Excerpts from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Science and Religion

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy addresses Religion and Science in an entry at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-science/. The focus, as expected, is philosophic and included interesting forays into what is true and what is not true. I excerpt some of the other interesting content below.

The Main Epistemological Question

For present purposes, perhaps the main epistemological question is this: what is the source of rationality, or warrant, or positive epistemic status, if any, enjoyed by religious belief? Is it of the same sort as that enjoyed by belief in the teachings of current science? Is the evidence, if any, for religious belief of the same sort as that for scientific beliefs? Or is there some special source of positive epistemic status for religious belief? This is really a contemporary version of a question that goes back a long way: the question about the relation between faith and reason. It is connected with the question whether there are cogent arguments (rational arguments, arguments drawn from the deliverances of reason) for theistic belief, and whether the existence of cogent argument is required for rational acceptance of religious belief.

evidentialism

Here there are fundamentally two views. According to ‘evidentialism’, the source of positive epistemic status for religious belief, if indeed it has such status, is just reason—the ensemble of rational faculties including, preeminently, perception, memory, rational intuition, testimony, and the like. The source of positive epistemic status for religious belief, therefore, is the same as that for scientific belief. This view goes back at least to John Locke (1689) and has prominent contemporary representatives. On this view, the existence of cogent arguments for a religious belief is required for rational acceptance of that belief, or at any rate is intimately related to rational acceptance. Some who endorse this view believe there aren't any such cogent arguments; accordingly they reject religious belief as unfounded and rationally unacceptable (Mackie 1982); others hold that in fact there are excellent arguments for theism and even for specifically Christian belief. Here the most prominent contemporary spokesperson would be Richard Swinburne, whose work over the last 30 years or so has resulted in the most powerful, complete and sophisticated development of natural theology the world has so far seen (see, e.g., Swinburne (1979, 2004), (1981, 2005)).

"non-evidentialism"

The other main view, one adopted by, for example, both Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae) and John Calvin (1559), is that belief in God in the first place, and in the distinctive teachings of Christianity in the second, can be rationally accepted even if there are no cogent arguments for them from the deliverances of reason; they have a source of warrant or positive epistemic status independent of the deliverances of reason. This view also has prominent contemporary representation (Alston 1991; Plantinga and Wolterstorff 1984; Plantinga 2000). To use Calvin's terminology, there is the Sensus Divinitatis, which is a source of belief in God, and the Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit, which is the source of belief in the distinctive doctrines of Christianity. Beliefs produced by these sources go beyond reason in the sense that the source of their warrant is not the deliverances of reason; of course it does not follow that such beliefs are irrational, or contrary to reason; nor does it follow that there is something especially dicey or insecure, or chancy about them, as if faith were necessarily blind or a leap in the dark. Indeed, John Calvin defines faith as “a firm and certain knowledge of God's benevolence towards us, … .” (Calvin, 1559, p. 551 (emphasis added)). On this view, religion and faith have a source of properly rational belief independent of reason and science; it would therefore be possible for religion and faith to correct as well as be corrected by science and reason.

There is some reason to think that if theism is indeed true, if indeed there is an all-powerful, all-knowing perfectly good person who has created the world and created human beings in his image, then religious belief would be independent of arguments from reason; it would not require such argument for rationality or positive epistemic status. For if theism is true, God would presumably want human beings to know of his presence (and in fact the vast majority of the human population believe in God or something very much like him); he would therefore arrange for human beings to be able to come to knowledge of him. But if knowledge of God depended on the theistic arguments, or other arguments from the deliverances of reason, then, as Aquinas says, only a few human beings would ever come to a knowledge of this truth, and they only after a long time, and with a substantial admixture of error.

I will post some more later.

Categories of the relationship between science and religion

Introduction:

There are a number of different ways to categorize the relationship between science and religion that various people have used or have critized. Here I start the process of catologuing those ways.

Wikipedia References

Wikipedia as of March 7, 2008 has a good section of science and religion under the heading "Relationship between religion and science". I copy it below:

Historically, science has had a complex relationship with religion; religious doctrines and motivations have sometimes influenced scientific development, while scientific knowledge has had effects on religious beliefs. A common modern view, described by Stephen Jay Gould as "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA), is that science and religion deal with fundamentally separate aspects of human experience and so, when each stays within its own domain, they co-exist peacefully.[2]

Another view known as the conflict thesis, which has fallen from favor amongst historians but retains popular appeal, holds that science and religion inevitably compete for authority over the nature of reality, so that religion has been gradually losing a war with science as scientific explanations become more powerful and widespread.[3] This view was popularized in the 19th century by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. However, neither of these views adequately accounts for the variety of interactions between science and religion (both historically and today), ranging from antagonism to separation to close collaboration.[4]

The kinds of interactions that might arise between science and religion have been classified by John Polkinghorne FRS[5] as:

• 1. Conflict when either discipline threatens to take over the legitimate
  concerns
  of the other

  2. Independence treating each as quite separate realms of enquiry.

  3. Dialogue suggesting that each field has things to say to each other about
  phenomena in which their interests overlap.

  4. Integration aiming to unify both
  fields into a single discourse.

Polkinghorne further suggests that 3 and 4 can be classified in terms of:

• a. Consonance The two fields retain due autonomies, but the statements they make must be capable of appropriate reconciliation with each other without strain
• b. Assimilation An attempt at the maximum possible conceptual meeting.
  Neither is absorbed totally by the other, but they are brought closely together.

Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)

Wikipedia also refers to the Non-Overlapping Magisteria in a nice post under Stephen Gould:

In his book Rocks of Ages, Gould put forward what he described as "a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to ... the supposed conflict between science and religion."[44] He defines the term magisterium as "a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution"[44] and the NOMA principle is "the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty)."[44]

In his view, "Science and religion do not glower at each other...[but] interdigitate in patterns of complex fingering, and at every fractal scale of self-similarity."[44] He suggests, with examples, that "NOMA enjoys strong and fully explicit support, even from the primary cultural stereotypes of hard-line traditionalism" and that it is "a sound position of general consensus, established by long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria."[44]

A similar position has been adopted by the National Academy of Sciences. Its publication Science and Creationism states that "Scientists, like many others, are touched with awe at the order and complexity of nature. Indeed, many scientists are deeply religious. But science and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience. Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each."[45]

Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion argues against the logic of the NOMA principle in shielding religions from scientific scrutiny. According to Dawkins, "the God Hypothesis," that "there exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us," is a scientific hypothesis, with a definite yes or no answer, and is therefore not exempt from scientific examination. Dawkins suggests both that NOMA is wrong and that Gould did not believe in it, but simply wanted to pay lip service to certain aspects of political correctness. With the exception of identifying Gould's motivation, Sam Harris has suggested the same. Paul Davies, on the other hand, has suggested that NOMA is flawed because "science has its own faith-based belief system."[46]

Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor has received the 2007 Templeton Prize for "Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities." In the following, I take some information from an article called "A 'disenchanted' age" by Robert Sibley, in The Ottawa Citizen published Sunday, January 20, 2008.

His career includes "300 scholarly papers and a dozen books" and explorations of the "genesis of the concept of selfhood, notions of identity and authenticity and the various ways westerners have "imagined" the meaning and purpose of their civilization." "He has written on everything from political theory, ethics and cultural criticism to epistemology and linguistic theory." The article continues:

Arguably, if there is one thread that winds through Taylor's thought it is his critique of "scientism." For Taylor, the scientific world-view and its empirical approach to human knowledge goes astray when it attempts to interpret humans as "objects" or "things" that can be "known" when detached from the social and natural worlds in which they live. Against this epistemology, Taylor has set his own perspective, one grounded in an idea taken from French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. "Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning."

Taylor's latest work, A Secular Age, extends his search for the sources of meaning within modernity with a mammoth accounting of the rise of secularism and the retreat of Christianity. Throughout the book Taylor returns repeatedly to one essential question: What does it mean, and how has it happened, that we, as westerners, have shifted from being an "enchanted" God-centred civilization to being a "disenchanted" civilization in which belief in a divinely ordered world is no longer a given?

Taylor examines the displacement of religious faith from the centre of the West's social, political and cultural institutions and what has emerged over the last half-millennium to fill the vacuum of faithlessness. Among those emergent "modern social imaginaries," Taylor cites that "historically unprecedented amalgam of new practices and institutional forms (science, technology, industrial production, urbanization); of new ways of living (individualism, secularization, instrumental rationality); and of new forms of malaise (alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impending social dissolution)." We now live in an age of "secularity," characterized by the decline in religious beliefs and practices, the retreat of religion from the public arena and, at the political level, the separation of church and state.

Taylor sees two theories about how western secularization happened, and postulates a third:

1), "the increasing acceptance of a scientific epistemology as the cause of a decline in personal faith"

2), "social and institutional changes set in motion during the Reformation and Enlightenment gradually marginalized religion" and

3), "the moral appeal of science."

Here is how the article describes the third view:

In the age of belief, people's sources of meaningfulness, including their social and political arrangements, were anchored by their faith in God. In a secular age, people believe they have alternatives to God for making sense of their lives. Over the course of the modern era, a God-oriented moral outlook gave way to a science-based, human-centric perspective that "consists of new conditions of belief," including atheism, or, to use Taylor's phrase, "exclusive humanism." In other words, the rise of secularism reflects a spiritual shift, not a rejection of spirituality.

Taylor traces this shift to the Reformation when notions of a more personalized relationship between man and God began to displace rituals rooted in collective worship. The Protestant Reformation rejected the need for institutional orders or rituals to mediate between man and God, which fostered the idea of inner or spiritual freedom. But the Protestants' desire to be free to worship as they wished was transformed during the Enlightenment into a worldly freedom aimed as satisfying the individual. The past two centuries have seen this notion of individual autonomy pushed to the point where many people, perhaps most, no longer perceive a spiritual dimension to the political or social structures -- marriage, family, community, etc. -- within which they have their lives.

Secular Humanism
Taylor recognizes meaningless as the modern malaise that the human potential movement and new-age spiritualism addresses. What is the alternative to religion. It is secular humanism:

The success of secularism depended on scientism's "disenchantment" of the world, its ability to replace religious faith with the hope of creating heaven on Earth. But now there is widespread disenchantment with secular humanism. The modern narratives that replaced Christianity -- faith in rationalism, belief in progress, individual freedom, and the like -- are weakening. Religion, says Taylor, has re-emerged as a consequence of dissatisfactions with secularism. "As a result of the denial of transcendence, of heroism, of deep feeling, we are left with a view of human life which is empty, cannot inspire commitment, offers nothing really worthwhile, cannot answer the craving for goals we can dedicate ourselves to."

"Desire for Eternity" deeply embedded in human psyche.

There is a deep spiritual dimension:

Taylor's central theme comes to the fore on this point -- the "desire for eternity" is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Humans require a spiritual dimension, an intimation of the sacred, if they are to flourish as more than creatures seeking to avoid violent death and live out their time in the cocoon of consumer comforts. "I insist on this point because in a way this whole book is an attempt to study the fate in the modern West of religious faith in a strong sense," Taylor says. "This strong sense I define ... by a double criterion: the belief in transcendent reality, on one hand, and the connected aspiration to a transformation which goes beyond ordinary human flourishing on the other."

Taylor reminds us that we remain spiritual creatures in our most essential natures, and that what we take for granted -- our age's lack of religious faith -- is, in fact, an anomaly of history. Our forefathers did not live this way and our grandchildren might not either.

Science and Religion Sites

There are a number of interesting and important websites on science and religion topics. Among them are:

• Tempelton Foundation: http://www.templeton.org/
• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_religion_and_science
• Einstein on Science and Religion: http://www.einsteinandreligion.com/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-science/
• AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion (DoSER): http://www.aaas.org/spp/dser/
• Center for the Study of Science and Religion (CSSR): http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cssr/
• Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago http://www.lstc.edu/
• Metanexus Institute on Science and Religion http://www.metanexus.org/
• Science and Theology News http://www.stnews.org/ \
• Science and Spirit http://www.science-spirit.org/
• Counterbalance Foundation http://www.counterbalance.org/
• Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) http://www.iras.org/
• Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) http://www.ctns.org/
• European Society for the Study of Science and Theology (ESSSAT) http://www.esssat.org/
• International Society for Science and Religion http://www.issr.org.uk/
• Lumen Christi Institute http://www.lumenchristi.org/
• ELCA Alliance for Faith Science and Technology www.elca.org/faithandscience/alliance.html
• Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science http://www.zygonjournal.org/ or www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/journal.asp?ref=0591-2385

and a number of others as well.

Steve