Tag: Russell Blackford

Accommodationism, philosophy, and the meaning of life

May 1, 2009 • 1:11 pm

Over at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club, Russell Blackford has a nice post on accommodationism, and how it has been deliberately but subtly integrated into the supposedly religion-neutral statements of organizations like the National Center for Science Education.  He’s a philosopher, so his analysis is much more finely reasoned than mine have been.  And lest you think that Russell is the Antichrist, just look at the nice picture of him and his cat that I posted two days ago.

Wednesday relief cat

April 29, 2009 • 7:41 am

In view of all the heat emanating from the debate about religious accommodationism, including the new statements on Panda’s Thumb that P. Z. Myers, I, and now Richard Hoppe are making the lot of young earth creationists much easier by telling the truth about the number of atheistic scientists, I think it’s time for a break.  But I can’t resist one more question about accommodationism:  where is the evidence that showing people how their faith comports with evolution makes them more likely to accept evolution? I’m not talking about anecdotes here, but systematic data. After all, the AAAS, NCSE, and NCSE predicate their entire strategy on accepting this principle.  Would it have been much easier for Christians to accept the heliocentric solar system has the Pope shown them that it could be seen as consistent with the Bible?  I don’t think so.  I think that in the end  scientific truth is always accepted by the public (albeit sometimes slowly), and that its acceptance is not accelerated by stroking people with religious platitudes.

Whoops, I’m on a tirade. Enough.  Here, for your delectation, is non-accommodationist philosopher Russell Blackford (a party to this debate) and his atheist cat Mystical Prince Felix (“Felix” for short).  Felix is a blue point ragdoll.

russfee

Russell Blackford on science organizations and the compatibility issue

April 25, 2009 • 5:38 am

Over at his blog Metamagician and the Hellfire Club, Russell Blackford has a nice post about the inappropriateness of scientific organizations taking a stand on what religions are compatible with evolution:

. . . . . .But what if I’m wrong about this? Perhaps there are Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) philosophers who can answer the point I’m making. Well, fine. But even if there are, official organisations representing science don’t – or shouldn’t – get to adjudicate between them and me. This is a highly contentious issue that falls outside the expertise of such bodies. In any event, individual scientists are entitled to have views on such philosophical issues, and it’s clear that many scientists take positions much like mine. Those scientists have every right to be angry that their official organisations – organisations that are supposed to be representing them – are taking a stand on the issue. . .

Science organisations should stick to the point that certain findings are the result of systematic, rational investigation of the world, supported overwhelmingly by several lines of converging evidence. In putting that case, they can be “religion blind”; they should present the evidence for the scientific picture, but that’s as far as they should go. They should not comment on what specific theological positions are or are not compatible with science. Leave that to the squabblings of philosophers and theologians, and, indeed, of individual scientists or other citizens. We can think and argue about it for ourselves.

Russell Blackford goes after faith/science compatibility

March 31, 2009 • 5:48 am

In a really nice essay on his blog “Metamagician and the Hellfire Club”, Australian writer Russell Blackford discusses the issue of the compatibility between science and faith and how that has become the official position of bodies like The National Academy of Sciences (a tip of the hat to PZ at Pharyngula for calling this to our attention). Blackford’s essay is a sarcastic take on an earlier post by Matt Nisbet (a professor of communication at American University who writes the blog “Framing Science”); Nisbet went after Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists for needlessly placing science and religion in opposition.

Blackford puts Nisbet in a full nelson:

. . . Nisbet elaborates how the National Academy of Science (NAS) and related bodies in the US used market research to decide what messages to present to the American public. Having researched the issue, with focus groups and a survey of course, the NAS decided to announce that religion and science are compatible.

Clearly, this is how you do it. For example, it would be wrong to check whether any particular religions or sects make claims that are inconsistent with robust, well-corroborated scientific findings. That’s obviously irrelevant. Furthermore, it would be quite wrong to consider any more (shall we say?) philosophical issues. For example, might there be an argument that even some of the more moderate versions of Abrahamic monotheism include doctrines that are in tension with the emerging image of the world offered by science? How well does the idea of a loving and providential deity square with the millions of years of suffering produced by the slow processes of biological evolution?

You and I might not expect the NAS to take a stand on questions like that. We might think that the compatibility of science with religion would be a matter of some legitimate controversy. If we thought like that – silly us – we might then think it inappropriate for bodies such as the NAS to adopt a position one way or the other. After all, we’d say, philosophers of religion disagree among themselves on this, as do individual scientists, so why is it appropriate for a professional body to take a stand? But we’d be wrong. Obviously the issue can be settled by sufficiently well-planned market research involving focus groups, surveys, etc. In this case, the research told the NAS that they should present material to the public that included “a prominent three page special color section that features testimonials from religious scientists, religious leaders and official church position statements, all endorsing the view that religion and evolution are compatible.” Yay!

This is how to settle a philosophical debate! . . .

So there we have it. When the NAS takes a stance on a highly controversial issue in philosophy of religion, based on market research suggesting that this will help make science appear more acceptable to the American public, that is ethical behaviour. It is certainly not, as you and I might have thought, a meretricious exercise in intellectual dishonesty. But when Dawkins presents his sincerely-held views, relying partly (though by no means entirely) on arguments from his own area of scientific expertise, that is an unethical exercise in denigrating social groups and, yes, in Giving Resonance (don’t worry too much what that expression might actually mean) to the paranoid fantasy, er narrative, “that the scientific establishment has an anti-religion agenda”. Never mind that Dawkins has never made such a claim; one must always be very careful not to go around Giving Resonance.

Another post critical of Nisbet’s stance can be found at the blog Entertaining Research.

Religious scientists and liberal theologians can tout the compatibility of faith and science until they’re blue in the faith [typo: I meant “blue in the face” but I’ll leave the Freudian slip], but in so doing they are seeing a world that they would like to inhabit, not the world they do inhabit. As I said in my New Republic essay on compatibility,

a true harmony between science and religion requireseither doing away with most people’s religion and replacing it with a watered down deism, or polluting science with unnecessary, untestable, and unreasonable spiritual claims.. . . The reason that many liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.

Faith, as it is practiced by many, many people, is simply incompatible with science. It doesn’t solve the problem to tell them to put their beliefs in line with science.