The truth of science:

The truth of faith:

h/t: Otter

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll wants to get back to research, and so is taking a break from blogging of undetermined length.  I, for one, will miss his posts on physics and his cool-headed, reasoned analysis of the faith/science question.  Appropriately, his last substantive post bears the double-entendre title “Reluctance to let go”: it’s about how faith impedes understanding of the world.

. . . the public discourse is so badly distorted that it has little relationship to the real issues. Instead of taking the natural world seriously, we have discussions about “Faith.” We pretend that questions of meaning and purpose and value must be the domain of religion. We are saddled with bizarre, antiquated attitudes toward sex and love, which have terrible consequences for real human beings.

I understand the reluctance to let go of religion as the lens through which we view questions of meaning and morality. For thousands of years it was the best we could do; it provided social structures and a framework for thinking about our place in the world. But that framework turns out not to be right, and it’s time to move on.

Rather than opening our eyes and having the courage and clarity to accept the world as it is, and to tackle some of the real challenges it presents, as a society we insist on clinging to ideas that were once perfectly reasonable, but have long since outlived their usefulness. Nature obeys laws, we are part of nature, and our job is to understand our lives in the context of reality as it really is. Once that attitude goes from being “extremist” to being mainstream, we might start seeing some real progress.

Can anyone claim posts like this are strident or uncivil? Come back soon, Sean; we’ll miss you.

As I predicted yesterday, the AAAS panel on science and faith turned out to be a warm, snuggly love-fest between the magisteria, with scientists and preachers united against those awful damned New Atheists. I’m sure that the Templeton Foundation, which funded this discussion, is licking its chops in glee.  Inside Higher Ed reports what the panelists said:

Jennifer Wiseman, astrophysicist and Christian:

Speaking to a crowd of scientists, she said that the disciplines of science and religion have a lot to learn from one another .

. . . Wiseman said it is incumbent on members of the scientific community to reach out to “the people who reach people,” or religious leaders.

William Phillips, Methodist and Nobel-winning physicist:

Facilitating such a conversation, however, is no easy task. Some of the scientists on hand to welcome Wiseman as head of the program noted that misconceptions about their general faith, or lack thereof, often go unchallenged. The stereotype that all scientists are atheists, they argue, hinders dialogue.

“There are plenty of scientists who have no problem being serious about their science and serious about their religion,” said William Phillips, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the University of Maryland’s Joint Quantum Institute, and an active member of the United Methodist Church. “If DoSER [the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion] can get that message out, then that’s a good start.”

This issue took center stage last year when Francis S. Collins was named the new head of the National Institutes of Health. Some in the scientific community took issue with Collins’s open profession of his faith and belief in God.

Phillips described this as little more than name-calling, noting his disgust that some of his fellow scientists would consider someone unfit to lead an organization like the NIH purely because of his or her belief in God. He countered that those who protested Collins’s appointment “obviously” had not met him or did not know his work.

Howard Smith, astrophysicist and “observant Jew”:

Other scientists on hand for Wiseman’s introduction took aim at “new atheism” – a more provocative brand of non-belief that takes aim at religious beliefs and whose rise is often associated with the works of scientists like Richard Dawkins and thinkers like Christopher Hitchens. They argued that these individuals make civil discourse between science and religion nearly impossible.

Howard Smith, senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a self-described observant Jew, defended the compatibility of his faith and scientific inquiry against attacks from “new atheists.”

“I strongly object to the notion that I need to compartmentalize my life,” he said. “I do not have the absolute answers to science or religion.… I’m not religious because I’m ignorant. I’m religious because I’m in awe.”

David Anderson, pastor:

David Anderson, pastor of Bridgeway Community Church, in Columbia, Md., told the roomful of scientists, that “comprehension begins with conversation.” Anderson, who also anchors a popular daily talk show on a local Christian radio station, said that “it is hard to demonize one another,” as scientists and religious leaders, when they come together for face-to-face dialogue.

Sadly, the problem is not one of demonization.  It is, I fear, a problem of conflicting methods and outcomes.

Over at Metamagician, Russell Blackford, who was once an evangelical Christian, discusses what he (and many of us) mean when we assert that religion and science are incompatible:

In my case, what I say is something like this: they are incompatible in a sense. Accordingly, it is misleading to state simply “science and religion are compatible” as if there’s no problem. If you say that, you’d better gloss it, and you’d better acknowledge that, in the sense that actually matters to traditionally religious people, they may not be compatible, and that there’s thus a big problem. When I was a religious person, I didn’t care whether it was psychologically possible for some or even many people to be both (a) scientists and (b)religious. I cared about the consistency between (1) the truth claims of the sort of the religion I subscribed to and (2) the more robust truth claims of science, and inferences that could be reached from these together with other fairly plausible premises.

The position as I see it is something like this: viewed historically, religion needs to thin out its epistemic content, or to introduce notions of the capricious way supernatural beings act, or to adopt intellectually unacceptable ad hoc tactics of various kinds, in order to maintain a formal compatibility with the scientific picture of the world; the advance of science pushes God into smaller gaps; and some religious views are plainly inconsistent with robust scientific findings. All this reflects a general mismatch between the scientific approach to the world and the religious approach, which follows from (1) the fact that they use different methods for discovering the truth and (2) the methods of science do not, historically and contingently, reach the same conclusions as previously reached by religion. It turns out that religion needs to adapt constantly, thinning out its original truth-claims or making various ad hoc manoeuvres, or it find itself plainly contradicted by science.

All of this then feeds into arguments that the religions of the world are probably false across the board. The evidence is that they use unreliable means of looking for knowledge – but why, if they have access to gods, angels, etc.? Meanwhile, various specific religions are already falsified to the extent they are plainly or less plainly inconsistent with robust elements of the scientific picture of the world.

In the last few weeks we’ve seen several people trying to put a favorable spin on data that clearly show how less religious and more atheistic/agnostic are American scientists than the general public.  “American scientists are surprisingly religious!” they proclaim.  If a scientist tried this tactic with those data, she’d be accused of distorting the facts.  Blackford shows that, seen objectively, the data give no solace to accommodationists:

More research needs to be done, but the data we have is totally consistent with the non-accommodationist idea that science tends to push people either away from religion entirely or into some sort of “thin” religion with little of the traditional content. That is not going to comfort religious people who are suspicious of science, and nor will it comfort those accomodationists who want to paint the picture that there’s just no problem. For what it’s worth, the data we have favour the non-accommodationist position, once the latter is understood – and not represented by a straw man version.

Frankly, I think the better evidence is what you get when you simply place the claims of various religions side by side with the more robust findings of science. Given what we now know, do the religious claims seem plausible or not?

Accommodationists avoid answering this crucial question at all costs, for the answer doesn’t help their cause.  Instead they show displacement behavior, banging on about issues of tone and stridency.

Yesterday The American Academy for the Advancement of Science had a panel discussion on the science/faith dialogue at its annual meeting. I haven’t heard the outcome, but you can guess what it was given that the number of discussants who find science and faith incompatible was apparently a big fat zero, and that the the Templeton Foundation helped fund the panel. The link in the first sentence leads to a video of astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman, a religious person who was just hired as “director of the Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion.”

In the video, Wiseman states that she’s “trying to help people see a harmony between scientific study of the natural world on the one hand and also grappling with these bigger questions of, you know, Is there purpose? Is there meaning?  Is there a way of incorporating a faith life in harmony with scientific study?—and I think there is.”

Is that the job of the AAAS—to promote just those theological views that espouse harmony between faith and science?

And, inevitably, HuffPo puffs up the panel with a post, “Science, Religion, and Civil Dialogue,” by Alan Leshner, CEO of the AAAS (I wasn’t aware that any scientific organization had a CEO) as well as executive publisher of Science. The word “civil” here is a tipoff that the dialogue will be only about the compatibility of science and faith, and will ignore the many scientists who feel that these areas are epistemically and methodologically incompatible.  Leshner also—and I’m getting used to this—distorts the recent study by Elaine Ecklund on the religious views of scientists, twisting her findings to make it seem that scientists are more religious than they are:

Of course, some people in sociologist and survey director Elaine Ecklund’s study group, as with the general population, described themselves as atheists. Yet even within that category, many also identified themselves as “spiritual.” This may explain why, in 275 lengthy follow-up interviews Ecklund found only five scientists who said they actively oppose religion.

Some scientists described themselves as atheists? This is, to put it charitably, an understatement of the facts. As Jason Rosenhouse points out about Ecklund’s survey:

Asked about their beliefs in God, 34% chose “I don’t believe in God,” while 30% chose, “I do not know if there is a God, and there is no way to find out.” That’s 64% who are atheist or agnostic, as compared to just 6% of the general public.

Have a look at Ecklund’s actual data and the analysis by Jason Rosenhouse here and here.

It is disingenuous for an organization like the AAAS to keep putting on these dialogues, and to pretend that faith and science are perfectly compatible, in the face of the palpable facts that:

• Science and faith are epistemically and methodologically incompatible
• American scientists are far less religious than the general public
• A huge number of Americans, including those who feel that evolution subverts their faith, see a real conflict between science and religion.

And the AAAS is a science organization, supposedly devoted to furthering science. Instead it seems to be engaged, like the National Center for Science Education and the National Academy of Sciences, in one-sided, two-bit theology.

As I’ve said many times before, I don’t think it’s the business of these organizations to do theology, let alone promote only theologies of compatibility.  Let them just deal with science.  But if they feel that they must do theology, then by all means highlight the many scientists who find faith and science incompatible. To do otherwise is intellectually dishonest.

Step up to the plate, AAAS. If you’re going to do these dialogues, and represent the world accurately, how about this one: “Science and Faith: The Eternal Conflict”.

You can find a lively discussion of the AAAS business over at Butterflies and Wheels.

Filmmaker James Gunn has collected on his website a number of anatomical takes of cartoon characters.  There are too many to show here, so if you like these go to jamesgunn.com for more.

The fabulous skeletal reconstructions were made by South Korean artist Hyung Koo Lee using resin, paint, and wire.  I’ve added the original cartoon images to refresh your memory.

Goofy:

Tweety bird ( I just realized how neotenic he is):

Felix the cat:

Donald Duck (see Gunn’s website for Huey, Dewey, and Louie) :

Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner:

And, of course, Bugs Bunny:

One more (by Jason Freeny, who has cool stuff on his website):

h/t: Stash Krod

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