The New Atheists continue to swing out against all and sundry. The Pope is an ever-popular target, especially with his trip to Britain. President Obama is another punching bag these days, what with his attempts to soothe down the row over the Muslim center near the World Trade Center site and his talk about America being a religious nation for folk of all faiths. But there is always a little venom to spare for the so-called "accommodationists," these being folk who think that one might possibly be onside with science and yet be religious. Some accommodationists, like Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project who now runs the National Institute of Health, are actually practicing Christians (or members of other faiths). Others, like me, have little or no religious belief. But all of us just don't see why the two cannot go together.
Of course, no one thinks that it is possible to hold every belief that someone has held in the name of religion also in the name of modern science. You cannot believe in a worldwide flood and in plate tectonics. You cannot believe that the Native Americans are the lost tribes of Israel and in modern physical anthropology. But the accommodationist claim is that there is much left over that you can believe in: a creator god, a divine backing for morality, and the notion that there is an ultimate purpose to it all with the possibility of some kind of eternal life, for instance.
What is usually said (and I think it is true) is that science is simply not about these sorts of questions. Take origins for instance, in the news at the moment because Stephen Hawking's new book is about them. The science that Hawking talks about may well be true. It is very exciting if it is. But it simply doesn't talk about the theological issues, the issues that religious people believe in. Even if it shows how something comes out of nothing, it doesn't -- it cannot -- explain why. Here, argues the religious person, we must invoke a creator god. This is not a scientific concept, but one that in some sense complements science.
Now this is all very well and good, but at a certain level I fear that the accommodationists are missing a very important link in the argument. Why are there questions that science cannot answer, and why is it that it is these questions rather than others that science cannot answer? You can tackle some, or perhaps all, of these questions piecemeal, as it were. For instance, if there is a creator, then it is pretty clear that he (or she or it) will have to be a necessary being in some sense. Otherwise you run into the perennial question of what caused God. If God is a necessary being (which is indeed the claim of the Christian), then no answer is needed. Nothing caused God. God always was, necessarily, just like 2+2=4 always, necessarily. But now the question becomes why science doesn't deal with necessary beings? And so the discussion continues.
I think (immodestly, perhaps foolishly) that you can bridge the gap, provide the link. Start with the point made by many commentators on science, most insistently by the late Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: all science is metaphorical. It is like poetry in this respect. Gravitational attraction, work, force, pressure, genetic code, natural selection, arms race, continental drift -- the list goes on indefinitely. Moreover, although one hears periodic calls for the elimination of metaphor (Thomas Hobbes of all people, in the Leviathan of all places, was a big one on this), it is pretty certain that it is not going to happen soon, if ever. However, Kuhn would say not to worry because metaphors (which he took to identifying with his key notion of paradigm) do a lot of good in science. For a start, they have incredible heuristic value, pushing you to think in new directions. And they give meaning when you are finished.
Now follow this point with the fact that there are certain metaphors that define, as it were, the practice of science. They are what are sometimes known as root metaphors. Back at the time of the Greeks, the root metaphor was that of the world as an organism. In some sense, all matter was seen as vital. That was why Aristotle insisted on the importance of what he called "final causes." Organisms have ends, have functions. You can ask, "What is the purpose, or end, of the nose?" He (and the other Greeks) thought that you could ask such questions of all things.
With the Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the root metaphor changed. Now it was the world as a machine. We had mechanism. Francis Bacon, the philosopher of the Revolution, was scornful about final causes. He likened them to vestal virgins, beautiful but sterile.
And now we have the third and final point. As Kuhn stressed, the reason why metaphorical thinking is so successful is that it focuses you on the problems; it makes and defines the problems, in fact. And it does this in major part by putting blinkers on you, like with a racehorse. (Nice metaphor there!) It excludes a lot of extraneous issues and questions. If I say my wife is a rose or a diamond, I am saying much. What I am not saying is anything about her mathematical abilities. She might be a wiz, she might be dumb. I am not even addressing the question.
What does the machine metaphor exclude? For a start, it says nothing about ultimate origins. You may (like Hawking) talk about how things are put together. You do not talk about the ultimate origins of the ingredients. Like Mrs. Glasse's recipe for jugged hare: "First take your hare." Second, as David Hume pointed out, it says nothing about moral values. A machine may be used for good; it may be used for bad. That is up to us, not the machine. Third, the machine metaphor in science says nothing about ends. This may seem a little strange because of the machines we make, we can ask about ends. What is that strange object in the kitchen drawer? It is a gadget for taking the stones out of cherries. In science, however, as pointed out already, at the time of the Scientific Revolution, people found that end-talk was not helpful.
God may have designed the world (all of the scientists of the day thought that he had) but (in the words of the greatest historian of the whole event) by the time the Revolution was over, "God was a retired engineer." Finally, let me stress that in basic respects this is an empirical matter. There is no predetermined list of excluded questions, and as science changes, we may change the list. For instance, many follow the German philosopher Leibniz in thinking that machine-talk excludes talk of consciousness. Some, like today's philosopher Daniel Dennett, would disagree. I'll leave this here as an exercise for the reader.
My conclusion follows simply (although I have written about these issues at much greater length in my recent book, Science and Spirituality). Today's mechanical science does even set out to ask or answer certain questions, and hence if the religious want to have a crack at answering them, they can. Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the ultimate foundation of morality? What does it all mean? Perhaps, what is consciousness that sets animals, humans particularly, apart?
This is why I think one should be an accommodationist. I stress that none of this means that one must be religious, much less subscribe to some particular form of religion like Christianity. For myself, I simply cannot get around the problem of evil. My god died with Anne Frank in Bergen-Belsen. And there are metaphysical questions that need answering. Grant that God must be a necessary being. Is the notion of a necessary being really coherent? Most importantly, it does nothing to speak to the virtues and evils of religion, particularly organized religion.
If well taken, what the argument I have just given does do is (in the words of the subtitle to my book) "make room for faith in the age of science." This the New Atheists would not allow, and I think they are wrong.
A moderate visceral understanding of the size and age of the Universe tends to make this seem preposterous.
I could advance at least as plausibly that intelligent cetaceans, or flying dinosaurs, are more understandable as God's Folk.
Overall I enjoyed the essay and it sums up what I've wondered a lot lately.
It was some of the pundits of the nineteenth century who saw virtue in competitive strife.
Dawkins makes it quite clear that your genes are selfish enough to be responsible for you willingness to risk death in the defense of other persons bearing copies of the same genes.
The difference between science and religion is the difference between a theory and a mere speculation.
Oh yes, and "The Selfish Gene" introduces the idea of "memes", which are the basis of patriotism, religion, and civilization. The memes that fill your head are not necessarily there for your benefit eithre.
A singularity does not equal nothing anyway. Why do they keep saying that?
I'm off for a long cool refreshing glass of Occam's Razor (TM).
Since then, what Shakespeare's contemporaries called Natural Philosophy has discovered things far more astonishing than mere ghosts, and besides that has abolished the need for slavery, proved that the difference between a genius like Jefferson and a dunderhead like George III is small enough to justify "all men are equal", and shown that we are closely related not only to all of the species homo sapiens, but to every living thing upon Earth. These are significant moral discoveries. Religion has made very little progress in the meanwhile, and the dominant religions -- none.
What is lightening? Clearly proof of God! Your pitiful science will never explain it!
if jesus came back the christians would kill him.
I mean forgive those that have committed a crime punishable by death.
the christians would have none of that in their chosen nation.
take a long hard look at this so called christian nation.
wars for corp profits, pre existing medical conditions to max corp profits, corporations now are persons, money is free speech, prisons overflowing and now corporate profits from them, racism, judgmentalism, culpability, guilt, etc.
the underlying reality of this nation is ignorance or unawareness of these teachings.
they are so profound neither the christians nor the materialists understand them.
both are concerned who made them (worship) or did not make them (denial) and not the value or the profound intelligence of most of the teachings.
Accomodationism seems too weak because it lets science (and everyday common sense) get away too easily with this argument. How is that? It's because science and common sense are themselves notoriously incomplete. And there's little reason why accepting the incompleteness of practical or scientific knowledge should be preferrable to accepting a mystery of revelation.
This is only one out of a large number of phenomena to the effect that science and common sense often trade one mystery for another when they seek to 'rid' themselves of religion.
That's why I much prefer co-evolution. It seems clear to me that the religious impulse and the scienctific impulse are a lot closer than any of the two would dare to admit. Of course they also act out differently, but they co-evolve. And none of them can be plausible until it makes itself compatible with the full history of that co-evolution.
btw I don't think that Hawking's theories are mechanistic. Spontaneous creation of matter or emergence of spacetime aren't mechanistic theories. What I strongly believe however, is that the mathematical backbone of these theories and the difficulty of testing them in the classical sense of empiricism is much closer to metaphysics than to the mechanistic period of astronomy. But again, there's no reason to think of this as a bad thing. It's only more evidence of co-evolution.
Precisely. We never will. Just like we will never know enough to tell which of the multiplicity of theories of the big bang is actually true because we will never be able to incorporate the full detail of our macroscopic world (including the name of Moses' sister) as constraints on the multiplicity of possible theories at t=0.
But not even this is new. I am pretty sure that those theologians who invented the historical critical method (or hermeneutics) did so after they arrived at the (sobering) insight that they will never even manage to reconstruct the precise history of 'revelation events' as recorded in the scriptures and all their history of being forgotten, transcribed, translated into different languages etc.
Hence: more co-evolution :-)
If there are only the three options, then I would probably call myself an accommodationist as well. But I think that it would be poor reasoning to leave it at that.
For example, it doesn't satisfy the basic requirement of being able to reproduce (and even generate) the historical chain of events in the evolution and co-evolution of religion and science themselves.
Let me explain: a major argument that science (and even everyday knowledge) has against revealed religion is that it runs into a huge conundrum of how god can simultaneously be omniscient and reveal himself and still be unknown to us. There seems to be a core tension, or even contradiction here. It is epitomized by ideas such as: if god is all-encompassing, then why didn't he show us the coli bacterium much earlier? And stuff like that.
Soo when someone asks a question that science could never answer, like... "What does it all mean?" The proper answer is, "God knows."
Eddington, physicist, 1940's, acknowledged that 'Something is going on, we know not what'. He also described the Eastern idea of the Cosmic Egg, 'Space is boundless by re-entrant form not by great extension. That which is is a shell floating in the infinitude of that which is not,' p. 277, J. Campbell, 'Hero...".
See my permalink 5? days ago for critique of 'super-NATURAL'.
Sooo, philosophers have dissected the concept of 'meaning', so that they can then ask the question of 'what does it mean'. The short answer: all meaning is subjective (your personal 'consciousness') and there is no 'eternal truth'. You get to say what the meaning is, for your life and for the universe, and you have to stand by this. Sartre's 'bad faith' is about hypocrisy and self-deception, the failure to answer the 'meaning' question and/or to deny this is life's only question.
Thus, to say that 'God knows' is bad faith because it absolves you from declaring a meaning.
See 'Hero', p. 236, 'To know is not to know; not to know is to know'.
To declare a personal meaning is 'to no longer resist the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth,' p. 237, (with the understanding there is no truth, or only relative truth). Scarey, huh? :)
My "God knows" comment is well ... tongue in cheek. Since I am a non-believing mechanistic determinist. I could have said "Beats me!" But of course I can't speak for science. However...I will no longer be flippant... thanks.
Personally, I don't think that there is any eternal truth, or meaning. But I do feel that our situation is "precious," and that language based intelligence is mighty rare in time and space.
Though I myself am not a believer, I suspect that science is not practiced with "pure" knowledge in view--it is about our attaining power over the natural world by way of objectification. Any claim to knowledge outside of the purview of power is of deemed incoherent by adherents to that sort of mechanistic worldview (Dennet, et al). For those of us who see reality as one, big, gooey mess, such pretensions to objectivity say more about those who cling to them than to the nature of reality itself.
I was excommunicated from the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Wikipedia) (my permalink, 2 months ago), and have proposed, instead, the Church of the Excluded Muddle, whose precepts and doctrines you seem to have intuitively recognized :)
Then there's religion.
Conviction is virtuous, and doubt only a facade. Any believer who says that doubt strengthens faith is full of it. Real doubt means a chance of abandoning a system of thought if said system should fail by means of logic or evidence; meanwhile, believers know deep down that nothing will sway their belief, thereby reinforcing the criticism that faith is irrational.
All religions presume to hold absolute truth. God revealed Himself through the literature of scientifically illiterate, ignorant people, in areas of the world rife with poverty and power struggles.
Religion is a system of faith without evidence, meant to control one's diet, one's daily schedule, one's sex life, one's overall morality, and yes, a skewed interpretation of how the world works (there's a reason why the Catholic Church adopted Aristotle's geocentrism in the first place); yet science is a system that remains open to what *the Universe* tells us, rather than projecting our own fables upon it.
So no, I'm sorry, science and religion are not reconcilable.
What? It is BECAUSE their methodology is different that they complement each other.
"Previc introduced the interesting notion that science and religion are actually cognitively linked via the expansion of the dopamine system:
'the final expansion of [dopamine] could have prompted the rise in abstract reasoning, human creativity in the form of art and music, and religious behavior....Both abstract reasoning and religious thought involve an emphasis on nonvisible (distant) space and time, and both are linked to the upper field....It might also seem strange that two ostensibly antagonistic processes--religious behavior and abstract (scientific) reasoning--may have co-evolved....both phenomena are concerned with abstract concepts and comprehensive frameworks with which to comprehend spatio-temporal events in the external environment. ' "
For me, the idea of 'frameworks' is key. Science is a fact based framework. Religion is a story and mythology based framework. One could, I suppose, entertain both.
‘Neti, neti’ is negative, metaphysical language which can only say what God is not. To do otherwise is to project ourselves, like the Wizard of Oz, onto the screen of the universe.
Using metaphor to represent a theological God is a ‘scientific’ hypothesis accounting for all experience which has left the realm of the unknowable for the world of Nature, for ‘things’ which can be named and differentiated, proved and disproved. This theological naturalism is pseudo-science, of course, but it must play by the rules of the scientific game. Theologians try to escape this trap of their own making--saying that the ‘super-NATURAL’ is on a ‘higher’ plane of being, invisible to our natural senses. The name for this plane is the psychic = psyche = soul = myth (sometimes metaphor). However science routinely deals with the invisible, such as gravity and magnetism; curved space and strings can be described only by mathematics, but they are studied scientifically and theories about them can be proved and disproved by the use of logic.
Both religion and science are about the knowable present. Science, as ToniQ wrote, is about ‘how’ by describing ‘what happened’ (past 'data'). Religion is more about the present, and is thus a collection of stories intended to guide moral choices in the ‘now’. Religion wrongly becomes circular argument when it offers ‘hope’ for the future based on stories and myth (psyche, soul) from the past.
gcarl, I think you have named the high level, real and positive differences between science and religion and where religion goes wrong.
However, that does not negate the author's very valid point - that there are things beyond the (admittedly, 'current') grasp of science and it behooves us to respect each others beliefs and theories regarding that. Too often do the 'New Atheists' (not necessarily a term I approve of) discount ANYTHING that cannot be scientifically proven and consider someone who adheres to any level of divine spirituality as akin to a creationist or other such fundamentalist.
That said, NO religion I have ever studied ( and I have studies MANY) is anything but man's creation of God in his own image, they are ALL, I mean ALL, man made and were created for some good reasons that served the people of their time. And knowing their man made nature only requires a BRAIN and CURIOSITY, I kinda figured it out before I was 10 actually. The fact that there are people in the 21st century, believing in these out of date ancient cults literally is truly beyond disgusting. And this is worrisome.