not truly need Galois theory because of numerical methods (which still presuppose ideal mathematical constructs). I noted that in a comment by a published physicist.
Postmodernism? No.
The difficulty of these demarcations had been impressed upon mathematicians as the nineteenth century progressed. As a profession, “scientist” was only then being discerned from “natural philosopher.” Mathematics had an even more ambiguous status — essentially a “bit bucket.” By the early twentieth century, the intractability of the nineteenth century problems exhausted any widespread interest in these questions. Consequently, the work of the few had easily become victim to the contempt and derision of practical-minded academicians who would choose “easy” topics (Scare quotes because all serious academic study is hard). Perhaps one ought to speak of prestige-minded academicians.
By virtue of the sheer size of the academic community, there are large numbers of people who study the foundations of mathematics. A significant proportion are deeply concerned about the relationship between science, mathematics, and logic. Typically, it is the sociology of the science community which impedes communication along these lines.
So, I invite any reader to fill in the blanks:
“Logic is …”
“Mathematics is …”
“Science is …”
Straightforward demarcations of this kind are necessary if one calls for a legalistic criterion. It is already needed to account for expert testimony in courtrooms. Susan Haack is a philosopher who has spent time on this problem. She does not speak of “knowledges” in the plural because of postmodernism (or whatever other dismissive label one may choose). She speaks this way because — up to the present — a resolution of the demarcation problem evades an objective criterion.
Feynman did a pretty good job demarcating science, saying: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”. “Religion” is where people have fooled themselves.
Too easy, Coel. Religious believers don’t accept that they are fooling themselves. Only we do. They think we’re mistaken, about our beliefs and theirs. Checkmate.
Yes. Thank you. A simple characterization of the checkmate that one sees played out in the foundations of mathematics.
It is one thing to argue about how others are in error. It is an entirely different matter to make an affirmative defense of one’s own claims.
The book which drives the character of this checkmate home is called “The retreat to Commitment” by Bartley,
https://archive.org/details/retreattocommitm0000bart/page/n8/mode/1up
It is, largely, a history of the schism which arose between rational scientific study and liberal Protestantism. Within this context, he explains how the attempts of logicians and philosophers to justify a scientific view creates the conditions for a tu quoque by opponents.
Indeed, I have great respect for that comment. However, in what manner does it comprise an actionable criterion?
Historically, the notion of a “unity of science” is associated with (a stipulated) reductionism to physics. And, this appears to be exemplified in current literature by the ubiquity of reasoning in terms of energy, potential wells, and entropy. Thus, if the rhetorical defense of mechanical philosophy has a weak link, it is likely to appear with physics.
What is currently described as “classical logic” for propositions had been believed to be categorical — admitting of a single model known as truth table semantics. But, in 1999, this belief about logic had been shown to be erroneous. A non-distributive model had been demonstrated in this paper,
https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9906101v2
I have yet to find any researchers actively investigating the consequences of this ambiguity. One impediment may be a folklore of the algebraic, category theory community about “the same.” What could it matter if the two models have the same inference rules and the same tautologies?
That there are two classical propositional logics ought not, perhaps, be surprising. But, since models differ in terms of semantics, how can one decide how any naive “logical argument” relates to truth?
The unsurprising nature of this multiplicity, in turn, seemingly relates to the fact that “the continuum” of applied mathematics appears to be non-Archimedean, whereas we are all taught about “a real number line” which is Archimedean.
As mathematicians worked through the apparent logical difficulties involved with using the calculus, it had simply been assumed that the epsilon-delta proof of Weierstrassian mathematics justifies the algebra of differential equations; the two different characterizations of “the real line” as “the continuum” offers cause to doubt this assumption.
Relative to an Archimedean continuum, an epsilon-delta proof may be seen as a game between interlocutors in which player #1 proves that player #2 cannot produce a numerical counterexample. This is, quite naturally, a proof of defensibility rather than a proof of some truth.
Before Weierstrass, there had been Cauchy. And, Cauchy had expressed his distrust of algebra. Yet, because of the close relationship between calculation and algebra, such concerns have received little attention.
So, what has foundational physics done for science in the last 40 years? String landscapes? Inflationary bubbles?Substantive existence for every possibility engendered by the Born rule? Tegmark’s mathematical universe?
I do not underestimate the difficulty of formulating theories under the profoundly difficult constraints of established physics. I could not have attempted this work. But, defenders of mechanical philosophy need to include these hard problems in their debates or come up with something other than reduction to physics.
Are you certain that the physicists who had broadcast these ideas had not conformed with the dictates of “science”? The journals and conferences which promoted these “unwitnessable realities” certainly approved this as “science.”
Who is fooling whom?
There’s a lot there that one could reply to, but likely most people would agree that there cannot be an algorithmic “actionable criterion” in that science cannot be reduced to a mechanical algorithm.
I also suspect that there would be rather few “defenders of mechanical philosophy”, depending on how you define that term.
I take the term “mechanical philosophy” directly from its usage in Section 3 of the SEP link,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-physics/#SpacBodyMoti
discussing Cartesian physics. Because of accusations of “mathematicism” on several physics blogs, I also correlate the Cartesian method with his rejection of skepticisn based on the excerpt at the link,
http://math.colorado.edu/~nita/Gilson-Part_2-The_Cartesian_Experiment.pdf
The problem with “depending on how you define term X” is precisely that a history of “great achievements” is exactly the history obfuscated by pretending everything is a matter of definition.
As for the reduction of science to a mechanical algorithm, there are those who concern themselves with specific passages from Alan Turing’s work for precisely those reasons. By contrast, modern logic, in a very real sense, begins with a so-called discovery of “laws of thought.” It is not uncommon to read “in principle” arguments that defend the idea that human thought is reducible to Turing machine computability.
For what this is worth, I have no answers. I am asking questions — in particular, I am asking for an affirmative defense of why I should give credence to “in principle” arguments, without details, based upon perceptions of what science is.
I like this one from him too:
“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt”
That sounds very much like Feynman — and good advice for anyone with a scientific perspective.
This is a non-issue; 99% of scientists, even the very good ones (who are “believers”) understand the distinction between “science” and “faith” or variably between “science” and “spirituality”.
ASIDE: How do you keep -say- gender ideology out of science? That too is a -simulated- religion; it’s a belief unfounded in reality/objectivity. Yet, Nature, Scientific American and (more recently) medical journals (i.e. the Lancet) clearly demonstrate (referencing WEIT’s own posts) a “religious” leaning; not in favor of a virgin birth, but in favor of males giving birth (I admit to some exaggeration/snark on behalf of making my point).
*Belief systems* rooted in post modern deconstructionism (such as gender ideology, or CRT) “infiltrating” the scientific (STEM) sphere are verifiably more dangerous/harmful than -say- belief in a higher power (somehow, how?) infiltrating science.
Do we need a constitutional amendment to separate all ideologies (beliefs) from “science”? What would such an amendment look like? I’ll opine that the exercise will quickly descend into chaos. And. You’d have to define what a belief/ideology is (first) – how do you separate it -cleanly- from a hypothesis?
If some folk choose to believe that science is a way to “Glorify god and find out more about his creation?”. No skin off my back; it may irritate/alarm some, I agree, but that would -essentially- encompass the extent of the fallout.
Here’s Beethoven:
“The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man’s soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That’s what musicians are.”
I doubt “anyone” takes the above literally, but *everyone* knows what Beethoven meant and (we) can -all- live with it. And. We can (I hope) agree that Beethoven was a genius, particularly in light of his deafness.
Do we need a constitutional amendment to separate “faith” from music as well? Maybe we can -simply- glory in brilliant music, understanding that it moves us deeply and remaining content in the knowledge that we may not know why, not exactly, not precisely.
(Yes, I know, science is not music).
So. I venture that the concern expressed in the post is misplaced. Our time is better spent (if it’s a choice) concerning ourselves with protecting children from losing their body parts before their 18th b’day, than worrying about the virgin birth “somehow” entering the sphere of science.
Well said
Wise in every respect. Thank you. It’s the entry into science of newer faiths, rather than the historic monotheisms – thoroughly tamed into values rather than faiths in the 19th century – that feels dangerous whether Lysenkoism, phrenology or more recently Transgenderism – into the methodologies and values associated with science. I do take those wonderful words of Beethoven literally when I’m listening to his music.
To Rosemary’s thoughtful comment I can only add, by way of seconding it, that the United States already prohibits the state from establishing a religion or preventing the free exercise thereof. The Bill of Rights is intended to limit the power of the state: the state cannot enforce a religion on the citizen and it cannot suppress any private religious adherence. But science is not the state. Science is the preserve of scientists satisfying their curiosity as private citizens (or visitors.) Granting the state power to purge religiosity from science, even if these two domains could be reliably defined and demarcated (h/t Mitch and Sastra), augments state power to investigate and punish, rather than limiting it as the authors of the Bill of Rights intended.
If science wants to purge believers from its ranks, it has to do it off its own bat. But it had better be sure that it doesn’t run afoul of the Civil Rights Act which does augment state power in the interest of punishing illegal discrimination in the workplace, in this case by religion.
Now, public universities and granting agencies are creatures of the state. They must not colour their scientific operations with religious overtones. Of course. No religious test can be applied. A scientist can’t be excluded from a grant because he’s not a good Catholic. But nor can he be excluded because he’s not a verifiable atheist. I don’t think we want to get rid of loyalty oaths and DEI statements only to bring in attestations of non-religion.
You are raising the question of how the proposed constitutional amendment would work. I do not think it would either work or be deemed acceptable and thus passed if it banned religious scientists from working. Nor can we police what goes on inside people’s heads. Maybe our host was being hyperbolic in his suggestion?
There is but one way of continuing to diminish the harms done by religion, and that is education. It’s not as if our educational system couldn’t possibly be made to do a better job of exposing kids to the wonders of science!
Lots going on here, so forgive me for focusing on one or two points on which I have more experience.
“post modern deconstructionism”
Is a contradiction — I think you mean poststructural[ist] deconstructionism. Moreover, it might be argued that “postmodernism” in the strict sense (see Lyotard’s classic analysis) is fairly close to the spirit of science, if I can borrow Weber’s small joke, in starting from the premise that every observation is made from a position. Latour, for example, was a master at teasing out how “facts” emerge from the intersection of the empirical world and the technology available to observe it. His rather hidebound critics accused him of denying that empirical reality exists, but he was simply pointing out how, in any given era, what counts as observed reality depends upon the technology used to observe and study it.
I am not familiar with this “gender ideology” you mention, so I cannot comment on that, but my understanding is that “gender” — as opposed to biological sex — has been an object of study for nearly 100 years, once psychologists decided that “minds” were not “brains”, though they may be giving up that distinction now.
If gender ideology is a religion, the the camel’s nose is already in the tent.
Very nice, Rosemary, even though I favor Bach over Beethoven! I would add that there is no “wall” between religion and government, at least not as is popularly understood. As Leslie has discussed, our First Amendment constrains the power of the government, not the practices or beliefs of the people. An individual legislator, for instance, does not check her rights at the door because she is a government official. The State cannot prohibit her free exercise of religion. She is thus free to allow her religion to motivate her votes, even if she has no other reason for a particular vote than her religious beliefs. She is accountable to her own God—and to her constituents, who are free to remove her if they do not like the intrusion of her beliefs into the public square. There are, of course, some limitations on a legislator’s free exercise. She and like-minded religionists could not violate the Establishment Clause; they could not impose a religion on others. Nor could they prevent the free exercise of those who have different religious beliefs.
The Obama administration made a concerted push through its public announcements at redefining our understanding of the First Amendment by its frequent use of the phrase “freedom of worship” rather than “free exercise.” Belief is a private matter; worship a purely religious one, generally confined to specific settings. Exercise is, quite often, very much a public matter. And it should remain that way. Have we forgotten what “toleration” means and why it is desirable in a society? Whether it be wrongheaded religious beliefs, misinformation of other kinds, or plain intransigence, do we really want to live in a society where the power of the State is used to silence or marginalize those who do not share the “correct” beliefs? Isn’t this, in part, what the Woke movement is about? The power to dictate what should be believed, who can participate, and how we should live?
I understand the frustrations when misguided notions interfere with the proper functioning of science or with a public policy. But our government is only secondarily about managing various programs and policies. It is more fundamentally about creating the conditions for a people—diverse as we might be in looks, language, beliefs, dispositions, interests, and practices—to live in freedom with the peace and security that requires.
Quite so. The problem with a constitutional amendment (or other laws elsewhere) is that it erects barriers that will be challenged by the religious and resented by those merely affiliated with religion. And since good science will (eventually) overcome poor science you can argue that a formal barrier will create more division than necessary.
Plus do 49% of Brits ‘believe’ in God? Maybe yes, maybe no. I rather think that a good proportion of the ‘believers’ are actually affiliates, cultural Christians, and are indifferent to the ‘existence’ of God, or the presence of a god in their lives.
And I don’t understand why “believing in a higher power” or even being agnostic would be any different from being affiliated to a religion, in the context of doing science…you either are an atheist and a materialist or any other option introduces a “viewpoint” (not to say “belief”) that veers away from the current scientific consensus. It would be interesting to know the % of scientists who overall do not call themselves atheists.
Intriguing.
Off-the-cuff :
Michael Behe’s “Intelligent Design” is, IMHO a dialectical synthesis by negation of all the Sistine Chapel imagery of God, but retaining the thing in itself (Kant) – although not a very good one, as it posited an unspecified “designer”.
The result to the untrained reader was a sort-of religion-free science. But we know the story here on WEIT.
So how would such casuistry be weeded out?
I’m just pointing it out, not arguing anything.
BTW I think mechanical engineers are more religious than scientists. Sort of hair splitting, but I think its worth noting.
Bryan, based on my experience I certainly have met many more mechanical engineers who are religious than scientists who are.
Regarding religion influencing their decisions, I have never seen a mechanical engineer’s belief change anything about how a part is designed.
I knew one who believed the earth was only 5000 years old and that dinosaur bones were planted by satan, but always relied on scientific material properties when designing parts. Apparently his faith in the known scientific properties of materials didn’t extend to Carbon-14 dating 🙂 , but he was able to compartmentalize his faith to avoid it influencing his engineering work.
Some members of my family are scientists who are also religious. The secret, I think, is compartmentalizing one’s beliefs.
My sister, a nuclear physicist, is aware that her scientific knowledge and experience preclude “young earth” claims. What other remnants of religion she holds onto do not interfere with her work.
I propose that it is also possible to be somewhat religious while simultaneously realizing that religion is nonsense. People are complicated.
I once heard “faith” described as continuing to believe what you know isn’t so.
Some disparate reactions to the thought provoking article Dr. JC posted:
1. A constitutional amendment might not be your best tool to change what should be a bedrock scientific principle.
2. Religion doesn’t need a god figure to have a theology destructive to science. For example, true believers in the tenets of critical studies, DEI and the oppressor/oppressed paradigm seem to have beliefs that prevent them from asking certain questions, accepting certain answers, or consorting with scientists who would ask those questions or publish those answers.
3. For the majority of people, religion lives in the emotional domain, was learned as a young impressionable child, and neither needs or appears to value critical thinking, proofs, or replications. Science lives in the analytical domain and depends on those characteristics. The two can co-exist comfortably in people who have a desire or need for both and who are able to do two things. First, able to keep both in their appropriate domains without expecting either to meet the requirements of the other. And second, have the ability to hold two or more conflicting thoughts in their heads at the same time. That’s a lot of work unless you need both in your life.
I agree on a separation of science and religion, but a constitutional amendment is inappropriate as the US govt doesn’t have any authority over “religion” in general or any specific faith.
What we really need is a wall between science and the govt. Over the past 50yrs the US govt has crowded out nearly all other sources of scientific funding (here and abroad) and science has bent to the needs of the govt acquisition bureaucracy. The cycle of grant applications and published papers have crushed scientific investigation so that peer-reviewed journal articles have gone from the gold standard of research back in the 70s to today where the vast majority of such papers are non-replicable gibberish. It is the massive increase in scientific funding (along with the attendant regulations and requirements) that has slowed scientific advancement around the world.
Great point.
Some stats under-estimate the gap. Many lay people who say they believe in evolution, for example, mean evolution guided by the hand of God, which is not the scientific view.
Imagine a constitutional amendment passing to say that religion should be kept out of science. Do we want US Marshals knocking down doors of creationists and jailing them in federal prison for this? Maybe you do. Aren’t our prisons already overcrowded and inhumane?
At what point do beliefs cross into the realm of science? Does belief in something that can’t be proved with existing scientific methods but that may be endorsed by religion count as a crime? If a person preaches that we all have souls and that we should do good so that we can reach some eternal heaven, is that a crime? At what point to beliefs become religion? If a teacher believes that sex is a spectrum and preaches belief that in a biology classroom, is that a crime?
Reversing that thinking, if Scientific American and The Lancet say that sex exists on a spectrum, and that becomes the established science by a very liberal administration who appoints a majority of Supreme Court judges who “aren’t biologists” and therefore can’t judge how many sexes there are and thus are open to those who think sex is a spectrum, wouldn’t that potentially also lead to problems? After all, one of the outcomes of such legislation is that we are asking the courts to rule on what science is.
If there’s a law, which is what a constitutional amendment would be, then you are asking that the issue becomes enforced by the executive branch and adjudicated by the courts which opens up a whole bunch of different cans of worms.
A separation of religion and science does not entail that breaches of that separation are crimes.
Missing in much of the discussion is a workable definition of “religion” — too many comments here equate “religion” with “belief,” or “profound belief,” yet there are millions of beliefs — the sun will rise tomorrow, it will be cold this winter, oatmeal will make me gag — that do not count as “religion” or “religious.” I always liked Tylor’s rough-and-ready definition: religion is the belief in and practices in regard to the supernatural. You may have an unshakeable belief in the flexibility of “sex,” but since that does not involve any supernatural dimension, it is not a religious belief, and presumably can be put to empirical test. Similarly, a belief in a “soul” is, by definition, religious.
Of course there are some grey areas — String Theory might not appear to be part of the empirical world, for example — but science assumes that even very abstract notions can be ultimately detected empirically (or indirectly detected, empirically).
On the other hand, our courts have already made it clear that they do not want to define what “religion” is — Hobby Lobby, for example, where a “sincerely held belief” was sufficient — and I suspect that the same would be the case for “science.”
“After all, one of the outcomes of such legislation is that we are asking the courts to rule on what science is.”
Or a judge can simply accept whatever ideological position is most to his liking—or most takes advantage of his ignorance—and can disregard contrary evidence. The below is from NPR’s reporting this week when a federal judge struck down Florida’s law banning “gender-affirming” care. Regarding such care for minors:
“He wrote, nothing could have motivated this remarkable intrusion into parental prerogatives other than opposition to transgender status itself. As far as scientific arguments on the merits of gender-affirming care such as puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, Hinkle said the great weight of medical authority supports these treatments and that denying such treatment, in his words, will cause needless suffering and will increase anxiety, depression and the risk of suicide.”
Surgically mutilate children. Chemically castrate them. Because the Science says it is good. Only haters would disagree.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/06/1180581910/judges-blistering-ruling-halts-floridas-ban-on-gender-affirming-care-for-minors
Spot on Doug. This ‘risk of suicide’ claim is constantly repeated by people supporting ‘affirming care’, including professionals who should know better. There is no reliable evidence to demonstrate this claim, yet nearly every affirmative care supporter uses it. The evidence base for the affirmative care movement is largely terrible anyway. For instance, studies showing very low rates of regret for transgender surgeries are frequently quoted. Still, almost every one of them has several serious methodological flaws, which make the data pretty much worthless regarding the specific issue being studied. These flaws include ridiculously silly errors like ending the study too early and before when the established data shows most regretters start regretting.
This is profoundly backwards. At no time has mankind ever proven well that they are able to manage ethics and morals independent of some ultimate moral authority. Some of the most important scientific discoveries made were those involving religious persons and goals. The entire renaissance was religious in nature; a reintegration of God with the natural world. The amendment that is needed is to keep POWER out of science, by permanently separating it from government. The fatal conceit of the progressive has always been the corruptibility and weakness of the men involved, and nothing corrupts like power. Bureaucrats should not be pulling the strings, and in each of the cases in recent memory where this has been allowed to occur, power inevitably has taken center stage and the results are poor, or worse, disastrous.
No, YOU are profoundly backwards. For one thing, atheists and atheist countries are quite moral without a “moral authority” (I presume you mean God or the Bible, but you don’t specify what “moral authority” you’re talking about. THe US and UK have become less religious but, if you believe Pinker’s copious data, morality is increasing. His thesis is that moral advance requires the abandonment of religion. And just because some discoveries were made by religious people doesn’t mean that religion played a role in the discoveries, for science is atheistic. Before 200 years ago EVERYBODY was religious so you could pin everything, good or bad, on religion. But you are right that government should intrude into science as little as possible, but remember that the NIH and HSF are the two biggest funders of science in the U.S.; they are government agencies; and they’re doing a good job.
Your first sentence, by the way, is rude. As a first-time commenter, did you read the commenting roolz on the left margin.
But your main thesis is wrong; read Faith versus Fact.
The Verification Principle – This was the central tenet of logical positivism which held that a proposition is only meaningful if it can be verified by experience or is tautologically true. However, this principle itself could not be empirically verified and hence, according to its own standards, was deemed meaningless, leading to a self-referential inconsistency.
If I just consumed the US media I’d have little idea about the rainshower of rockets that hit Israel every single day.
Our media – sorry boss – but NBC nightly noos etc. are really just a series of colors and patterns for head injury patients in brain damage wards.
for a better take: See my upcoming article (!) on the coming war in Lebanon.
🙂
And as always: Onwards Israeli heroes.
D.A.
NYC
“…but also using the high proportion of nonbelieving scientists (compared to the general public) as evidence for the incompatibility of the two areas.”
Hold on- if the two areas are incompatible, why would there be any believing scientists at all? Are you so bold as to say that such men are deficient as scientists?
Let me explain the difference. Science is a method of acquiring knowledge- of the objective, the quantifiable, the repeatable. Religion is a method of accessing the subjective, the personal, the vague and esoteric, and then of guiding you in your application of the knowledge acquired through science. To put it in mathematical terms, they are orthogonal to one another and your practice in one does not affect your practice in the other.
Most importantly, science cannot tell you what to do with the knowledge you acquire through science. We are all aware of scientific practices and innovations that have done harm to humans, while the religious and other subjective thinkers had predicted and recognized the harm, and stood athwart it to the best of their ability. These are cases where religion has offered answers superior to those of science, from the perspective of those who have to suffer the consequences. Perspective is very important. Vivisection is completely painless from the perspective of the researcher engaging in it, advanced and terribly destructive weapons are perfectly safe from the perspective of a person with the privilege of being secured in a bunker, environmentalism and centrally-planned economics offer no risk of starvation or impoverishment to a billionaire who is advocating for such schemes. Religion, which tends to see humans as a collection of souls under a deity rather than recognizing status or wealth, is more likely to see things from the perspective of the vulnerable and can inform and deter the scientist from harms he may be, when relying on science alone, oblivious or insensitive to.
You clearly haven’t read my book “Faith Versus Fact”, which explains all this. And you haven’t read this website, either. No, I think religious scientists suffer from a form of unresolved cognitive dissonance. But it’s clear that there’s a strong correlation between the degree of scientific accomplishment and atheistm. Explain that, please.
As for your lecture, you don’t seem to realize that secular humanism and secular morality can deal with nonscientific moral questions. You don’t need God for that. And there are many cases in which religion impedes science. Creationism is one, and distorting mifepristone results to prevent abortion drugs is another.
I suggest you read Faith Versus Fact before you start lecturing me.