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On knowledge and consistency

Well, the cat and the pigeons are having a field day, although it is open yet to interpretation which are the cats and which the pigeons.

Josh Rosenau’s post, which I approvingly cited and riffed off, has led to a number of critical blog posts in the ongoing accommodationism war. I say war and not debate because the matter has rarely been civilly debated, but I am in fact rather impressed at the overall civility of the commentators on both sides at my previous post, but less so elsewhere. Jason Josh himself has wound it back a little, but that’s fine too. Rants and polite expressions both have their place.

Larry Moran, who despite our obvious disagreements I count as a friend (and will continue to do so despite his being clearly wrong) has responded. First he defends the Verification Principle and makes my case about the positivist basis for the incompatibilist view. Well and good. If he takes a positivist view, he has a principle that is not scientific, and upon which his entire rejection of other, non-scientific, beliefs rests.

He misreads my view that if you take this approach you have to treat the compatibility of science and religion as an empirical issue, and assumes I am making the argument that this is what it means for science and religion to be consistent. I obviously do not think that – it was a reductio. Clearly the issue is whether or not the tenets of science and religion are compatible logically or reasonably. This cannot be resolved by assertion, such as simply defining religion as irrational and eliminating it from consideration. So we must, out of necessity, insist on religious scientists and philosophers putting their views out there so we can debate the matter.

I wrote: “As an accommodationist, I think that whether or not science and religion should be treated as compatible, in fact they are, or as compatible as any potentially competing set of beliefs may be, such as the belief that science is the only way to gain justifiable beliefs, which is not, itself, scientifically justifiable.” Larry read this thus:

I argue that if you adopt science as a valid way of gathering knowledge then most everything about religion fails the tests of science. Those who claim to be scientists and still believe that there’s a God who answers prayers are expressing two contradictory positions. You can’t claim to be thinking like a scientist while holding on to beliefs that have been refuted by science.

Only I didn’t say that religion is a way of knowing. It may be, if it is true, but I have no dog in that hunt, and I don’t need to. I said that this was about ways to gain justifiable beliefs. PZ Myers, who I also claim as a friend and will be flying to meet when he finishes the Atheism Lovefest in Melbourne (no, I’m not miffed I wasn’t invited to speak, why do you ask?), makes the same mistake – he tries, as Chris Schoen discusses, to show that his love for his wife is a scientific inference. I think there’s a clear is-ought fallacy here; trial and error may explain why Paul and his Trophy Wife[tm] found each other compatible, but the justifiable belief that he loves her is not the result of anything like a scientific inference. It’s what linguistic philosophers call a “performative”: he loves her in virtue of expressing the love. How he got there is beside the point.

A belief can be justifiable in a number of ways – in Wittgensteinian terms, a belief is justified when it satisfies the criteria for that sort of belief among a language community, who have a self-contained set of rules. Chess players have beliefs about what it is wrong to do (you can’t punch the other player, for instance) that are not in any sense scientific. Religious beliefs may be of that kind; that’s for those who care to argue. I don’t need to say they must have ways of knowing, merely that they have beliefs that satisfy some criteria, and we can then talk about those criteria.

Larry thinks I am committed to arguing that Young Earth Creationism is okay, which is a bit nonplussing. I think that if a scientist holds that, say, the second law of thermodynamics is true, and yet thinks that God can overcome the second law in a miracle, he had better think something like “miracles suspend but do not falsify the laws of physics”. In other words, if Miller thinks God did things that are not physically possible, I hope he doesn’t thereby abandon the scientific enterprise, but (having met and talked to the man) I hardly suppose that he does. So he slides under my, but not Larry’s, limbo bar. But a YEC is beyond the pale, because in order to argue for their miracles, they do reject that science can tell us about the world. They have to, since everything we know about the world must be false if they are right. So why would I have to defend them? Their views just are incompatible, explicitly, with science. I am not sure this is true of Millerian views. Miller still does good science, and that’s all I really care about.

Larry also thinks that a failure to reject religion in science is an assertion that religion should be in science. The NCSE has, it seems, people asserting that science and religion are compatible, and therefore they must think that science and religion are the same sort of thing. I don’t get that at all. There is a fallacy known as the argument from ignorance in which not knowing that X is false means knowing that X is true. I think that if NCSE fails to exclude religious belief (yes, because its director and others who work there are often religious themselves), it doesn’t follow they are promoting religion in science, which is a whole other position I don’t see them take.

Then there’s the problem of what counts as “knowledge”. Larry thinks that “Knowledge, in my mind, is a form of justified belief that can be affirmed as true by all people.” There’s a studied ambiguity here. “Can be”? Well if that is the case any theist can say that knowing that God exists “can be” affirmed by all people (indeed, they claim that all people should so affirm). If he means something like must be, then he has a problem with the incompatibilities within science (or your epistemic model of choice – math, logic, whatever): just take the “Birds Are Dinosaurs” debate as an example. I think, and many BAD proponents also think, we know that birds are a clade within the dinosaur clades, and in particular in the theropod clade. But on Larry’s definition, nobody knows this. Since I think that science is fallibilistic, that is fine by me – we’ll just say it is a strong supported hypothesis, but it’s good enough for government work in my book, so I’ll call it knowledge. In fact, I think nearly all knowledge is like this.

Larry, though, wants something more, I think. He wants knowledge to be inescapable, to be a belief that imposes itself on all properly functioning individuals. And that might be fine if the individuals who were religious did, in fact, have some epistemic pathology like schizophrenia. But they don’t. If you want to say that Ken Miller is not a functioning individual, then I say there’s something wrong with your definition of “proper”. If you want to say that he’s not functioning properly in this case then we are right back to the issue at hand. What counts as “rational” is precisely the question.

I think that religion is, on the whole, not rational, as a set of beliefs (but I make an exception for some as-yet-unencountered form of elite philosophical religion that maybe Einstein held), but that doesn’t mean I think that individuals who hold religious beliefs are less rational than I am. Why this is has to do with what is called “bounded rationality” – we all have limited time, capacity and resources to work through every issue, and so I think that a religious person can be as rational as we should expect and yet hold ideas that I think are wrong. In that respect, science and religion are compatible, because we are all (Larry included), boundedly rational. Do I think the religious scientist is right? Obviously not, or I’d be religious. But, and this is the point, they also think the same about me.

Either way, Larry’s positivism, which he at least is open and honest about, is the point of disagreement. PZ is a little less obvious, but I think he, too, has a similar view of what it is to know. Whenever people are called “irrational” or “illogical” for their religious beliefs, the underlying foundation is the view that the only knowledge worth having, and the only way that beliefs can be justified, is through science. Which, to return to my point, is itself an unjustifiable and unscientific belief, about which we can have many happy debates. Civilly.

60 Comments

  1. Rachael Briggs Rachael Briggs

    Why is the following view not on the table:

    Science is not the only way of getting either knowledge. (I know that my shirt is greenish blue, and I know that you don’t believe in God, but I don’t know either of those things by science.) However, religious teaching is not generally among the useful sources of knowledge, or even justified belief. (This is compatible with there being some exceptions. If we’re counting all testimony from religious people as “religious teaching”, then some of it will be the reliably reporting of information gained by science, sound philosophical reasoning, or common sense. But that doesn’t seem like what people mean when they assert that religion is a way of knowing.) We know that religious teaching is not a good source of information because it frequently conflicts with our other information streams, we have good explanations of why it is misleading, we don’t have good explanations of why it would be non-misleading, etc.

    I think that’s my own view view.

    Also, PZ is not coming to Brissie, is he? Because if he is, I would like to meet him and buy him a beer. (The cost, from his perspective, that he has to put up with my fangirlness for however long it takes to finish his beer, but hey, nothing’s free.)

    • John Wilkins John Wilkins

      I would agree with your view, but that is not the question: it is whether or not someone can have scientific credibility and yet be religious. I most emphatically do not think that religion is a way of knowing. Nor do I think that it generates, qua religion, justified beliefs. But I think that rational and sensible people who are able to do good science think these things.

      No, I must fly to Canberra to drink beer with PZ. It’s OK, as he once drove to Toronto from that abysmal hole in reality he calls a home town to meet me, and that was over 1000 miles. So the least I can do is fly to Canberra.

      However, he positively feeds on fangirlishness, the Trophy Wife[tm] notwithstanding…

      • Rachael Briggs Rachael Briggs

        Oh good, I didn’t say exactly what you said, just something compatible with it!

        I’m not sure I approve of the word “rational” at all, especially when applied to persons rather than procedures. (In my work, I find I get much less woolly-headed when I specify which standard of reason I am talking about specifically, rather than just lumping everyone under the heading “rational”.) Which is not really disagreeing with your fundamental point at all. (They are going to take away my philosophy badge!)

        • John Wilkins John Wilkins

          Rachael, I think your philosophy badge is a lot more secure than mine. For a start, you do real metaphysics and epistemology, not the faux stuff I do…

  2. Rachael Briggs Rachael Briggs

    Whoops, I think I just said roughly what you just said. Go-go Gadget reading comprehension!

  3. Wes Wes

    I think that religion is, on the whole, not rational, as a set of beliefs (but I make an exception for some as-yet-unencountered form of elite philosophical religion that maybe Einstein held), but that doesn’t mean I think that individuals who hold religious beliefs are less rational than I am. Why this is has to do with what is called “bounded rationality” – we all have limited time, capacity and resources to work through every issue, and so I think that a religious person can be as rational as we should expect and yet hold ideas that I think are wrong. In that respect, science and religion are compatible, because we are all (Larry included), boundedly rational. Do I think the religious scientist is right? Obviously not, or I’d be religious. But, and this is the point, they also think the same about me.

    This shifts the debate from the merits of the claims to the merits of the person who accepts the claims.

    There’s a big difference between saying “X is false” and saying “If S believes X, then S is irrational in everything she does.” The claim is not that Ken Miller is an irrational person. It’s that his beliefs about God are incompatible with scientific findings. He might be entirely rational on all other accounts. His rational capacities as a person are neither here nor there when it comes to the question of whether it is scientifically defensible to claim that an omnipotent personal being created the universe.

    Miller insists that an omnipotent personal being created the universe. The problem is that every single branch of science treats the universe as an entirely impersonal entity, and science works quite well. The theist who wishes to claim that a personal being is responsible for the universe has the burden of proof, because none of the scientific evidence is compatible with that claim.

    It has nothing to do with whether or not the theist as an individual is a rational person. It has to do with the fact that the evidence which is currently available to us doesn’t fit that claim.

    • Wes,

      This “shift” has been part of the debate all along. Coyne wrote in The New Republic last February:

      [O]ne cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time. That alleged synthesis requires that with one part of your brain you accept only those things that are tested and supported by agreed-upon evidence, logic, and reason, while with the other part of your brain you accept things that are unsupportable or even falsified. In other words, the price of philosophical harmony is cognitive dissonance. Accepting both science and conventional faith leaves you with a double standard: rational on the origin of blood clotting, irrational on the Resurrection; rational on dinosaurs, irrational on virgin births.

      JW’s point about bounded rationality is that this does not hold for theists alone. John Pieret’s (and Bob Koepp’s) point is that it does not hold for theists generally, as Coyne concedes, when he writes that a “handful” of theists do not make empiric claims. (However many in a “handful,” it shows the weakness of the categories as proposed).

      If there is an essential incompatibility between science (not naturalism) and religion, its borders have not yet been very rigorously drawn, nor its logical consequences very clearly charted.

  4. Jim Harrison Jim Harrison

    I’m a bit suspicious of arguments that settling things at one stroke, including the argument that reduces the verification principle to absurdity by pointing out that it is not verifiable. It doesn’t take very many epicycles to save the hypothesis in that instance; and, more generally, anybody can easily evade even a masterstroke from so blunt an instrument as logic. My problem with positivism, or more accurately with the folk positivism sometimes called scientism, isn’t that one can construct a rare counterexample to its principal thesis; but that practically everything one thinks about is a counterexample. I draw an analogy with the history of mathematics. In the 19th Century, various thinkers were very proud of themselves for devising mysterious functions that didn’t have a derivative at any point or were “pathological” in some other respect. A hundred years later it had become clear that far from being interesting exceptions, the exceptions were the rule and non-pathological functions made up an infinitesimal fraction of possible functions. It seems to me that non-scientific knowledge and, a fortiori the larger class of human cognitive activities about which it is meaningful to reason utterly dwarf the extremely specialized realm of scientific knowledge. That’s not to deny the importance of science—though it doesn’t win all the tricks, it is very often trumps—but in many respects it is a rather odd activity to pick as exemplary of what people do with their minds if only because it routinely ignores the aesthetic, ludic, performative, and normative dimensions of discourse. You might as well pick a tiny hyperparasitic wasp as the paradigm of animals.

    I know from experience that making this sort of claim will be interpreted as a plea for the legitimacy of theology; but in my case, at least, it is more like a charm against claustrophobia. I see an irony in the presumption that the obvious alternative to empirical science is something like natural theology: maybe the fierceness of these arguments has to do with something that theology and the ideology of science have in common besides their narrowness and lack of imagination. After all, to have a satisfactory fight, you not only have to dislike your opponent. You have to want to fight over the same dunghill; and, as I remarked in another recent comment, traditional Christianity, like science itself, does seem to have an especially close relationship with philosophy. Maybe theology and science are Jacob and Esau: “Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels.” Surely the real Rebecca can drop a bigger litter than two, however.

    • John Wilkins John Wilkins

      The point about the VP is that it is only incoherent if you make the universal claim that all knowledge is scientific. If you do not, as Popper did not (and later logical empiricists did not) that problem dissipates. But if you do not, then the motivation for much of the incompatibilist position also dissipates. Quod erat demonstrandum.

      A play that is remembered for one line is Terence’s Heauton Timorumenos, and the line is: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” – I am a man, nothing human is foreign to me. I just want to accept that some perfectly okay people believe things that I don’t but which do not threaten society or science. I applaud the lack of claustrophobia in your comment – I would likewise seek a bigger dunghill. There’s enough crap for us all…

  5. Michael Fugate Michael Fugate

    So comment on someone like Phil Skell – he is a NAS member but squarely in the ID camp. Does he do good science? How is this different than Ken Miller?
    It seems like an arbitrary line is being drawn.
    One problem I see is how we deal with the supernatural. Is it real? How do we know? I haven’t seen anything to convince me something other than the natural exists. We don’t need to invoke supernatualism to deal with PZ’s love for the Trophy Wife (TM), do we?

    • John Wilkins John Wilkins

      Do Skell’s views interfere with scientific conclusions? Does he, for example, reject scientific hypotheses and explanations for nonscientific reasons? If so (and IDevotees by definition do), then his views interfere with science and they are not compatible with science.

      Let’s take a supposed core miracle – say, the resurrection or the Fatima miracle. Let’s say some ordinary evidence pops up, e.g., video footage of the event. It shows that the miracle didn’t happen. Now, if one has to reject the scientific evidence to maintain that belief, then I would say that the belief in incompatible with science [NB: it is by definition inconsistent, since it proposes events that are excluded under our best scientific theories; the question is whether it can coexist without harming science]. But suppose the believer instead says “I do not need that to have been a physical event, but a spiritual one, which cannot be videotaped”, are they still being incompatible with science? I think not (this is, in fact, a view put forward by the Protestant theologian Rudolph Bultmann early in the 20th century).

      So the question for me is whether religion survives in the empirical gaps out of necessity or convenience. Honest believers who realise that just because the Bible or whatever says that some event, like the Exodus, happened we are required to disbelieve it’s reality if we find evidence that compels us to do so are no threat to science, society or reason. And that is pretty much what we do see in a small proportion of religious believers.

      Now, if the claim was more guarded, and only said that most religion is inimical to science, we’d not be having this debate… likewise if it was claimed that people cab justifiably believe things they haven’t scientifically investigated, and which may indeed turn out to be consistent with a natural account. PZ’s love for his wife is not, in itself, in contradiction to science, of course, but the belief he no doubt has that he should be is in no way supportable scientifically; if that is so, some beliefs are acceptable which are not scientific. Now, all we have to do, is figure out where and how to draw the line…

  6. I’m sure they’ll punch your ticket, John, when it comes time for the Global Agnosticism Conference. 🙂

    What I don’t see often remarked by blogosophes on this subject is that this brand of extreme verificationalism is held almost exclusively by scientists (Moran, Myers, Coyne, Peter Atkins…). Even the hardline logical positivists never intended verification to hold only for scientific statements, which would have the absurd consequence of only allowing truth to be known by people who had actually conducted the experiments. Ayer, Russell et al allowed (at least early in their careers) that philosophical statements could be constructed in such a way to be meaningful, if they were expressed formally and atomistically. But I wonder if even this would constitute a kind of incompatibility, in the many cases such statements weren’t scientific.

    If “science and religion are not compatible” were expressed in terms of formal symbolic logic, it would be subject to a certain form of verificationalism, but it would be a much different claim than the one we are seeing.

    • John Wilkins John Wilkins

      I’m sure they’ll punch something.

      Funny thing is, I am a kind of verificationist myself – not the positivist kind, but I do think we verify hypotheses as well as falsify them, and this is common. It’s confirmationism, I guess.

      But you have to remember, I am a card-carrying pragmatist, and for me truth is just what works in the relevant cases and ways. No justified true belief that somehow corresponds to atomic facts for me…

  7. Jason himself has wound it back a little, but that’s fine too.

    Did you mean Josh?

    • J.J.E. J.J.E.

      Ouch. I kinda feel sorry for the J pair. This is just an anecdotal musing, but does it seem to anyone else that more people seem to call Josh “Jason” by mistake than the other way around?

  8. J.J.E. J.J.E.

    IANAP, but:

    I don’t see the compatibility/incompatibility thing as very controversial and I think that science and religion are incompatible, almost by definition. I’d love to be convinced why the lens through which I see this conflict is in error, or at least understand why those who disagree with me prefer their lens of looking at the conflict.

    Queue my shoddy thinking:

    The way I see it, science (as a method and the results which come about by applying that method) conventionally recommends that those that practice it be willing to at least attempt to subject claims within its purview to scrutiny. And when such claims aren’t subject to scrutiny, it isn’t because of proscriptions, but because of logical necessity, or perhaps because of a lack of imagination that we will someday outgrow.

    On the other hand, I’m hard pressed to conceive of a religion* that doesn’t specifically (and often vigorously) proscribe all examination of at least certain sacred beliefs. If you are a member of a relatively large proportion of Christian denominations (whether Protestant or Catholic or Mormon) then there exists one particular interpretation of the divinity of Christ that is an axiom one must accept to be considered a member of that faith. To question that axiom is to be disqualified as that type of Christian (and in some eras doing so led to being labeled an apostate and being sanctioned by church and/or state with death).

    A slightly smaller proportion of Christians would demand axiomatic acceptance about resurrections and would proscribe questioning them accordingly. Listing these types of thing can go on ad nauseum. While the next example seems just merely cheeky, bear with me. Among modern Christians who are scientifically literate, one is proscribed from wondering what the other half of Jesus’ genome looked like. After all, if we accept the Bible in regard to the outlines of the story of Christ (as most Christians do) he was made flesh (not just the appearance of it) and he was the son of god. I’d love to see those alleles. I wonder whether god alleles for genes were expressed at higher levels or lower levels than the mortal alleles? Probably depends on the function, I suppose. And what about the god copy of the “junk” DNA? Seriously, if people really did have parts of Jesus or stuff that touched Jesus, and they didn’t feel threatened by “disproving” him, why ever would they object to subjecting his traces to real scientific scrutiny? There are some great sequencing technologies that can do amazing things with stuff much much older than old Hay-Zeus’s DNA.

    Anyway, my point isn’t to present a litany of varyingly plausible beliefs that religious people hold, but to point out that religions, in what I can only perceive as self-defense, FORBID examination of a rather large number of tractable questions or preemptively seeks out currently intractable scientific hidey holes and secretes their ineffable doctrines there instead.

    In short, I accept (for the sake of discussion) that merely possessing unverifiable beliefs may not put a “way of thinking” into conflict with “scientific thinking” (for reasons you outline), but surely you’d have to admit that wrongly asserting that a belief is unverifiable (the unsophisticated YECs, for example) or at least actively refusing to consider verifying potentially verifiable beliefs (almost all Christians wrt Christ or human evolution or to “the soul” in light of neurobiology) is deeply unscientific. And I’m even inclined to conclude that it is unscientific to actively modify one’s beliefs specifically to avoid the scrutiny of modern science (e.g. the quantum-god of Collins and Miller; from now on I think I’ll simply call this god “Qod”).

    In a way, perhaps religions will fall into one of two categories: “wrong (like YEC)” or “belief systems that are asymptotically compatible with science, but that nonetheless like to mock Occam”. The latter category refers to stuffing a larger and larger proportions of beliefs into smaller and smaller scientific blindspots so that the longer history continues+, the less conflict religions have with science (although religions will still contradict each other unless all religion ends as something resembling the love child of Bahá’í and Unitarian Universalism).

    It just seems deeply unscientific to evade particular questions so unnecessarily, resolutely, and disingenuously.

    * Due mainly to ignorance on my part, not absence of such religions; however, the exceptions, multitudinous though they may be, pale in sheer population represented by Islam and Christianity.

    + Assuming of course that science continues to be strong and respected, that is. Any Post-Apocalyptia I think would see the crumbling of scientific respect and a concomitant increase in batsh!t crazy cults, some of which would evolve into widespread faiths worthy of conventional “respect”.

    • And I’m even inclined to conclude that it is unscientific to actively modify one’s beliefs specifically to avoid the scrutiny of modern science …

      So, thinking about what science doesn’t tell us about the world makes you unscientific? A scientist is only allowed to think about what science does tell us?

      It just seems deeply unscientific to evade particular questions so unnecessarily, resolutely, and disingenuously.

      But if “the scrutiny of modern science” is incapable of answering the questions, then it isn’t being “evaded,” since it can’t answer them. You wind up insisting that scientists should assume that science can answer all questions, which is scientism. That’s an acceptable philosophical position but not a scientific one. The question becomes why it is acceptable for you to “evade” science by asserting a scientifically unverifiable philosophy.

      Need I say that that the “disingenuously” is unevidenced, scientifically or otherwise, in the case of people like Miller, et al?

  9. Chris' Wills Chris' Wills

    This argument runbles on and I suspect that it is because people have different agendas.

    1) Some wish Science to be taught in schools without religious beliefes being in the Science classroom. That’s is my wish.

    2) Some wish to destroy religion and ban its believers from voicing their beliefs in public, whilst laying out a red carpet for their beliefs (truths).

    The idea that everyone must subject everthing in their life to falsification or whatever other tests are deemed to define science is simply innane.
    No one, except perhaps a few recluses, do this. It isn’t practical nor, I suspect, possible.

    The likes of moran, the dawkin, coyne and myrrh; amongst others; may believe in what they claim to hold as true. From their writings and pontifications they often come across as being more self righteous and snide than those they attack.

    Science doesn’t answer what is right or wrong.

    Yes, if you decide on aims you wish to achieve using science it may assist you to achieve your aims, but it doesn’t set them and doesn’t say if they are correct.
    You may, perhaps, measure how close you’ve come to your perfect society using scientific methods, that says nothing about its correctness.

    Slavery is wrong isn’t a scientific statement, nor are the rights/wrongs of abortion or genocide or nose picking.

    As for compatability; if the scientist holds that their investigation and teasing out of the natural laws is to the greater glory of God how is this better/worse than just doing science because it suplies a wage?

    • J.J.E. J.J.E.


      1) Some wish Science to be taught in schools without religious beliefes being in the Science classroom. That’s is my wish.

      2) Some wish to destroy religion and ban its believers from voicing their beliefs in public, whilst laying out a red carpet for their beliefs (truths).

      One wonders why you are still allowed commenting privileges with such tendentiously phrased strawmen as that.

      It escapes you that simply: s/religion/secularism/ and s/truths/faith/ leaves the form of your “argument” unchanged vis a vis the arguing style, inverting only the actors.

      The rest isn’t worth response, as apparently you think that childish pet names for your interlocutors communicates something useful.

      • Chris' Wills Chris' Wills

        One wonders why you are still allowed commenting privileges with such tendentiously phrased strawmen as that

        Perhaps he is amused by having a fool posting sometimes?
        You could always ask him.

        The only made up name was for PZ Myers. You may have noticed, if you wander over to pharyngula, that he doesn’t seem to mind mispellings of his name.

        Feel free to ignore my posts in future, you’ve yet to respond with any rational comment to them.

  10. J.J.E. J.J.E.

    So, thinking about what science doesn’t tell us about the world makes you unscientific? A scientist is only allowed to think about what science does tell us?

    No. Fortunately I didn’t suggest that, so we can move right along.

    But if “the scrutiny of modern science” is incapable of answering the questions, then it isn’t being “evaded,” since it can’t answer them.

    This doesn’t logically follow. The form of your counterargument isn’t convincing. Just because some questions beyond the ken of science aren’t posed specifically to avoid scrutiny doesn’t prevent some of them to be. Just like some people that incorporate in the Bahamas aren’t evading taxes doesn’t prevent some people to incorporate there specifically to avoid taxation.

    The next question you may ask is: “Well, how do you know? Maybe some people are posing questions in such a way to evade science disingenuously, but maybe religions aren’t. How do you know?”

    The most obvious answer is “historical”. If you study the history of any church, you’ll see see the steady recession of “real world” theological claims when the overwhelming scientific consenus becomes too strong to combat. For those that included Genesis among their scriptures, this means that a modern adherent will much more frequently cleave to a very metaphorical meaning of the text than would an adherent living 3,000 years ago. Other examples are easy to conceive.

    What is interesting to see isn’t necessarily the views that changed (the universe was created in 6 days) or what they changed to (the universe wasn’t really created in 6 literal days, that’s metaphorical) but the detritus that remains (the important thing is that god had some important role somewhere, probably where we least expect it). It seems that when science hoses down the edifice of religion over time, what remains is of the “not even wrong” variety (in the Pauli sense). After all, god has been stripped of being responsible for anything we could actually observe when once (in a less scientific era) he was tasked with all manner of real issues (even issues of life and death!) from creating the universe to causing favor on the battlefield to successful agriculture to carving laws into stone tablets, etc.

    This is in contrast to the questions that literature or music or certain categories of philisophy or other humanistic enterprises pose. Indeed, even religion and science get in on this act as well when they put on their ethics caps. They ask questions that may not be “scientific” per se, but they can at least motivate the questions from real human experiences. Like wonder, empathy, appreciation of art, culture, etc. If these were the sorts of questions that religion confined itself to and we weren’t instead left with the historically contingent, not-even-wrong “god” detritus (or other natural cum supernatural), it would all be good. But in point of fact, overwhelming majorities of Americans (for one example) can be seen to hold varying levels of weird beliefs that are either outright wrong (YEC) or oddly unmotivated (like eternal life with two entirely disconnected phases).

    Indeed, one can even see ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny. When I was younger and a strong evangelical Christian from the U.S. south studying biology in college, I remember thinking in my pchem class, “Entropy must increase? Hmmmm. Evolution seems to lead to a decrease in entropy. Perhaps god caused it?” And I’d never read the silly apologetics that state that very “principle” before. (And of course it would also mean that god was required for my fridge to operate but not necessarily for my stove…) And I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t been a part of a religion that was deeply anti-scientific, that such an idea wouldn’t have came to me immediately. Of course, after I learned that one must consider the system to be closed for that to be valid, then my place for god in evolution retreated to a more amorphous brand of theistic evolution. If I’d done better in biophysics, I may even have independently come up with Qod. Alas, that class was very difficult for me.

    So, to make a long story short, I very much think that the historical evidence is pretty supportive of a causal relationship for religions actively changing themselves to evade what they perceive as threats instead of to pose questions that are interesting. As I acknowledged before, this isn’t the ONLY thing that religions do. They do some interesting question posing as well.

    You wind up insisting that scientists should assume that science can answer all questions, which is scientism.

    Why? I don’t think you need to assume scientism to show that religions self-consciously evade science. I think history works just fine.

    Need I say that that the “disingenuously” is unevidenced, scientifically or otherwise, in the case of people like Miller, et al?

    I disagree. Otherwise, we’d be forced to accept Sagan’s invisible dragon as a serious idea worthy of scrutiny (or Russell’s teapot for a more respectable idea or the FSM for a more hipster idea) simply because they were posed outside the purview of science. This despite the idea that their proponents are on record as having created them specifically to address the very issue we’re now discussing. Even if individual actors (like Collins or Miller) may sincerely believe what they propose, the historical record shows that the post hoc modifications to theology are exactly what you’d predict if the type of disenguous motivations were at play.

    • J.J.E. J.J.E.

      This should have been attached to John Pieret’s response to me.

  11. Just because some questions beyond the ken of science aren’t posed specifically to avoid scrutiny doesn’t prevent some of them to be.

    Of course. Fortunately I didn’t suggest that, so we can move right along.

    The most obvious answer is “historical”.

    I see. You get to judge Ken Miller based on the group he belongs to. There’s a word for that but it slips my mind. Do I get to judge “scientists” by Josef Mengele and Nazi scientists (or lots of other examples)?

    If you study the history of any church, you’ll see see the steady recession of “real world” theological claims when the overwhelming scientific consenus becomes too strong to combat.

    The same goes for scientific claims like phlogiston or the Rutherford model of the atom. Incompaiblists advocates generally think its a good thing when any institution adjusts its thinking to scientific results and don’t assume that there is any disingenuousness involved … except when it comes to religion. Wilkins even has a post on it.

    • J.J.E. J.J.E.

      But if “the scrutiny of modern science” is incapable of answering the questions, then it isn’t being “evaded,” since it can’t answer them. You wind up insisting that scientists should assume that science can answer all questions, which is scientism.

      compared with

      Just because some questions beyond the ken of science aren’t posed specifically to avoid scrutiny doesn’t prevent some of them to be.

      Well, I recommend you rephrase again if for nothing else than to get the distinction through my thick skull. I give you the benefit of the doubt that you don’t intend for these two to seem so similar to my mind. So we’ll assume that I messed up. So, help me correct this. I’m interested what your point actually was. I’m not being snarky. Again, I really would like to know your perspective.

      I see. You get to judge Ken Miller

      Wait, you’re talking about specific people not religious thinking or religious institutions? If so, I think we’re talking past each other. Far be it for me to judge a person in the context “religion is not compatible with science”. If that’s the way you want to frame the debate then I agree with you and we have no quarrel. But if you’d like to discuss “relgion’s compatibility with science” I’d be happy to oblige. (And I call a Godwin en passant.)

      In fact I rather think that individual actors in religion and science can behave very similarly in appropriate contexts. It is the institutional differences that strike me as making them incompatible. As a matter of fact, I think a great many scientists act more “religious” in certain key aspects than a great many religious people. But, this wasn’t my point.

      And just one more point before I move on… I criticized Miller’s and Collins’s god, not Miller and Collins. That a crucial distinction and not a particularly subtle one at that.


      The same goes for scientific claims like phlogiston or the Rutherford model of the atom. Incompaiblists advocates generally think its a good thing when any institution adjusts its thinking to scientific results and don’t assume that there is any disingenuousness involved … except when it comes to religion. Wilkins even has a post on it.

      This is getting somewhere. I think this is the only point that you made that seems to address what I had in mind. If you’d care to discuss, I’d be happy to later (it is past midnight on this part of the globe so I won’t do justice in engaging in this topic in the next 12 hours or so). But I’ll let you reply first and see if your comparisons to Nazis were just writing me off or not and whether or not you’re still taking this seriously or you just want to bash another “fundamentalist atheist”.

      My ideas aren’t fully formed (otherwise why would I pose the question the way I originally did) but my instinctual response is that science makes myriad positive claims in addition to the failed ones that get whittled away. None of religion’s naturalistic claims have withstood science’s advance. And the “worthwhile” claims of religion that get maintained seem to be more economically arrived at by secular philosophy or ethics, etc. The unique contributions of religion seem to me to be (again I’m open to other suggestions) these naturalistic vestiges from when religion really was making poor naturalistic claims. If religion really did want to get into the specifics of the good life, ethics, morality, or even philisophy, why start off by saying everything was created in 6 days and woman was formed from a rib, etc.?

      What purpose does god even serve anymore if creation, etc. doesn’t seem appropriately explained by that route? And obviously we need not get into why declaration of morality by fiat is so fraught. (And that’s just argument from authority. I haven’t even started in on the morality of conquering the Holy Land the way the Old Testament portrays it.)

      Again, these are inchoate ideas. If you want to discuss them, I’d be happy to.

      PS

      It may seem hypocritical for me to reject your iteration of “No. Fortunately I didn’t suggest that, so we can move right along.” while maintaining my own. In short (not to be snarky, but this is my perspective) I feel that I was right when I used it.

      So, in good faith let me explain why I think your paraphrase feels inaccurate to me.

      So, thinking about what science doesn’t tell us about the world makes you unscientific? A scientist is only allowed to think about what science does tell us?

      I actually said: “science conventionally recommends that those that practice it be willing to at least attempt to subject claims within its purview to scrutiny” whereas I thought what makes religion uniquely non-scientific is its unwillingness to allow its ideas that within science’s purview to be subject to scrutiny.

      And clearly I wasn’t directing my argument to the entire broad category of “what science doesn’t tell us”. That’s a fairly easy counterargument to anticipate, and anticipate it I did:

      “They ask questions that may not be ‘scientific’ per se, but they can at least motivate the questions from real human experiences. Like wonder, empathy, appreciation of art, culture, etc. If these were the sorts of questions that religion confined itself to and we weren’t instead left with the historically contingent, not-even-wrong ‘god’ detritus (or other natural cum supernatural), it would all be good.”

      Instead, I restricted it to the specifically scientific aspects (and the “not even wrong” aspects left as vestiges from when religion was doing the heavy lifting of explaining the natural world). So, no I don’t believe that your paraphrase was accurate. If you think the same of my paraphrase of you, I invite you to write a similar response.

      • J.J.E. J.J.E.

        Argh. Run away bold. It was supposed to stop at “Ken Miller” to highlight that I wasn’t calling out specific people, just ideas that are more easily discussed by referring to the people who have explained them most thoroughly most recently. Ugh. HTML fail.

        • J.J.E.,

          What you are defending here is the incompatibility of philosophical naturalism and theism. That should go without saying. What the “compatiblists” question is whether there is an essential incompatibility between theism and methodological naturalism (or what such an incompatibility might entail). In other words, is science reliant on naturalism that goes “all the way down,” or which is only called upon in the context of the hypothesis in question? The fact that science was invented by theists (Descartes, Bacon, Newton, Galileo) goes a long way toward answering that question.

          You wrote:

          Science … conventionally recommends that those that practice it be willing to at least attempt to subject claims within its purview to scrutiny. And when such claims aren’t subject to scrutiny, it isn’t because of proscriptions, but because of logical necessity, or perhaps because of a lack of imagination that we will someday outgrow.

          The question that follows from this is: How perfectly must a scientist manage this recommendation before we declare an incompatibility? I have not seen anyone offer such a threshold. Everyone appears to agree that Miller and Collins are good scientists. So what shape does this incompatibility take in the real world?

          In theory, you might have a point about “proscriptions” versus “lack of imagination.” But this is where is JW’s point about bounded rationality comes in. Is there a quantitative difference between the two? In the real world, religions evolve, proscriptions are challenged and abandoned. This is the work of theology, and it does filter down to the “man in the pew” as any cross-sectional historical comparison of religious practice will show. In the real world, even secular scientists consider some matters too sacred to subject to hypothesis testing. (Which was John P’s point about courtship).

          If science relied upon metaphysical naturalism, it might never have come into being, and it would be seriously hobbled today (consider the difficulty of teaching it in American schools, which prohibit philosophical advocacy.) Luckily for us all, it doesn’t.

        • John Wilkins John Wilkins

          Fixed.

        • J.J.E. J.J.E.


          In theory, you might have a point about “proscriptions” versus “lack of imagination.” But this is where is JW’s point about bounded rationality comes in. Is there a quantitative difference between the two? In the real world, religions evolve, proscriptions are challenged and abandoned.

          This is where I think we have a lot in common. I agree and indeed, I’ve had thoughts that might well be subsumed under the term “bounded rationality” before. As I indicate about, I think that a fair number of “good scientists” may suffer from the same things that that religious people do, and one might say this is a necessary consequence of “bounded rationality”.

          I’ve no qualms with that.

          A few additional points. I think the discussion is most interesting (as well as important) when we are considering the strengths and limitations of human institutions/social aggregations instead of the strengths and limitations of individual humans. While an individual scientist (like me) may very well take the results of general relativity on faith for my entire life (bounded skepticism or bounded rationality) just as a religious person may take the doctrine of the trinity on faith, I think the social aggregate of science most certainly doesn’t take relativity on faith in the way that I do. I don’t think this is true for articles of faith for believers.

          Ultimately, I feel slightly constrained when carrying on this conversation in the context of what I c0nsider to be the special case of religion. My argument is actually a bit broader and only partially overlaps religion. If we were to replace “religion” with “dogmatic ideology” (after suitable definitions of course, I’m trying to be brief) the argument is much more satisfying to me. It starts to encompass things like AGW denialism, Lysenkoism, YEC, etc. Of course, it also tends to exclude from scrutiny Deism, vague “spirituality”, pantheism, etc. It is this argument that suits me very well.

          However, I must say that I see such a tight association between religion and “dogmatic ideology” that I don’t mind be a little bit sloppy in this conversation. I think the caveats that JAC and LM present are pretty reasonable (Deism is probably exempt). But my heart is much more set on the more general argument.

          And for the record, if I had to make a guess as to how much religion is dogmatic in the offending way, I’d use the following set notation:

          (R^D)/R ~ 1.

          Where R is the set of Religion and D is the set of Dogmatic ideology and ^ is the intersection operator. Of course I would also guess that:

          (R^D)/D << 1.

          I'm under no illusions that religion is the only (or even necessarily the worst) offender.

        • J.J.E.,

          I appreciate the thoughtfulness of this, and don’t find much to quarrel with, until you get to the part making allowance for Coyne and Moran to be “sloppy.” I don’t meant to be flip, but this has a sort of “kill em all, let god sort em out” ring to it. If you know in advance that you are going to apply a double standard because the probabilities superficially show a “tight association” doesn’t this offend on both scientific and moral grounds?

          What is wanted, if we’re going to pursue an “incompatiblist” agenda that is not just a cover for an anti-naturalist purge is (1) some kind of etiology of irrationality, and (2) some kind of systematic quantification of the effects of this irrationality on science and the society as a whole. Coyne, PZ and Moran intuitively see the difficulty of such a program, which is why the conversation never gets past rather broad assertions of incompatibility, without much in the way of what that means or why we should be concerned. So what (for our present purposes) if religion is “dogmatic in the offending way,” if everyone agrees that Collins and Miller (e.g.) do good science?

          What Coyne and Moran would like to be the case is that people practicing science fully embrace naturalism. Perhaps someday it will be the case. At present it’s not. If “cognitive dissonance” is the worst thing Coyne can find to say about this in almost 10,000 words in the New Republic, maybe we can all find other things to worry about?

        • J.J.E. J.J.E.


          If you know in advance that you are going to apply a double standard because the probabilities superficially show a “tight association” doesn’t this offend on both scientific and moral
          grounds?

          First of all, I don’t grok what “double standard” you’re talking about. Who is justifiably getting the “bad” treatment and who is unjustifiably escaping it? Or alternatively who is justifiably getting the “good” treatment and who is unjustifiably withheld it?

          Also, I take exception with the term “superficial”. At the very least, if you believe in a god, that is dogmatic. Otherwise, show me the evidence and tell me under what grounds a god believer would retire that belief for which they can present no evidence. I could accept any number of gods. My absence of belief is suitably contingent on my experience of the world that it could be changed by evidence. Can the same be said of the belief of theists (especially those liberal ones that practically require an inaccessible god)?

          And beyond this basic dogmatism inherent in most theisms, the association isn’t superficial at all, especially for issues that count. Religious dogma is directly, intimately, and causally associated with outright rejection of science. I’m here to tell you, unequivocally and without argument, as reliable as dropping a ball and it hitting the ground: incompatibility between religious dogma and science causes enormous conflicts in science acceptance and science education in majorities (check the Pew polls) of American citizens that threatens the education of an entire generation. This is no more up for debate than observing that the majority of U.S. citizens is Christian or that the majority of them is white. It is a fact. Of course, not all religious dogmas exhibit obvious, important, near-term policy implications. But that doesn’t make them any less incompatible with science.

          Regarding moral grounds, I don’t see what you’re talking about. I don’t see anything moral about saying religion is compatible or incompatible with science. Such an assertion can be right, wrong, or an irrelevant statement. But a moral one? Perhaps we should defer discussion of morality in the normative/policy section of my response (i.e. my upcoming “agenda” for a “purge” of insufficiently scientistic people).

          Which brings me to:


          What is wanted, if we’re going to pursue an “incompatiblist” agenda that is not just a cover for an anti-naturalist purge

          Wow, do the phrases “agenda” and “purge” really come so readily to mind when debating with a certain class of atheists? This is the latest in a long line of how taboo it is simply to publicly dissent from the popular unearned respect god concepts are given. I know you are sidestepping treating this as a “purge” but why would that even have a place in this discussion. You might as well have just inserted “if we’re going to pursue something that isn’t just stupid Mr. Poopy-Pants being a big-cry baby” in place of the purge statement. My position deserves more respect than damning with faint praise.

          Before we address your two requirements, let me first present some perspective for how mild the actual “agenda” is. I also recommend you go back and read Coyne, Myers, Rosenhouse, Carroll etc. They positively heap praise upon Scott and Miller and tell people “Support the NCSE! They do great work! Miller was awesome in Dover! He trashed Behe!” That in itself bespeaks a huge shared agenda with compatibilists, religious and atheist types alike. But, in the spirit of free and open communication (as our host is also wont to do) those incompatibilists will not hesitate to add “But I disagree with my good friend X in areas A, B, and C. Here’s why.”

          In particular, incompatibilists’ agendas include:

          1) using their own personal time and personal resources to put their ideas that science and religion aren’t compatible into the public sphere to combat the widespread notion that they are (usually via blogs);
          2) asking science advocacy organizations refrain from taking a stance on the compatibility issue using group resources, because such a view, in addition to being “controversial” is also highly unrepresentative of at least a large minority if not a plurality (or perhaps even majority, I don’t know) of its constituent members.

          That’s it. That’s the agenda. Those are the goals that are in such danger of being misunderstood, that you feel it must be carefully distinguished (or maybe shepherded?) lest someone consider it a (lest it become a?) purge. That’s what the whole hullaballoo is all about. Maybe the incompatibilists are obsessive compulsive and really are gnawing on a small issue. But then your only objection is the size of the issue, which is pretty subjective. But when the rubber meets the road, we merely want to be able ensure that science advocacy organizations don’t pick a side in the compatibility debate. That’s all. I think most of us would even accept it if the NCSE et al. were to only point out the empirical fact of coexistence, as long as they don’t falsely imply that coexistence => compatibility.


          (1) some kind of etiology of irrationality,

          I disagree. First of all, I don’t see that irrationality (as opposed to compatibility) is at all at issue here. And even if it were, I care little for its etiology in this context (although I do find it interesting in its own right). I think that simply establishing incompatibility is sufficient to justify my pedestrian policy prescriptions. And I think it is established.


          (2) some kind of systematic quantification of the effects of this [incompatibility vis-a-vis] science and the society as a whole.

          I have made a substitution above because I’m not invested in this “irrationality” tack. If you’ll permit me to be less inflammatory in this one way, we can proceed. First of all, how systematic do you want to be? Does this suffice? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Creationism-related_court_cases How about religiously motivated definitions of the soul versus right to die cases and/or abortion cases? Stem cell research? Check out Gallup’s and (especially) Pew’s surveys in the intersection of personal belief and policy. There is a lot of fodder for how incompatibility born of dogma adversely effects the development of science. And it has a long history. Don’t forget that Catholicism is responsible for the death of additional millions in AIDs ravaged Africa due to their silly dogmas regarding contraception (they lied about the effectiveness of condoms in preventing AIDs, for example). And if you permit me an additional step to generalized dogma that isn’t necessarily religious, then we start to have Lysenko, Mengele (h/t Pieret), the Great Leap Forward, etc. Basically, when your beliefs are informed by dogma, you can wreck science, sometimes to the detriment of millions of lives. Dogma is inimical to science, and a great deal of the scientific method is tasked with rooting out and expunging dogma.


          Coyne, PZ and Moran intuitively see the difficulty of such a program, which is why the conversation never gets past rather broad assertions of incompatibility, without much in the way of what that means or why we should be concerned.

          I disagree. See above. If you want your kids to learn to be skeptical thinkers, and that it is no more acceptable to reject evolution because it makes Jesus cry than it is to reject AGW because Al Gore made it up to get attention, then you agree as well. All of this bad thinking (and worse science) comes from the uncritical acceptance of dogma. For the NCSE to say “Pshaw! It’s O.K. You can be a good scientist and still have several beliefs that are immune to evidence.” is to abet the perpetuation of unscientific thinking.


          So what (for our present purposes) if religion is “dogmatic in the offending way,” if everyone agrees that Collins and Miller (e.g.) do good science?

          While nearly everyone agrees that Collins and Miller have done good science, this does not preclude them from pushing some deeply shoddy scientific thinking on rare occasions. Asserting that humans are specially endowed with a soul and a moral compass by god sometime in the last 5 my (Collins) flies in the face of our rapidly improving understanding of human genetics, neurobiology, psychology, and even animal behavior. Suggesting in the absence of evidence that there is some deterministic deistic force that acts in the quantum gaps sufficiently to drive human events when desired flies in the face of what we know about physics.

          Sure, they do great science most of the time. What is interesting is what motivates their bad science when they are doing bad science. For Lysenko it was the dogma of Communism. For Kurt Wise, it is Protestant Christianity. And in the case of Collins, Miller, and Behe, it was the dogma of theism more generally (that you can’t question the existence of or test god, god is the most basic axiom) that caused them to put good sense aside and inject unscientific bits of thinking into clearly scientific contexts. Of course, of the three, Behe has been orders of magnitude more harmful and has offered virtually nothing to make up for his unscientific transgression. Collins and Miller contribute exceptionally to the scientific enterprise and their mistakes are mere peccadillos by comparison. But that doesn’t mean that when they are on occasion guilty of unscientific thinking that we shouldn’t call them out for it. But again, I allowed myself to wander. I don’t even want to call these guys out necessarily. Let’s just stop important organizations from making the unsupportable claim that religion and science are compatible. That they may coexist, even happily, is trivial, true, and uncontroversial. But to say they are compatible is at best controversial, and at worst either wrong or a meaningless statement.


          maybe we can all find other things to worry about?

          I don’t want to find stop worrying about this. I find it sufficiently important to strip accommodation of dogma from public life that I think it is well worth my time. And to suggest that we all worry about something else to those who find the status quo unacceptable is pretty disingenuous. Of course you’d think it was fine if we all just dropped the topic and went about our lives worrying about other things. By doing so, the status quo (and the position you advocate) continues unchanged.

        • J.J.E.,

          I don’t know how to reconcile this comment with your earlier one where we were so much in agreement. Does anyone else have access to your WordPress account?

          The double standard I referred to was the one you yourself alluded to when you said “a fair number of ‘good scientists’ may suffer from the same things that that religious people do” and “I’m under no illusions that religion is the only (or even necessarily the worst) offender.”

          Given that we agree on this, doesn’t it follow that questions about “incompatibility” should be pursued (if at all) along some other axis, not that of “science and religion”?

          I’m here to tell you, unequivocally and without argument, as reliable as dropping a ball and it hitting the ground: incompatibility between religious dogma and science causes enormous conflicts in science acceptance and science education in majorities.

          The conclusion you draw from this statement makes the same logical errors I pointed out to Larry. It is true that some elements of certain religious dogmas appear to interfere with embrace of science. But it is not legitimate to abduct from this a general causation from religion to science rejection. What is (still) missing is an exposure of the conflict thesis to hypothesis testing. What variables need controlling for? Does everything the word religious denotes in a James Dobson apply to an Andrew Sullivan? If not then we need to refine our terms.

          If we learned that visits to Lourdes by the ill and lame had a statistically beneficial impact on their health, you would not permit me to infer from this that there was a religious or miraculous influence. We would need to test the null hypothesis that some other factors were at play. The placebo effect, or self-selection bias, or something in the water, for example.

          We can’t call folk empiricism “woo” when it supports conclusions we don’t like, and “science” when it supports those we do. There is a reason why Descartes, and not Locke, was the father of modern science. Empiricism without doubt is just credulity.

          You say that incompatibility is “established.” Well, OK, on what evidence? Nothing I have seen so far rises above the level of what homeopathy advocates call “proof” of their position. What do we do with the counterexamples, like poor Miller and Collins who have been trotted out so many times in this debate? How has their “dogma” hurt their attempts at good science? (To argue, as you do here, that Miller and Collins “might” be corrupted by their dogma in the future is to accept your own conclusion as a premise a priori. What “might” happen is not data).

          You asked “how systematic do you want to be?” My answer: a lot more than what you’ve provided here. A single peer-reviewed study on the effect of religious dogma on science would be a good start.

          Unless of course the one dogma you don’t want challenged is that science and religion are incompatible. If everything you say here about the importance of critical thinking and rigor of method is true (and I agree it is), then why not apply it to your own hypothesis?

        • J.J.E. J.J.E.

          @ Chris Schoen

          Here I am writing a good-faith reply to your points, doing point and counter point with your discussion when I finally arrive at the end:


          Unless of course the one dogma you don’t want challenged is that science and religion are incompatible.

          I can see that I’ve wasted my time. That statement has no support whatsoever, does not extend me the basic courtesy of the benefit of the doubt, and it mocks the amount of time I’ve spent replying to you in good faith. Since the good faith I extend to you is not returned, I’ll not waste my time any further as I’m engaging only you here apparently. Good day sir.

        • J.J.E.,

          You should take that statement in the rhetorical sense it was intended. I take no interest in mocking your view, and I am fully prepared to be convinced that you are not dogmatic on this issue. In any case I didn’t mean it as a slur, and I apologize if it came off that way. We are all human, and all prone to biases in our thinking.

          What I have seen so far in your comments is that you seem to take incompatibility as a starting place, not as a conclusion worked out from first principles. I consider it a matter of fairness to apply the same rubric to your argument as one would apply to a theist making logical or scientific claims. This rubric requires that we not only make plausible inferences from empiric evidence, but that we test these inferences against alternate hypotheses. If I have missed where you–or Coyne, or PZ, or Carroll, or others–have done this, then I duly withdraw the comment. But it seems to me entirely within the scientific spirit to ask the question I close with. Are you applying the same standards to the incompatibility hypothesis that you would to the god hypothesis, the homeopathy hypothesis, the “morphogenic field” hypothesis, or any number of others that you would argue do not pass scientific muster?

          As for your taking offense, again I apologize if I appeared to belittle your view, but have I done even a fraction as much “mocking” here as the new atheists claim is their prerogative (Dawkins, Myers, Coyne, Blackford, Grayling) in challenging religious and pseudoscientific statements? I have not called you any names, nor implied you were incapable of rational thought. I merely asked you if there was a sticking place in your argument that we could analyze and get past to more fruitful discourse. If I’m wrong, I’m prepared to say so, but not on the basis of your indignation alone, which would serve only the cause of those who wish their beliefs to remain impenetrable.

      • Well, I recommend you rephrase again if for nothing else than to get the distinction through my thick skull.

        I put “evaded” in scare quotes in the first for a reason, because I was talking about the limits of human knowledge. In your response you were talking about the motives of particular people for appealing to the limits of human knowledge.

        Wait, you’re talking about specific people not religious thinking or religious institutions?

        Um, yes, that why I said: “Need I say that that the “disingenuously” is unevidenced, scientifically or otherwise, in the case of people like Miller, et al? (the last to avoid including Collins and others who hold to what you call “Qod”)”

        I criticized Miller’s and Collins’s god, not Miller and Collins. That a crucial distinction and not a particularly subtle one at that.

        So, in saying that “it is unscientific to actively modify one’s beliefs specifically to avoid the scrutiny of modern science (e.g. the quantum-god of Collins and Miller …” you are not criticizing specific persons actions?

        But I’ll let you reply first and see if your comparisons to Nazis were just writing me off or not and whether or not you’re still taking this seriously or you just want to bash another “fundamentalist atheist”.

        No, sometimes a reference to Nazis is just a way to stop someone short and ask them to consider what they are saying. After all, the formation I used did not seek to compare scientists to Nazis … quite the opposite!

        … my instinctual response is that science makes myriad positive claims in addition to the failed ones that get whittled away. None of religion’s naturalistic claims have withstood science’s advance. And the “worthwhile” claims of religion that get maintained seem to be more economically arrived at by secular philosophy or ethics, etc.

        What difference does it make which way they arrive at them if they are worthwhile (you know the story about the benzene ring, don’t you?)? Part of the accommodationist programme is to encourage theists to accept science as it is, as well as noting the ways that religion need not be in conflict with science.

  12. A few points of clarification.

    I’m absolutely convinced that Thomas Kuhn is right about how science is done. I don’t know if I’m a positivist or not. All I was doing was pointing out that your earlier posting didn’t present a very good case for rejecting the Verification Principle. You should not have assumed that I therefore support it—that is not a logical deduction.

    I am not PZ Myers and I don’t agree with his statements about whether emotional experiences are part of the scientific way of knowing. My position is that emotional experiences don’t count as “knowing” in the context of this discussion. Let me give you an example: my friend’s dog has a strong attachment to her owner; some people think this is a form of “knowledge” that the dog has gained. I don’t.

    I did not accuse you of saying that religion is a way of knowing.

    I did accuse you of using a false argument when you pointed to “evidence” that there are religious scientists. It would be nice if you could acknowledge that such an argument is useless in these discussions and it would be even nicer if you could stop using it so I don’t have to keep correcting you! 🙂

    You completely misrepresent my position on the accommodationism of NCSE and other scientific organizations. I do not believe they are promoting religion in science. I believe they are promoting the idea that religion and science are non-overlapping magesteria. According to the accommodationists, religion and science are compatible because they deal with acquiring knowledge in two completely different spheres.

    The distinction between methodological naturalism (science) and philosophical naturalism (not science) is used to support NOMA.

    I’m struggling with a definition of knowledge that makes sense. (I’m a pragmatist, as you claim to be.) I realize that philosophers are really good at sophistry and that’s a problem in trying to come up with a satisfactory definition.

    I’m just looking for a pragmatic understanding of “knowledge” that doesn’t devolve to trivia like whether you “know” that you love someone. That’s not the kind of knowledge that I’m referring to when I say the science is a way of knowing.

    Whenever people are called “irrational” or “illogical” for their religious beliefs, the underlying foundation is the view that the only knowledge worth having, and the only way that beliefs can be justified, is through science. Which, to return to my point, is itself an unjustifiable and unscientific belief, about which we can have many happy debates. Civilly.

    My position, which you still don’t seem to understand, is that science is a way of gaining knowledge that requires rational thinking, evidence, and skepticism. I don’t know whether there are any other ways of gaining knowledge that’s worth having (probably not) but I do know that religious claims are almost always in conflict with the scientific way of knowing. I conclude, therefore, that science and religion are incompatible.

    I have never claimed that adopting science as a way of knowing is logically defensible and I have never claimed that it is a “scientific” belief.

    It’s an axiom. You don’t have to think like a scientist if you don’t want to. However, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you choose to adopt science as a way of knowing then you have to live with the consequences of that choice and one of the consequences is that you can’t rationally believe in fairies or miracles.

    John, I know you’re familiar with this line of argument. We all live by axioms like the one I describe—at least most of us do. Don’t we all agree that rationalism and logic are preferable to the alternatives? Don’t we all agree that there are pragmatic reasons to defend our choice of those behaviours? But don’t we all agree that you can’t use logic to defend the idea that you prefer logic to illogic without getting into a circular argument?

    Now, if the claim was more guarded, and only said that most religion is inimical to science, we’d not be having this debate…

    BTW, I have always maintained that there are some forms of religion (e.g. Deism) that might be compatible with science. I’m sure you know this since you and I have been engaged in this debate for more than a decade. Deism could easily be the exception that proves the rule and I mean that literally. The existence of such an exception does not negate the general principle that religion and science are incompatible. (Besides, there probably aren’t any people who are strict Deists.)

    • Let me give you an example: my friend’s dog has a strong attachment to her owner; some people think this is a form of “knowledge” that the dog has gained. I don’t

      I’m really kind of curious about this, Larry. Are you asserting that what “animals” “know” is quantitatively different than what humans “know”? (Yes, we can know about diferences but how do you know the quality of differences? More importantly, if so, how do you know that scientifically?

      • … what “animals” “know” is quantitatively different …

        … should have been “qualitatively” …

  13. bob koepp bob koepp

    Larry – Exceptions of the sort you allude to do, indeed, “negate the general principle.” In other words, if deism is a form of religious belief, and if deism is compatible with science, then accommodationism is vindicated. And that’s basic logic; not sophistry.

    • Wait a minute. Do you mean to say that since Young Earth Creationism is a form of religion that’s totally incompatible with science, then accommodationism is proven false?

      Hurrah! I win!

      Is that the sort of “basic logic” you are proposing?

      Life is much more complicated than you seem to realize. Please, let’s get beyond the sophistry.

      • Larry,

        Bob is correct. Your counterexample confuses the relations of sets.

        If all Canadians believe in evolution, then it follows that all Ontarians believe in evolution, and all Torontonians, and all Cabbagetownians. If all Cabbagetownians believe in evolution, it may also be true that no Albertans do, but it is false that no Ontarians do, or no Canadians.

        Accomodationists do not say that all religions are always compatible with all sciences. They say it is false to say as a general rule that they are incompatible.

        Bob’s point is that your “general principle” is too broadly defined, and easy to falsify. Deism is your black swan.

        Whether or not YECism, on the other hand, is incompatible with science does not bear on religion generally, since most religions don’t share the doctrine of a young earth, and have no need to call the fossil record counterfeit. To argue upward from YECism would be a form of guilt by association. Whether or not it is sophistic, it is definitely not logical.

        Even on the matter of Deism you’d get an argument from Wes, above, who argues that just positing a god who created the cosmos–even if he never again intervenes in its operation–is incompatible with science, since science is reliant on demonstrable, non-intentional causes, whereas an omnipotent creator god is a causal black box.

        This seems like a tremendously high standard to me, since it says that a science that goes all the way back tot first milliseconds of creation is not good enough, raising the question of how pure we need our naturalism to be for it to function in society. We want to be careful of making the perfect the enemy of the good.

        But that is for you and Wes to work out.

        • Accomodationists do not say that all religions are always compatible with all sciences.

          That is correct. They usually say that science and religion are compatible and the grownups who read that statement understand that there are many exceptions.

          What they often say when they are being precise is that some religions (e.g. Ken Miller’s version of Roman Catholicism) are compatible with science. But not others.

          Similarly, those of us on the other side say that almost all religious claims—including most of those made by Roman Catholics—are not compatible with science.

          The short form of that argument is that science and religion are incompatible. When talking to a group of adults you don’t need to put in all the subtle qualifications although many of us do add from time to time that there may be some religions that avoid the worst of the conflict.

          This is not the type of claim that you discuss in kindergarten (e.g. all swans are white) and disprove with a single counter-example. We are grownups here, we’re not stupid.

        • Larry,

          I would challenge the idea that accomodationists believe as a general principle that “science and religion are compatible.” No doubt the Templeton people would put it this way, but what I see being argued by John W., John P., and others is that S and R are not incompatible, which is a much different logical claim.

          So this may account for some of the present confusion.

          My opinion is that science and religion are not logical categories that can reduce, respectively, to irrationality and rationality, so any assertions of their relative compatibility I find more or less meaningless. Most Jesuits are better logicians than you or I will ever be, and the type of bigotry displayed by a James Watson or Ayaan Hirsi Ali needs no religious convictions to fuel it. (And James Watson is reported to be, or once have been, quite the exemplary scientist).

          If you are talking about statistical trends–that swans are very likely to be white, with important exceptions and the means for rapid evolution–then I think you should say so. Then we can probe for more plausible and nuanced explanations (like good scientists). “Incompatible” is a strong and unyielding word, which even grown-up disputants arguing in good faith are likely to take at face value.

    • J.J.E. J.J.E.

      @ Bob

      Exceptions of the sort you allude to do, indeed, “negate the general principle.”

      That may or may not be true, but in any even it isn’t particularly interesting. I for one am not looking for a general principle. (And of course, I wonder if inverting the thrust of the argument is any more convincing for incompatibility’s side. Basically, I don’t see this thrust as motivated by the actual religious environment that we actually encounter in teaching evolution for example.)

      The exception for religions that “play nice” has always been generously extended. The only reason we’re having this debate is the empirically undeniable fact that huge proportions of religions ARE incompatible.

      Gould’s NOMA is a wonderful idea, if religion really must stick around. And it may even be true for a hanful of people (certain flavors of deists) and I grant that it can in principle be true. However, for huge amounts of people it manifestly isn’t true, despite protestations to the contrary.

      I for one (and I suspect many incompatibilists) are not arguing for the impossibility of compatibility. We’re arguing for the empirical observation that so much religion simply ISN’T compatible. The only problem is that some religions admit this (YEC) and some don’t (followers of Qod).

      So, when I say “religion is incompatible with science” you can mentally add the little adendum “and I hope that someday religion’ll outgrow this state of affairs”. Of course, when religion finally does give up pretense of ever dealing with real world issues, I think it will lose a lot of adherents, so I’m not optimistic. And I think Gould’s NOMA is unlikely to be the way that peace is finally achieved. (I think religion will die out before NOMA actually dominates.)

      • John Wilkins John Wilkins

        NOMA, as a historical thesis, is simply false, but the inverse claim, that religion is always in conflict with science is also false – it’s a false dichotomy. Science and religion elbow each other for space on the conceptual dance floor. Sometimes they are polite about it, and sometimes not. You cannot make a general claim that is historically adequate, because every period, place and event has its own features. Sometimes religion is supportive of science and the educational underpinnings of science (Jesuits are often mentioned here); and sometimes it is not (Inquisitions are often mentioned here). Sometimes scientists are sanguine about religion, sometimes not. Some eras are compatibilistic, some are exclusivistic on both sides or one. And it depends on the particular and unique conditions of that time, place and actors.

        I begin to think (I’m slow; cut me some slack) that the problem here is one of overgeneralisation in both directions). I should do a post about equivalence classes in natural and social philosophy…

        • J.J.E. J.J.E.

          I agree about NOMA. I admit to being a bit sloppy. Mainly because I’m a motor mouth (so to type) and want to say so much. My apologies. I guess by NOMA being “good” I mean as a goal or as a stable equilibrium that could some day be achieved. As matter of historical fact, I do in fact agree with your take.

  14. bob koepp bob koepp

    Larry – What Chris Schoen just said. And it’s a good thing (for you) that it’s really not about winners and losers, but about sound reasoning.

  15. bob koepp bob koepp

    Larry – Your protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, basic logic is not dispensable for grownups — especially those who want to contrast their own rationality with that of illogical theists. Your own suggestion that I was proposing some utterly illogical sort of “basic logic” simply highlights the fact that you do not have a very firm grasp on this essential element of sound reasoning. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but I figure you’re grown up enough to handle blunt truths.

  16. Mike Mike

    John says,

    “I think that if a scientist holds that, say, the second law of thermodynamics is true, and yet thinks that God can overcome the second law in a miracle, he had better think something like “miracles suspend but do not falsify the laws of physics”. In other words, if Miller thinks God did things that are not physically possible, I hope he doesn’t thereby abandon the scientific enterprise, but (having met and talked to the man) I hardly suppose that he does.”

    How many things that are not physically possible fit within the scientific enterprise? When can a scientist play this card? Do you really claim this? Young earth creationism is an obvious example of this.

    • John Wilkins John Wilkins

      It’s a matter of whether religious beliefs are thought to falsify the science. Miller’s views on the 2LoT are presumably those of any educated person, except that he thinks God can intervene from time to time. The YEC, OTOH, thinks that religious beliefs falsify science, at every level.

      Is there a principled cutoff? I do not know. This is going to have problematic border cases, but on the whole we can tolerably distinguish the two cases.

  17. Mike Mike

    Bob says,

    Larry – Exceptions of the sort you allude to do, indeed, “negate the general principle.” In other words, if deism is a form of religious belief, and if deism is compatible with science, then accommodationism is vindicated. And that’s basic logic; not sophistry.

    I get it. What does Deism add to anything, let alone science? In other words, deism is consistent with science but isn’t glufarbism consistent with science in the same way? Deism must mean something in addition to science – otherwise I fail to see the point.

  18. Mike Mike

    John says,

    I think that religion is, on the whole, not rational, as a set of beliefs (but I make an exception for some as-yet-unencountered form of elite philosophical religion that maybe Einstein held), but that doesn’t mean I think that individuals who hold religious beliefs are less rational than I am. Why this is has to do with what is called “bounded rationality” – we all have limited time, capacity and resources to work through every issue, and so I think that a religious person can be as rational as we should expect and yet hold ideas that I think are wrong.

    This is interesting. Do you think Ken Miller would agree. Would you call him “not-rational” for lack of effort or “irrational” as the evil new-atheists do? He would disagree with both no? You are not a good accomodationist in the end.

  19. bob koepp bob koepp

    Mike – Part of what deism “means” is that the natural world is a created thing. Insofar as that implies something external to nature, and insofar as science recognizes only what is natural, deism means something “in addition to science.” It’s not a thesis that I find particularly attractive, but it does give the lie to certain ill-conceived notions about the relations between science and religion.

  20. Mike Mike

    Bob,

    But do the deists offer a coherent version of what a “created” thing is, beyond special pleading? I don ‘t find the thesis attractive either, and I conclude from that the ill-conceived notions about science and religion may not be so ill-conceived after all. It may be that the natural world is a created thing or that a “young earth” world is a created thing, but I still fail to see how you or John can differentiate from them if you take these claims seriously. I really want to understand your view, but I always see it collapasing into a relativist view that will make my head explode – and one that at least John has rejected in the past if I read him correctly.!!

  21. bob koepp bob koepp

    Coherent? Well, if the notion of natural necessity is coherent, then probably the notion of a created world is coherent. But I don’t have a firm opinion about the matter. Bear in mind who raised the issue of deism as an “exception” to the incompatibilist thesis — maybe we should be asking Larry to explain deism.

  22. Mike Mike

    John says,

    It’s a matter of whether religious beliefs are thought to falsify the science. Miller’s views on the 2LoT are presumably those of any educated person, except that he thinks God can intervene from time to time. The YEC, OTOH, thinks that religious beliefs falsify science, at every level.

    Is there a principled cutoff? I do not know. This is going to have problematic border cases, but on the whole we can tolerably distinguish the two cases.

    Ken is simply not any educated person. He is an extremely competent scientist from all that I can see, and he should know better — and he has shown better when it did not interfere with his relgious preconceptions. Some folks in the ID movement are also extremely competent scientists, and they have shown better at times, but they have also shown their relgious biases biases in spades at times. Even YEC’s have done good science at times… but in the end they share a common view – supernatural beings *do* something. Fine, some of their claims are easier to dismiss through the methods of science, some are tougher (or immune to the methods) but do we really want to make claims about their motives? I know from first hand experience the power of witnessing, and I would be hesitant to make excuses if I had no solid data.

  23. Mike Mike

    Bob says,

    Coherent? Well, if the notion of natural necessity is coherent, then probably the notion of a created world is coherent. But I don’t have a firm opinion about the matter. Bear in mind who raised the issue of deism as an “exception” to the incompatibilist thesis — maybe we should be asking Larry to explain deism.

    If my Usenet history is right, Larry, will have no problem running his mouth. 🙂 Natural necessity interests me though – totally out of my depth, but wasn’t that some sort of claim about universals? Interested to see the universals that bear on various supernatural claims?

  24. bob koepp bob koepp

    I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there is some deep connection between the idea of natural necessity and universals. I may well have misused the term, but my purpose was to provide a contrast with the contingency of a created nature.

  25. Science and religion elbow each other for space on the conceptual dance floor. Sometimes they are polite about it, and sometimes not.

    I know that you’re recycling Wilkins here John (I remember reading it the last time you wrote it) but that doesn’t stop it being one of the best things you’ve ever written 😉

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