early christianity and natural philosophy

Although the course of the moon... is known to many, there are only a few who know well the rising or setting or other movements of the stars without error. Knowledge of this kind in itself, although it is not allied with any superstition, is of very little use in the treatment of the divine scriptures and even impedes it through fruitless study; and since it is associated with the most pernicious error of vain [astrological] prediction it is more appropriate and virtuous to condemn it.
Augustine of Hippo, On Christian doctrine.


One of the themes of David Lindberg's essay, 'Early Christian attitudes toward nature', is the love-hate relationship of early Christian intellectuals towards the Greco-Roman culture around them. Tertullian, and to a lesser extent Augustine, are clear examples. The quote above captures this nicely. There's this view, which might almost be called a pretence [just to be presentist about it] that knowledge is useless unless it illuminates 'scripture', as if scripture is the given, like a giant maypole that everything else must be tied to and dance around. What always fascinates me about this is the dogmatism of the early Christians. Many of these folks - not just Tertullian and Augustine, but such leading lights as Origen, Ambrose, Athanasius, Arius and many others - though they argued interminably amongst themselves, were united in this kind of maypole view, and yet the texts and tales they based their unshakeable faith upon were quite newly minted. The same thing happened, of course, with the the advent of the Islamic religion some centuries later. If we were able to grasp more thoroughly the psychological forces behind these sweeping forms of group-think, I think we would be able to make major advances in guarding ourselves against them.
It seems that concepts about nature were pushed to the back burner during this early period of Christian fervour from the second to the fourth century. The very influential figure of Paul of Tarsus set the tone with remarks like this addressed to the Colossians:

Be on your guard; do not let your minds be captured by hollow and delusive speculations, based on traditions of man-made teaching centred on the elements of the natural world and not on Christ.

However, not all the early Christian intellectuals followed this advice, and Plato, the neo-Platonists, Pythagoras and other pagan speculators were mined for material that would provide support to Christian metaphysics. At the same time, the new religious orientation provided an opportunity to scoff at the 'blindness' of pagan thinkers. Commentators like Tertullian and Basil of Caesarea were very keen to provide evidence of their mastery of the most abstruse pagan thought while insisting on its uselessness and upon the need for simple faith.
Augustine was generally a little more sympathetic to what was called 'natural philosophy', but still he had serious reservations, as the quote indicates. In his Confessions he describes curiosity as a disease – one that he himself was curiously prone to. It should be added that this attitude wasn't born of Christianity. Suspicions about pursuing knowledge purely for the sake of it were rife in highly stratified pagan society. Plato's Republic discouraged abstract thought in society as a whole – it should only be pursued by an intellectual elite. Such an attitude to knowledge would've been commonplace in his time, and for a long time afterwards - in fact right up to the enlightenment period really, and beyond. And the idea of natural philosophy as the handmaiden of religious faith, as an aid to the comprehension of the deity's glorious creation, an idea more or less encouraged by Augustine, is still found more than 1300 years later in the thought of Isaac Newton, and further on in the approach to science of Georges Cuvier and Robert Owen in the nineteenth century.
The point is that although all of these thinkers gave priority to their faith, they still made contributions to an understanding of the world which, whether or not they might be considered baby steps, led us away from enthralment to religion. That's no doubt a 'presentist', internalist perspective. Augustine, in spite of being a 'dyed in the wool faith-head', took pride in his own knowledge of 'profane' matters, and was embarrassed at the ignorance of his fellow believers:

Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian.... talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

Augustine himself wrote a work called The Literal Meaning of Genesis, in which he analysed the first three chapters of Genesis, covering the biblical creation story through the lens of his very considerable knowledge of natural philosophy as it was understood and practised in the Graeco-Roman world of that time. It was accepted, for example, that the earth was spherical. Eratosthenes had quite accurately calculated its circumference more than 500 years before Augustine's time. There's little evidence that Christians of the patristic period rejected such knowledge. Certainly, in medicine and other practical sciences we find a mixture of empirical knowledge, superstition and ideas of supernatural possession, just as we find in pagan thought and practice. However, with Christianity's transformation into a state religion, concepts of orthodoxy and heresy became paramount, and the freedom of intellectuals to think freshly about the natural world became severely curtailed. And that seems to have been the situation for a long long time.

'The conflict of science and religion' - a critique

bulldog Huxley

For nearly a century, the notion of mutual hostility [the Draper-White thesis] has been routinely employed in popular science writing, by the media, and in a few older histories of science. Deeply embedded in the culture of the West, it has proven extremely hard to dislodge. Only in the last thirty years of the twentieth century did historians of science mount a sustained attack on the thesis, and only gradually has a wider public begun to recognise its deficiencies.
Colin Russell 'The conflict of science and religion'

Colin Russell's contribution to the book of essays I've been reading was a dismal one, as I will show. His bias struck me as so clear and manifest that I had to check out his bio. He's very much an elder, born in 1928, and he's been admirably prolific in the promotion of science and its history, especially in chemistry, his chosen field. However, as I suspected, he was at one time president of Christians in Science, and vice-president of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship. Always useful to have these things out in the open.

From the quotation above, taken from early in the essay, one might expect a laying out of the deficiencies of the conflict thesis, but it doesn't happen - apart from the usual stuff about the religiosity of Boyle, Newton, Pascal, Gassendi, Faraday and so on, none of which is dwelt on in any detail. It might've been useful for example, to be made aware that Blaise Pascal, a mathematical wunderkind, gave up doing mathematics because he believed the severe migraines he suffered from were his god's punishment for indulging in such a frivolous pastime. We now know, though, that Pascal's sufferings were due to a deformed skull, probably resulting from a forceps delivery. If only Pascal had been armed with such scientific knowledge, instead of the religious 'knowledge' he thought he had direct from his god, his own personal history would have been much altered.

Russell tries to be systematic in his undermining of the conflict thesis, giving six 'problems' with it, which I'll summarize.
1. The conflict thesis hinders the recognition of other relationships between science and religion.
2. It ignores the many documented examples of science and religion operating in close alliance.
3. It enshrines a flawed view of history in which 'progress' or [in this case] 'victory' has been portrayed as inevitable.
4. It obscures the rich diversity of ideas in both science and religion.
5. It engenders a distorted view of disputes resulting from causes other than those of religion versus science.
6. It exalts minor squabbles, or even differences of opinion, to the status of major conflicts.

So let's look at these problems. As to [1], what about these other relationships? It's true that, in earlier times, much scientific work, and science-talk, was conducted within a religious framework. The writings of Francis Bacon provide a good example. Nowadays, though, science and religion have little to say to each other, and I don't see any harmonious relations in the offing. Again, Russell avoids looking at science and religion as 'ways of knowing' [he doesn't ever attempt a definition of either], he just talks about relations between scientists and believers, which is an entirely different matter. The same goes for [2], he really means scientists and believers operating in close alliance, by avoiding all the issues.
Problem 3 is of course familiar, and more or less identical to what Marilynne Robinson says in her talk, in which she accuses 'new atheists' of having a defunct enlightenment view of science, in which mystery after mystery will fall like so many dominoes before the winds of scientific explanation. Exactly how flawed is this view, though? The scientific explanatory framework does seem to be cumulative. The mystery of lightning gets explained by theories which gradually become more comprehensive, covering electricity, magnetism, the behaviour of matter inside stars and so forth. Scientific analysis has also proved fruitful in categorising the kinds of supernatural concepts that are found to be viable for religious practice, and in detecting patterns in religious thinking. I don't think victory over religious modes of thought and practice is inevitable, but I do think it is desirable, because religious ways of thinking profoundly interfere with a comprehensive understanding of how the world works - precisely because it provides an alternative, competing view, which is inadequate and stunting, but highly appealing to some.
Problem 4 speaks of diversity, but scientific diversity is necessarily circumscribed by the need for hypotheses to pass certain crucial and stringent tests. Religious or theological diversity has no such tests - which is precisely why heresies are dealt with so harshly. Orthodoxy can only maintain itself through repression, and through the gaining of popular support [often through a kind of demagoguery that whips up a frenzy of opposition to 'heretics']. Russell, though, is again largely speaking of personal approaches to religion. He does claim that it was only the Catholic Church, and then not uniformly, that sought to condemn Galileo, while the Protestants had no problem with heliocentrism. This may well be so - and after all, accepting heliocentrism doesn't really concede much, for scriptures really have little to say about the relationship between the earth and the sun, but the problem really is whether scriptures are acceptable as a way of knowing how the world works. It's the methodologies being developed by Galileo and other pioneers that were the real challenge to the religious, and this was a challenge perhaps barely recognized at the time. Russell uses much the same argument regarding the response to Darwin [though without the sharp division between Catholic and Protestant], but he has nothing whatever to say about the challenge to human 'in God's image' specialness that Darwin's theory represented. It's hard to understand how so central a point could be so completely overlooked.
Problem number 5 is one well-recognized, I think, by many observers. The rise of anti-scientific fundamentalism, particularly in the US in recent decades, cannot be attributed wholly to religious belief, few of us are unaware of this. The causes are complex and multi-faceted, and have much to do with a new-found 'tradition' of insularity, and the indoctrination of children. However, religion has always provided a haven for this kind of inward-looking community spirit, which is why cults are perennially attractive to the culturally alienated.
Problem number 6 is perhaps a matter of opinion. Russell it seems wants to minimise the issues involved because he wants to see a harmonious relationship between religion and science, something that he has perhaps managed in his own life. However, I suspect that he has achieved this by ignoring much that looms large in those with a different perspective. I cannot say more as I don't have any idea what Russell is left with in his religion if he accepts the findings of biology, genetics, cosmology and the methodologically rigorous analysis of texts presumed to be sacred.
In his conclusion, Russell presumes that he has proven the 'warfare model' to be manifestly inadequate, and he gives the example of Thomas Huxley as an explanation for its continued success:

By establishing the conflict thesis, [Huxley and his friends] could perpetuate a myth as part of their strategy to enhance the public appreciation of science. Thus, Huxley could write, with a fine disregard for what history records: 'Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that wherever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter have been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched if not slain'.

This is surely the shout of science triumphant, and I'm pretty sure that Russell quotes it with a sneaking admiration in spite of his criticism. And the question of whether Huxley really did disregard history, in its broad sweep, is far from decided.

science and religion again

Andrew Dickson White - early proponent of the conflict thesis

The Draper-White thesis, as it has come to be known, was enormously influential. For the past century it has been the predominant view of the relationship of science and religion among scientists and laymen alike. It wedded a triumphalist view of science with a patronizing view of religion. Popular misconceptions doubtless underlay the widespread presumption that religion was opposed to science. Grounded in faith, religion seemed bound to suffer when confronted by science, which was, of course, based on fact.
Gary Ferngren, 'Introduction', Science & religion: a historical introduction

Being dirt poor, I can't afford to buy the latest texts, assuming there are any, on the topics that most interest me, such as the science/religion conundrum [conflict, compatibility, incompatibility, complementarity, complexity], and I still have difficulty reading long screeds online, so it was with some interest that I uncovered a text at my local library, Science & religion: a historical introduction, which was published not so very long ago, in 2002 [actually, all but one of the essays was written before 2000]. I realized, of course, that the book wouldn't take into account the resurgence of interest in this subject due to the publication of such 'new atheist' works as Breaking the spell and The god delusion, but I was hoping for some really stimulating discussion about these two 'ways of knowing'. I have to say that after reading the intro and the first essay, I've been sorely disappointed.
My expectations were too high perhaps. These are essays by historians of science and religion, not by scientists or philosophers. They're really looking at the way the relationship has played out in the public arena, rather than the central philosophical and theological issues involved. Still, I detect an irritating bias. I'll probably write a few posts as I read my way through the essays.
The quotation at the top of the post gives an indication of the approach, which I suspect will persist throughout the book. Triumphalist and patronising - where have I heard that before? More importantly, terms such as 'popular misconceptions' litter this introduction and the following essay. The conflict thesis persists due to 'popular misconceptions' or it persists 'in the popular mind', condescendingly referred to in contrast to the sophisticated mind. There is no attempt to present these popular misconceptions for our examination, there's just a lot of telling and no showing. More to the point, the conflict thesis is presented as warfare between personalities, and so it's easy for the historian to show that, in fact, there isn't just warfare, there's tension, there's accommodation, there's mutual ignorance, there's collaboration, there's a whole variety of positionings which amount to a complexity thesis which more accurately reflects the relationship.
All of this, though, seems utterly irrelevant to the issue. At no point in the introduction or the first essay [by Colin Russell - and he's much more biased in his approach than Ferngren] do the writers address the basis of the conflict between religion and science. They make no acknowledgement whatever that, personalities aside, the aims of science in general clash with the aims of religion as explanations of how things are. The community benefits of religion, the sense of group or tribal identity generated by these beliefs are well understood by most non-believers, but what gripes us is that the beliefs that the religious share are very unlikely to be true, and they clash head-on with scientific theory and scientific evidence. The closest that either of these two writers come to even considering this fundamental issue is in the last sentence quoted above -  Grounded in faith, religion seemed [and forget about the past tense] bound to suffer when confronted by science, which was, of course, based on fact.
Too right, but then this possible starting point is abandoned, and particular struggles or accommodations are focused on again. No attempt is made to examine what faith is, and of course no notice is made of the fact that faith is used precisely to justify belief in stuff that isn't backed up by any evidence - that there's an afterlife, for example, or that a dissident preacher who may or may not have lived 2000 years ago was the offspring of the supernatural creator of the world/universe/multiverse. Along with many people, I just don't accept that science and the rules of evidence have nothing to do with these claims. Most believers don't believe in this separation either - they're often intensely concerned with finding proof, of the power of prayer, of the existence of life after death, of miracles and so forth.
Anyway, what I've read so far has only underlined for me the considerable limitations of taking a purely historical approach to this subject, with little thought for the philosophical. As to Colin Russell's infuriating first essay, I'll deal with that next time.

By the way, here's a much more informative, and plausible, account of the conflicts between science and religion, especially in the US.

Roger Scruton and the atheist 'fashion'

I note that the British Medical Journal, which has spent some time investigating the controversial study of some years ago [published in the Lancet in 1998, and since retracted] linking childhood vaccination to autism, has recently come out strongly against the study [which has not been replicated by other studies], claiming, in particular, that it downplayed the already-present symptoms of autism of some of the children. There were in fact only 12 children in the study. It's reported here.

Now to the last speaker in the public talks I've been critiquing. Roger Scruton is a very well known British philosopher, of a conservative bent. Apparently he plies his trade as a philosopher in the same faculty as A C Grayling, who describes Scruton as a good friend with whom he disagrees about virtually everything. So it amuses me to surmise that he would have heard many times over what I'm going to say in criticism of his position.
By the way, the RSA actually stands for the royal society for the encouragement of the arts, manufactures and commerce, and it describes itself as a charitable organisation which encourages enlightenment thinking.
Scruton at the outset describes himself as someone who lost his faith as a youngster, but who found it again late in life through a circuitous and painstaking journey. So we're dealing with another believer. He then, referring again to Robert Elsmere, claims that the new atheists present atheism as a liberation, in which you gain much and lose nothing - contrary to the experience of Elsmere. A couple of responses to this - many atheists are acutely aware of how difficult it is, in terms of family relations, social status, even danger to one's own life - to openly declare yourself an atheist. From the awful experience of Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the awful experience of local religious sect members, horror stories abound. At the same time, for many, atheism is a liberation. It should be remembered that 'new atheism' didn't spring from nowhere, it emerged as a response. A response to one of the most troubling developments of the late twentieth century - that's to say, the rise and rise of a new, more aggressive, more primitive, more intolerant and belligerent form of religious belief, or dogmatism. Richard Dawkins would have felt it most in the rise, particularly in the US, of an antipathetic, indeed an enragedly hostile, attitude towards the theory of natural selection [or any other evolutionary theory], a theory he has spent his professional life expounding and promoting as the most profound and successful theory in the history of biology. I for one can well understand his extreme frustration, and it's hard not to imagine, even for believers like Scruton, that these kinds of rigid, aggressively primitivist belief systems are something of a prison-house, especially for women as they always seem to be profoundly patriarchal.
So, yes, liberation is a theme for atheists, but they don't see it, by and large, in simple-minded terms - at least I don't. I've attended a few atheist meet-ups, and they often feature traumatized members or visitors who have lost a great deal in coming out against the family or community faith.
Scruton points to two major features of religion. One is the set of metaphysical beliefs that point to an understanding of the world as a created, purposive entity rather than an accidental, random one. And the other, which he characterises as much more important - membership of a community of like-minded believers, and the sense of cohesion and identity this brings. He also asserts that the idea that you can be set free from religion is naive 'because it doesn't engage with that part of the human condition from which religion springs'. Now again, I can't speak for other atheists, but I know that I am very much concerned with understanding the causes and nature of religious belief, and I'm massively aware of the fact that religious beliefs or spiritual beliefs are very much at the heart of human being for a lot of people. It would be unthinkable for such people to lose their faith - which is indeed so much a part of their being that they don't even recognise it as faith.
However, it should also be recognised that these people are generally innocent of modern science. In Afghanistan, for example, you'll find virtually no atheists, and you'll also find one of the lowest levels of literacy in the world. There are no debates there, I strongly suspect, around 'intelligent design' and evolution, because the vast majority of the population, outside of some cities, haven't much of an inkling of the theory of evolution. This is important, because there's one feature of modern atheism - one of many perhaps - that differentiates it from the atheism of the nineteenth century, say, and that is the issue of the compatibilism of science with religion. No doubt this was touched on in the nineteenth century with the controversy over Darwin's theory, but today that debate is more complex, sophisticated and urgent. Most of the prominent 'new atheists' today - Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Myers, Coyne and a number of others - are incompatibilists. They see science and religion as being on a collision course, and they see religion as presenting a false understanding of our world, an understanding that is a major roadblock to the scientific view and the scientific approach. To these atheists, no amount of sophisticated metaphysics and no amount of community spirit can justify the holding of what they see as patently false beliefs. Many of the most damaging false beliefs - that children can be possessed by demons, that women who dishonor their families should be stoned to death, that those who don't believe in a particular god, or a particular version of a god, deserve death, and so on - are held to be so by the majority of religious people as well as by atheists, but modern atheists argue that a truer understanding of the nature of humanity will lessen our sense of dependence on or subjection to any supernatural agency, from which these pernicious beliefs ultimately spring.
Now, I think it's true that the rise of fundamentalism and Islamism isn't entirely the fault of religion per se. There are a number of complex forces determining this development, which we should try to comprehend and intelligently combat. Religious indoctrination, though, of the sort evidenced in the documentary 'Jesus Camp', and in the head-bobbing youths in Pakistani madrassas, is a matter of serious concern never addressed or even mentioned by the three speakers I have been critiquing.
Scruton finishes by talking of the sacred, a sense of which most people need in their lives. He talks of Weber's idea of 'disenchantment', of the desecration of sex as a formerly sacred activity, and the general downgrading of the sacred, presumably in western society.
Ah, the sacred, the sacred. How often this one is wheeled out in at attempt to diminish the experience and the aims and ambitions of atheists. Of course it's true that many atheists are contemptuous and dismissive of this catch-all term. The concept of the sacredness of sex and the sacredness of the family has been used by the Vatican to promote a homophobic and mysogynist agenda for centuries. The sacredness of life - almost always exclusively human life - has been invoked to prevent the development of medical procedures and medical research of all sorts, not to mention its sometimes pernicious influence on contraception and the treatment of the suffering and the dying. Scruton doesn't sufficiently emphasise, I think, the self-serving nature of the human concept of the sacred - it's generally about the monumental, dare I say god-like, specialness of all things human. So the concept of the sacred needs to be scrutinised much more carefully, I think - and this is being done by our best evolutionary psychologists. Meanwhile, as person who is highly sceptical of the concept of the sacred, and who doesn't feel this metaphysical need to see myself, or my sexual activity, or my impending end, as a sacred matter, I do feel the need to defend myself against the charge of crassness or superficiality that the 'pushers of sacredness' often make. A few years ago I wrote a no doubt inadequate response to two books I read in tandem - both of which were about pilgrimages of a kind, albeit secular pilgrimages. The two books were Roads to Santiago, by Cees Nooteboom, and Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban. They were both deeply reflective and contemplative works, which I found both intellectually and emotionally challenging and satisfying. They both reflected on history, religion, lifestyle, change, questing, the big issues. They were as close to spiritual works as I ever want to come - though of course there are other works of this kind out there, for which we must be grateful. I don't like to use the word 'spiritual' or 'sacred' myself - I think there's far too much baggage attached to these words that I don't want to be a part of. But I've always deeply resented the use of these terms to indicate some sort of superiority of being and feeling. I'm sure we've all met the self-described 'deeply spiritual person' who has about as much sensitivity to others as a doorknob. There are also those those who would eschew such terms as 'spiritual' and 'sacred' but who are deeply empathic to our world and its struggling, failing denizens, human or otherwise.
Finally I should make some remarks about the apparent theme of these talks - 'beyond the new atheism'. For me, what is beyond the new atheism, a term I reject, is more atheism. Modern atheism has certainly been given a shot in the arm by the anti-scientific, anti-modernist move towards religious primitivism in some parts of the world, and it has found a number of new voices, some rather shrill, some very articulate. However, Roger Scruton's description of it as a fashion strikes me as the most profound mischaracterization I've come across in a long time. Atheism is here to stay, and it's here to make itself heard. Not only are the numbers swelling and the percentages rising in the west, but most of the best and brightest are going or have gone 'secular' - not only our best scientists, but our best philosophers, our best lawyers, our best journalists - take any intellectual profession you like, and you'll find the percentage of non-believers will far exceed the percentage in the general population. We're an increasingly questioning society - a good thing, in my view - and religious belief tends to crumble under rigorous - but fair - interrogation.

a critique of Jonathan Ree's contribution

Don't take up golf.  James Watson

The second speaker in these talks, Jonathan Ree, is a British philosopher and historian, and an atheist who has serious doubts about 'new atheism'. He begins his talk by referencing Robinson, speaking approvingly of her term 'parascience', which is nothing like parapsychology, but refers to the tales scientists tell each other to 'gee themselves up', a kind of scientific jingoism, something like what others have described as scientism chit-chat. The idea is that 'new atheists' are particularly prone to this arrogant scientistic tone and attitude. As Ree puts it, it's rather dualistic - there's either science or ignorance. Yet, again, if you look at the people being dubbed 'new atheists', they are quite various. Certainly, such atheist advocates as Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer and Daniel Dennett are probably guilty, even self-confessedly, of scientism, but others such as Christopher Hitchens and Anthony Grayling are not so easily classified. I do have an interest in this subject, and I generally take the view that science, defined broadly as an open-ended set of methods and techniques and even ways of thinking, which involve discipline and rigour, repeatability, verifiability and testability, can contribute substantially to our understanding of any subject. It's not so much about reducing all ways of knowing to science, but expanding science to comprehend and judge all ways of knowing. Science is, to me, not just a method, but an organic, evolving set of processes. And the subject matter will determine which process or processes out of the set should be applied. If this is scientism, so be it. It's an approach that seems to be working a treat.
Ree next seeks to criticize the new atheists by arguing that there's really nothing they say that wasn't already said in the nineteenth century. So, guess what, they aren't new. An extraordinary insight, that one. Interestingly, this is one of those truisms that isn't quite true. Yes, the philosophical arguments are largely the same, and I haven't heard any of those dubbed new atheists claiming that their arguments are new. But today's atheists are able to present new evidence, the fruits of archaeology, palaeontology, genetics, particle physics, cosmology, precise evidence about when our universe was formed, when and how our planet was formed, our relationship to other species and our evolutionary history, as well as evidence relating to the authorship of sacred texts, the probable where and when of that authorship, and how the events related in those texts are verified or falsified by archaeological and other evidence. The modern atheist lives in a more globalized world, in which more is known about a variety of religions, through the media and through direct contact as well as via the fruits of twentieth century anthropology, not to mention Wikipedia. Religion can be looked at from a broader and more multi-faceted perspective than it was in the nineteenth century.
Of course, the real issue isn't newness but trueness. Atheists, new or old, are saying what they have long said, that we should look to this world for understanding and meaning, not to some putative other-worldly phenomena. Many atheists would like to say that gods just ain't true, and probably feel gyped that they can only allow themselves to say there ain't no evidence. This has nothing to do with scientism, and often nothing to do with science. Jonathan Ree himself points out that his own loss or lack of faith had nothing to do with Copernicus or Darwin or whoever, and that would be the same for me. It had to do with something ludicrous about the whole god-worshipping ritualistic paraphernalia when I was first confronted with it, a sense of profound ludicrousness which has never left me. This hasn't been a rational response, which is why I'm a little wary of those atheists who connect non-belief to a greater rationalism, but neither is it an irrational response. It's something visceral and basic. I'm reminded of Paul Valery's comment, something along the lines of the 'the nonbeliever is always convinced that the believer is being insincere, and vice-versa'. Maybe there is an unfathomable divide between 'believers' and 'unbelievers', or this-worlders and other-worlders, as I prefer to designate them, and maybe this-worlders will always be in the minority. I personally hope not, but I don't hope with a great deal of confidence.
Ree's objection to new atheism, that it isn't new, is also ludicrous - 'new atheist' is a term foisted on people like Dawkins and Dennett and Harris by their opponents, and once the term is grudgingly accepted by the culprits, since there seems no alternative but to accept it with a more or less good grace, the same opponents leap up and down shouting 'there's nothing new about you lot'. It's all very hypocritical and silly.
Ree's description of the novel Robert Elsmere sounds intriguing, but his attempt to use it in support of multifarious atheisms surely fails. He says that Robert Elsmere's objections to his church, his rejection of certain beliefs, would put him on the same level of belief as the 'reformed' Anglican Church of today, and he uses this example to suggest that there are many kinds of atheism. But this isn't true. Elsmere - and I haven't read the book - might have reacted negatively to some aspects of church doctrine, and had a 'crisis of faith' as a result, but if his belief at the end of it all was the same as what the Archbishop of Canterbury believes now, then it's clear that Elsmere never became an atheist. I'm assuming here that the Archbishop isn't an atheist, which is perhaps a big assumption. Atheism isn't many different things. Atheism is something clearly defined. It's a lack of belief in gods. You could perhaps extend this to a lack of belief in supernatural agency, which would bring ancestor spirits, rainbow serpents and even ghosts into the net, but I think it's safer to just leave it at gods. Apart from this lack of belief, atheists are of course as various as all humans are.
Ree's final remark, referring to William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, is another attempt to have a go at the 'new atheist' straw person. He says we should guard against the varieties of religious inexperience, as evidenced by some of these new atheists. What is meant by this piece of rhetoric? I have never experienced religious belief, it's true, just as, presumably, the pope has never experienced non-belief. I'm talking about direct, personal experience here, of course. There are some who've had faith, and lost it, and there are some who converted to a particular faith, from having no interest in matters religious. These are varieties of experience that we all accept and recognise. I feel no need to apologize for having no direct experience of religious belief. I've learned a lot about religion through reading anthropological essays, through talking to people of faith, through observing various rituals, through reading history and sacred texts etc etc. That's the best that I can do to try to understand religious belief. It's true that some atheists are willfully ignorant of religious practice and belief - it takes all kinds. Some new atheists may fit that description. Some may not. It's not a fair criticism of modern atheism. One is reminded, when talking of the religious inexperience of atheists, that recent research has shown that American atheists are on the whole more literate about the Bible than Christians are. So it might even make sense to talk about the varieties of religious inexperience of the professedly religious.

Marilynne Robinson tries her hand at taking on 'new atheism'

Marilynne Robinson - 'the world's best prose writer', according to some geezer

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours - Stephen Roberts

I'm failing in my course, and would much much rather focus on my favourite topics, so I will. The above quote comes from the common sense atheism blog, and I love it.
I was somehow directed recently to this set of talks, hosted at the website of the RSA [the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts], and co-produced by New Humanist magazine. I want to respond to the speakers, Marilynne Robinson, Jonathan Ree and Roger Scruton, whose collective take on the soi-disant new atheists struck me as very limited and straw-personish. I should hope that New Humanist encourages other voices than these - and I'm sure they do.
The first speaker, Robinson, is a US novelist and essayist, and a committed Christian. She starts out very badly by making the claim that 'new atheists' are generally committed to a kind of post-enlightenment 'science is on the verge of explaining everything' view of the world. She doesn't provide any evidence for this claim. I'm not sure I've heard this one before, though I've heard much criticism of new atheism in terms of scientism and scientific triumphalism. This criticism is often levelled at Richard Dawkins in particular, and maybe there's something in this, but I've read quite a bit of Dawkins's work specifically on science, and he has often commented on the way science raises more questions, opening up ever-new fields of enquiry in a never-ending project. The more we do science the more we find things that are in need of explaining, and there's doesn't seem to be any end in sight. So Dawkins, the favourite whipping-boy of the critics of 'new atheism', takes a view of science which is precisely the opposite of the one Robinson seeks to criticize. I can't think of a single prominent modern atheist - and they're a very diverse bunch - who takes this 'everything's almost explained' view. Names and evidence are required.
After pointing out how 'fantastical' [at least she didn't say miraculous] are the findings of modern science, and arguing, or rather boldly stating, that new atheists don't appreciate this, Robinson goes on to talk about William James, obviously an important philosopher, but talked up here as the American philosopher of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her presentation of James's 'democracy of ontology', in which, according to James, we concede the mystery of everything that we encounter, sounds rather relativistic. Science, as one commentator to this discussion points out, just cannot proceed this way. Here is his comment:

  In the light of the data, we look how plausible each proposed theory/model is (using probability calculus). Redundant statements (i.e. that don't add up to the explanation of the facts) are discarded, and experiments are devised with maximal information value in it (testing limits, or rival hypotheses).

I'm not sure of the detail in this comment, but surely the point is that we have to be much much more hard-nosed in sorting out what we allow in and what we discard from an 'ontology' or a theory in order to produce reliable knowledge. And science is all about the production of reliable knowledge. Quantum theory may be 'fantastical', but more importantly, it is reliable, or it would have been discarded long ago.
Robinson speaks favourably of James's contention that you can reject a particular 'cosmology' because it offends your moral sense - another example of relativism, and Robinson's choice of the word 'cosmology' seems arbitrary here. Why not 'scientific theory'? After all, hasn't the theory of natural selection - along with every other evolutionary theory - been rejected on just those grounds by creationists? And it was largely due to this kind of rejection that 'new atheism' has grown up and come out fighting. No modern scientist and no modern philosopher of science would accept moral feelings or moral qualms as a reasonable basis for rejecting any scientific theory or 'cosmology'. The data has to be respected. And democracy is no basis for accepting or rejecting a theory. If James ever seriously put this forward, then, however pleasant and open it might sound, his philosophy of science is impossibly naive and completely unworkable.
Robinson next goes on to claim that 'new atheism', which she seems to understand as something monolithic, has ignored the issue of human consciousness and human brilliance. Again, Robinson tells us what new atheists think, or don't think, rather than showing us. And again I would counter that new atheists are a very diverse bunch. One of that bunch, Daniel Dennett, is a philosopher who has spent most of his career analysing and probing the nature of consciousness, human and non-human. I'm not sure what Robinson is trying to say, in fact, with this observation. It seems to be something about the specialness of humans, a felt specialness which is at the heart of much religious thinking, with supernatural beings generally being obsessed with the detail of human lives - they know every hair on our heads - thus enhancing our specialness to ourselves. Scientists in general seems unimpressed with this specialness, not because of obtuseness, but because they find 'specialness' - or complexity, extraordinariness, unpredictability [but also regularity] - everywhere, whether they're studying cephalopods, hadrons or plate tectonics. I do think, of course, that human consciousness is amazing, and that our achievement in discovering laws that seem to comprehend the formation and activity of our universe, the formation of complex living entities from much more simple [but in their way still incredibly complex] life forms, and which have enabled us to colonise and dominate the biosphere so effectively, all of this is a wonder. It just doesn't make me think in religious terms - let alone in Christian ones.
So much for Marilynne Robinson's brief and, IMHO, unconvincing contribution to the future of 'new atheism'. I'll deal with the other two next time.

my first letter to the pope

So, okay, I've been asked to start writing letters to the Vatican about their positions on various issues, and if I don't get responses, at least I can try collecting them in book form. I don't entirely like the idea of getting bogged down in such a project, but at least letters might provoke more of a response than my blog does.

Before I get started though, just another, entirely different subject to get off my chest. In the most recent issue of Cosmos there was an exciting piece on the exploration of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, by the space probe Huygens, named after the 17th century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who discovered Titan [a lovely romantic touch]. Turns out it's one of the most promising bits of rock in our solar system for exploring the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. It's believed, but not yet substantiated, that there's H20, in liquid form, beneath the crust, some 45kms deep. Evidence of radioactive decay suggests that this possibly watery area is a lot hotter than the surface [which averages -179 degrees celsius]. The combination of this subterranean ocean and a surface rich in hydrocarbons makes for very interesting possibilities. And even if the search for life turns out to be unsuccessful, it raises hope that certain chemical combinations friendly to life as we know it will surely exist elsewhere in the outer vastness. It's a cinch, surely. I truly believe that extra-terrestrial life will be discovered in the coming decades, hopefully in my life-time. These are among the thoughts that can keep a fellow bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Anyway, back to my letter.

Dear pope,
I don't mind if one of your employees responds to this enquiry as I realize you're a very busy man. Please send it on to whoever oversees this sort of thing. It's just that, in my part of the world, Australia, one of your archbishops recently advised his constituents - I don't know how many there were, but I don't think Australia is a very Catholic country - not to vote for the Greens, a political party, here as elsewhere, with an environmentalist and generally liberal agenda. It seems that the Greens are advocating reform in the fields of abortion and euthanasia, which the archbishop found offensive, presumably in line with the doctrine of the Catholic Church. He urged all Catholics to avoid voting for the Greens in an upcoming election. Or it may be that he urged all potential voters so to do. Which raises another niggling question, which I'm sure you are best placed to answer. Does Catholic doctrine on moral matters cover just Catholics or is it intended to cover all of humanity? I realize this is a big issue, but just to save time and effort, a yes or no answer would be fine. Thank you.
Anyway, because the Catholic Church comes out very strongly with its views on such topics, I thought I should do some research on Catholic doctrine. You know, on how, when and why it was formulated. I have been reading the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care services, fourth edition, which, to quote, was developed by the Committee on Doctrine of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops [in the USA] and approved as the national code by the full body of bishops at its June 2001 General Meeting. I'm not sure if the document was submitted for your approval, or that of your Vatican advisers, but I'm sure it's very much in line with Catholic doctrine, which is universal and unified, is it not?


Obviously the document doesn't go deeply into the history of the formulation of Catholic doctrine, but it does provide some hints, and I'm hoping you and your office can provide clarification. I won't go into all the questions I have, because I know you and your people are very busy, so I'll confine myself two one or two hopefully clearly formulated questions. First, in relation to this quote from the Introduction to Part One of the above-mentioned document:

 ... within a pluralistic society, Catholic health care services will encounter requests for medical procedures contrary to the moral teachings of the Church. Catholic health care does not offend the rights of individual conscience by refusing to provide or permit medical procedures that are judged morally wrong by the teaching authority of the Church.

Does the Catholic Church consider 'the rights of individual conscience' to be the rights of all human individuals with a conscience? If so, how can it claim to know that it is not offending anyone by its refusals?Or does 'individual conscience' here mean some kind of abstraction created or defined by the Catholic Church? In the first case, offence is a very personal, sometimes idiosyncratic thing, but in the second case something entirely created by the Catholic Church could be treated in whatever manner the church wants to treat it, for example as never being offended by any of that Church's decisions. So I would assume that by 'individual conscience' you mean something else, something more objectively defined as a morally active force or sounding board? If so how do you know that such a conscience is not offended by the Church's refusals? Clarification on this matter would be much appreciated. Thank you.


I will quote from another part of the document, ask a few questions, and then I will be finished, I promise. In the Introduction to Part Four, there is this passage: 

For legitimate reasons of responsible parenthood, married couples may limit the number of their children by natural means. The Church cannot approve contraceptive interventions that "either in anticipation of the marital act, or in its accomplishment or in the development of its natural consequences, have the purpose, whether as an end or a means, to render procreation impossible." Such interventions violate "the inseparable connection, willed by God . . . between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive and procreative meaning."

Now, I know that when Catholics use the term 'God' they're referring to their god, and I know, because I've researched the matter, that this god is one of hundreds, indeed thousands of gods, major and minor, universal and local, that people have believed in and do believe in throughout the space and time of this planet. So I'm wondering whether all the marital acts, of all kinds [and think of all the many different cultures and religions that have celebrated these acts] have been willed by your god, according to your church, and how you come to this conclusion. Does your beloved book, The Bible, state this explicitly anywhere? I will say nothing for now about the unitive and procreative meanings of the conjugal act, for now, because I think I may have already asked too many questions in this preliminary letter. I suppose I'm wondering whether your god, God, only connects Catholics in marriage by his will, or does he even connect those who reject or are ignorant of your god?  And how do you know the answer to this - whichever answer is correct?


I thank you and your team for their patience, and I look forward to your response. 


I've printed out a very slightly edited version of this letter ready for sending to the pontiff.

Francis Bacon's dream

So much concerning the several classes of idols, and their equipage; all of which must be renounced and put away with a fixed and solemn determination, and the understanding thoroughly freed and cleansed; the entrance into the kingdom of man, founded on the sciences, being not much other than the entrance into the kingdom of heaven, whereinto none may enter except as a little child.

These remarks are from Francis Bacon's Novum Organum, in which he criticises what he calls 'idols', what we might call preconceptions or idees fixes, which inhibit our understanding and our approach to the phenomena around us. Interestingly, Bacon was particularly concerned about the muddying effects of everyday language, anticipating such later seventeenth century thinkers as Spinoza and Descartes, who were won over by the achievements of mathematics, and sought to model philosophical thinking upon mathematical axioms.

In the version I have, an extract published in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Bacon describes the Idols of the Tribe [the tendency to generalize or abstract from too little evidence, and to create general forms from specific instances], the Idols of the Cave [the tendency to generalize too much from your own specialization], the Idols of the Marketplace [the above-mentioned tendency to mystify what should be clear, through the use of everyday language], and the Idols of the Theater [a preoccupation with philosophical systems, discredited or not, as a guide to truth]. Another problem that I encounter is the fear of divesting yourself of the trappings of supposed adulthood and sophistication, so to become child-like, as if wonder is a failing and knowingness is all. Our identity is wrapped up in a bank of knowledge, opinions and attitudes, and these are the greatest barriers to scientific exploration we have - which is all somehow rather ironic.

scientism, etc

maybe I should read this book

I've been reading with some bemusement about the problems Chris Mooney has been having with sock-puppetry. I'm no expert, but it does seem as if they've been largely of his own making. And all I wanted to do was focus on the compatibility issue [which is related to, but different from, the accommodationist issue]. Mooney's credibility seems to be sinking fast, so I'd better get on with looking at his and others' claims that there's a useful distinction to be made between methodological naturalism [roughly, the view that science should follow methodologies which rule out the supernatural, for purely pragmatic reasons - it works, spectacularly] and philosophical naturalism [the view that the natural world is all there is]. The reason for this 'useful distinction', of course, is to allow science and religion to cohabit, or to occupy mutually exclusive spheres, the natural and the supernatural. In other words, science has nothing whatever to say about philosophical naturalism, because it shines no light on the supernatural to discover whether it exists or not.

I've already raised a number of objections to this, as have Dawkins, Coyne, Rosenhouse and probably innumerable others. The essential objection is that the supernatural never seems to keep to its own sphere in the minds of those who believe in it. In fact it is central to deistic thinking that something/someone supernatural caused the natural world. You can't get more connected than that.

Unfortunately, when scientists explore causation with regard to such biggies as the origin of the universe, they follow the tenets of methodological naturalism, which tends to render more and more remote the possibilities for supernatural causation - especially as the scientific theories involved are extremely rigorous and highly verified. We now know that our universe is about 13.7 billion years old, that it began with a 'big bang', and that our earth, far from being central and prominent, is minuscule, peripheral and contingent. It becomes harder to believe in a personal god, with a special interest in the human species in particular, created in that god's likeness.

You could also say that methodological naturalism has nothing to say about astrology or faith healing, except that this approach yields much better explanations [for people who get better after visiting a faith healer], or helps show that no explanation is necessary [astrological predictions are no more likely to be true than any random predictions], and thus undermine any reasons for believing in them. For this reason, many scientists, insofar as they go in for philosophy, tend to make no distinction between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism. Everything in their world, their working world, can be explained naturalistically, so why not just accept that this methodology can explain everything, or has the potential to do so.

Mooney and others want to uphold this distinction as vital, and seek to disparage philosophical naturalism as 'scientism', which they associate with hubris. Instead of 'science has been found, after centuries of testing and exploration, to provide the best methodologies for understanding our world and ourselves [and indeed, science could be defined as the sum of those best methodologies]', scientism lectures us with 'science has all the answers, or will have shortly, so get with the program or fuck off'. You could say it's just a matter of tone. Philosophical naturalism doesn't claim to provide all the answers, it only argues persuasively that its approach has been phenomenally successful and provides the standard. Belief in the supernatural, whether religious or not, hasn't gotten us anywhere, either in the sphere of knowledge or of morality. Our growing scientific knowledge of the human species has informed our morality, as we come to understand the basis of our feelings of sympathy and antipathy, upon which morality is based. Belief in supernatural entities and obedience to their supposed commandments has not helped us towards greater understanding, and introspection has clear limits. As scepticism has been an important factor in developing scientific methodologies, it's unlikely that the genuine philosophical naturalism will ever claim that science has or will have all the answers. Science has always generated more questions than answers, and it's likely that it will continue to do so. It is this scepticism, I think, that distinguishes philosophical naturalism from scientism.

So what other objections do Mooney et al come up with? So far, I've not been able to come up with anything philosophical from Mooney, it's all about pragmatic accommodationism. Casey Luskin suggests that he's concerned primarily about constitutional issues [see the first amendment to the US constitution], but I think it's more about recognising, in the US sphere, that there's a real fight to be had in keeping claptrap out of American schools, and being nice to scientifically-minded believers will be the best strategy in fighting that fight, considering the high percentage of supernatural belief in that country. This may be right, in the short term, but I'm more concerned about deeper issues of compatibility. I'm also concerned that the being-nice-to-the-right-sort-of-believers strategy might entail being nasty to the wrong sort of atheists.

I'll keep looking through Mooney's back catalogue of posts for something more substantial from him.  

Mooney and Forrest: strategy or truth?

In Chris Mooney's second [short] post on the science-religion compatibility issue, he again focuses on strategy, and, in the very title of his essay, accuses Coyne [and by implication Dawkins, Dennett, Rosenhouse and others] of incivility, because he takes the view that even believers like Kenneth Miller and Karl Giberson, who are pro-evolution liberals, have problematic interpretations of evolution - necessarily problematic, in order to let Christian belief in. This despite the fact, as I would call it, that Coyne is not at all uncivil in his treatment of Miller and Giberson, he simply points out the flaws in their reasoning.

Mooney approves of the position of the philosopher Barbara Forrest, who directly challenged Coyne on the matter of strategy at a conference in Michigan. She criticized Coyne's approach from three perpectives. First, etiquette [be nice]; second, diversity [so many beliefs out there, wouldn't it be better to focus on the fundamentalists, or literalists, or primitivists?]; third, humility [we can't prove a negative, so why be arrogant?]. Essentially, Mooney's post simply draws our attention to Forrest's position, which he elaborates a little further. I hope he got it right because it needs to be criticized.

Apparently, in asking us to be nice, Forrest argues that religion is a very private matter. Presumably, in emphasising this, she's referring to people's sensitivities about their beliefs, and of course this is true enough in many cases, but it's also important to point out that religion, in its essence, is no more private than language is. We don't invent religion any more than we invent our own languages - we learn the language around us, and use it to relate to others. That's also what we do with religion, which has its rules and conventions and shared histories and public displays. It doesn't really make sense as a purely personal way of making sense of the world, because religious people learn about their gods from others, and they learn about the characteristics and the histories of those gods - they aren't simply free to invent the gods to suit their purposes. Their gods are public figures, and as such are open to public scrutiny, as are all their supernatural beliefs. And Forrest's claim, as reported by Mooney, that 'they're not trying to force [their religion] on anybody else' is quite doubtful. Few religious people think their religion is true only for themselves. In fact it would be quite weird if that were the case. Most would certainly find it incumbent on themselves to bring their children up in the same religion. After all, religion tells them something about the world, not just about themselves. In fact, I would argue that, far from religion being intensely personal, few people if any would hold religious views if others didn't have them too - I mean basically the same views.

On diversity, Forrest claims that of the range of believers, there are those 'who have not sacrificed scientific accuracy' in their views about evolution, and they should be seen as allies. I've already dealt with this issue, as have Coyne, Dawkins and others. This blanket claim ignores completely the arguments of Coyne and others, who have been at pains to point out that believers do sacrifice scientific accuracy to accommodate their religious convictions. And they go into detail on the whys and wherefores.

Finally, humility. Scientists don't know everything, and logic can't disprove negatives, so gods might exist, indeed it might just be true that the god of the Bible existed, and had a son somehow by a virgin who died for our sins and was resurrected and taken up to 'heaven'. Come on. It isn't arrogant to reject these beliefs or to mock them. They're absurd. And there are many good reasons why they're absurd. Why should we hold back in getting stuck into this kind of silliness? After all, we're interested, primarily, in discovering more and more of the truth about ourselves. I understand that many Americans are more immediately concerned about the spread of creationism and anti-sciencism in the US school system, and no doubt that's important - but the battle against religion itself, and not just its loopy fringes, will have to come. The truth will out. Why postpone the inevitable?

Mooney and Forrest appear to be odd types. They might well be incompatibilists at heart, but for strategic purposes they are accommodationists. Maybe it's a useful strategy from where they sit, but I don't see much use for it at all. Perhaps it's just that we're further along the road here in Oz.

nothing personal: a first response to Mooney

I've been a bit preoccupied, but at last I've read Chris Mooney's first response to Jerry Coyne, and I must say I'm not particularly impressed, though not being a citizen of that horribly divided and over-heated nation, the USA [or so it seems from here], I'm more relaxed about critiquing the empirical or quasi-empirical claims of the religious.

Mooney's essay of over a year ago has evoked over 100 responses, which deepen the debate, but for now I'll focus only on the essay itself. He begins with what seems to me a bit of bluster - claiming that he'd be the first to join an alliance of believers and non-believers for the promotion of evolution. My immediate response, considering that I've joined a few alliances in the past, is - what if members of that alliance start saying things about evolution that I can't agree with, or that are just plain wrong? Which then raises the question - and Coyne and others raise it too - when do believers ever get evolution right? For example, the claim that humans and humans alone have a soul, a claim common to the Judaic, Christian and Islamic religions I think, just can't be reconciled with the theory of natural selection. I really think the theory refutes this belief. I therefore think that anyone holding this view cannot at the same time, without contradiction, hold the view that natural selection accounts for the diversity of species, including homo sapiens. 


Mooney considers it important to distinguish between religions, but we all know that it's the politically powerful religions, notably Christianity in the US, but also Islam, that constitute a threat to science education and the spread of scientific knowledge. Of the other religions, I'd suggest they all base themselves on supernatural explanations for real world phenomena, and as such, are in opposition to scientific thinking and methodology. Many of the more intellectual believers profess a vague deism in public and never address the particular problems of their particular religions - Charles Taylor, for example, or Howard Smith, a leading astrophysicist and a 'self-described observant Jew', whose defensive response to the 'new atheists' is this: 'I'm not religious because I'm ignorant: I'm religious because I'm in awe'. Now 'awe' might be a necessary condition for religious feeling but it's hardly a sufficient one, and it's certainly not a sufficient condition for believing in a particular god, with a particular and frankly bizarre history tied up with a so-called chosen people, whose history as related in the Tanakh seems to bear very little resemblance to the facts uncovered on the ground. How people like Smith reconcile scientific methodology and analytic reasoning with such a bizarre and largely counterfactual belief system is the real problem. All religions are particular, and it's with these particularities that many non-believers take issue. Clearly it's not so much about awe as about maintaining a cultural tradition which many people feel lost, identity-less, without. In my view, awe, which I personally feel on a regular basis, just doesn't cut it as a basis for religion.

This, of course, takes us into areas of religion and its relation to cultural identity, a minefield I'll avoid for now, while acknowledging that it's probably the key issue in understanding the persistence of religious belief.

So returning to Mooney, he quotes from Coyne's original essay and takes him to task for daring to criticize coalitions intended to achieve shared goals. Yet he fails to acknowledge that the cobbling together of such a coalition means smoothing over areas of real dissent, and the excluding of those scientists - more than a few - who see no value in such a coalition,or who know a thing or two about history, and how organised, powerful religion has sought to block every step of scientific progress over the years. Here in Australia, for example, there's no serious threat from creationism, despite the occasional wild rumour coursing through atheist circles. So we're free to focus on what divides us rather than on what unites us.


Mooney fares much worse, it seems to me, when he attempts a deeper criticism of the paragraph he quotes from Coyne. Here are his first remarks:

First, I don’t see anything particularly “philosophical” about the accommodationist stance. Rather, holding that there is no necessary conflict between faith and science is an empirical matter:  There are a vast number of different religions traditions in the world, and a still more vast number of ways in which different people profess and live out their faiths. In some of these traditions, and for some of these people, there is stark conflict with science; in other traditions, and for other people, there isn’t. That’s just a fact, and one that can be demonstrated simply by identifying any number of scientists who are religious, any number of religious leaders and denominations which embrace evolution, and so on.

It's true, of course that there are many different religious traditions, but along with many other non-believers, I think it's fair to single out Judaism, Christianity and Islam as the main causes for concern, and especially the last two, as they are the only religions, in my part of the world at least, politically powerful enough to interfere in any way with scientific advancement. It's also true, of course, that within those two religions, people profess and live out their faiths very differently, many of them completely ignoring the defining dogmas of their particular denominations. Bully for them. Yet there are defining dogmas, and I have already written about them with regard to Christianity, and to Judaism in passing. Interestingly, and I think unsurprisingly, those Christian denominations that have most readily embraced evolution have weakened themselves thereby. One feels a sense of drift with them, or retreat to a vague deism. On the other hand, Catholicism, which to me has only pretended to embrace evolution, and the more conservative side of the Anglican church, still have some political power in this country at least, and Catholicism is making great strides in Africa and rural China, where evolution has no purchase. The sexier Pentecostal-type churches don't seem to have lost any popularity by appealing to the lowest common denominator with regard to evolutionary understanding.
The official Catholic position on evolution is full of claptrap, and any biological scientist worth her pay would surely be happy to point this out. It may well be that there are many practising Catholics who have a sophisticated and accurate understanding of evolution which contradicts the official line, and that is all well and good, but rather odd. It would surely mean no belief in the exclusively human soul, and no belief in souls in general, because I don't see any place for disembodied souls in a genuinely correlated scientific understanding of our world. With these beliefs and many others shredded by a commitment to coherent scientific understanding of what we are, I don't really see what these practising Catholics would have left to practice.

In short, the numbers of the religious who embrace evolution and science are of no consequence. Coherence is all. That's a scientific criterion of course. Who cares how many people embrace the theory of general relativity? Its coherence, its testability and its fruitfulness, these are the measures. Those who question the compatibility of science and religion do so on these grounds. It's nothing personal.

silly season

Dr Alan Leshner, BC, resolves the compatibility issue once and for all

The fact that so many are weighing in on the science-religion compatibility issue is an important sign. There's a lot of discomfort about. As Ophelia Benson reports, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, obviously a Big Cheese, has come out with the same line as that country's NCSE. Some 50% of US scientists are religious, therefore science and religion are compatible, end of story, and he hopes that will bring an end to the debate!!??#&! No mention of epistemology, which is what this is all about. The utter inanity of these remarks, from such a Big Cheese, is sure to fire up the issue all the more. What fun!

random thoughts on science

Trying not to get too distracted after reading this [I'm such an emotional cuss], I'll focus instead on scientism, so-called, and the problematics of a dialogue between science and faith.
The difficulties and pitfalls of such a dialogue are certainly highlighted by the discussions at the Biologos site. In fact the Benner article isn't representative of Biologos, which has a specific and quite narrow agenda, clearly stated in its mission statement:

The BioLogos Foundation explores, promotes and celebrates the integration of science and Christian faith.

So, it has no interest in any other faith, and it has no interest in a dialogue with those who can't clearly see any positive value in Christian faith. So it's not about promoting dialogue between religion and science generally [that was my mistake], and it would naturally tend to take the view, not only that science can't explain everything, but that science can't explain anything really important, because Christianity covers all the really important stuff.
So it's hardly surprising that the concept of scientism is highlighted at such a site, for the purpose of condemnation. Scientism, a term I've only recently encountered, is, as its name suggests, the belief that science rules, ok? Of course it is defined negatively as hubristic, shallow, positivist, rationalist, ideological and so forth. These claims are countered, I think rather effectively, by pointing out that the methods of science are multiform and open-ended, with an emphasis on skepticism, on evidence, on testability and reproducibility, and that the scientific approach has changed our world for the better. Another development that has changed the western world for the better is the secularisation of our political system. This is not directly attributable to science, but both science and secularisation have been helped along by the values of the Enlightenment, and as such I think they are quite close relatives.
I could say a lot more about this, but I think it's an old argument. Those non-believers who have taken the 'new atheists' to task for rudeness, aggressiveness and so forth have tended to defend the smaller, more 'harmless' religions rather than the ones politically powerful enough to purvey their own brand of 'truth'. I'm sympathetic to the point that many people, or peoples, seem to need religion, at least in the short term. And that they derive a strong sense of identity and integrity and purpose from those beliefs. We've all come across people with whom it would be useless to argue on religious matters, so ingrained and irreplaceable is their faith to them, people who are yet very humane and worthy individuals. The question of whether their worthiness is a result of their faith, or something that shines through in spite of it, is an almost impossible-to-answer question, but nevertheless one always worth asking.
Science helps us to better understand humans as social animals, and so it helps us in our ethics and our politics. In fact there is no area of life, I feel, to which a scientific approach can't contribute. Science is by no means narrow, it's as broad as can be - it's often a matter of basic astuteness or acuteness, formalized. At our best, we all practice it, to some degree.

we can't help but advocate, let's be honest

Jasen Rosenhouse has a piece here about advocacy in science, and, more or less as usual, I'm in agreement. Of course, I'm not a scientist, and I get overwhelmed sometimes by the detail in some fields - in climate change for example - but you don't have to be absolutely certain about your own position to know that at least some other positions are crap, or baseless. So you advocate for not having a baseless position. You advocate for evidence, and fruitful methodology.
Of course, in the science versus religion debate, there's just so much going on it's hard to know where to start, re advocacy, but clearly if a person claims that evolution by natural selection is false because it contradicts the Bible account of creation, then those with knowledge about natural selection have every reason to advocate for its soundness, and the real question is whether or not it should be seen as a duty. The same, of course, goes for geologists and cosmologists when faced with the arguments or dismissals of young earth creationists.
Rosenhouse takes issue with Steven Benner who has warned of the dangers of advocacy in science on a site called Biologos, which seeks to promote a dialogue between science and faith, it seems. I might have more to say on that, generally, later, but for now let's look at what Benner says:

... it is important... for scientists to emphasize that uncertainty is central to science, and advocacy is disruptive of it. When a scientist becomes an advocate, he loses for himself the power to use scientific discipline to discern reality.

Reading this makes me think of the process of philosophical discourse, as it has occurred through the ages. Some of this discourse has been about the nature of reality, and this is largely the province of science today. There has also been much discourse about how we should live - the fields of moral and political philosophy. Philosophers, or thinkers generally, have proposed different ethical approaches, consequentialist or deontological or whatever, and defended their position against critiques. Often they strengthen their argument though critical conversation. Are they not advocates? Many people - Robert Hughes being one I remember -have said that arguing is the best way to learn, to develop your ideas. Scientists argue vehemently and healthily, for the most part, about their interpretations of reality - string theory, the multiverse, the nature of time even. Some are fierce advocates for particular positions, but are guided by the results nonetheless. Science can and does help us with developing ethical systems by contributing to the ongoing understanding of what we are, and how we best thrive as highly socialized but individual creatures. The idea that you can't derive an ought from an is has always struck me as false - we do it all the time.
Besides, I'm not sure that uncertainty is central to science. Skepticism, yes, but uncertainty? Would science ever get off the ground if uncertainty ruled always? Science owes much of its success to transformational positive findings or theories that have stood up against all testing and have opened up fruitful avenues. The developers of those theories weren't driven by uncertainty - which doesn't really drive anything. They were driven rather by skepticism or dissatisfaction with existing accounts.
 This is an important issue - scientists are the last people who should shy away from advocating in the fields in which they are experts. As Nick Matzke says in his comments on Benner, there are levels of uncertainty, and these are often exploited, for example when politicians such as Tony Abbott claim that AGW is not 'settled science'. When this sort of distortion is promoted, it's time for scientists not only to advocate, but to unite in advocating.
Having read all the comments on this Benner piece, many of them by people apparently sympathetic to ID, I feel confirmed in my view that scientists should advocate for evidence-based thinking, reproducible results and so on at every opportunity. Which I suppose brings me to the issue of 'scientism', which I might write about soon.