Category: religion and science

Why theological challenges to science resemble conspiracy theories

October 2, 2019 • 10:00 am

My friend the philosopher Maarten Boudry called my attention to a fairly new paper by Taner Edis, a professor of physics at Truman State University and frequent critic of religion and creationism. I’ll let Maarten tell you about it in this post. His take is indented, and we’ll both give you links and ways to read the paper.

COSMIC CONSPIRACIES

Maarten Boudry

My long-time collaborator, the physicist Taner Edis, has a cool new paper in which he draws analogies between religions and conspiracy theories. In dealing with challenges from modern science, theologians have often resorted to conspiracies, involving both the “scientific establishment” and God himself (or Satan). As Edis writes in the abstract:

“Theological responses to scientific challenges can usefully be compared to conspiracy theories in order to highlight their evasive properties. When religious thinkers emphasize hidden powers and purposes underlying a seemingly material reality, and claim that these hidden purposes are revealed only through special knowledge granted to initiates, they adopt conspiratorial attitudes. And when they charge mainstream science with corruption or comprehensive mistakes, so that science becomes a plot to conceal the truth, the resemblance to a conspiracy theory deepens. Theologically conservative denial of evolution often exhibits such features, but some liberal theologies also border on conspiracy theories. Intelligent design creationism, however, is sometimes less conspiratorial.”

In some respects, according to Edis, the responses to evolutionary theory developed by liberal theologians are MORE (not less) conspiratorial than those of their conservative, fundamentalist counterparts. Since liberal theologians want to evade conflicts with science as much as possible, their conception of God tends to be that of a “Deus absconditus”, a God who choses to remain hidden and does not interfere with the natural order. For example, liberal theologians like John Haught believe that God is secretly meddling with quantum processes to bring about the right DNA mutations needed to fulfill his creative plan. All biological evidence points toward processes of pure chance and necessity, but in reality, according to Haught and others, God is tweaking atoms and molecules in statistically undetectable ways. It’s like a casino operator who cheats, but only very rarely, as Edis writes. This is nothing less than a giant, cosmic conspiracy in which God, for whatever inscrutable reason, is pulling the strings behind the scenes, though always making sure to cover his tracks.

More conservative theists, by contrast, want to attack certain parts of modern science head-on. As a result, they tend to believe in a God who massively interferes with the natural world. Young-earth creationists, for example, believe that the evidence for Biblical miracles such as the Flood and the Resurrection of Jesus is all around us. Or take the infamous example of ID creationist Michael Behe, who claims that he has found empirical evidence of design in the ‘irreducible complexity’ of the bacterial flagellum and the blood-clotting process. This is not a God who covers up his tracks, but one who leaves his fingerprints everywhere in plain sight.

Initially, ID creationists were also less likely to invoke conspiracies involving the scientific establishment (the other type of conspiracy discussed by Edis). They believed that scientists were just wrong or misguided, but not that they were actively hiding some truth. As a result, ID advocates were also pretty optimistic about the prospects of Intelligent Design in the scientific world. After all, they found irrefutable evidence for design! It was only a matter of time before Darwinism would be toppled. As the scientific community turned against them, however, and no cracks appeared in the Darwinian paradigm, ID creationists resorted to conspiracy theories to explain their defeat. It was all part of a secret plot by “dogmatic materialists” to keep God out of science.

This is what often happens when a belief system is threatened with counterevidence. Even though many pseudosciences did not start out as conspiracy theories, sooner or later many believers resort to conspiratorial thinking as an immunizing tactic, to explain away defeat or to evade confrontation with reality.

The paper’s link is in the screenshot below, and if you aren’t a member of ResearchGate, judicious inquiry will yield you a copy.

And I’m told the paper is in this book that was published last December (click to go to Amazon link). The book has no reviews on Amazon yet, perhaps because it costs £120!

Another big Templeton grant for philosophy (religious philosophy, of course), and a note on Templeton’s corruption of the field

February 19, 2019 • 9:30 am

A certain philosopher who could be mistaken for Santa Claus called my attention to this article in the Daily Nous, a website devoted to the profession of philosophy—and by “profession” I mean “job”. Below you can read yesterday’s announcement of a big new John Templeton Foundation (JTF) grant by clicking on the screenshot, but I’ve put the entire announcement below (it’s also announced on Leiter Reports):

Luis Oliveira, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, has received $1.3 million to lead an international project on the epistemology of religion.

The central question of the project is “What arguments are there for believing in God or for following a specific religious tradition?”, according to the University of Houston.

The project aims to “connect Latin American philosophers with colleagues from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to stimulate academic interest and research in the epistemology of religion.”

The funding for the project is from the John Templeton Foundation. Funds will support summer seminars in Latin America, research scholarships, academic prizes, and a conference at  the University of Houston. You can learn more about the project here.

There’s a bit more from the University of Houston’s exultant announcement about the Big Questions, and about how Templeton’s dosh will be used.

Summer workshops planned over the next three years in Brazil, Argentina and Chile will connect Latin American philosophers with colleagues from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom to stimulate academic interest and research in the epistemology of religion. Fellowships will bring Latin American scholars to U.S. universities in order to further strengthen research ties between the two groups.

The project is religiously neutral. This means the work won’t be limited to one religious tradition and will include study of the reasons for atheism and agnosticism, Oliveira said. Scholars of every persuasion will be involved.

He said the timing is right. “In the last 15 years, discussions of religion in the public sphere have become very acrimonious and not very philosophical at all,” he said. “There has been too much one-sided conviction. The atheists think religious people are ignoring the scientific evidence. The religious people think atheists are ignoring obvious aspects of the human experience. Very few acknowledge the force of the points made from the other side.”

While the Daily Nous announcement doesn’t say anything about nonbelief, the UH announcement says the project is “religiously neutral”. And by that they mean “the work won’t be limited to one religious tradition and will include study of the reasons for atheism and agnosticism.”  Well, I’m not heartened by the note that other religious traditions will be involved (that’s only to be expected), and not much heartened by their claim that the work “will include the study of the reasons for atheism and agnosticism.” How about “NO EVIDENCE, PEOPLE!”?  Can I have some dollars now? Can I go to Argentina and talk about atheism?

As for the main question, “What arguments are there for believing in God or a specific religious tradition?”, don’t we know the answer now? There have been almost no new arguments for God’s existence since medieval times, with only gussied-up emendations proffered by the likes of Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig.  And as for “what arguments are there for believing in a specific religious tradition?”, the answer is “WHERE YOU WERE BORN AND WHO BRAINWASHED YOU”. Can I have some dollars now and maybe a trip to Chile?

And there’s this:

The atheists think religious people are ignoring the scientific evidence. The religious people think atheists are ignoring obvious aspects of the human experience. Very few acknowledge the force of the points made from the other side.

Well, the empirical (scientific) evidence for God is exactly as copious as the scientific evidence for Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. That is, no evidence. The “data”, as Vic Stenger used to say, consist of the absence of evidence for God when there should be evidence. 

The other scientific evidence consists of empirical refutation of religious claims, including the claim that prayer works and that there was an Exodus, Adam and Eve, the de novo creation of life, and so on. Liberal religion accepts these refutations while still clinging to claims that are harder to refute (or, as in the case of theologians like David Bentley Hart, lapsing into arcane and flabby theobabble), while conservative faith, like evangelical Christianity and Islam, won’t be swayed by scientific evidence.

And “obvious aspects of the human experience” as evidence for God? How does that work? As far as I can see, this isn’t evidence but revelation and wish-thinking: “I think there is a God because I feel/want to believe that there is one.”  I don’t acknowledge the “force of these points made from the other side” because that force is equivalent to the force of drag applied by a single barnacle affixed to a humpback whale.

In sum, I see absolutely nothing that this expensive study will add to the sum of human knowledge, though it will contribute to the sump of futile human endeavor.

It appears that philosophers are still divided on the issue of whether it’s okay to take Templeton money. When Googling philosophy and Templeton, I came upon a pair of articles by Dan Dannett and Alfred Mele from 2014. In a generally positive review in Prospect Magazine of Mele’s book Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will, Dennett brings up Templeton at the end (click on the screenshot below):

Dan:

This review could similarly end on the mild, modest verdict that Mele has done his job and done it well. But there is a larger context worth considering. Suppose you were reviewing a scientific report that drew the conclusion that a diet without fat was in fact unhealthy, and that butter and cream and even bacon in moderation were good for you, and suppose further that the science was impeccable, carefully conducted and rigorously argued. Good news! Yes, but the author acknowledges in fine print that the research was financed by a million dollar grant from the Foundation for the Advancement of Bacon. We would be entitled—obliged—to keep that fact in the limelight. The science may be of the highest quality, honestly and sincerely reported, but do remember that the message delivered was the message hoped for by the funder. This is not reporting a finding contrary to the goals of the fact-seekers.

So it is important to note that Mele’s research, as he scrupulously announces, and not in fine print, is supported by the Templeton Foundation. In fact, Mele is the director of a $4.4m project, “Free Will: Empirical and Philosophical Investigations,” funded by the Templeton Foundation, almost certainly the most munificent funding of any philosopher in history. The Templeton Foundation has a stated aim of asking and answering the “Big Questions,” and its programmes include both science and theology. In fact, yoking its support of science with its support of theology (and “individual freedom and free markets”) is the very core of its strategy. The Templeton Foundation supports, with no strings attached, a great deal of excellent science that is otherwise hard to fund. The Foundation supports theological and ideological explorations as well, and it uses the prestige it garners from its even-handed and generous support of non-ideological science to bolster the prestige of its ideological forays. It could easily divide itself into two (or three) foundations, with different names, and fund the same research—I know, because I challenged a Templeton director on this score and was told that they could indeed, but would not, do this.

Alfred Mele is in an unenviable position, and there is really nothing he can do about it. Was his decision to stay strictly neutral on the compatibilism issue a wise philosophical tactic, permitting him to tackle a more modest project, demonstrating the weakness of the scientific argument to date, or was it a case of simply postponing the more difficult issue: if, as science seems to show, our decision-making is not accomplished with the help of any quantum magic, do we still have a variety of free will that can support morality and responsibility? The Templeton Foundation insists that it is not anti-science, and demonstrates this with the bulk of its largesse, but it also has an invested interest in keeping science from subverting some of its ideological aspirations, and it just happens that Mele’s work fits handsomely with that goal. And that, as I persist in telling my friends in science whenever they raise the issue, is why I advise them not to get too close to Templeton.

Mele responded briefly at the Daily Nous, saying that he’s never felt pressure from Templeton and was working on free will long before the JTF gave him money (he admits, though that he got about $9 million from Templeton!)

An excerpt from Mele:

As I’ve said in print, I enjoyed working with JTF on the Big Questions in Free Will (BQFW) project and I never felt pressured to do anything that seemed wrong to me. I have friends there now — good, hard-working people who love philosophy and want to showcase what philosophy can do. But, of course, Dan has a right to express his opinions about JTF.

. . . I don’t take Dan’s remarks personally. I know his views on JTF. We had a friendly discussion of them in London a couple of years ago while I was in the midst of directing the BQFW project. It’s safe to say that we disagree about what JTF is up to. His views about JTF come through clearly in his article, and writing about Free was an occasion for him to express them. Tying those views to me by way of the agnosticism about compatibilism in Free is ineffective, for the reason that I mentioned. If JTF likes neutrality about compatibilism, I’m their guy; I’ve pretty much had that market cornered for almost 20 years.

But the issue is not whether the JTF pressures its awardees to come up with a specific set of findings. The issue is whether the JTF distorts philosophy (and science) by funding projects in areas that are ideologically and philosophically compatible with Templeton’s mission, which is to show that science can help answer the “Big Questions” about God and spirituality. Projects defending free will and attacking its detractors fit nicely into that schema.  As Dan notes, the JTF funds projects that are more purely scientific to help buttress the religion side of its agenda, so the Scientific Horses are put in a stable with the Woo Horses, in hopes that they will breed and produce the kind of wooish hybrids that Templeton loves.

The $1.3 million grant above is in one of the religion stalls of the Templeton stable, which makes it pretty much a waste of money. Yes, philosophers like Mele may indeed take JTF money without feeling pressure, but they don’t realize (or want to ignore) how the JTF slants the philosophical playing field by funding ideologically agreeable projects. This is unlike the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, which have no ideological slant and fund science projects based on the assessment of whether they’re going to find out anything interesting and important.

“Scholars” explain religion to me

December 24, 2018 • 8:30 am

Yesterday I got three longish emails taking issue with my piece on The Conversation in which I argued that science and religion are incompatible. Two of them were incoherent and don’t deserve reproducing here, much less mentioning. The one below, however, came from a person who said he was a scholar of religion, and I wanted to post it to show the kind of criticisms that are arising. I’ve omitted the person’s name. (I checked on who he/she/hir is, and it’s not someone very notable or accomplished, as far as I can see). But on to the argument:

Hello Dr. Coyne,

You make some very good points but I think you have misunderstood the nature of religion.  As it happens, that is my specialty.  I have studied religion for over 30 years.  What most people do not realize is that there is an academic study of religion and we have been at this for over a hundred years now — and its greatest center of study has been at your home university.  Religion is not what most people think, just as you probably encounter people who think they understand ecology but are totally clueless.

The problem with using Dennett for a definition of religion is that he doesn’t know what he is talking about.  I have personally tried to explain this to him but he is unwilling to consider any ideas that are not his own.  And I even use his theory of consciousness in my own work to understand why we have religion.  He is absolutely talking about things that he has no grounds to discuss, totally outside his field.  People do this all the time with religion and as an actual expert it is quite frustrating.  His definition has nothing to do with any scholarly work in the study of religion — and I find it shocking that he makes these claims and astounding that people don’t know better than to listen to ignorance on any subject (even if he is an expert on something else).

Religion is a worldview with a ritual system.  That is the formal definition and it works for all known religion.  The issue you are pointing to is the worldview, and how it is constructed.  Using our naive intuitions to construct a worldview only leads to confusion.  That is true.  But the problem is that the opposite of science is not religion, it is superstition.  Religion can be but may not necessarily be superstitious.  There is no logical reason why the worldview cannot be founded on science.  The trick is the ritual that keeps it religion. [JAC: Not just that, it’s the morality and truth claims (which buttress the morality) that keep it religion.]

The point is religion is not about explaining the world, it is about living in the world.  When people use ignorance to undermine science and claim they are hiding behind religion they are lying.  That sort of thinking has nothing to do with religion, qua religion, it is entirely political. [JAC: I guess this person considers all creationists as motivated by politics, for creationism, he argues, has nothing to do with religion. That’s nonsense.]

The right wants to control people and they understand the science is inherently egalitarian and democratic.  They want to attack science and can use reactionary forms of religious superstition to do this, but that is not about religion, it is about people and politics.

What you need to attack is those who reject science, regardless of their claimed motive.  They are political actors, not religious one.  The religion is cover for the politics.  Don’t get lost in their lies.

Yours,
NAME REDACTED

I don’t want to get into this in detail, as I am not fond of people who tell me I’m wrong because they are scholars in the field and therefore know more than I. This kind of credential-mongering obviates the real issue: the nature of my arguments. In this case the person takes issue with my definition of religion, which was Dan Dennett’s:

“Social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.”

OF COURSE that doesn’t hold for all bodies of thought that we see as religions (viz., Buddhism), but I qualified it this way:

Of course many religions don’t fit that definition, but the ones whose compatibility with science is touted most often – the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – fill the bill.

The fact is that for most believers that definition holds well, as you can see from looking at the stuff that Americans actually believe. I’ll quote myself again:

And yet, without supporting evidence, Americans believe a number of religious claims: 74 percent of us believe in God, 68 percent in the divinity of Jesus, 68 percent in Heaven, 57 percent in the virgin birth, and 58 percent in the Devil and Hell. Why do they think these are true? Faith.

This is not “a worldview with a ritual system.” Yes, it’s a worldview, but one propped up and justified by belief in truth claims. My interlocutor also argues, correctly, that the opposite of science is superstition, but fails to recognize that for the vast majority of the world’s believers (I’m not talking about Sophisticated Theologians™ here), religion is a superstition, which is defined this way by the Oxford English Dictionary:

A religious system considered to be irrational, unfounded, or based on fear or ignorance; a false, pagan, or idolatrous religion.

That pretty much holds for all religions—certainly the Abrahamic ones, for all are irrational and are based on ignorance, which is the fount of “faith”.

My correspondent, whom I didn’t answer, claims that religion isn’t about truth but about “living in the world,” not realizing that that kind of living rests on claims about what’s true: that Jesus existed, was the son of God, and will send you to heaven if you believe in him, or that Muhammad received the words of the Qur’an from an angel sent by God. (Most pious Muslims are of course Qur’anic literalists.)

The last paragraph of the email above is peremptory, pompous, and pontifical. I am not just attacking those who reject science; I am attacking those who reject the empirical methods of science as a way to find truth—in other words, those who believe things about the divine based on faith. Or, if you will, I’m attacking faith.

The problem with this writer is that he conceives of religion in a way different from most believers, and can’t conceive of anybody who bases their religion on truth claims. The person is, in other words, a self-styled Sophisticated Theologian™ who thinks that his take on religion is the only one worth considering. Everybody else is just WRONG.

 

I get emails from theists

December 22, 2018 • 10:00 am

Since my piece on the incompatibility of science and religion was published yesterday at The Conversation, I’ve been bombarded with emails and “requests for interaction” (The Conversation allows readers to contact you this way), with the latter being largely “requests for you to listen to my point of view.”

Here’s an email from someone who found my address and sent me a confusing message masquerading as a request to “engage me in meaningful conversation.” But it doesn’t look like the person (name redacted) wants a meaningful conversation. Rather, the person wants me to absorb his/her/zir views.

I’ve learned two things through bitter experience. The first is that if you try to have a discussion with someone like this, no minds get changed, nor does it wind up as anything besides mutual acrimony.  The second is that I need to learn the lesson given by Christopher Hitchens, who said something like: “Unsolicited emails deserve to go unanswered.” (I’d appreciate it if anyone could give me his actual quote.)

Engagement on social media is pretty much useless with an issue like accommodationism, and my tactic has been to just publish what I think, read some of the comments, and examine my views to see if they need modification. I try not to engage in online catfights or exchanges. The comments posted at The Conversation and, especially, on Pinker’s retweet of my article (see below) are largely ignorant (also ignorant of what I actually wrote), angry, or irrelevant.

Anyway, here’s the email that greeted me this morning.

I appreciate your point of view in the recent article; “Yes, There is a War between Science and Religion” published December 21, 2018. I would like to engage you in meaningful conversation in regards to your view that science and religion are incompatible. I would argue that you are morphing science into a religion in regards to what answers you expect science to be able to produce. I would agree with you that science is the set of tools we as humans use to discover “truth” (a more appropriate term to use in the definition you provide would be facts) about the universe, with the understanding that the truths/facts are provisional rather than absolute. In other words, inductive reasoning allows for the generalization of a set of data or observations to describe the probable way in which the world or some phenomena functions. Repetitive experiments increase the probability of the generalization being true, but there is no possible way in which the generalization could ever be 100% certain, yet alone able to be extended to other areas to make 100% certain predictions in that area. In fact you argue that faith without evidence is a vice. Do you not take many things on faith in performing your experiments? Have you replicated every possible experiment personally and validated its veracity? Of course not, and it is not necessary. However there is some degree of certainty in the uniformity of the universe that allows you to function and to make predications in vastly differing fields. While science has made great and amazing gains in understanding the universe, it still relies on the underlying assumption of uniformity. It would seem to me then that you are suggesting that science would thus be able to function in such a manner distinct from faith? If so, then science has moved beyond science and has become philosophy. What is religion but other than a philosophy? In arguing that science can serve as more than what its capacity as science permits (and subsequently using it to derive meaning) you have made science a religion. You have simply created yet another god to which you adhere to unknowingly.

The reader, as happens so often, mistakes “faith” (the belief in “verities” that lack evidence) with “confidence” (the prior probability you develop from experience). So yes, I don’t assume, when doing an experiment, that a tornado nearby will change the barometric pressure and affect fly behavior. That’s not faith but confidence born of experience.

Likewise, “uniformity” is not a “faith” but an observation that hasn’t been contradicted: the laws of physics operate the same everywhere we know. That’s why we’re able to get probes sent to distant planets, and to confidently make predictions and conclusions based on observing distant bodies. That’s a long way from religious faith, two notions that—at the risk of repeating myself too often—I distinguished in my Slate article “No faith in science.” Thus, the reader’s conclusion that confidence based on experience turns science into a “religion” or “another god” is arrant nonsense.

But the reader went on, immersing him/her/zirself into the quicksand of Sophisticated Theology™. Clearly my definition of religion wasn’t nuanced enough! I’ve put the mindmush in bold:

Moreover your definition of religion is much too simplistic and arguably a straw man. While religion is a social system, it is also much more than what your definition would permit, especially in regards to how it applies to Christianity. You argue for the incompatibility of religion as a belief system in relation to science, I would presume because you view that science is a better belief system. Why else would you be making such an argument as outlined in your article? Religion is at its essence a system of beliefs by which the adherent seeks to come to transcendental truth and meaning. As religion is a philosophy it rests on deductive reasoning. I’m not here to outline the numerous arguments for God. If you are interested, maybe we could have that argument in a future correspondence. I do however want to clarify the view of God that you hold.  From the Aristotelian perspective, God is that which its essence is existence. In other words, God is that which is. Stated another way, God is subsistent being itself. Everything else in the world is contingent upon what we refer to as God (to you it very well may be your assumption of universal uniformity or some other principle). Given that everything in the universe is contingent (nothing sustains itself in being/existence, but can easily perish or go out of existence), we would argue that we are all dependent upon God for existence. Subsequently any action of matter would then be, ultimately, an action of God (through secondary causes). Therefore in relation to your field, evolutionary biology does not explain away God. Once matter is in existence, it has its own set of actions and causes. Therefore life arising from nonliving matter and subsequently changing does not preclude the existence of God. It simply cannot answer, nor can any science fully explain, why there is existence in the first place (even if it is just matter/gravity/universal laws/etc). Science however can detail how the universe works, deepening our understanding and bringing to light the true beauty of God in the universe. Science and religion are absolutely compatible.

This, of course, is the cosmological argument for God, also called the “argument from contingency” or the “first cause” argument. The rebuttals to this claim are numerous and you should already know some of them; I’ll refer you to this section of Wikipedia for the most common ones. Suffice it to say that contingency and first-cause arguments are unconvincing.  The reader’s last sentence, “science and religion are absolutely compatible”, is simply an assertion, apparently resting on his/her/zir bogus argument that science is a religion based on faith.

Here’s a private message I got from The Conversation (name redacted), asking for discourse. How on earth would that be possible here? But I love the last sentence.

Finally, check out some of the 193 comments appended to Pinker’s tweet. I’m pretty sure Steve doesn’t read comments, as he’s busy and most of the comments are pretty nasty.

Here are a few:

https://twitter.com/jacobatkinson99/status/1076252748562206720

Who cares if religion is true if it makes us feel good?

September 29, 2018 • 1:53 pm

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:

Stephen T Asma is professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of 10 books, including The Evolution of Imagination (2017) and his latest, Why We Need Religion (2018).

 

Asma’s argument:

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 The Magic 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.

To close, I’ll point out that the countries that are the happiest ones in the world are on average less religious (see chart below). Just sayin’. This is a correlation and not necessarily a causal relationship, but it’s the exact opposite of what Asma predicts. So it goes.

What is going on with the online magazine Aeon, anyway? Are they taking Templeton money on the sly?

Stephen T. Asma:

h/t: Ant

Secular Jihadist podcast today: Ali ‘n’ Jerry

June 17, 2018 • 7:15 am

Today, as Ali Rizvi’s Facebook page notes below, I’ll be on his Secular Jihadist podcast at 11 AM EST. If you subscribe to Ali’s podcast through Patreon, you’ll be able to see it live (it’s a Skype interview); but even if you don’t, it will be available for free later.  Patrons can see the podcast here and there’s also a subscription button on the same page.

I believe that, beyond religion, we’ll also be talking about evolution and the best way to teach the public about evolution and science in general.

Ali is, as you probably know, author of the very nice book The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason. (I think I have a blurb on one of the covers). The screenshot links to Amazon, where you can buy it:

Did someone make science and religion compatible?

April 9, 2018 • 9:00 am

Apparently so. This article, sent to me by reader Snowy Owl, appeared on Quartz (click on screenshot to read it):

And the first sentence notes that “bridging the gap” means making science and religion compatible:

Katharine Hayhoe is here to challenge the idea that science and faith are incompatible.

Okay, well, I’ll bite. How does she harmonize them?

The answer is that she doesn’t. All she does, according to the piece, is try to convince Christians (she’s one) that anthropogenic global warming is real:

An atmospheric science professor and the director of the Climate Science Center of Texas Tech University [JAC: she’s actually co-director], Hayhoe studies the impact of climate change at a local level, helping governments and organizations use climate data to adapt to the future. The Canadian scientist also happens to be an evangelical Christian—the US religious group that is least likely to believe climate change is the result of human activity.

“It’s a little like coming out of the closet admitting that you are a Christian and a scientist,” Hayhoe said in an interview with PBS. [JAC: there’s nothing at PBS that shows that religion and science are compatible.]

Hayhoe’s ability to bridge faith and science has made her one of the country’s most effective communicators when it comes to climate change. She gives scripture-based lectures to church groups and religious organizations that focus on the positive benefits of collective action—water for farmers, food for the poor, moral values for churchgoers—instead of bleak facts and dystopian pictures of the end of times. And she never talks down to her audience. “If you begin a conversation with, ‘You’re an idiot,’ that’s the end of the conversation, too,” she told the New York Times last year. [JAC: you won’t find anything about how she harmonizes science and faith in that article, either.]

I’m glad Hayhoe is able to reach fellow Christians, and I hope she has convinced some doubters among them that climate change is real—and dangerous. I’m still dubious that being a religionist is a big advantage in convincing people of facts they don’t like: after all, BioLogos has been a miserable failure at convincing evangelical Christians that evolution is a fact. But more power to her.

But there’s no way that she her activities show that science and faith are compatible. As I note in Faith Versus Fact—and I won’t dilate on this—despite the fact that both science and religion make claims about the nature of the universe, they’re incompatible in the way they investigate these claims: in methodology (reason and empirical study versus revelation and dogma), in outcome (what you find out), and in philosophy (science doesn’t take into account the supernatural; religion must). Nothing Hayhoe does addresses that incompatibility.

What we have here, then, is the least effective way of showing that science and religion are compatible: the claim that “there are religious scientists.” That’s like saying that science and belief in Santa Claus are compatible, or that science and belief in astrology are compatible. All it shows is that a person can simultaneously hold in their heads two disparate ways of investigating “truth”.