Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
There are two “alliances” that I think about constantly. The first is one that I’m involved with, which isn’t a real alliance but a convergence of interest. That is the concentration of both the Right and people like me in calling attention to the excesses of the authoritarian Left. For instance, a lot of the stuff I write about dealing with regressiveness in universities is also highlighted on right-wing websites like The College Fix or Campus Reform. That has led people to call me “alt-right,” but that doesn’t worry me. If I think behavior of some liberals is hurting the Left, or I’m disappointed with college students in some cases, I’ll say so. Just because the Right also does that, as a way to discredit the Left as a whole, doesn’t deter me so long as I emphasize my profound differences with the American Right in other ways. Further, the Leftist media, like the New York Times or the New Yorker, judiciously ignores (or excuses) regressive Leftism, or, in the case of Sarah Jeong, promotes it (see my next post). What is happening, in fact, is that collegiate regressivism metastasizes to the Leftist media as college students enter the work force and become journalists.
The other alliance—and the subject of Nick Cohen’s latest piece at the Spectator (click on link or screenshot below)—is the alliance between the Labour Party (and other moieties of the British Left) and the subset of Muslims that is anti-Leftist in rejecting apostates, free speech, gays, and women’s rights.
This second unholy alliance occurs in the U.S., too, and is the outcome of the Left’s misguided decision when two aspects of liberal philosophy collide: sympathy for oppressed people of color, and sympathy for the plight of other marginalized or “second class” people like gays, nonbelievers, and women. Many Muslims, even those in the West, have regressive views on homosexuality, atheism, apostasy, blasphemy, and women’s rights, and yet because Muslims have somehow acquired the status of OPOC (oppressed people of color), the pigmentation trumps the misogyny, censoriousness, and homophobia. This is THE great philosophical schism of today’s Western Left, and Nick Cohen (a national treasure of British journalism) has expended a lot of words exposing it. He’s also spent a lot of time calling out the Labour Party for not only its Islam-osculation, but also the anti-Semitism that comes along with it. And so he continues in the piece below:
I don’t have much to say today, what with Kavanaugh’s depressing confirmation and my Duck Troubles, so let me steer you to Cohen’s piece and tender a few quotes:
The alliance between the white far left and the Islamist right is a dirty secret in plain sight. Few can bear to look at it. None of the books and documentaries on Corbyn’s takeover of the Labour party asked, even in passing, how people who professed to be socialists and feminists, found themselves promoting theocrats and misogynists. I have no doubt that ‘serious’ scholars will be as negligent when they come to write their accounts. In supposedly stable Britain, there is a psychological aversion to admitting that the dark corners of modern history can be the best place to find the roots of current crises.
However much respectable writers hate to admit it, you cannot understand Brexit without understanding the rise of Ukip from its beginnings on the cranky fringe of James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party. We may one day explain the rise of anti-Muslim bigotry by looking at the shift of today’s Ukip supporters from hatred of the European Union to hatred of Muslims. What applies to the far right applies to the far left: without understanding its toleration of religious extremism, little about modern Labour politics makes sense.
But wait! There’s more!
In 2002, Jeremy Corbyn attended a rally for Palestine in Trafalgar Square. Nothing unusual in that: many on the centre-left had marched for Palestine for years. But 2002 was different. They were no longer marching for the Palestinian Liberation, Organisation whose secular constitution connected it to the western left. In 2002, however, they marched alongside Islamists whobelieved apostasy from Islam is either “a religious offence punishable by death” or, at least, “an act of mutiny or treason, that is punishable”.
Even before the great protest against the Iraq war of 2003, the combination of the far left and the religious right could get 100,000 on to the streets. Imagine that: 100,000 people willing to listen to your speeches, wave your placards, vote for you in elections and give you an energy your moribund movement thought it had lost. Radical Islam was crack cocaine for the old left. All Islamists asked in return for the fix invigorating support was that the left ignored and excused religious fanaticism, however violently it manifested itself. They were happy to go further and merge the rump of the old socialist movement with the Islamist right.
But wait! There’s a bit when the Palestine Solidarity Committee asked Cohen (a secular Jew) to become their patron. His response was this:
I experienced the shift when the Palestine Solidarity Committee called and asked me to become a patron. I had not yet realised the modern left required you to think about Israel from the moment you woke up to the moment you went to sleep, and wondered why they wanted me. ‘Because of your name”’. Ah right, I had a Jewish name it would be useful to stick on the letterhead to reassure those who worried that they were straying into racism.
I said that to my mind you had to combine a campaign for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank with principled opposition to Hamas. It was all very well to announce your support for ‘the Palestinians’. They were not a homogenous bloc, but divided between too warring parties. Surely you had to decide which side you were on.
‘Do you condemn Hamas’,’ I asked.
‘We don’t think it’s our business to tell Palestinians what to think.’
‘That’s funny,’ I thought, as I turned down the offer, ‘you seem very keen on telling everyone else what to think.’
Now that is a riposte!
Cohen predicts that in the end, the British Left will suffer from this alliance, for many Muslims have the goal of spreading their faith, and do so by demonizing those who dislike Islam with the label “racist” or “Islamoophobe.” And they’ve succeeded. The rub will come when Labour is finally asked to tolerate sharia law, and I hope that at that point they dismount from the tiger. If Corbyn becomes Prime Minister, then Brits had better start looking in the mirror.
UPDATE: I wrote about this letter six years ago when it was up for sale, but forgot (my post is here). At that time commenter Wolfgang, a German speaker, said that most translations of this letter, including this one are somewhat inaccurate, in particular that the phrase “childish superstition” is simply not in the letter, even in German. Wolfgang suspects this is a meme that has gotten perpetuated, probably because it appeals to some people’s preconceptions. (The gist of the letter besides that, however, seems pretty much the same.) Nevertheless, please see Wolfgang’s comment if you want his criticism of this and other translations.
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Why is everybody so concerned about whether Albert Einstein was religious or an atheist? I suspect that it’s because he’s regarded as The Smartest Man of Our Time, and so his opinion on any issue is taken as authoritative. And if Einstein was religious, well, then accommodationists can claim that science and religion are compatible.
But there are two errors in that train of logic. Someone who’s a great scientist need not necessarily offer the most authoritative word on other topics. Further, just because a scientist might be religious does not—at least to me—show that science and religion are compatible. Readers should be familiar with my argument for incompatibility, so I won’t reprise it here.
Nevertheless, the debate continues, although there’s ample evidence that Einstein was not a theist, but at best a species of pantheist who derived personal awe from the regularity of the laws of nature. He surely wasn’t religious in the sense that religious Americans are religious, as he abjured belief in a personal god, the Scriptures, and so on.
The latest revival of the “Was Einstein religious?” issue is the reappearance of a letter that he wrote in 1954 in response to having read (at the instigation of a friend) a book promoting God and religion. Einstein’s letter was directed to the book’s author, Erik Gutkind (see below). The letter is up for auction again, and at a fancy price: it was bought in 2008 for $404,000 (Richard Dawkins was an unsuccessful bidder), appeared on eBay six years ago with an asking price of $3 million that wasn’t met, and is now up for auction by Christie’s, with an estimated selling price of between $1 million and $1.5 million. The high price is without doubt due to the letter’s content.
It turns out the letter is pretty damning about religion and God, explicitly rejecting both; the former is a “childish superstition” and God “nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness.” The Bible, too, is merely a “collection of primitive legends.” After reading the letter (see below), it would be hard to maintain that Einstein was religious in any sense!
Inspired by Brouwer’s repeated suggestion, I read a great deal in your book, and thank you very much for lending it to me. What struck me was this: with regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common. Your personal ideal with its striving for freedom from ego-oriented desires, for making life beautiful and noble, with an emphasis on the purely human element. This unites us as having an “unAmerican attitude.”
Still, without Brouwer’s suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and whose thinking I have a deep affinity for, have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.
Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e; in our evaluations of human behavior. What separates us are only intellectual “props” and “rationalization” in Freud’s language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.
With friendly thanks and best wishes,
Yours,
A. Einstein
Since this was written a year before Einstein’s death, I think it can stand as the culmination of his thinking, regardless of how deistic, theistic, or agnostic he was earlier. Einstein was certainly not mentally incapacitated or demented when he wrote this, and so those who say Einstein was religious will have to somehow rationalize the letter away. I look forward to the religion-osculators at Brainpickings and Krista Tippett’s unctuous show “On Being” coming to grips with Einstein’s words. Tippett, I suspect, would somehow try to claim that Einstein still had a quasi-religious faith.
Here we go again: a Sophisticated Thinker decides that it doesn’t matter whether the truth claims of religion are really true, and argues that most believers don’t think that they are. Instead, religion is important because it makes us feel good. The three problems with this are, of course, that it does matter to most people (if there’s no God, is there any sense in religion?), that in fact most believers do accept some supernatural truth claims, and that it’s hard to see how people can be religious, or go to church, unless they believe at least some claims about the universe—especially the claim that a god exists.
Further, the author, Stephen T. Asma, doesn’t worry about the downside of religion: how it controls people in a way that makes them feel bad (the guilt of Catholic children and the brainwashing of Muslim children come to mind), how it leads to a warped morality, and how it inspires bad and immoral acts. Finally, Asma doesn’t worry about whether the increasing secularization of the West (and the near-atheism of northern Europe) has proceeded in the face of increasing despondency of the secularized inhabitants. Are Swedes and Danes really that gloomy and bereft?
Do I need to go any further? Perhaps just for a bit. Read the article below (click on screenshot), whose author is identified this way:
1.) Religion doesn’t make important truth claims that motivate believers. Some quotes (indented; emphasis is mine):
Religion does not help us to explain nature. It did what it could in pre-scientific times, but that job was properly unseated by science. Most religious laypeople and even clergy agree: Pope John Paul II declared in 1996 that evolution is a fact and Catholics should get over it. No doubt some extreme anti-scientific thinking lives on in such places as Ken Ham’s Creation Museum in Kentucky, but it has become a fringe position. Most mainstream religious people accept a version of Galileo’s division of labour: ‘The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.
. . . Religion is real consolation in the same way that music is real consolation. No one thinks that the pleasure of Mozart’s opera TheMagic Flute is ‘false pleasure’ because singing flutes don’t really exist. It doesn’t need to correspond to reality. It’s true that some religious devotees, unlike music devotees, pin their consolation to additional metaphysical claims, but why should we trust them to know how religion works? Such believers do not recognise that their unthinking religious rituals and social activities are the true sources of their therapeutic healing. Meanwhile, Hitchens and other critics confuse the factual disappointments of religion with the value of religion generally, and thereby miss the heart of it.
Ahh, he’s channeling Stephen J. Gould’s NOMA idea. You can see that taken apart in my book Faith versus Fact, but I’ll give a very abridged version in this post. But do most people think that religion’s truth claims are bogus, or irrelevant? Here’s what a random poll of all Americans (not just believers) think is true; this was taken by the Harris organization five years ago. These are all metaphysical claims, of course:
A personal God concerned with you 68% Absolutely certain there is a God 54%
Jesus was the son of God 68%
Jesus was born of a virgin 57%
Jesus was resurrected 65%
Miracles 72%
Heaven 68%
Hell and Satan 58%
Angels 68%
Survival of soul after death 64%
Further, many well known religionists have recognized that religious belief depends on truth claims. Here are three quotes I often use as well:
“I cannot regard theology as merely concerned with a collection of stories which motivate an attitude toward life. It must have its anchorage in the way things actually are, and the way they happen.” —John Polkinghorne
“A religious tradition is indeed a way of life and not a set of abstract ideas. But a way of life presupposes beliefs about the nature of reality and cannot be sustained if those beliefs are no longer credible.” —Ian Barbour
“Likewise, religion in almost all of its manifestations is more than just a collection of value judgments and moral directives. Religion often makes claims about ‘the way things are.”—Karl Giberson & Francis Collins
Asma needs to get out more.
2.) Religion is really about morality, consolation, and emotional connection.
Maybe, then, the heart of religion is not its ability to explain nature, but its moral power?
If that’s the case, then give me secularism any day. For religious “morality” is often twisted and warped, more about people’s sex lives than their character. It tells them who to copulate with, what to wear, what to eat, whom to hate, and how often you should pray, and in which direction. How is that good? And of course here are some results of Catholic “moral power,” a list I often give in talks:
Opposition to birth control (leading to an increase in STDs, including AIDS)
Opposition to abortion
Opposition to divorce
Opposition to homosexuality
Control of people’s sex lives
Oppression of women
Sexual abuse of children
Instillation of fear and guilt in children
If that’s the heart of Catholicism, please do an Aztec-style cardiectomy! But wait, Asma has more! (Emphases are mine.)
Emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion. Social bonding happens not only when we agree to worship the same totems, but when we feel affection for each other. An affective community of mutual care emerges when groups share rituals, liturgy, song, dance, eating, grieving, comforting, tales of saints and heroes, hardships such as fasting and sacrifice. Theological beliefs are bloodless abstractions by comparison.
Emotional management is important because life is hard. The Buddha said: ‘All life is suffering’ and most of us past a certain age can only agree. Religion evolved to handle what I call the ‘vulnerability problem’. When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.
Asma makes a big deal about how religion can console people facing death, or those whose loved ones have died, implicitly arguing that atheists lack such consolation:
Consider how religion helps people after a death. Social mammals who have suffered separation distress are restored to health by touch, collective meals and grooming. Human grieving customs involve these same soothing prosocial mechanisms. We comfort-touch and embrace a person who has lost a loved one. Our bodies give ancient comfort directly to the grieving body. We provide the bereaved with food and drink, and we break bread with them (think of the Jewish tradition of shiva, or the visitation tradition of wakes in many cultures).
He goes on and on. But I want to point out just one thing. We all know, of course, that much of that consolation does indeed come from religious beliefs that are taken to be true, namely the existence of God and of an afterlife. And Asma even obliquely admits this (my emphases):
Part of our ability to cope with suffering is our sense of power or agency: more power generally means better coping ability. If I acknowledge my own limitations when faced with unavoidable loss, but I feel that a powerful ally, God, is part of my agency or power, then I can be more resilient.
What? But what about those “bloodless theological beliefs”? Clearly God isn’t one of them!
God’s existence is in fact a genuine metaphysical claim, and without that then not even Asma is consoled. And has he considered that we nonbelivers who don’t accept gods on the grounds of no evidence cannot force ourselves to believe, even if we think it would help us? God may make Asma feel better, but I can’t make myself believe in God. I am not so constituted.
All I can say is that Asma seems clueless here, oblivious—in his eagerness to argue that religious makes no truth claims—to how the world really works. And yet he requires God to be consoled! The man is not only clueless, but can’t make a coherent argument. And Aeon doesn’t require that he make one. All they want is endless and sloppy osculation of faith.
By my own rules I’m not allowed to write the full name of disgraced plagiarist and Islam-osculator C. J. W*rl*m*n, so I’ve disemvoweled his name. I note that his Wikipedia entry, which described his plagiarism and other bizarre deeds as well as his osculation of Islam, has now been deleted (I have no idea why). I refer you, reluctantly, to his Twitter feed. You can find his plagiarism amply described on this website; much of the cribbing was found by Stephen Knight, creator of the Godless Spellchecker website.
The Man Who Cannot be Named was once a strong critic of Islam, but then something happened: an atheist, he began ripping into New Atheism à la Glenn Greenwald and, also like Greenwald, became an Islamophile, working for Islamic outlets and constantly decrying “Islamophobia”. The conversion was, I think, intensified when he was found guilty of plagiarism and could no longer write for mainstream outlets. And of course when you become hugely sympathetic to Islam, you gain a big new audience that isn’t so scrupulous about your journalism.
Now, it seems, W*rl*m*n is issuing encomiums for Muslim terrorist-supporting organizations (he’s always blamed their existence on the West). They even seem to be supporting him.
I tender this Twitter thread, which gives documentation for the claims. It was found by Grania. Note the bizarre touting of a bogus Qur’an. Stephen Knight is a main participant in the thread.
Thread. CJ Werleman (nominally a leftist) is in deep with the Islamist far right, and it should be no surprise to anyone who has paid even a little attention to his sketchy career. https://t.co/MnCeBV7bWb
3. MEND (another Islamist group) funds CAGE and shares the same values. It seems one is an extension of the other. MEND gains recognition in places where CAGE is shunned, all the while pretending to be completely separate entities https://t.co/wrBWOnRBDR
9. CJ Werleman even uses PBUH (peace be upon him) when naming Islam's prophet. I suppose 1.6 billion people and their useful idiots won't monetize themselves. pic.twitter.com/zJIBz5wam2
Werleman knows very well that people who leave Islam face social isolation and, depending on the country, possible execution. Yet he is not shy in revealing his callous disdain towards ex-Muslims. pic.twitter.com/gcTLrObutz
There’s more documentation of W*rl*m*n’s activities on the thread, but I’ll leave you to look at them.
In view of this, I wouldn’t be surprised if W*rl*m*n actually converted to Islam. There he will find a congenial group of friends who share his values.
My apologies for tendering a Tweet-based post, but I think this is informative, and I’m short on time today.
I’m a great admirer of the Ex-Muslims of North America organization (EXMNA), whose President is Muhammad Syed and whose Executive Director is Sarah Haider. They actually do stuff rather than just talking, and they’re courageous to do it in public knowing that an apostate Muslim is, to many active Muslims, deserving of death. I suspect these apostates are even worse than Jews to Islamists! At any rate, to be a public ex-Muslim these days is to evince bravery.
And you also court the disapprobation of non-Muslim Leftists, who revere Muslims as Oppressed People of Color and demonize those who criticize the religion or its pervasive oppression. You’re also spurned by the many people who are simply afraid to be around ex-Muslims because their mere proximity means you might be in danger—but even if not you’re certainly around “Islamophobes.”
That explains the incident described on the EXMNA website (click on screenshot to read about it).
What happened is that EXMNA members were in Houston handing out flyers at the Islamic Society of North America’s annual conference, as well as speaking to conference attendees. That itself is a brave thing to do. Taking a break, the EXMNA people repaired to a nearby Starbuck’s coffee shop. They weren’t protesting there, but simply looking for coffee.
But they were wearing teeshirts that said “I’m an Ex-Muslim, Ask Me Why” and “God Love is Greatest”. Those aren’t even that “in your face”, but it was enough for Starbucks to kick them out. As the report notes:
“I was surprised. I was simply drinking my iced coffee and scrolling through my phone, and they told me I needed to leave, so I asked why”, says Lina an ex-Muslim Syrian woman who had traveled to the conference on behalf of EXMNA. “I was told that they are not allowing protestors at the property, I assured the woman that I was not a protestor. She then asked me if I was part of the event or a guest at the hotel. I was neither. I was then told that even though I was a paying customer, I was not allowed to be on the premise as it was reserved for guests and event members for the weekend and that they will not be allowing anyone else on their private property. However, I noticed the Starbucks was still open to the public and I didn’t see anyone else being asked to leave.”
In other words, Starbucks was feeding them a line of bullshit.
Upon additional inquiry after leaving the premises, the hotel employees stated on video that the EXMNA group was not welcome due to their T-shirts, and repeatedly claimed the group was “protesting”, a charge which all volunteers explicitly denied multiple times.
“This appears to be a case of discrimination,” says President of Ex-Muslims of North America, Muhammad Syed. “We were asked to leave the premises and informed that we could only enter the premises if we removed the shirts, none of which stated anything inflammatory. The treatment was unjust and especially cruel considering the plight of ex-Muslims. We are killed and abused all over the world for our disbelief. It is unconscionable that companies like Starbucks and Hilton acquiesce to conservative religious sensibilities”.
. . . Armin Navabi, an Irani atheist activist, was in Houston on behalf of EXMNA. “Our goal was to see how tolerant Muslims can be, to our delight, we found many Muslims were tolerant”, he stated. “On the other hand, we found that many Westerners were intolerant. It seems that “saviors” of Muslims are more sensitive about anything that could potentially offend Muslims than Muslims are themselves.”
Hazar, another Syrian ex-Muslim who was in Houston for ISNA, states “I expected negative pushback of our presence by ISNA itself but in fact, most Muslims we talked to were welcoming. And so I certainly didn’t expect to be discriminated against on American soil by the Hilton staff for refusing to be closeted about my ex-Muslim identity. It was important for me to represent ex Muslims at ISNA because we are some of the lucky few that are able to do so with minimal consequences in comparison to those of us who aren’t privileged enough to live in a democratic society. And yet today, the treatment we received by the staff at the Hilton felt just as dehumanizing.”
Here’s a video of the EXMNA members getting the boot, apparently because they’re considered “part of the protest”. Even someone not wearing a shirt with any motto was apparently prohibited because he was “part of the protest”. But I’m sure they’d let Muslims in wearing shirts that said “Allah is greatest”, or religionists saying “I’m not an atheist. Ask me why.” This is simply discrimination against ex-Muslims.
I’m not sure about the legality of what Starbucks did, but I’m certainly going to write to them in protest. (Their drinks are overpriced, anyway.) You can see where to write below the video.
Reader Patrick, who sent me a link to the EXMNA article, adds this:
The ISNA conference took place at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. The nearest Hilton is the Hilton Americas, which does have a Starbucks. Their address is 1600 Lama St., Houston, TX 77010. Their phone number is (877) 421-9062. Starbucks corporate complaint page is: https://customerservice.starbucks.com/app/contact/ask/
A bit of my own complaint (I used the “In our stores” form and asked for a response):
I thought that, by and large, Aussies were nonreligious, though I’m aware of the hold that the church has on certain Australian states. I’m also aware that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is the national public television network—an organ of the government. And its website has just published a pretty dire piece—in its “Science” section, of all places—showing how scientists can reconcile religion and science, and using three scientists as examples. If there’s any freedom of the press at the ABC, perhaps they can put up an article showing the much larger number of scientists (especially accomplished ones) who don’t reconcile religion and science.
Here’s the article, by Anna Salleh, published yesterday (click on screenshot):
The article makes two familiar arguments for the compatibility of science and religion:
Yes, we are talking here about George Lemaitre (a priest), Gregor Mendel (a monk), and Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health. We can discount much of this argument for scientists who lived before 1900, since before that nearly everyone was religious, or if they didn’t believe they kept mum about it.
And yes, there’s no doubt that some famous scientists, even today, accept superstition. But that’s an argument not for compatibility, but for compartmentalization. If you don’t believe me, take a deep breath and read Collins’s book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. The “evidence” consists of his wish-thinking, his viewing of three frozen waterfalls, a feeling that came over him at evensong, the solace that some believers got while dying, and (Ceiling Cat help him), a “deep” reading of C. S. Lewis. If you’re going to say that religion and science are compatible because some scientists are religious, then add that religion and arrant immorality are also compatible because many Catholic priests raped children.
2.) Even today, a lot of scientists are religious.
Scientists these days may be less religious than the average person, but just over half of scientists surveyed in 2009 said they believed in some sort of deity or higher power.
The interesting thing here, which the ABC conspicuously omits, is that scientists are a lot less religious (in both the US and UK) than are non-scientists. Now why would that be? Here is the comparison from the link, a comparison the ABC doesn’t mention:
And here’s the comparison discussed in my book Faith versus Fact:
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 showed that 33 percent admitted belief in God, while 41 percent 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 percent and atheism at only 4 percent. In other words, scientists are ten times more likely to be atheists than are 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 percent being either atheist or agnostic, and only 23 percent who believed in God—a degree of nonbelief more than fifteenfold higher than among the general public. Finally, sitting at the top tier of American science are the members of the National Academy of Sciences, an honorary organization that elects only the most accomplished researchers in the United States. And here nonbelief is the rule: 93 percent of the members are atheists or agnostics, with only 7 percent believing in a personal God. This is almost the exact opposite of the data for “average” Americans.
(Even more members of the UK’s Royal Society are atheists.) One has to conclude that either nonbelievers are more likely to become scientists, that scientists tend to give up their faith or (as I suspect) both. Whatever the case, we see something about science that’s inimical to faith.
Salleh then highlights three religious scientists.
Jennifer Wisemanis an astronomer who also heads the AAAS’s “Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion” program, and I’ve written about her several times. Let’s look at the “evidence” for why she believes in God (she’s an evangelical Christian). Here are a few bon mots:
While science is a “wonderful tool for understanding the physical universe”, Jennifer says her religious beliefs give her the answers to the bigger philosophical questions in life — like how mere humans can be significant at all in the context of the universe.
“In Christian faith, our significance is basically given as a gift of love from God, who’s responsible for the universe,” she says.
Her religious belief gives her one set of answers, other religious beliefs give other sets of answers, secular humanism gives still more answers. How does she know her religion gives her the right answers? And how does she know that? As for “how mere humans can be significant in the context of the universe”, that’s an ambiguous question. We are significant to ourselves and each other, but not in the grand scheme of the cosmos. After all, in a few billion more years we’ll all be incinerated—if we haven’t yet gone extinct. There’s a reason why people were drawn to Carl Sagan’s elegy about the “pale blue dot.”
But wait—there’s more!
Meanwhile, Jennifer sees her scientific work as deepening her faith.
“God’s responsible for everything. So, by studying more of nature you’re … enriching your understanding of God,” she says.
How does she know this? She doesn’t, and couldn’t provide evidence that would convince even a semi-skeptic. That is the disparity between her science and her faith!
Finally, she uses the “metaphor” escape:
While some point to statements in the Bible as evidence Christianity is incompatible with science, Jennifer says the book has to be seen in its historical context.
“You have to look at biblical literature from the perspective of when it was written, the original audiences, the original languages, the original purposes … the message that was meant to be conveyed by it,” she says.
“The Bible’s not a science text.”
Okay, so is it a science text about Jesus and his miracles (which Wiseman accepts), and about the Resurrection? Remember, the statement “The Bible’s not a science text” really means “What the Bible says is true isn’t really true. But some parts are true!” The question, of course, is “Which parts are true, and how do you know?” Wiseman is unable to winnow the true from the false, which again underscores the incompatibility between science and faith. After all, science has ways to determine whether an asteroid hit the Earth about 65 million years ago. Wiseman has no way to determine if Jesus was the son of God, or was resurrected.
Andrew Harman is an immunologist at the University of Sydney who is also a Buddhist. He apparently doesn’t believe in God, but adheres to the practices of Triratna Buddhism. Given that he sees Buddhism as answering questions (but really, his gloss says it provides methods to help answer questions), yet he abjures the supernatural and doesn’t proselytize, I don’t have much of a problem with his beliefs, which may not be at odds with science if meditation does work in the ways he claims:
Buddhism, Andrew says, is interested in “creating the conditions for enlightenment to arrive” — a state in which people feel “unconditional love, deep spiritual peace, completely free of inner conflict”.
The trick, he says, is to understand and accept “the true nature of reality” and that attachment to things — like our youth, loved ones, jobs or money — is the source of suffering.
“We’re psychologically dependent on things that, at any moment, could be taken away from us,” he says.
“But they are all impermanent, so you will suffer if you depend on them.”
For Andrew, religions that require “blind faith” in God are at odds with science.
“Science is about seeking truth and testing a hypothesis. I don’t believe you can prove the existence of God.”
By contrast, he sees Buddhism as “very compatible” with science.
“I think Buddhism and science are absolutely in tune with each other fundamentally,” he says.
“They’re both driven by the idea that you can’t just believe something without any evidence.
“The Buddha was very clear that you follow a system of practice and only when you’ve experienced those things for yourself is your faith then justified — because it’s a faith that is based on experience.”
Well, that depends on what form of Buddhism you accept. I presume that Harman doesn’t accept woo like karma and reincarnation (stuff that Tibetan Buddhism accepts),and if he does reject that kind of stuff, you can hardly call him religious! He claims “Buddhism is a faith based on experience”, but “faith” and “experience” are somewhat at odds. If by “experience” he means “this practice often has results X and Y on your mind and behavior”, then that’s not faith, but evidence. If by “experience” he means “revelation”, then yes, he’s religious. But I suspect he’s not religious—at least not in the conventional sense of accepting a supernatural being to whom fealty must be given and who provides a moral code and who takes a personal interest in the believer. And what he means by faith is “confidence born of repeated experience,” which is a far cry from religious faith.
But one thing he says does disturb me:
But, says Andrew, there are some clashes between Buddhism and the idea that we can be reduced to a bunch of particles, and that studying matter will ultimately explain the whole of our reality.
“There’s still a very strong current in science that thinks everything can be broken down into bits and put back together,” he says.
But science is changing, says Andrew.
“I think Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum theory show you can’t reduce everything to the sum of its parts,” he says.
I’m not sure that he means what I think he means: that there is something beyond the laws of physics. Regardless, he’s not what I’d call “religious”
Fahad Ali is a a graduate student in genetics at the University of Sydney who is also a Muslim. (He’s also been investigated for misconduct and anti-Semitism, but has been cleared; see here.) Again, it’s not clear how religious he is, at least based on his statements. He sees the Qur’an as metaphorical, something that about 90% of Muslims disagree with (the vast majority see it as having to be read literally). He also ignores the nasty bits of the Qur’an, saying that the book encourages “compassion, common decency, generosity and intelligence.” Well, only under the most blinkered reading can you conclude that: compassion towards women, unbelievers, and apostates? I don’t think so.
Ali credits Islamic scientists as having contributed to world science, which is true, but again, that doesn’t do anything to show that the tenets of Islam are correct. After all, in those countries and in those days, virtually everyone was a Muslim. Why should the religion get credit for the scientific advances? Was there something about the Qur’an that brought about algebra and geometry? I don’t think so.
Further, Ali abjures the God of the gaps, but gives no evidence for The God Who is Outside the Gaps:
“Science closes the gap, and then there’s one less place for God to be found.
“Eventually God will vanish entirely — removed from the picture by science — and then people get aggressive and say science is wrong, which doesn’t help anyone.”
While some see evolutionary theory as threatening faith, Fahad disagrees.
“I think it’s a testament to God more than anything — that we can bring about all life on earth from a single origin.”
But again, Ali simple presumes there’s a God—he was an apostate until his mother got cancer, which brought him back to Islam—and I’d ask him, “How do you know that there is a God? Isn’t natural selection capable of bringing about all life on earth from a single origin? And why do you think that Islam is the right religion?”
Nevertheless, if we must have Islam, then I’d rather have a questioning and thoughtful Muslim like Ali than a fundamentalist who simply accepts the Qur’an.
So of the three scientists who supposedly demonstrate the compatibility of science and religion, only two are really religious. And those two make statements that are insupportable by evidence, but are based purely on wish-thinking—on what they’d like to believe and what makes them feel good.
As Richard Feynman pointed out, science is a way of avoiding fooling ourselves by accepting what we want to accept. That is why science and religion are truly incompatible. And that point is demonstrated by both Wiseman and Ali.
On many liberal sites these days, including the New York Times, we see an increasing coddling of religion—exactly the opposite of what should be happening as secularism in the U.S. increases. I’m not sure why this is; perhaps it’s a spillover from the Leftist reluctance to criticize Islam (and perforce to praise all faiths), or perhaps it’s a pushback against the death of religion in the West. Regardless, much of this kind of writing is either irrational or, as in the case of the new piece below, makes no sense whatsoever.
Click on the screenshot to read this confused, space-wasting op-ed:
First, the author. The NYT describes Jennifer Finney Boylan as “a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College of Columbia University and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.” Her Twitter description says she is the author of “15 Books. [JAC: the list is here] NYTimes op/ed writer. Trustee, PEN America; former Co-chair of the Board, GLAAD. Professor of English, Barnard/Columbia.” She’s a transgender woman, the first to head up GLAAD (a gay media-monitoring institute), and her website is here.
What the article seems to describe (it’s hard to tell because it’s both poorly written and loaded to the gunwales with overemotionality) is an aging transgender woman who lost her faith when she was young, and then recaptured it in some form a few years ago. But did she? The “agony” she describes appears to be her reluctance to go into a church, which seemed to have salubrious results. The “I didn’t get it until I was older” is unclear because it’s uncertain what she “gets” (she doesn’t really seem to become a believer), and as for “belief doesn’t come easy”, well, it’s not clear that even now she has any religious belief. What the piece conveys is the trite observation that it’s great to have loving friends, and that for Boylan, Jesus prompted that feeling. But read it for yourself.
Here are a few excerpts following Boylan’s initial description of Balaam’s talking donkey in Numbers—one of the things that caused her to reject the reliability of Scripture:
Back then, I thought that doubt (also known as “common sense”) was my roadblock to a spiritual life. Now, these many years later, I have come to believe that doubt is, in fact, the drive wheel of faith, not its obstacle.
She doesn’t describe how doubt drives faith, and that sentence is simply left hanging.
One Sunday morning a few years ago, I wandered out of my apartment in New York without having a clear sense of where I was going. The next thing I knew I had pulled into a nearby church, where I looked around suspiciously, and thought, “Please, God, don’t make me do it.” I sat in a pew.
The sermon that day was not about talking donkeys. It was about feeding the hungry. It was about working for equality. It was about justice for minorities, and gay and lesbian and bisexual and trans people. It was about giving refuge to people — including immigrants and refugees — who do not have a home.
It was, in the end, about only one thing: the necessity of loving one another.
Well, Jesus, I thought. I could get behind that.
What we see, then, is that Boylan was fighting any exposure to religious faith (is that the “agony” she describes? I don’t think so, as it’s the agony of faith, not unbelief). Then she hears a sermon about social justice, and suddenly she is infused with love.
That’s fine, of course; there’s no doubt that religion has prompted some good acts. (I’m not agreeing, however, that in the net religion has been a good social force.) But just because it does that doesn’t say anything about the factuality of Scripture. In fact, Christian scripture has also led people to hate: to hate gays, to hate women, to hate blacks, to hate Jews (millions were murdered on the claim that they killed Christ), and so on. Boylan seems simply to have been ready to love people more, and in this case a church visit was the catalyst.
But she’s clearly softened on Christianity. In the end, her church experience—and I don’t know if it’s continuing—simply infuses her with feelings of love. What this has to do with vindicating faith or prompting “belief” that’s “worth it” remains mysterious:
We have had hard lives, my old friends and I, in some ways. Since we first met in 1970, there have been all kinds of misfortunes. There have been car accidents and job losses, divorces and heartbreaks, newborn babies whose lives were endangered. One of us is in a wheelchair now.
But here we all are, on the threshold of 60, and still deeply connected to one another. That day in New Jersey, as I sat there with these precious souls at the shore — can I call them anything but old men now? — it occurred to me that I have seen things a lot more improbable than talking donkeys turn out to be true. What greater miracle could there be than friendships that last a lifetime?
The next morning, my friend Kenny and I were up early enough to see the sun rise over the Atlantic, standing on the same beach where we had stood, nearly half a century before, as teenage boys. Thirty years ago, before I came out as trans, he’d been my best man.
He is still my best man.
Listen: I do not know if an actual person named Jesus rose from the dead. I hope that this is true, but I don’t know. I wasn’t there.
I know this though: On Sunday morning I stood on a beach with the friend of my youth, our arms around each other’s shoulders. The rising sun burst over the ocean, and the light shone on our faces.
And the donkeys talked! This is simply breathy, overblown, and just plain bad writing. What was the country’s best newspaper doing when it accepted this piece?
What is the point of Boylan’s purple prose? If it’s that religion makes some people do good, why didn’t she just say that? But of course lots of people do good and don’t need religion as the catalyst. Music, for instance, is another such catalyst, and perhaps Boylan could have skipped her agony by listening to James Taylor (see also here):
