Earlier this year Pope Benedict XVI created a new foundation to promote constructive dialog between science and faith, something we desperately need (CNA/EWTN News). The initiative draws on years of conversation coordinated by Science & the Ontological Quest (STOQ), a project funded in part by the Templeton Foundation. I made a modest contribution to this conversation a few years back when I was asked to speak at the Vatican on "America's Ongoing Hostility to Evolution," a phenomenon that European Catholics find incomprehensible.
In a recent blog, the prominent new atheist biologist Jerry Coyne uncharitably attacked this effort to promote peace between science and religion. The Vatican initiative involves "weaselly accommodationism" he wrote. He criticized references to Thomas Aquinas on the grounds that the great Medieval scholar was really a "waffler" being "trotted out" to defend an eccentric position on creation. Religion, he said, provides only "self-help bromides" in contrast to science that provides "truths."
The science and religion "debate" wrote Coyne, has long been confused, ever "since science began showing that the claims of religion, including Catholicism, are not credible." He goes on to say that the "debate has been lively since 1896, when Andrew Dickson White, co-founder of Cornell University, published his two volume anti-accommodationist opus History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom."
Coyne's perspective is widely shared by the New Atheists but there are few with his energy (he posts substantive blogs on his site Why Evolution is True at least once a day). He also does his homework, taking time to read the works of leading religious thinkers. He is reading the King James Version of the Bible from cover to cover, a project that many Christians have been unable to complete. (He even made it through the book of Numbers, which contains some of the most boring stuff that has ever made it into print.)
Nevertheless, I think his critiques of the Vatican project are slanted and unfair. For starters, Thomas Aquinas is not being "trotted out" to make some point, as though he were some obscure figure cherry-picked from a pantheon of options because his 13th century view of creation comports with contemporary views of evolution. Aquinas is, by most estimates, the most important Christian thinker since St. Paul, and his views on creation have informed all subsequent thinking on the topic by both Protestants and Catholics.
Like other thinkers from previous centuries, Aquinas certainly held beliefs that we can no longer embrace. Coyne mentions that Aquinas believed the earth was 6,000 years old, for example, and thought the events in Genesis, including the Eden story, really happened as described. "So let us hear no more," he concludes, "about Aquinas showing that there's no conflict between the Bible and science."
What Coyne is missing here -- because he opposes harmonizing science and religion -- is the difference between beliefs that Aquinas shared with his century, embraced uncritically because they were not controversial, and Aquinas's more original thinking in response to the challenges of his day. All Western thinkers believed the earth was roughly 6,000 years old until the science of geology was born. Kepler dated the creation at 3992 B.C. and Newton dated it at 4000 B.C., but nobody would argue that these were the central ideas of these early scientists, or that their work on the nature of planetary orbits should be ignored because they thought God created those orbits 6,000 years ago. The same for the Garden of Eden, which was on many maps during those centuries and which Columbus thought he might have discovered when he set foot on the Americas. In the centuries before Newton, most scholars believed the stories in their ancient books, whether Moses's accounts of Eden, or Aristotle's tales of an uninhabitable "Torrid Zone" at the equator.
Aquinas's central insight -- the one that is appropriately defended as his enduring claim and not just something that everyone accepted in his time -- is that the foundation of the Christian doctrine in creation is the belief that God created and upholds everything, including the laws of nature. This remains relevant today because it lets us distinguish between God as the primary cause or source of the laws of nature, and the activity of the laws themselves. This, in turn, provides a helpful way to understand secondary (and tertiary, etc.) causes. God can create the law of gravity without having to be the immediate cause of everything that results from that law. Or, more importantly, God can create a world with the capacity to change and evolve without having to direct the details of those processes. This is complicated, of course, and raises its own set of questions, but it provides a basis for dialog by showing that new scientific developments can be incorporated into traditional Christian understandings.
Unfortunately, such dialog between science and religion will continue to be widely misconstrued as a "debate," largely because Andrew Dickson White did such an effective job painting it with that brush. White's influential polemic, one of the holy books of the New Atheists (you can download it for free at infidels.org) has been widely condemned for its irresponsible scholarship, but convenient mythologies can be hard to displace. I have just started teaching a course at Stonehill College titled "Does Science Disprove God?" and one of the primary goals of the course will be to expose the poverty of White's thesis.
The Vatican project, executive director Father Tomasz Trafny told the Catholic News Agency, raises the important question of "how to offer a coherent vision of society, culture and the human being to people who would like to understand where to put these dimensions -- the spiritual and religious and the scientific." At a time when religiously motivated concerns make it almost impossible to discuss the warming of our planet, the curriculum in our schools and even the reproduction of our species, we should embrace efforts at dialog, not assault them.
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Science has reduced the role of God only if you believe in a God of gaps. Ultimately, it will be mpossible to disprove Gods existence, even if Science is good at disproving some of our religious myths. My own opinion is that our reason and free will represent the only human attributes with which we can apprehend the nature of God...if he exists.
Science is a glimpse of material reality afforded by our capacity for inductive reasoning, quite apart from our subjective experience. Science is capable of understanding where the "I want" in the head comes from, but it can't make it optional and it can't make it rational.
Doing science can fool us into the illusion that we are rational autonomous deciders, but it can't make it so. There is a higher power. From inside the mechanism God created everything. So from outside the mechanism God is the subjective agent representation of the mechanism. You can have it both ways as long as you know what point of view you are taking. Either way God is entirely legitimate and entirely active in our lives. But from outside the mechanism He is still an immaterial product of material reality.
Congratulations, in one sentence you summed up why these "peace talks" are pure nonsense.
That is what we call an *unfalsifiable hypothesis*. Scientific methodology dictates it be rejected, for the good and proper reason that unfalsifiable hypotheses are devoid of any actual information or utility. They are completely empty. They tell us *nothing*.
If that bit of drivel is Aquinas's "central insight" then we have nothing to discuss.
There is no accommodation to be made here. For cripes sake imagine if Science DID accept that idiocy?!? The laws of nature are upheld at the whim of an inscrutable supernatural being? And what's stopping said being from deciding he likes gravity better as a repelling instead of an attracting force tomorrow afternoon? NOTHING. Or that he thinks it's *hilarious* to make those experiments at CERN look like they found a Higgs Boson by magically tricking the sensory equipment?
Introduction of such a factor renders all scientific inquiry null and void!!!!
What about the other fundamentals, like belief in the resurrection, prophets, god affecting nature(should be measurable) etc...
"Weaselly accomodationism" is right. The Judeo-Christian god, given it's indelible characteristics in religious texts, can never be revised into a version of Spinoza's god. Science has made belief in the Judeo-Christian god untenable.
You are perhaps right, though, that such a revision could foster dialogue and maybe get fundamentalists to view sciences as more approachable; but since you basically have to discard most, save for the simple creation metaphor and ethical principals, of the 'god-talk' of religion to try and reconcile the believers with science, I'd call that both noble(for trying to increase scientific literacy) and "weaselly accomodationism".
My second point is that, while I disagree with accommodationism on intellectual grounds, If new scriptural interpretations can increase scientific literacy or acceptance, that's a good thing.
The way I see it is that this new interpretation is still scientifically bankrupt, but, statistically, if more people buy into a worldview that doesn't directly challenge science, more people could understand more science.
It is my view that if humanism or secular ethics should replace religion all together, that that would be best for scientific literacy.
I'm not saying that people's lives aren't better, or worse, for believing something. But, objectively, it is what it is: accomodationism.
Science, on the other hand, is well suited to discuss beliefs, like evolution, biology, etc. I'm still wrapping my head around it, but I think there is something real here.
I'm an atheist, I won't deny that, but there are spiritual truths that religion should help people address, people who need that kind of comfort and shape. But they really don't need to hear about evolution or biology from a priest or a born-again minister, or worse, a charlatan.
Tell me why I should take either of those possibilities seriously.
Your criticism of Dr. Coyne's blog post misses the mark. You don't address his core assertion:
Spiritual faith is a way of trying to know, but not of knowing itself, for, based on revelation and dogma, it cannot arrive at truths about anything. Spiritual faith has never answered any question with certainty—not even whether there is more than one god. It may give you personal “answers” that make you feel better, but those are merely self-help bromides, not universal truths. Unlike religion, science does more than pose questions: it answers them.
Do you accept or refute this assertion?
And where does science get such authority to make such demands? From it's past track record of valid and refined answers to any question that is put to it. Never in the history of humanity has there ever been a question that science has answered that religion has later provided a better more complete answer. That is where the authority of science resides.
"Allowed"?
Are you going to pass a law or something?
Fundamentalism is a mental attitude and is not confined to religion.
NOMA is bunk as well.
The Greek word behind “faith” in the NT is “pistis”. As a noun,” pistis” is a term borrowed from the technical language of rhetoric meaning “forensic proof”, and as a verb it means “trust based on evidence”. Examples of this usage are found in the works of Aristotle and Quintilian, and in the NT in Acts 17:31.
Faith is not something based on authority at best and nothing at worst. The raising of Christ is spoken of as a proof that God will judge the world. If we think about the missionary preaching in Acts 2:22-36, this makes perfect sense. It also means that Peter's appeals were evidentiary; He appealed to the evidence of the wonders and signs performed by Jesus, he appealed to the empty tomb, and he appealed to fulfillment of OT prophecy. The point is that Peter grounded belief in Christianity on evidence.
The complaint about methodology is a straw man, albeit probably not deliberately. One can certainly question whether that evidence can stand modern scrutiny, but to effectively critique the Bible one must engage it to a level that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Onfrey, and Coyne simply have not, nor are prepared to, given that is not their field of specialty.
Tom Bryant
BA Philosophy - Clemson Univ.
MA Religious Studies - Univ. of South Florida
Accepting claims without evidence is the essence of faith: because one requires faith when one lacks *reasons*; i.e., evidence. And why is the bible an authority on semantics, exactly.
"The Greek word behind “faith” in the NT is “pistis”. As a noun,” pistis” is a term borrowed from technical language meaning “forensic proof."
The origins of language can mean little in context, though it's understandable why you condescendingly become professorial: it's all you know.
And it's borrowed from language meaning "forensic proof"? Oh my! Now it's convincing.
"Faith is not something based on authority." Says the guy who refers to the bible as the standard on how to define faith.
And invoking scripture to support scripture is another absurdity. Citing chapter and verse does not a good argument make: though it makes believers feel super smart when doing so.
"The complaint about methodology is a straw man." Beyond laughable.
"...one must engage [the bible] to a level that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Onfrey, and Coyne simply have not..."
Interesting that you left Hitchens out of that critique (and Dawkins et al are well-versed in nonsensical verse). Coyne recently reread it, too, which he blogged about repeatedly.
And no need for credentials. It's akin to plastering a published book with "Ph D." Invoking a title is to hide behind it.