I’ve just finished reading the recently-published collection of short essays edited by Gregg Caruso, Science and Religion: 5 Questions. Caruso posed the same five questions to 33 theologians, scientists, philosophers, and others who have worked on or written about the relationship of science and religion. Here are the five questions:
- What initially drew you to theorizing about science and religion?
- Do you think science and religion are compatible when it comes to understanding cosmology (the origin of the universe), biology (the origin of life and of the human species), ethics, and/or the human mind (minds, brains, souls, and free will)?
- Some theorists maintain that science and religion occupy non-overlapping magisteria—i.e., that science and religion each have legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority, and these two domains do not overlap. Do you agree? [JAC: This of course is Steve Gould’s famous NOMA solution to the science-religion “conflict,” though others like Whitehead had proposed it earlier.]
- What do you consider to be your own most important contribution(s) to theorizing about science and religion?
- What are the most important open questions, problems or challenges confronting the relationship between science and religion, and what are the prospects for progress?
When this book appeared after I’d already finished The Albatross, I was a bit upset, as I thought it would have been a good resource to inform my arguments about the incompatibility of science and religion. It turned out, though, that I’d already read most of the contributors’ thoughts on this, and so I didn’t learn much that was new. But for those of you who haven’t spent several years reading deeply about science and religion, the book is a valuable resource to begin investigating this very live controversy.
Here are some of the contributors: Susan Blackmore, Sean Carroll, Rabbi David Wolpe (misspelled “Wople” in both the contents and chapter heading), Victor Stenger, Peter van Inwagen, Michael Shermer, Alex Rosenberg, William Dembski, William Lane Craig, Daniel Dennett, John Haught, Rebecca Goldstein, James Randi, John Searle, Mary Midgeley, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Ruse, and John Polkinghorne. You can see that there’s a good mix of philosphers, scientists, and theologians.
As I said, if you’ve read these people’s works you won’t be very surprised at their answers. What did surprise me, however, were two things. First, the relative lengths of the contributions of theologians versus everybody else. Theologians like Polkinghorne, Haught, and van Inwagen would often write ten pages of answers, dilating at length on their views about theology and science (especially the former), while the contributions of scientists and philosophers seemed on average shorter (I haven’t done the statistics). The philosopher of mind John Searle, for instance, wrote only a page and a half, answering each question in three to seven lines. In other words, the theologians were more full of hot air.
Second, the answer to question number 3—whether science and religion occupy distinct magisteria—was almost uniformly “no.” In other words, nobody is buying Gould’s hypothesis. While some of the answers are qualified, I can’t name anyone offhand who agreed with Gould’s thesis. (I myself have rejected it in two longer pieces—here and here—though I don’t have a piece in this volume.)
And the reason is heartening, at least to me. One of the main theses in The Albatross is that the incompatibility of science and religion rests on their competition to understand the universe, and on the inability of religion’s methodology to achieve any understanding. That thesis, in turn, depends on the supposition that religion makes truth claims, and is not just about sociality, morality, or nebulous and indescribable Grounds of Being. Now anyone with the slightest acquaintance of religion as it’s practiced by most believers knows that this is true—religions do make truth claims, often many of them. Christianity, for example, is grounded on the claims that Jesus was the son of God (or was part of God), came to Earth, and was crucified and resurrected for our sins. Those are claims about the existence of God, of a historical Jesus and what happened to him, and about our existence beyond death.
Any honest theologian knows that. Even though he or she might reject the very notion of religious truth claims, they surely know that most believers’ faith indeed rests on such claims. If people knew for sure that Jesus was a pure fiction, and didn’t get crucified and wasn’t resurrected, how many people would be Christians?
Many theologians answer “no” to question 3 precisely because they realize that Gould’s claim of nonoverlap—part of which said that science embraced questions about the natural world, and religion only about meaning and morals—wasn’t true. Religion, they say, does make claims about the natural world (let’s not quibble about “supernatural” versus “natural” here; we can simply say that both science and the Abrahamic religions make claims about about reality—about what exists).
Here, for example, is part of theologian Peter van Inwagen’s answer to that question about NOMA:
. . . I don’t think that, taken as a whole, the “non-overlapping magisteria” view is acceptable. My reason for saying this is not profound; it consists simply of a recognition of the fact that most religions—mine included—incorporate doctrines that pertain to matters other than morals and the way we should live our lives and the meaning of those lives. Here is one example that I have already touched on: if the steady-state cosmology had turned out to be strongly supported by the cosmological evidence, that support would have raised an important obstacle to my belief in the Christian doctrine of creation.
So there you have it: religious claims are subject to adjudication by evidence. Presumably van Inwagen sees a steady-state Universe as refuting the idea that God created the universe, so it had a beginning. But I think he’s misunderstanding the steady-state universe here, since, as far as I know, that obsolete theory proposed that the universe did have a beginning, and is still expanding, but that new matter comes into being as the universe expands, so it always looks the same everywhere. [Correction: See note below when I vetted this to our Official Website physicist.]
Regardless, why doesn’t the doctrine of evolution “raise an important obstacle” to van Inwagen’s belief in creation? I suspect he’d answer that God created through the process of evolution. Well, why couldn’t God make a steady-state universe, then? After all, even the steady-state universe, I think, is supposed to have had a beginning. But at any rate, the near-unanimity of theologians who reject NOMA in this book do so on the grounds that religion does indeed make claims about reality.
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Update: I’ve asked the Official Website Physicist™ Sean Carroll about the nature of the steady-state universe, and van Ingwagen’s theological take on it, and he’s responded as follows:
I’m not an expert on different varieties of steady-state universes. Certainly the traditional understanding is that they don’t have a beginning — that overall they look the same at every moment in time (thus the name). But I can’t promise that someone hasn’t attached the name “steady-state” to some unusual model with a beginning. (Steady state is very different from “inflationary,” which is a type of universe that often does have a beginning.)
Also, I see no problem whatsoever for a clever Christian theologian to reconcile a beginningless universe with traditional theology. (“You didn’t think we meant that God created the universe with some literal first moment of time, did you? How charmingly non-sophisticated you are!”)
“Commendably” my tuchus! As far as the first paragraph goes, yes, some New Atheists, including me, are anti-theists, but are we really “unusually” angry compared to the “old atheists”? I suggest that you read some of those old atheists and see if they’re really markedly different in tone from people like Dawkins and Harris. Read, for instance, Nietzsche (now there’s anger!), H. L. Mencken, R. G. Ingersoll, Bertrand Russell, and even Carl Sagan, who took more than few sarcastic potshots at faith in his time.
I don’t think Burkeman has had a look at Mencken or Ingersoll, because if he did he wouldn’t argue that New Atheists are unusually angry compared to the old ones. What’s new, I think, is not our level of passion, but the willingness to be public about it instead of shutting up, combined with the notion that religions make claims that can be tested through reason and empiricism: religious tenets are, by and large, hypotheses. What’s largely new in New Atheism, therefore, isn’t “anger,” but unwillingness to keep quiet combined with applying a scientific approach to religion.
And really, Burkeman is unfair to the atheists he cites, for among the angriest people around, according to his criterion, are religionists. Just read some David Bentley Hart, Terry Eagleton, or even John Haught if you want to see vociferous scorn of atheism. Why are religionists so angry? I’m not mentioning, of course, the many Muslim believers and theologians—the angriest people at all. Atheists, after all, don’t issue fatwas or kill people with whom they disagree. Burkeman is silent on the issue of religionist anger.
As for the second paragraph, I suggest you click on the links, including the three of mine at this site, and see if you see those as embodying pure anger rather than passionate arguments against the harms of religion—harms that Burkeman, according to his piece, doesn’t accept.
Burkeman’s biggest mistake is construing the writings of New Atheists as showing prima facie that they are angrier than other people, even the “quiet’ atheists. I, for one, have never in my life been described as an “angry person” (at least as far as I know), though of course I do get angry at times. Nor, from having known the other New Atheists, can I think of one that I think of as inherently an angry person. Dawkins, for example, is mild-mannered, though he can be passionate when he’s either discussing the harms of religion or fighting back in response to what he sees as unfounded criticism. I have never known either Sam Harris or Steve Pinker to even raise their voices. If you gave all of us the same psychological tests that those other atheists took, would we show abnormal “dispositions to anger”? I don’t think so. So why don’t you put a muzzle on it, Mr. Burkeman, until we’ve all had our psychological tests? In light of that, this statement of Burkeman is simply unfounded:
Burkeman’s second mistake is assuming that situational anger is a bad thing. Greta Christina’s book, Why are you Atheists So Angry?: 99 Things that Piss off the Godless, lists a lot of the bad things about religion that do inspire anger. What is our response suppose to be to child rape by priests? To the beheading of apostates by ISIS? To the murder of witches in Africa? To the demonization of gays by American Christians? To such things anger is the appropriate response, for it’s anger and a sense of injustice that motivates action. I wonder what Burkeman’s reponse would be to the “anger” of civil rights activists in the sixties.
But you can be angry about some things and still not be an “angry person.” If I were to list the atheists whom I so see as angry people, it would be those “ragebloggers” who seem to make a career of dissing other atheists, finding offense at everything, and, most important, in giving the impression that there is little in life that brings any joy.
So here’s Burkeman’s summing-up:
There’s not a scintilla of evidence here that the loudest people are also the angriest people. If Burkeman is going to let the “quiet” atheists off the hook because psychological tests show that they’re no angrier than anyone else, then he should keep quiet until he uses the same tests to show a correlation between the “anger” of atheists and their participation in public life. After all, there are plenty of public atheists who aren’t “angry” by even Burkeman’s lights, including Chris Stedman, Michael Ruse, Philip Kitcher, Massimo Pigliucci, and the physicist Sean Carroll. Clearly a public avowal of nonbelief doesn’t mean you’re angry. But I reject the whole notion that we’re angrier than others, since it’s based on Burkeman’s own biased impression of what “anger” is, his ignorance of historical atheism, and his failure to consider the “anger” of religionists and accommodationists.
h/t: Christopher, Heather