Category: theology

What is the value of theology?

June 21, 2020 • 9:30 am

Dan Barker, co-President of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, cleverly defined theology as a “subject without an object”.  That presupposes that there is no evidence for the “subject”: gods, prophets like Jesus, and so on, and I think most of us agree with that. So does the Oxford English Dictionary, which gives this as a definition:

I find the word “science” in the above definition offensive.

But some people consider “religious studies” or “Biblical history” as part of theology as well, and those areas don’t presuppose the truth of religious beliefs.  Further, those areas can be wide-ranging. Have a look at last year’s course list at the University of Chicago’s theology school, which includes courses like “Anthropology and Sociology of Religion,” “History of Religions,” “Islamic Philosophy”, “History of Judaism,” “Christian Iconography,” and so on. Since religion has been an enormous influence on history, art, and sociology, I have no problems with these, though I don’t see why they can’t be folded into history, anthropology, philosophy, and art departments. And of course studies of the history of the Bible and Qur’an, as well as Hindu scriptures, are also useful since these books have been so influential and connect Christianity and Judiasm with Islam and the myths of other faiths and early non-Abrahamic religions.

But there are also courses like “God and the Good Life” and many courses on “Religious leadership and practice,” which appear to be courses preparing one for a life in the ministry. These, of course, presuppose the truth of gods and of the dicta of specific religions. Here’s one that looks a bit suspect (my emphasis):

RLST 20901 – Interpreting Jesus

This course examines the on-going mutability of portrayals, images, and narratives of Jesus in ancient Christian gospels and later art, literature, drama, and film. Our investigation will begin with the New Testament gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We will then discuss the lesser known gospels according to Thomas and Mary. This in turn allows us to consider how literary and dramatic works, art, and films frame, narrate, and interpret Jesus and the stories about this controversial figure as he appears in these later receptions in a variety of guises. Works to be examined likely will include Nikos Kazantzakis’s controversial 1955 novel The Last Temptation of Christ; a variety of artistic portrayals of Jesus at the Art Institute; The Gospel at Colonus (in conjunction with this spring’s production at Court Theater); and films by Scorsesi (The Last Temptation of Christ), Monty Python (Life of Brian), and Van der Put (The First Temptation of Christ).

I mostly object to the part in bold, which assumes that there was a real Jesus-person. I don’t see any courses that are about “The Myth of Jesus,” but I haven’t looked closely. Yes, there’s some interesting stuff in here, but is there any questioning of whether Jesus even existed as a person, divine or otherwise? If he didn’t, then this course is like “Interpreting Paul Bunyan”, “Interpreting Zeus”, or “Interpreting Leprechauns.”

Here’s another:

RELP 40800 – Field Work Practicum III

The Practicum sequence complements the MDiv Congregational Placement and offers opportunities for students to engage in critical reflection of their respective practical experiences of ministry leadership. In addition to this element of personal and practical reflections, students will engage a range of readings, written exercises, and classroom conversations to assist in articulating and refining their own practice of ministry.

Why should a university be in the business of helping its students promulgate religious mythology? I hasten to add that ministers serve sociological and psychological functions, and can be a form of social glue, but I doubt that that’s all these field work courses involve.

I’m sure I’ll get pushback from the people at the Divinity School (and I like some of them, having talked to them when I was writing Faith Versus Fact), but I’ll pose my own view on theology in the next three paragraphs in bold (I’m taking “theology” here to apply only to Abrahamic religions):

Insofar as “theology” encompasses philosophical, sociological, and historical studies of religion, which do not presuppose the existence of anything divine or supernatural, these studies can be valuable and should be taught in universities. But I don’t think they need to be lumped together in a divinity school. Remember that Thomas Jefferson, when establishing the University of Virginia, specified that it would be a nonsectarian school lacking both schools of theology or even places of worship. (And yet there is a Department of Religious Studies at U.Va, though it seems to exist to produce academic scholars of religion, much like a virus that uses a larger organism to facilitate its own replication.)

In other words, “theological” studies that have bearing on secular issues like philosophy and history, or reveal something about human actions and beliefs, or discuss religious influences on literature, art, and music, are justifiable—so long as nobody argues that the objects of theology, gods and prophets and unsubstantiated and unevidenced religious claims, should be taken seriously. Likewise, “theology” that is like “New Biblical Criticism”, dissecting Scripture as a human document, examining its genesis (so to speak), its influences, and its connections with history and other faiths, is also justifiable. 

Insofar as “theology” includes courses that presuppose the existence of the divine, take seriously the existence of God or Jesus, or prepare people for the ministry or to promulgate religious beliefs, then those courses not only have no place in a University, but are exercises in delusion. Now I think the higher-class divinity schools, like Chicago’s and Harvard’s, have very few of those courses, but there are some.  They should not be part of a secular university. 

Maybe I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that Hitchens’s razor is correct: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” That applies to any form of theology that takes gods or superstitions as real. Universities should not be in the business of taking seriously those myths that have no evidence behind them. They can, of course, teach myths, but at no point should they imply that there is evidence for their truth.

I’m sure others disagree here. Some will say I don’t go far enough in dismissing theology; others will say that I don’t give theology enough credit. And expressing your view is what the comments are for on this Christian Sabbath.

A short Francis Collins interview on the BBC

May 23, 2020 • 11:00 am

Here’s a short (7.5-minute) interview with NIH director and Templeton Prize awardee Francis Collins that was played on NPR yesterday but came from the BBC Newshour.  Collins answers questions about God, evil, coronavirus, and so on, but you may already be familiar with his theological views, which are at the preceding link.

Collins’s interview starts at 30:07 and ends at 37:34; click on the screenshot below to hear it.

You’ll hear that Collins is scientific and religious because science answers the “how” questions but—citing Steve Gould’s NOMA hypothesis—only religion can answer the “why” questions, questions like “Is there a God?”, or “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Collins claims that faith provides the answer to these questions, but of course it does not. Collins knows there’s a God because humans have a “moral law” (a ridiculous idea), but I’d like to hear how his Christianity answers the second question. Is “God did it” the answer to “why is there something instead of nothing?”

When asked why the coronavirus has killed so many (the question of “physical evil”), Collins has no answer. When asked if the virus is a “God-given plague”, he says that faith provides the answer, which is “no”. But then when pressed about why God would allow so many people to suffer, and whether there’s a moral dimension to the suffering, Collins says this:

“The question of suffering and its meaning and why a loving God would allow it is one of the toughest ones that both believers and nonbelievers have to wrestle with. I don’t have an easy answer to that and I grieve for all those who are suffering and all those who have lost family members to this terrible plague. . .”

Now that’s just plain weird.  Why do nonbelievers have to wrestle with the question of suffering? It’s a non-question for atheists, or at least an empirical question that has no “why” answer. And the secular answer is better than any religious ones. All we have to say is this: “It’s a virus that’s evolved to do its thing in the cells of other organisms, and its reproduction involves killing the cells and getting passed on through respiratory droplets.” I suspect that Collins wasn’t thinking about what he was saying here.

He then rabbits on about how we have some valuable lessons to learn from the pandemic—perhaps the reason God allows that suffering!—including pondering the “significance of suffering in general” and learning that (he quotes Scripture), “humans should not expect to be free of suffering.”

Collins ends by trying further to make a virtue out of necessity by arguing that the pandemic gives us a chance to ponder the Big Questions (which is what the Templeton prize is for)—questions about suffering, about our own natures, about our relationships, about what love means, and about what happens to us when we die.  Of course we can ponder these, but faith provides no better answers—and probably worse ones—than does Collins’s evangelical Christianity.

Listen to a very smart man who has become deluded by adherence to Iron Age mythology.

Egnor claims that the evidence for God is as strong as it is for evolution and the Big Bang

March 18, 2020 • 9:30 am

Christian neurosurgeon and intelligent-design advocate Michael Egnor insists that he and I are “debating” the appropriateness of prayer in response to the coronavirus (see my post here). But there is really no “debate”, just Egnor’s assertion (and my denial) that God is real and that prayer couldn’t hurt. He insists that I am “clueless” about the watertight evidence for God’s existence and am ignorant not just about natural theology, but about natural science. (I must have fooled a lot of people over my career!)

Egnor is obsessed with attacking me, and I’m convinced it’s because Intelligent Design has failed to catch on as its advocates promised, and so they resort to pushing a theological agenda and ignoring the indubitable evidence for evolution. This is a good example of that tactic, for here Egnor reiterates Aquinas’s “Five Ways” arguments for God—arguments that have long been refuted by philosophers—and claims that they’re dispositive: God really exists, and Aquinas proved it!

I hate to keep going back and forth with this clown (and I’m not going to be respectful of him given his language towards me). If you want to see some breathtaking examples of theological casuistry, though, read his latest piece at “Mind Matters,” one of the house organs of the ID-creationist Discovery Institute (DI). Like all the DI venues, it doesn’t take readers’ comments.

I’ve archived the article, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot.

In response to my claim that any evidence for God’s existence must be empirical rather than logical, Egnor responds by citing Aquinas’s “Five Ways” as empirical arguments. Most of these five arguments are variants of the “First Cause” argument: everything is caused, there can’t be an infinite chain of causes, and therefore there must be a First Cause. And that First Cause is God—or at least, as Aquinas said, “this everyone understands to be God.” And that, he says, is an airtight empirical argument, for isn’t the observation of “cause” itself an empirical one?

I’ll just summarize a bit of Egnor’s argument, but if you want to be amused by the mental gyrations of a true believer, by all means read the rest of the short article.  Egnor’s words are indented:

Me [i.e., Egnor]: Evidence for the existence of God, as provided by Aquinas, actually consists of the same logical and evidentiary process as science itself, only with much stronger logic and more abundant evidence than any other scientific theory.

Coyne, in reply : If there are going to be arguments for god that are convincing, they will have to be empirical ones, not theoretical lucubrations of ancient theologians.

[Egnor]: Coyne is clueless. All valid proofs of God’s existence—and there are many—are empirical proofs. As St. Thomas observed, any proof of existence must contain empirical evidence in its premise, because a purely logical proof, which is valid for mathematics and logic, cannot demonstrate the existence of anything. That is why the ontological proof of God’s existence is invalid. You can’t, by pure reason alone, conclude that God (or anything) exists. You must have evidence.

Well, yes, the ontological proof of God’s existence is a bizarre non-starter (read about it here). But here’s Egnor’s argument for why Aquinas, the consummate scientist, was correct in making an inductive and empirical argument for God.

All valid scientific theories are inductive. We begin with evidence, arrange the evidence in a logical (often mathematical) framework, and draw a conclusion. Here’s the Darwinian inference, for example:

1) Living animals and fossils show certain patterns of structure (evidence)
2) These patterns imply certain causes and are inconsistent with other causes (logic)
3) All living things are related by common descent (conclusion)

This theory of common descent, which Jerry Coyne accepts, is inductive—it is not and cannot be a deductive proof.

Well, the causes of evolution are independent of the observations of common ancestry, for you can have common ancestry regardless of what causes evolution, so long as it’s a gradual process that leads to changes in lineages as well as splitting of lineages (speciation). The causes could be natural selection, genetic drift, Lamarckism, teleoglogical or theistic evolution, and so on. You will get common ancestry under any theory of change so long as it is gradual, leads to splitting of lineages, and characters are modified only gradually after splitting occurs.

On to the First Cause argument as rehashed by Egnor:

Here’s Aquinas’ First Way:

1) Change exists in nature (evidence)
2) Change is the actuation of potentiality, and an essential chain of actuations cannot go to infinite regress. A fully actual Prime Mover is necessary (logic)
3) That Prime Mover is what all men call God (conclusion)

Note, contra Coyne, that all three scientific conclusions—common ancestry, the Big Bang, and God’s existence— are structurally equivalent. The inference to God’s existence is formally in every way identical to scientific theories. The inference to God’s existence based on the Prime Mover argument is a scientific theory—supported by massive evidence (change occurs in nature) and irrefutable logic (the reality of potency and act, and the law of non-contradiction). We are more scientifically certain of God’s existence than we are of quantum mechanics or Newtonian or relativistic gravitation.

While the first claim is basically correct, though not all things change (e.g., the speed of light in a vacuum or the laws of physics), the other two claims are where Aquinas’s argument collapses. I don’t want to reiterate the many flaws of even the first of Aquinas’s Five ways, as you can find those refutations in numerous places (e.g., here, here, here, here and here; I also have an earlier post on the First Cause argument as supported by Egnor and his ID colleage Klinghoffer here).

In brief, here are a few of the many counterarguments:

a.) There is no reason a chain of actuations cannot “go to infinite regress”. If there’s a multiverse, that’s more or less what you get. See Sean Carroll’s discussion below.

b.) The Universe didn’t have to have a cause, just as the decay of an atom of a radioactive element doesn’t have a “cause” —as far as we know. Nor does the appearance of virtual particles have to have a “cause”. There is no scientific “law” that says, “Everything has a cause.” As Sean Carroll said of the origin of the Universe in his post “Does the Universe need God? (his answer was “no”):

One sometimes hears the claim that the Big Bang was the beginning of both time and space; that to ask about spacetime “before the Big Bang” is like asking about land “north of the North Pole.” This may turn out to be true, but it is not an established understanding. The singularity at the Big Bang doesn’t indicate a beginning to the universe, only an end to our theoretical comprehension. It may be that this moment does indeed correspond to a beginning, and a complete theory of quantum gravity will eventually explain how the universe started at approximately this time. But it is equally plausible that what we think of as the Big Bang is merely a phase in the history of the universe, which stretches long before that time – perhaps infinitely far in the past. The present state of the art is simply insufficient to decide between these alternatives; to do so, we will need to formulate and test a working theory of quantum gravity.

c.) If you’re going to talk about causes, then what caused God? People like Egnor who make these arguments call god the “Unmoved Mover” or the “First Cause”, and so the question “who made God?” seems to them nonsensical, but nobody has made a convincing argument why the buck must stop at God (see my post here). See (b) above. The question of “where did God come from”—if there is a god—remains viable and trenchant.

d.) This is perhaps the dumbest of Aquinas’s arguments, but it’s one that Egnor buys into: Why is the Prime Mover—even if there is one, which isn’t necessarily the case—identical to the Christian God, the very God embraced by Aquinas and Egnor? This flaw can be seen at the end of all of Aquinas’s Five Ways: they finish with a sentence that says “This everyone understands to be God.” What a fricking joke! Everyone?  What about those of other religions, whose gods (and there can be multiple gods) are not Christian gods, and not ones that have the salvific Jesus as a divine son of God.  And what if space aliens are the prime movers?

Even if you take Aquinas’s argument seriously, and even if you buy his premise that everything needs a cause—which I don’t buy, and which physicists don’t buy—all you can conclude is that there was a beginning to things. Beyond that, you can say nothing, not even that there was a “being” that started it all off with an act of creation.

Egnor and his delusional confrères (including Aquinas himself) immediately conclude that the “prime mover” must be the Christian God, with all his omnipotence, benevolence, and omniscience, but this is surely the paradigm of tendentiousness. THEY JUST DON’T KNOW, but make the assertion anyway. Is that a “scientific proof” of a divine being, much less of a Christian God? I’m burning with curiosity about how they know who the Prime Mover really is. (You know the answer: they’re going on faith.)

And so Egnor comes to the end of his tiresome affirmation of his own Christian faith:

The inference to God’s existence based on the Prime Mover argument is a scientific theory—supported by massive evidence (change occurs in nature) and irrefutable logic (the reality of potency and act, and the law of non-contradiction). We are more scientifically certain of God’s existence than we are of quantum mechanics or Newtonian or relativistic gravitation.

Really? Which God? And how do we know it was a God rather than a clever alien, or even a malicious God rather than the Christian God. But wait! There’s more!

. . . The classical proofs of God’s existence are empirical proofs based on overwhelming scientific evidence and meticulous logic—perfectly valid inductive reasoning, identical in form to all scientific theories. Proofs of God’s existence are arguments in natural theology, and they share exactly the same structure as theories in natural science.

I think I’ve shown that the reasoning is not valid for several reasons, and I’ve demonstrated that “all rational men who haven’t already embraced religious superstition know the First Cause argument to be nonsense.”

Egnor adds this:

While it is true that much of the essence of supernatural reality is beyond our comprehension, we can validly infer the existence of supernatural reality. For example, as I noted above, we can validly infer the existence of the Big Bang singularity (which is not a part of nature) from natural evidence and logic. The Big Bang singularity and black holes are not in the natural world—they are undefined singularities in gravitational field equations—but we can know of their existence using evidence and the methods of natural science. In just the same way, we can know of God’s existence using evidence and the methods of natural science.

Notice that we don’t have the same kind of evidence for Egnor’s god as we do for the Big Bang, where we can see the expanding universe and hear the echo of that Bang. Egnor’s “evidence” is the argument that “everything has a cause in a chain of actuations,” and we already know that that isn’t an empirical observation, but a claim—one that isn’t supported by data from radioactive decay or, indeed, from the existence of the Big Bang.

Perhaps in his next piece of the debate (and I’m pretty much done debating tendentious faithheads like Egnor), Dr. Egnor will explain to us how he and Aquinas can conclude that the Prime Mover just happens to coincide with the God of Scripture. Rest assured that he’ll have an answer, but you can be equally assured that it won’t make sense to those not already marinated in religious Kool-Aid.

Egnor: We need to pray during this pandemic

March 9, 2020 • 11:30 am

Once again the creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor can’t resist scrutinizing my website and trying to find flaws in what I say. I suppose this is because he and his Discovery Institute colleagues, despite their confident assurances of two decades ago, have failed to make progress in getting the scientific community to accept Intelligent Design. So, like a frustrated pigeon pecking at a leaf, he pecks at me.

He’s really surpassed himself this time, though, for in his latest diatribe he claims to show that a.) prayer works during a pandemic, despite my mocking Mike Pence’s coronavirus response team praying together; b). Science’s rejection of gods, or at least its failure to seriously entertain divine actions in science—is circular and wrong; and c.) There’s strong proof that there’s a God.

This article appears in the site Mind Matters, which is run by the creationist Discovery Institute. Its theme appears to be that materialism (what I call “naturalism”) is false and that science can’t explain the material phenomena of the world. The usual guff! Click on the screenshot for a good laugh:

Let’s take Egnor’s three claims in order. Since he’s drunk the Kool-Aid, it’s easy to respond.

1.)  Prayer works in a pandemic. Egnor’s claims are indented.

The wisdom and efficacy of prayer in a crisis depends wholly on one question: is the prayer directed to Someone who is real, or is prayer based on a delusion?

If the Object of supplication is real, then prayer is probably the first thing you want to do in a crisis. A plea to the Boss is a fine preamble to the grunt work of managing a crisis. I’m a neurosurgeon, and I pray before each operation. It really helps.

If there is no real Object of supplication, then prayer is based on a delusion. But it’s interesting to note that, as historian Rodney Stark has pointed out, prayer and Christian faith during ancient epidemics saved lives because faithful Christians stuck around during epidemics. They provided care to afflicted neighbors who would not have survived except that they had kindly courageous friends to nurse them. St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital—the world’s leading cancer center for children, was founded because of a prayer. So the focus and compassion evoked by prayer saves lives, whether or not God is there to hear the prayer.

This is Pascal’s Wager applied to prayer.  First of all, what evidence does Egnor have that prayer “really helps” when he operates? And whom does it help? If it helps Egnor operate, fine; a New Ager could also be calmed by rubbing crystals before an operation.

But the true test is whether it helps the patient. I doubt Egnor has any evidence for that, as it would require controlled tests. Do religious neurosurgeons who pray before an operation have better outcomes than nonbelieving surgeons? I doubt it, but the onus is on Egnor to show it. The only really good test of the efficacy of intercessory prayer in healing—the Templeton-funded study of healing in cardiac patients—showed no effect at all of prayer in healing, not even an effect in the right direction. The only significant effect was in the direction opposite to that prediction—intercessory prayer hurt the patients in one measure of healing!

And we don’t need a Christian community now during a pandemic: that’s been replaced by epidemiologists and, most of all, medicine and medical care, all based on materialistic science. 

Finally, has Dr. Egnor asked himself this: if praying to God stops people from dying, so God has the power to cure, why did God allow coronavirus to spread in the first place? It’s not just killing off evil people, you know: it’s taking babies who haven’t even had the chance to do evil, or learn about the salvific effects of accepting Jesus.  In fact, pandemics are one bit of evidence against the existence of any god who is powerful and empathic.

2.) Science’s rejection of God and divine intervention in nature is wrong because it’s circular. This is Egnor’s dumbest argument:

Of course, if God does not exist, Coyne is right to imply that prayer is based on a delusion. But here’s the point: if God does exist, prayer is essential.

So, I ask Coyne, does God exist? Coyne’s answers to the pivotal question have been puerile. His arguments center on an astonishing line of reasoning:

1) [S]cience is about finding material explanations of the world
2) Only materialistic explanations have been found by science
3) Therefore, no non-material explanations for nature are needed.

So Coyne uses science that expunges theism to refute theism. In short, he concludes that atheism is true by using a scientific method that presupposes atheism. Oddly, Coyne finds this logic compelling.

There’s no circularity here. Science is perfectly capable of sussing out supernatural explanations for things, as I discuss in Faith Versus Fact. If prayer worked, that would be one hint of a god or gods, and you can test that (n.b., it doesn’t work). If only CHRISTIAN prayers worked and not those of Jews or Muslims, that would be even more evidence for a god. And I discuss scenarios in my book which would convince many, including me, that there was a god. It’s just too bad for Egnor that none of this evidence has ever come to light.

In fact, there was a time when the supernatural and religion were part of science: when Newton thought God’s twiddling was necessary to keep the planets in their orbits, because Newton thought their orbits were otherwise unstable. Then Laplace showed that a naturalistic explanation explained the stability. There was a time when everyone thought the remarkable adaptations of plants and animals, as well as their origins, required a divine creator. Then Darwin came along and gave the correct naturalistic explanation. Over the history of humanity, one divine explanation after another for things like lightning, diseases, and plagues have been replaced by naturalistic explanation.

So here’s the lesson, which I’ll put in bold.  Science doesn’t reject divine or supernatural explanations because we rule them out in advance. We reject them because they haven’t been shown to work. (Sadly, my Ph.D. advisor Dick Lewontin once gave an unwise quote that has served repeatedly as ammunition for creationists who claim that scientists are sworn not to accept any evidence for gods, divinity or the supernatural. We’re not! Science investigates supernatural claims all the time.)

3.) Finally, Egnor says that the arguments for God’s existence are convincing. Here’s how he proves God:

It is noteworthy that Coyne’s efforts to refute the actual arguments for God’s existence consist of his insistence that he really isn’t so stupid and he provides a few links. He obviously doesn’t understand the arguments, nor does he wish to learn them.

If God exists, prayer in crisis is warranted and even essential. The arguments for God’s existence are irrefutable. Aquina’s Five Ways are a handy summary:

Aquinas’ First Way and a Stack of Books

Irrefutable, Impeccable, Inescapable: Aquinas’ Second Way

Aquinas’ Third Way: An Analogy to Moonlight

Evidence for the existence of God, as provided by Aquinas, actually consists of the same logical and evidentiary process as science itself, only with much stronger logic and more abundant evidence than any other scientific theory.

And, as Porky said,

And it is all. If there are going to be arguments for god that are convincing, they will have to be empirical ones, not theoretical lucubrations of ancient theologians.

Science versus religion: Are they “gifts” to each other?

November 29, 2019 • 10:30 am

Reader Mark called my attention to an accommodationist essay in Aeon by Tom McLeish, described as “a professor of natural philosophy in the Department of Physics at the University of York in the UK. He is the author of Faith and Wisdom in Science (2014), Let There Be Science (2016) and The Poetry and Music of Science (2019)”.

McLeish, to be sure, is a scientist of some accomplishment, having been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and has been awarded several academic medals. He’s also had an ecclesiastical award, having received the Lanfranc Medal from the Archbishop of Canterbury last year “as one of the most outstanding scientists of his generation, and the leading contemporary lay Anglican voice in the dialogue of science and faith..” But, as you might guess from his piece, he’s also not only been funded by the John Templeton Foundation (see here, for instance), but also is a trustee of the Foundation. I suspect that be a trustee you have to have a demonstrated commitment to accommodationism.

Click on the screenshot below to read the latest attempt to show that science and religion are best buddies:

First, McLeish tries to dispose of the “conflict theory”, which is sometimes framed as the claim that science and religion have constantly been in conflict on all fronts. McLeish (all his quotes are indented):

The late-Victorian origin of the ‘alternative history’ of unavoidable conflict is fascinating in its own right, but also damaging in that it has multiplied through so much public and educational discourse in the 20th century in both secular and religious communities. That is the topic of a new and fascinating study by the historian James Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition (2019). Finally, the concomitant assumption that scientists must, by logical force, adopt non-theistic worldviews is roundly rebutted by recent and global social science, such as Elaine Eklund’s major survey, also published in a new book, Secularity and Science (2019).

Well, even if you frame the theory McLeish’s way, it’s clear that there have indeed been sporadic but strong conflicts between science and religion, beginning with Galileo and extending through the creation-versus-evolution battle that started 160 years ago and continues to this day in the U.S. and Muslim world. But, as I explain in Faith Versus Fact, I do see the conflict as “unavoidable” in an important sense: both science and religion make statements about what’s true in the universe, but only science has a way to verify or falsify these statements. That’s why there are so many religions making competing truth claims, with no way to discern a “true” religion.

As far as Dr. Eckland is concerned, she has spent her career pushing the misleading idea that science and religion are in harmony because many scientists are religious. As I’ve argued many times before, all this shows is that some scientists can wall off a superstitious, faith-based way of ascertaining truth from a scientific, empirically-based way of ascertaining truth. It’s amazing to me that Ecklund has risen through the academic ranks by pushing this specious argument, but of course that’s what many people want to hear, including many nonbelievers who just want everybody to get along. (Ecklund, of course, is also heavily funded by Templeton.)

And so McLeish poses his questions:

It seems a good time to ask the ‘so what?’ questions, however, especially since there has been less work in that direction. If Islamic, Jewish and Christian theologies were demonstrably central in the construction of our current scientific methodologies, for example, then what might such a reassessment imply for fruitful development of the role that science plays in our modern world? In what ways might religious communities support science especially under the shadow of a ‘post-truth’ political order? What implications and resources might a rethink of science and religion offer for the anguished science-educational discussion on both sides of the Atlantic, and for the emerging international discussions on ‘science-literacy’?

Frankly, I’m tired of the claim that the foundations of modern science, and of its methods, are deeply rooted in Abrahamic religion. You can show that some early scientists, like Newton, thought that their work was revealing God’s plan, but even so they made progress by relying not on faith but on empirical observation. The methods of science are not the methods of religion, and were developed independently. Further, most good scientists in our day are atheists, and you’d be hard pressed to argue that they’re unwittingly using methods based on religion. Even if faith once motivated men like Newton, that motivation is defunct.

As for the other two questions, well, meh. How, for instance, is the creation-evolution debate going to be ameliorated and resolved by “a rethink of science and religion”?

Onward and upward. What points does the sweating professor make in his essay? I’ll give four. Briefly, they are these (McLeish’s words are indented):

1.) Without theology, the purpose of science is unclear, and even distorted. 

 . . . theology has retained a set of critical tools that address the essential human experience of purpose, value and ethics in regard to a capacity or endeavour.

Intriguingly, it appears that some of the social frustrations that science now experiences result from missing, inadequate or even damaging cultural narratives of science. Absence of a narrative that delineates what science is for leave it open to hijacking by personal or corporate sectarian interests alone, such as the purely economic framings of much government policy. It also muddies educational waters, resulting in an over-instrumental approach to science formation. I have elsewhere attempted to tease out a longer argument for what a ‘theology of science’ might look like, but even a summary must begin with examples of the fresh (though ancient) sources that a late-modern theological project of this kind requires.

Seriously, do you imagine that atheistic societies, like those in Scandinavia, would have a kind of science that is inferior to that of a more religious country like the U.S.? I doubt it. Britain is less religious than the U.S., and yet both Anglophonic countries do science the same way.

And if science is distorted by economic needs, well, sometimes those needs should be met, and at any rate that distortion is often the result of capitalism, or, as in the case of Lysenko’s Russia, of Communism. The fact is that any ideology can distort science, including theology.

You might be amused by McLeish’s contention that the Book of Job gives us material that is absolutely crucial to a theology of science. But I will drop that hot potato and pass on, giving just one specimen of McLeish’s muddled thought and writing:

The call to a questioning relationship of the mind from this ancient and enigmatic source [The Book of Job] feeds questions of purpose in the human engagement with nature from a cultural depth that a restriction to contemporary discourse does not touch.

I’m not sure that that’s even English. Why must these people write so turgidly?

2.)  Theology also promotes the doing of good science. 

A project on the human purpose for science that draws on theological thinking might, in this light, draw on writing from periods when this was an academically developed topic, such as the scientific renaissances of the 13th and 17th centuries. Both saw considerable scientific progress (such as, respectively, the development of geometric optics to explain the rainbow phenomenon, and the establishment of heliocentricity). Furthermore, both periods, while perfectly distinguishing ‘natural philosophy’ from theology, worked in an intellectual atmosphere that encouraged a fluidity of thought between them.

And yet the rise of modern biology since Darwin, including molecular biology and genetics, has nothing to do with theology. Jim Watson told me that Francis Crick in particular was motivated to discover the structure of DNA by his antitheism:  Crick wanted to demonstrate that the “secret of life” was purely physiochemical in nature.

What McLeish is doing is mistaking correlation for causation. As for the “scientific renaissance of the 13th century”, I know of no such thing. McLeish mentions a few names, but I’m not impressed with the work.

3.) The method of doing scientific experiments derives from theology.

McLeish:

The rise of experimentation in science as we now know it is itself a counterintuitive turn, in spite the hindsight-fuelled criticism of ancient, renaissance and medieval natural philosophers for their failure to adopt it. Yet the notion that one could learn anything general about the workings of nature by acts as specific and as artificial as those constituting an experiment was not at all evident, even after the foundation of the Royal Society. The 17th-century philosopher Margaret Cavendish was among the clearest of critics in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1668).

For as much as a natural man differs from an artificial statue or picture of a man, so much differs a natural effect from an artificial…

Paradoxically perhaps, it was the theologically informed imagination of the medieval and early modern teleology of science that motivated the counterintuitive step that won against Cavendish’s critique.

Now how did that happen? Because, argues McLeish, Francis Bacon formulated his “experimental philosophy” in theological terms. Adjudicating that claim is above my pay grade, but I’ll add that Galileo (who lived at the same time as Bacon) and the Arabic scholar Ibn al-Haytham, who worked on optics, also used the experimental methods, with hypotheses and tests. And did every experimentalist rely on Bacon’s “theology”?

Finally, as I’m growing weary, there’s this:

4.) We need more than the reason inherent in science to do science properly. Here McLeish quotes the critic and philosopher George Steiner to somehow confect a rapprochement between science and theology. If you can understand this kind of postmodern obfuscation, you’re better than I:

[Steiner} Only art can go some way towards making accessible, towards waking into some measure of communicability, the sheer inhuman otherness of matter…

Steiner’s relational language is full of religious resonance – for re-ligio is simply at source the re-connection of the broken. Yet, once we are prepared to situate science within the same relationship to the humanities as enjoyed by the arts, then it also fits rather snugly into a framing of ‘making accessible the sheer inhuman otherness of matter’. What else, on reflection, does science do?

(The superfluous dissection of words, like that of “religio” in the antepenultimate sentence, is a marker of postmodern writing. It’s showoffy but always contrived.)

What else does science do? Is matter really perceived as “inhuman”? Are the advances of geology and physics scary unless they’re somehow “humanized”? In truth, I don’t know what McLeish is talking about here, and I have a suspicion that neither does he.

In the end, McLeish reveals a motivation for accommodationism that I suspected from the beginning of his piece: his realization that religion, which he apparently embraces, is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the modern world; and he has to show that it’s still relevant. And so he says this:

Although both theology and philosophy suffer frequent accusations of irrelevance, on this point of brokenness and confusion in the relationship of humans to the world, current public debate on crucial science and technology indicate that both strands of thought are on the mark. Climate change, vaccination, artificial intelligence – these and other topics are marked in the quality of public and political discourse by anything but enlightenment values.

Yes, irrationality, confirmation bias, and other psychological distortions of reality are pervasive, and while philosophy itself can contribute to clearing up confusion and framing discussion, theology—which is simply philosophy bent out of shape by a belief in the nonexistent—has nothing of relevance to contribute to matters like climate change and vaccination. Look how theology has already intruded uselessly into discussions of abortion and human reproduction!

And so, and I draw to a close, McLeish’s defense of religion’s value to science strains credulity, drawing on postmodernist Bruno Latour’s “call. . . for a re-examination of the connection between mastery, technology and theology as a route out of the environmental impasse.” If you understand that, call me. But here’s how McLeish uses Latour:

What forms would an answer to Latour’s call take? One is simply the strong yet gentle repeating of truth to power that a confessional voice for science, and evidence-based thinking, can have when it is resting on deep foundations of a theology that understands science as a gift rather than a threat. One reason that Katharine Hayhoe, the Texan climate scientist, is such a powerful advocate in the United States for taking climate change seriously is that she is able to explicitly work through a theological argument for environmental care with those who resonate with that, but whose ideological commitments are impervious to secular voices.

Well, yes, theology should recognize science as a gift rather than a threat. But the fact that McLeish needs to say that already shows anti-science currents among some theologians. And really, citing one religious climate scientist shows that theology is the way forward in solving global warming? Give me a break! If Greta Thunberg—the 16-year-old whose activities have prompted worldwide activism against anthropogenic climate change—is religious, it’s news to me. Thunberg is powerful because she’s angry, highly motivated, and representative of a younger generation that will experience more serious effects of climate change.

McLeish’s piece reads to me like muddleheaded palaver. But what else do you expect when a trustee of the John Templeton Foundation has to justify the value of religion for science? Everyone else besides the faithful already knows that religion has nothing useful to say to science.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ evidence

September 4, 2019 • 10:45 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “being”, once again highlights the bizarre world of theology. I needn’t expand on this, for it’s certainly true that many believers mistake “conviction” (or “revelation” or “feeling”) for evidence. And the last panel gives the whole thing a kind of ontological-argument feel:

A philosopher at the NYT writes about the incoherence of most people’s theism

April 8, 2019 • 12:00 pm

It’s surprising that the New York Times would publish an atheistic op-ed showing that most people’s notion of God is incoherent, but the piece below (click on the screenshot), is actually Unsophisticated Atheism in at least part of its argument. And the parts that aren’t weird are old and familiar arguments.

Well, perhaps believers need to hear arguments about God that have been repeated to previous generations, explaining why Atterton, a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University, attacks the claim that God can be omnipotent. He first trots out the old bromide “Can God make a stone so big He can’t lift it?” and then asks, “Can God create a world in which evil does not exist?” The first question is barely worth arguing, but the second is. And, as has been pointed out many times before, the existence of moral evil in the world, while explained by theologians as necessary for the action of free will (NOTE: it’s libertarian, you-can-do-otherwise free will this argument uses), does not explain the existence of physical evils like the suffering of animals, the diseases like leukemia that kill children, tsunamis that sweep away the innocent, and so on. As I’ve said before, the existence of physical evil is the Achilles Heel of Abrahamic religion and the death knell for the idea of an omnibenevolent God. Only through tortuous and unconvincing logic can you explain why God allows little kids to get leukemia.

And there’s no reason God couldn’t have created a world in which people can choose freely, but always choose to do the right and moral thing. Free will and The Best of All Possible Worlds are not logically inconsistent.

But here’s the bit that gets me: God couldn’t be omniscient because if he were, he’d be touched with evil. Or so Atterton maintains:

. . . if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know. But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection. Why?

There are some things that we know that, if they were also known to God, would automatically make Him a sinner, which of course is in contradiction with the concept of God. As the late American philosopher Michael Martin has already pointed out, if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy. But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect.

What about malice? Could God know what malice is like and still retain His divine goodness? The 19-century German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer was perhaps the first philosopher to draw attention to what he called the “diabolical” in his work “On Human Nature”

. . . It might be argued, of course, that this is precisely what distinguishes humans from God. Human beings are inherently sinful whereas God is morally perfect. But if God knows everything, then God must know at least as much as human beings do. And if human beings know what it is like to want to inflict pain on others for pleasure’s sake, without any other benefit, then so does God. But to say that God knows what it is like to want to inflict pain on others is to say that God is capable of malicious enjoyment.

However, this cannot be true if it really is the case that God is morally perfect. A morally perfect being would never get enjoyment from causing pain to others. Therefore, God doesn’t know what it is like to be human. In that case He doesn’t know what we know. But if God doesn’t know what we know, God is not all knowing, and the concept of God is contradictory. God cannot be both omniscient and morally perfect. Hence, God could not exist.

I don’t really get this. You can understand what it’s like to sin without being a sinner yourself; all you have to do, if you’re God, is say, “Okay, let me be imbued with the feeling that somebody gets when he kicks a dog.” That doesn’t make God a dog-kicker, someone who enjoys kicking dogs, or in any way sinful—at least in my view. If God were omniscient, he’d know what it would feel like to sin without having sinned himself.

Now there’s another issue not discussed: if God knows everything, then he knows how we’re going to decide to act. Doesn’t that obviate the libertarian free will beloved of religionists? You might say that it doesn’t, but if libertarian free will means anything in a theistic world, it has to be a choice that is made without the knowledge of God. Otherwise the concept of eternal reward and punishment have no meaning, and we’d be a bunch of Calvinists whose fate is already known to God.

But I don’t believe in either God or free will, so I leave this vexing questions to the theologians.