Posting to Russell Blackmore's blog of Sam Harris's Comments in NYT

I posted this in Russell Blackmore's blog.

Steve Friberg said...

Hi Russell:

About Francis Collins, you write:

"These are not the words of someone who embraces a liberal, non-literalist version of Christianity. Collins believes in a literal creator, in supernatural interference by the creator in evolutionary and human history, and in an objective, supernaturally-grounded moral law."

Given that Francis Collins has written extensively on what he believes, and given that many believe as he does, I can't say that your description rings true. You are, I think, offering a caricature. Sam Harris does much worse in his NYT piece. He misrepresents what Collins believes.

I suspect both of you are being sincere. You are reporting what you believe to be true. But, if we are to be true in a scientific manner, more than just belief is needed. Understanding, backed by verification is needed.

Which brings me to an interesting perspective: you, and the new atheists as well, are at the leading edge of developing a new theology, one more meaningful to the modern world. It is the back and forth of ideas that counts, not initial starting positions and labels.

I think that what is happening, and it is a process going on for the last fifty years, is that the old enlightenment consensus - maybe we could call the academic consensus - has been shown to be shot through with illogic. Religion and science are only opposed if you misrepresent the language of the other side. With the older language of theology, that was easy to do. What is happening now, I think, is that a new and better theological language, one more meaningful in these times, is being forged by the new atheist wars.

Sam Harris Trumps Both Science and Religion

In today's New York Times, Sam Harris - a man of no known scientific accomplishment - weighs in on the qualifications of Francis Collins - a man of tremendous scientific accomplishment - for the position of director of the National Institutes of Health. Apparently, Dr. Collins is not scientist enough for the redoubtable Mr. Harris.

Below is the article with my comments in blue.

Science Is in the Details

By SAM HARRIS

Published: July 26, 2009

PRESIDENT OBAMA has nominated Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. It would seem a brilliant choice. Dr. Collins’s credentials are impeccable: he is a physical chemist, a medical geneticist and the former head of the Human Genome Project. He is also, by his own account, living proof that there is no conflict between science and religion. In 2006, he published “The Language of God,” in which he claimed to demonstrate “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and evangelical Christianity.

Dr. Collins is regularly praised by secular scientists for what he is not: he is not a “young earth creationist,” nor is he a proponent of “intelligent design.” Given the state of the evidence for evolution, these are both very good things for a scientist not to be.

But as director of the institutes, Dr. Collins will have more responsibility for biomedical and health-related research than any person on earth, controlling an annual budget of more than $30 billion. He will also be one of the foremost representatives of science in the United States. For this reason, it is important that we understand Dr. Collins and his faith as they relate to scientific inquiry.

What follows are a series of slides, presented in order, from a lecture on science and belief that Dr. Collins gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008:

Slide 1: “Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.” [Probably, Harris doesn't like the language. As a fact, we do exist, so it is incontestable that the parameters were precisely tuned. SRF]

Slide 2: “God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.” [See comment above. Yes, we do exist, so whatever plan there was "included human beings." SRF]

Slide 3: “After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.” [Only a idealogue could complain about this!. SRF]

Slide 4: “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.” [Yes, children, there is a Christ! SRF]

Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?” [Collins strike paydirt! Harris must hate this! SRF]

Why should Dr. Collins’s beliefs be of concern?

There is an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. This isn’t surprising, as very few scientific truths are self-evident, and many are counterintuitive. It is by no means obvious that empty space has structure or that we share a common ancestor with both the housefly and the banana. It can be difficult to think like a scientist. But few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion. [How about self-anointed high priests of science with fanatical theological predispositions? SRF]

Dr. Collins has written that science makes belief in God “intensely plausible” — the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of nature’s constants, the emergence of complex life, the effectiveness of mathematics, all suggest the existence of a “loving, logical and consistent” God. [

But when challenged with alternative accounts of these phenomena — or with evidence that suggests that God might be unloving, illogical, inconsistent or, indeed, absent — Dr. Collins will say that God stands outside of Nature, and thus science cannot address the question of his existence at all. [Harris Truth #1: God must measurable. If he isn't measurable, he doesn't exist. SRF]

Similarly, Dr. Collins insists that our moral intuitions attest to God’s existence, to his perfectly moral character and to his desire to have fellowship with every member of our species. But when our moral intuitions recoil at the casual destruction of innocents by, say, a tidal wave or earthquake, Dr. Collins assures us that our time-bound notions of good and evil can’t be trusted and that God’s will is a mystery. [Harris Truth #2: Belief in God must NOT address the mysteries of good and evil, nor is belief in the afterlife allowed. SRF]

Most scientists who study the human mind are convinced that minds are the products of brains, and brains are the products of evolution. Dr. Collins takes a different approach: he insists that at some moment in the development of our species God inserted crucial components — including an immortal soul, free will, the moral law, spiritual hunger, genuine altruism, etc. [Harris Truth #3: Creation and evolution are necessarily incompatible. Anybody who believes differently is wrong and not trustable. SRF]

As someone who believes that our understanding of human nature can be derived from neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science and behavioral economics, among others, I am troubled by Dr. Collins’s line of thinking. I also believe it would seriously undercut fields like neuroscience and our growing understanding of the human mind. If we must look to religion to explain our moral sense, what should we make of the deficits of moral reasoning associated with conditions like frontal lobe syndrome and psychopathy? Are these disorders best addressed by theology? [This is a completely dishonest argument. Collins is not suggesting this. SRF]

Dr. Collins has written that “science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence” and that “the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted.” [The most pressing questions of human existence are the purpose of our life and our responsibility to others. If science offers answers to these questions, let Mr. Harris offer them for our enlightment. SRF]

One can only hope that these convictions will not affect his judgment at the institutes of health. After all, understanding human well-being at the level of the brain might very well offer some “answers to the most pressing questions of human existence” — questions like, Why do we suffer? Or, indeed, is it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself? And wouldn’t any effort to explain human nature without reference to a soul, and to explain morality without reference to God, necessarily constitute “atheistic materialism”? [But, not yet, eh? SRF]

Francis Collins is an accomplished scientist and a man who is sincere in his beliefs. And that is precisely what makes me so uncomfortable about his nomination. Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible? [Again, a very dishonest remark. There is no reason to believe that Collins holds this to be true. SRF]

Sam Harris is the author of “The End of Faith” and co-founder of the Reason Project, which promotes scientific knowledge and secular values.

Just posted to the Blackford Blog

Having just discovered the Russell Blackford blog (turns out Russ is a fellow SF writer and SFWA colleague) I felt compelled to jump into the dialogue with this comment:

I'm a fellow science fiction writer and SFWA member who also happens to be a member of the Baha'i Faith.

I'm in complete agreement that the "new atheists" have indeed done a public service by opening up the debate on the content of religious dogma.

While I wish they could do so without the sarcasm, vitriol and obfuscatory rhetoric, it is still of benefit to have the light of reason shed in the "'cause that's the way it is" room.

The rhetoric (such as Hitchens' derogatory comments on Christ's "primitive understanding of agriculture") only serves to inflame rather than communicate and just about guarantees an emotional response rather than a rational one. I am cynical enough to wonder if this is not actually the intent.

Here's to honest communication and a moratorium on demonization ... on both sides.

The “religion is bad, science is God” crowd.

I meant to say "religion is bad, science is good" crowd. This is in the excellent Chris Mooney website on Discover.

25. Stephen Friberg Says:
July 2nd, 2009 at 3:28 pm

Hi Ophelia:

Don’t know you, so I don’t know your politics yet. Are you in the “religion is bad, science is God” crowd or the “agnostic” crowd?

27. Stephen Friberg Says:
July 2nd, 2009 at 3:36 pm

Chris, might you be up for a new book project?

Something like “The Democratic War on Religion”, or probably much better (because a lot of Democrats are religious), “The New Atheist War on Religion.”

A New Post on the Russell Blackford Site

Hi Mark:

You write: "As our evolution progresses some features of past evolutionary necessity will be superseded by new adaptations required for the continued survival of the species. Rationality is one of these characteristics."

I agree, but I want to note that the time spans we are talking about - maybe ten thousand years - are too short for biological evolution to be at play. Rather, what is happening is learning, both individual and social.

Science typifies a modern high speed learning process. It powerfully combines both reasoned thought - theory, model building, conjecture - with empirical testing. The "wisdom of crowds" approach - the driving force behind Google - is another.

Very clearly, religion has some catching up to do, bit it too has evolved an important and powerful role to play, But, it is very big, and very slowly moving, except when a new prophet shows up every thousand years or so. That doesn't mean that it is inherently anti-rational, but it certainly can get that way at times.

Three more posts to Russell Blackford's site:

Stephen Friberg • Mountain View, CA, USA • Jun 21, 2009

Hi Russel:

You write:

"There is just a history of science not finding religion-based causes fruitful. ... preformationism of the kind that says God created an infinite set of individuals inside each other dating back to the Garden of Eden was not a fruitful hypothesis. ... Likewise, diluvian geology is now known to be false (this was well-established during the 19th century)."

Best be careful here. Neither of these are notably religious in origin, although I understand the temptation to see as them as such. The later, of course, was a specifically western European hypothesis inspired by the historical genius of Judaism which became a part of an extraordinarily fruitful iteration of thought that prefigured modern geology and of course evolution.

What is of religious origin, history shows, is science itself. The history of astronomy is a case in point. (The history of astronomy, to a surprising degree, IS the history of science).

Starting from Egyptian and Babylonian religious concerns, astronomy was merged into Greek number mysticism with its belief in the sacredness of pure geometrical form. Ptolemy's superb writings took this astronomy and made it into common currency in the Islamic world.

In Islam, the world was considered a sign of God, meaning that to study the world was to glorify God, an approach that encouraged the growth of empiricism and mathematics. For astronomy, extraordinary mathematical, engineering, and observational advances resulted from this empirical bent, leading to a full and rich scientific literature that became the foundation of European astronomy and its subsequent flowerings.

I think the broader thrust of all this may be the following:

The idea of unsophisticated and superstitious supernatural explanations as the religious perspective is pretty much a red herring. Yes, creationism and ID are such things, but delving into their history suggests that are due more to a "high church/low church" political struggle. The "high church" side has morphed into a science-based secular elitism.

In the 17th century, leading religious thinkers were NOT contemplating supernatural acts of God as explanations - that was the domain of the polemicists and fanatics of the war between religionists. Rather, they were doing the opposite. People like the Jesuit-trained Descartes who were setting up science as a truth-seeking way to create unity and an alternative to conflict.

Stephen Friberg • Mountain View, CA, USA • Jun 21, 2009

Hi Athena:

I would agree that most people have a simplified view of science, which is why the danger I warn of is so real.

The danger, and the evidence for it is increasing, is of individuals or groups taking simplistic interpretations of science and turning them into philosophical dogma and recruiting ideological followers. The "accommodationist" discussions on the internet which Russell describes are a skirmish in the ugly cultural war this has engendered. I think it is very dangerous to underestimate the appeal of being an authority.

For (2), you are probably thinking of a different century than I am. Western European slavery was not abolished until the 19th century - and yes, it didn't happen easily. Christianity - this time Protestantism - played a major role in its abolition. If you are a Marxist, I suppose you could say that the factory worker or the immigrant became a serf. Is this what you mean?

Stephen R. Friberg • Mountain View, CA • Jun 22, 2009

Hi Mark:

You write:

"Through the scientific method we have come to know that there is no supernatural. Even if we come to discover other dimensions or universes, these would be part of the natural order of things."

Let me propose a radically different way to think about the supernatural, one that turns your conclusion around 180 degrees. If you understand it, you can understand religion.

My observation, and yes, I'm a working scientist, is that the scientific method has demonstrated very clearly that there is a supernatural. We use it every day - or should - in our work and research.

It is, of course, that which enables to grasp the scientific method, that which enables us to use scientific methods, and that which enables us to understand things.

If you understand what it is, and keep in mind that "super" means above, not superman, and that natural means "nature", not organic, then you can figure out religion, and maybe even break free of all the imagery - the gods, the images - that so bedevils people who don't understand it.

This is a post that I made to Russell Blackford's Blog at IEET

COMMENTS

Stephen Friberg • United States • Jun 20, 2009

Publish Post

Hi Russell:

You are wading into contentious territory, and doing so carefully, and I commend you both for your boldness and your care.

A central claim you are making might be summarized as follows: science has an equal claim to moral authority as does religion, suggesting that NOMA is wrong.

I disagree with the moral authority claim for reasons that strike me as obvious. However, I agree with your distrust of the NOMA doctrine.

- First of all, science makes no claim to moral authority, nor should it be expected to.

- Second, when moral claims have been drawn from science, they have been often disastrously and dangerously wrong. Social Darwinism and the murderous uses it was put to is a case in point. Communism, with its claimed-for basis in scientific materialism, is another.

- Thirdly, a very small percentage of the population are scientists, so any system that ascribes - or attempts to ascribe - authority to science creates a priestly structure empowering "those who know", in this case the scientists. Others therefore have to follow, in this case everybody else.

Religion, which clearly has it failings in living up to its stated goals, is different.

- First of all, it directly focuses on moral issues as a central, if not the central, component of what it does. And, literally for billions of people, it focuses on moral issues such truthfulness, honesty, fairness, compassion, and the need for education as central to its teachings.

- Second, it is for everybody, and at least since Christianity, directly says so. It is phrased so it is accessible to everybody. It does not require a 4 years of undergraduate school and 5 years of graduate school and a Ph.D. thesis.

- Thirdly, it has, and continues to have a track record of tremendous success in achieving moral goals. The elimination of Western European slavery being but one of them. That record continues to expand.

However, there is an important sense in which science is an integral part of addressing moral issues, one which dovetails very well with the moral focus of religion and which suggests that NOMA is inadequate.

And that is that the principles of religion can neither be well-understood nor put into action without the empirical, rational, and pragmatic approaches that science - divorced of its theological trappings - brings to bear.

A case in point is the need to address ecological concerns for the world of our children and their future. Both science, which can supply accurate information and evaluation of various methods to address the problem, and the moral willpower of large numbers of people, mostly folks who are not scientists, are needed ingredients.

This, I think, shows NOMA to be wrong. Both science AND religion working together are needed.

My comment in the Wall Street Journal to Dr. Krauss:

• 15 minutes ago

Nonsubscriber comments are set to "Hide" Show this comment +

• Stephen Friberg wrote: (your comment)

Dr. Kraus weighs in less feverishly than some of his colleagues, notably Jerry Coyne who would cast out all believers from doing science. Certainly, his measured and moderate words are reassuring.

Nonetheless, it is bothersome, as well as inaccurate, to hear him say that "Harris and Dawkins are simply being honest when they point out the inconsistency of belief in an activist god with modern science."

More honesty - including intellectual honesty - would be welcome here. Professor Krauss, of course, is making a theological statement, not a factual statement or a scientific statement. (In the vernacular, these are known as "opinions.") What are his definitions of "activist God?" Is he at all familiar with the hugely vast religious literature on these issues?

I have to ask, how is it that atheists such as Professor Krauss have acquired a direct and innate knowledge of the nature of God, a knowledge unavailable to religious believers, such that they can answer these question so clearly and resolutely without thought? Is their knowledge of God, because of lack of belief, somehow more true and direct?

Be that as it may, a more reasoned and historically correct answer to the question about the relationship between an activist God and modern science is that an activist God is the Lawgiver, the Creator, and the Maintainer of the universe and everything within, and that understanding those laws by the scientific method is an act of worship just as much as is prayer. Note: the method that was evolved - most definitely first in the Islamic world - included something called "empiricism", an approach which better sidestepped worldly delusion and the false "idols" of ignorant and irrational superstition.

Or to put in another way, modern science came out of, and is a consequence of religion and reasoned faith through and through. And yes, its roots are Islamic as well as Hellenistic, a point that had consequences, first good, and then bad, in its struggle to put down roots in late medieval Europe.

In the Wall Street Journal on June 26th, 2009

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.

-- J.B.S. Haldane

"Fact and Faith" (1934)

Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in several exciting panel discussions at the World Science Festival in New York City. But the most dramatic encounter took place at the panel strangely titled "Science, Faith and Religion." I had been conscripted to join the panel after telling one of the organizers that I saw no reason to have it. After all, there was no panel on science and astrology, or science and witchcraft. So why one on science and religion?

I ended up being one of two panelists labeled "atheists." The other was philosopher Colin McGinn. On the other side of the debate were two devoutly Catholic scientists, biologist Kenneth Miller and Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno. Mr. McGinn began by commenting that it was eminently rational to suppose that Santa Claus doesn't exist even if one cannot definitively prove that he doesn't. Likewise, he argued, we can apply the same logic to the supposed existence of God. The moderator of the session, Bill Brinkman, a reporter with some religious inclination, surprised me by bursting out in response, "Then I guess you are a rational atheist."

Our host was presumably responding to all those so-called fundamentalist atheists who have recently borne the brunt of intense attacks following the success of books like Sam Harris's "The End of Faith," and Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion."

These scientists have been castigated by believers for claiming that science is incompatible with a belief in God. On the one hand, this is a claim that appears manifestly false -- witness the two Catholic scientists on my panel. And on the other hand, the argument that science suggests God is a delusion only bolsters the view of the of the fundamentalist religious right that science is an atheist enemy that must either be vanquished or assimilated into religion.

Coincidentally, I have appeared numerous times alongside Ken Miller to defend evolutionary biology from the efforts of those on various state school boards who view evolution as the poster child for "science as the enemy." These fundamentalists are unwilling to risk the possibility that science might undermine their faith, and so they work to shield children from this knowledge at all costs. To these audiences I have argued that one does not have to be an atheist to accept evolutionary biology as a reality. And I have pointed to my friend Ken as an example.

This statement of fact appears to separate me from my other friends, Messrs. Harris and Dawkins. Yet this separation is illusory. It reflects the misperception that the recent crop of vocal atheist-scientist-writers are somehow "atheist absolutists" who remain in a "cultural and historical vacuum" -- in the words of a recent Nature magazine editorial.

But this accusation is unfair. Messrs. Harris and Dawkins are simply being honest when they point out the inconsistency of belief in an activist god with modern science.

J.B.S. Haldane, an evolutionary biologist and a founder of population genetics, understood that science is by necessity an atheistic discipline. As Haldane so aptly described it, one cannot proceed with the process of scientific discovery if one assumes a "god, angel, or devil" will interfere with one's experiments. God is, of necessity, irrelevant in science.

Faced with the remarkable success of science to explain the workings of the physical world, many, indeed probably most, scientists understandably react as Haldane did. Namely, they extrapolate the atheism of science to a more general atheism.

While such a leap may not be unimpeachable it is certainly rational, as Mr. McGinn pointed out at the World Science Festival. Though the scientific process may be compatible with the vague idea of some relaxed deity who merely established the universe and let it proceed from there, it is in fact rationally incompatible with the detailed tenets of most of the world's organized religions. As Sam Harris recently wrote in a letter responding to the Nature editorial that called him an "atheist absolutist," a "reconciliation between science and Christianity would mean squaring physics, chemistry, biology, and a basic understanding of probabilistic reasoning with a raft of patently ridiculous, Iron Age convictions."

When I confronted my two Catholic colleagues on the panel with the apparent miracle of the virgin birth and asked how they could reconcile this with basic biology, I was ultimately told that perhaps this biblical claim merely meant to emphasize what an important event the birth was. Neither came to the explicit defense of what is undeniably one of the central tenets of Catholic theology.

Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Moreover, the true believers in each of these faiths are atheists regarding the specific sacred tenets of all other faiths. Christianity rejects the proposition that the Quran contains the infallible words of the creator of the universe. Muslims and Jews reject the divinity of Jesus.

So while scientific rationality does not require atheism, it is by no means irrational to use it as the basis for arguing against the existence of God, and thus to conclude that claimed miracles like the virgin birth are incompatible with our scientific understanding of nature.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that these issues are not purely academic. The current crisis in Iran has laid bare the striking inconsistency between a world built on reason and a world built on religious dogma.

Perhaps the most important contribution an honest assessment of the incompatibility between science and religious doctrine can provide is to make it starkly clear that in human affairs -- as well as in the rest of the physical world -- reason is the better guide.

Mr. Krauss, a cosmologist, is director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University. His most recent book is "Hiding in the Mirror" (Viking, 2005).

If you have faith in science its no longer faith, its being superior or special

This a a post I made to Chris Mooney's excellent Intersections blog on Discover

127. Stephen Friberg Says:
June 25th, 2009 at 9:31 pm

Coyne writes:

“Instead of beefing about our “militancy,” why don’t accommodationists start addressing the question of whether faith can tell us anything that’s true?”

Neat trick, this accomodationist bit. Its like what the radical right did with the word liberal. First you label them, then you try to get rid of them.

Can faith tell us anything that’s true? I sincerely hope so. I believe in evolution because I have faith in the scientific community that thought it true. I certainly didn’t do all the legwork myself. The same holds true for anyone who believes in any scientific result whatsoever that they haven’t repeated (and not just repeated, but repeated several times).

So, Coyne has apparently made up his own definition of faith. If you have faith in science its no longer faith, its being superior, or special, or something higher than those who have faith in other things, like, say, democracy, truth, love, those kinds of things.

I don’t get it!

Claiming apples (allegories about spiritual truths) to be oranges (scientific fact statements)

Here is a post I made on Sean Carroll's Discover Magazine Blog (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/06/23/science-and-religion-are-not-compatible/) . There were a lot of good responses to Sean's post.

There was only one to mine which I include at the end along with my response.

44. Stephen Friberg Says:
June 23rd, 2009 at 1:12 pm

Hi Sean:

Yes, I happen to be a physicist. And I understand religion too, something which I’ve found many scientists don’t. (Hi e.pierce, ex-Baha’i).

You write:

“The reason why science and religion are actually incompatible is that, in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions. It’s worth noting that this incompatibility is perfectly evident to any fair-minded person who cares to look.”

and

“Different religions make very different claims, but they typically end up saying things like “God made the universe in six days” or “Jesus died and was resurrected” or “Moses parted the red sea” or “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility.”

I like to think I’m a fair-minded person, and as U of R trained physics Ph.D., I would like to think that I’ve got a reasonably good scientific education. So, do I think your claim makes any sense? To the analysis.

Point 1. Your claims about fact statements.

You are taking allegorical statements like “God made the universe in six days,” “Jesus died and was resurrected,” and “Moses parted the red sea” and conflating them with scientific fact statements.

I grade this as a D-, not quite an F. I don’t give you an F because I know that many religionists do as you just did, so I want to give you a little credit.

Another type of truth claim you discuss is “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden”.

Given that neither you nor I have died, I’m not quite sure where you get your data on this. But still, I give you a C-. Here, you seem to inch in the direction of recognizing that religion might make truth claims that are different than scientific facts.

Conclusions:

Overall, as a “fair-minded person who cares to look”, I conclude that the incompatibility you suggest is not at all evident from the examples you present. Rather, they suggest you are claiming apples (allegories about spiritual truths) to be oranges (scientific fact statements) and skirting the real issues.

Point 2. Oh forget it. If you don’t get point 1, you are not going to get point 2.

82. Phillip Helbig Says:
June 24th, 2009 at 3:36 am

“You are taking allegorical statements like “God made the universe in six days,” “Jesus died and was resurrected,” and “Moses parted the red sea” and conflating them with scientific fact statements.”

The historical fact is that no-one considered these to be allegorical until science started making
them look very unlikely. YOU say they are allegorical. Why?

I answered Phillip on June 25th, 1:41 PM.

126. Stephen Friberg Says:
June 25th, 2009 at 1:36 pm

On June 24th, Phillip Helbig quoted me as saying:

>“You are taking allegorical statements like “God made the universe in six days,”
> “Jesus died and was resurrected,” and “Moses parted the red sea” and
> conflating them with scientific fact statements.”

He then made an interesting comment and asked an important question:

> The historical fact is that no-one considered these to be allegorical until
> science started making them look very unlikely. YOU say they are
> allegorical. Why?

Let me try to answer. This is an important issue because a very common argument against religion these days is that it is a kind of pre-scientific science and that it’s truth statements are primitive - and wrong - truth statements of a scientific type. Carroll is making this type of argument in saying that science and religion are incompatible.

Clearly, many religionists, including such distinguished early Christian church figures as Saint Augustine and medieval authorities such as Thomas Aquinas did not mistake allegorical truth for scientific fact. The historical record is very rich on the issue of the relationships between “natural philosophy” and religious allegory, and indeed it is one of the main topics of study in fields like medieval studies, Islamic studies, or late classical studies.

So it is simply a mistake to assume that religious allegory was always interpreted as science. However, it is highly probable that the poorly educated did so.

If you are interested in European history, you might consider looking into the emergence of modern science in the so-called scientific revolution in the 17th century. Galileo was a major figure in that scientific revolution.

Galileo’s fight was not with allegorical religious truth - he seems to have had no problem at all with it. Rather, his fight was with Aristotelian science and Aristotelian philosophy that had been absorbed into Catholicism as unassailable dogma. In other words, the big fight was between old science and new science, not science vs. religious allegory.

Another thing you might consider looking into was the relationship between religious allegory and Hellenistic science in the late classical age. Judaism and especially Christianity came of age in cultures permeated with Hellenistic rationalism, the precursor to modern science. What this means is that for classically educated Christian - and later Islamic - elites the difference between allegory and what then considered natural philosophy was no great mystery.

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

Emergence vs. Creation

The Baha'i Faith, along with Christianity, Islam, and other religions, views the world and all in it as created by God.

All praise to the unity of God, and all honor to Him, the sovereign Lord, the incomparable and all-glorious Ruler of the universe, Who, out of utter nothingness, hath created the reality of all things, Who, from naught, hath brought into being the most refined and subtle elements of His creation ... [Bahá'u'lláh, GLEANINGS: XXVII, pp. 64 – 68.]

Praise be to God! the least change produced in the form of the smallest thing proves the existence of a creator: then can this great universe, which is endless, be self-created and come into existence from the action of matter and the elements? How self-evidently wrong is such a supposition! [`Abdu'l-Bahá, SAQ: PROOFS AND EVIDENCES OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD, p. 5]

In apparent opposition, emergence and evolution are usually described as growth processes that occur from the ground up.

Even thinkers at the 53rd Annual Star Island Conference of The Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) seem to view things this way, saying that "emergent properties give rise to yet more emergent properties, generating the vast complexity of our present-day cosmic, biological, ecological, and cultural contexts" according to the conference introductory notes.

Stuart Kauffman, a prominent founding father of modern emergence science views it as a lacking a "directing agency":

It is my further belief that we are coming to see our universe and life as creative, without a directing agency. Meaning emerges with life. If this view becomes widespread, it has the promise to become the sustaining myth we need to sustain in turn an emerging global civilization beset with its concomitant fundamentalist communities.[THE CREATIVITY OF THE BIOSPHERE, Stuart Kauffman, ABSTRACT, Program and Schedule, The Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, 53rd Annual Star Island Conference, July 29 to August 5].

Modern writers on the topic such Michael Shermer think this way too. Shermer, in Why Darwin Matters writes: "If new species are created naturally, what place, then, for God? [page xvi]." This is typical of the idea the many have that a scientific understanding of development of something as a natural process overrules the idea that God is the creator of that process.

Here is another quote from Shermer in the same book in the context of emergence:

Self-organization is itself an emergent property, and emergence is a form of self-organization. The system is self-repeating, and therefore there is no need to invoke an Intelligent Designer.

He seems to be saying that if things are explained by science it rules out their being created by God.

A modern superstition?

Let us examine the assumption that scientific explanation voids divine creation.

The assumption is basically an inverted "Creationism" argument. All arguments about divine creation, the argument goes, are creationist arguments. Therefore, because creationist arguments are obviously wrong, all arguments that posit divine creation are also wrong. [For this argument to be true, one has to prove that all arguments for divine creation are creationist arguments. Given that very few arguments for divine creation are actually creationist arguments, one has to act as if they were, i.e., to ignore what they actually say.]

Often, the rush to deny divine creation is by biologists uncomfortable with the lawlike behavior of natural processes and the constraint that the only things that can happen are those things that are enabled to happen by such lawlike behavior. Lawlike behavior, of course, is equivalent to divine creation.

Physicists think quite differently, holding that what enables things to come into being are the underlying laws that make structure possible. Then, it is only a matter of time before things that are possible potentially become actual physically.

The most obvious counterexamples to the view that natural processes and divine creativity are irremediably in conflict are our everyday experiences of engineering, planning, gardening, child raising, agriculture, writing, and animal husbandry. In all of those fields, the will to make things happen are an essential ingredient to the thing happening. Watches, of course, don't engineer themselves or come to lie on the heath through localized entropy reversal. Rather, someone plans and executes their production. However, every single step in the manufacturing process is "natural" in that it involves natural processes. In goal directed processes, no matter the will and intelligence involved, all the steps are natural.

Growth from a seed:

The analogy for the God's creation that the Baha'i Writings use is growth from a seed, or growth from an embryo. In both cases, something complex and big starts out from something seemingly simple and small. In biology, for example, DNA instructions make possible a growth process that creates structure that is complex and sophisticated.

So with man, the Baha'i Writing say. From the very earliest days, humanity existed in perfection, although not in its present form here on earth. A growth process, a maturation process, had to take place before humanity as potential became humanity as actual. Far from being a random and probabilistic chance process, such a maturation is certain and sure.

Correspondence to emergence:

Clearly, emergence viewed as a random-like growth process with no purpose or direction is not the same as divine creation. Of course, it is not true to say that emergence has no purpose or direction. Emergence is usually considered to be a process that brings about increasing organizational complexity.

But, emergence as a random-like exploration of possibilities that (if you will) stumbles on structures that make other structures possible is entirely - and for some, surprisingly - consistent with the idea of divine creation. Those structures - stars, crystals, cells, DNA, plants, animals, humans - have always been intrinsic to the laws of the universe (if not, they could never happen). Emergence is simply the maturation process by which what is potential becomes actual in a way analogous to the growth of a seed or an embryo.

Randomness, the bugaboo of many a science writer who mistakes it for purposelessness, plays a central and dynamic role in this process. Like heat that hardens iron into steel, randomness drives the multiplicity of explorations that bring new phenomena into reality.