Poll questions that ask "do you believe in evolution?" bother me no end. Fellow teachers who state, "well, this is evolution, but not everybody believes in it" continue to frustrate me.
Science is NOT a belief system. Period. It's absolutely ridiculous that poll-takers and science teachers can't get that straight.
"Secularists should clearly and patiently explain their own philosophical views even as they join hands with men and women of faith to defend science education from the know-nothing attacks of the fundamentalists. There is nothing incompatible in this approach."
Right - except you fail to use the language of the true believers on both sides of the issue, so you piss off all of the most vocal. It seems that the strong atheists and upset former theists want to go head to head with the cartoon fundametalist and new earth loonies, leaving subtleties of philosphy in the dust.
We need to catch a clue from the effective lobbying done by conservative political groups over the years. Effective lobbying is done by groups with a narrow focus who do not allow themselves to be pulled into other issues. Theistic evolution supporters and secularists are natural allies in the fight to keep science in our schools and religion out.
The suggestion that science and religion are incompatible is absurd. A logical error has been made somewhere. I have too low a tolerance for nonsense to go looking for it myself.
Thanks for this well-said, well-reasoned piece.
It would seem that a few folks are basically agreeing with Cardinal Schonborn, if from the other direction, and insisting that science is insisting on evolution being unguided *as a metaphysical statement*. For example, Weisberg, referring to the '04 Gallup poll, states that
"another 38 percent believe that God directed the process of evolution. Only 13 percent accept the prevailing scientific view of evolution as an unguided, random process."
This seems to be his basis for stating that "not many people" believe (bad phrasing!) in both. Certainly, to say that "God directed the process of evolution" is in no way science, and cannot be presented as such. But must we say that this view is *necessarily* a rejection of evolution? (Personally, I'm one of the 13%, but whatever.) This seems like a conflation of methodological and metaphysical naturalism, but perhaps I misunderstand.
Like it or not, the bottom line is that reason and faith are completely and irrevocably incompatible. Faith means willfully abrogating reason, and reason provides not the slightest support for faith. Choose one side of the fence or the other, you don't get to walk on both. Scientists who practice religion are hypocritically abandoning the scientific method. The scientific community needs to take a stand that is in complete support of empirically observable reality and let the chips fall where they may. If we start worrying about whether "people of faith" (a phrase that makes no less sense than "believers in the tooth fairy") find reality somehow threatening to their carefully crafted world-view, we have already lost. Acommodating those who live in the land of make-believe is not going to be of any benefit to science and will always be used as a truncheon with which to beat it.
It's time to grow up and stop believing in that which has no evidence of existence.
ruidh says, "The suggestion that science and religion are incompatible is absurd. A logical error has been made somewhere. I have too low a tolerance for nonsense to go looking for it myself."
Should we just take your statement . . . on faith?
One need not look too far to find the "logical error" that has been made here.
"There are other ways of knowing. Science can explain the workings of the natural world, but has little to say about the existential questions we humans have. Music, film, literature, the visual arts, dance -- all of which might be seen as filling the role that religion once did -- can get at these existential questions in a way that science can't."
Really?
I'm an artist, I enjoy literature and music. While these disciplines may describe what it's like exist as a human, they explain nothing unless they're based in rational, factual analysis. Expression isn't explanation. Feeling isn't understanding. I expect that science can explain the roots of religion and the arts as behaviors that extend reproductive success for social groups.
I don't agree the idea of multiple ways of "knowing". Emotion is certainly at the core of our existence, but angst, joy and the other innate biochemical reactions that define our existence aren't understanding. They're profound because they're what we are, but actual knowledge comes from our ability to (at times) observe and use reason to explain and usefully predict the world.
Belief in a religion or some spiritual component of the expressive arts is surely comforting and emotionally resonant for most people, but it's not rational. Faith and "feeling" are not means of "knowing" anything.
Science (not just evolution) is incompatible with all but the most vague and sweeping religious ideas. The more specific the dogma, the more one has to supress rationality and deny fact to keep the faith. And the more we really understand, the less room there is for a creation story, an anthropomorphic deity, revelation, and the other trappings of religious experience. The vague omnipotence of a Cosmic Muffin Prime Mover may exist nicely outside the realm of the knowable, but the concept isn't useful except as a mental comfort device. And a fuzzy God isn't especially comforting. I suspect the more vague the dogma, the less emotional support it offers.
What is light?
Is light a particle? Yes. We can prove it.
Or rather
Is light a wave? Yes. We can prove it.
How is this possible?
It's not either or, it's both/and. How can this be?
Plenty of things have no evidence that they exist - reality is beyond our knowledge and perception - just as the "New World" was once beyond the knowledge and perception of peoples in Europe. When we insist we know all we do things like think we've arrived in India...
Using reason - tell me - where does a perfect circle start? Where does it end?
Neither science nor faith ought to be about absolute certainty. As John Polkinghorn (physicist and priest) says - "The ultimate reward of science… is a sense of wonder…
Chaos theory is teaching us that the universe is governed by an interplay of order and disorder, randomness occurs within a patterned structure.
(Within these patterns, there are) cloudy spaces where the laws of nature make room for multiple possibilities. "
Faith and reason are different - they need not conflict. Those "fundamentalist" on either side that insist on blinding themselves to the other do us all a grave disservice.
Attack of the hyper-rationalists! Tonight at 11.
"Faith and reason are different - they need not conflict."
How can they do anything other than conflict? If you are going to lie to yourself, how can you expect to be taken seriously by anyone else?
Well Milo, you seem to have a handle on heat
but light seems to be eluding you.
Great answer. Content-free, derisive, and incomplete. That's pretty much what I expect from somebody who can't produce any evidence to support their statements.
"How can they [faith and reason] do anything other than conflict?"
Think cooking and chemistry. Indeed, in this case, chemistry *explains* what goes on when you cook; cooking is chemistry. But they serve completely different purposes. Doing chemistry might provide yourself with food - it wouldn't cut if for Thanksgiving dinner. One of the problems is that people are talking about these vague, abstract grand categories, making vast sweeping statements - reason is, faith is, religion is, science is - with no reference to real human life. An anthropological persective would be very helpful here. You don't live your life by pure reason alone - seriously, you don't - and what we call faith is generally intertwined with some of those other parts. There are different domains of action and thought, usally mixing and overlapping. In some cases things occupy *just* the space that science fills - they're "bad science," but often they're also connected to other things, and represent important meanings and relationships to the participants. Metaphor is not merely a fancy way to state a fact. . . and so on.
"You don't live your life by pure reason alone - seriously, you don't -"
Yes, Dan-boy, seriously, I do. Who the hell are you to tell me what I do or don't do? How would you have the slightest idea of how I live my life? How incredibly presumptuous and WRONG it is for you to make that completely unsupported assertion. If YOU choose to live your life by disregarding reason in favor of some vague, undefined "anthropological perspective," then you are simply trying to justify your own primitive superstitious yearnings. Your argument provides ZERO evidence to support your contentions.
Incompatible? Not an option. To say God couldn't have made the universe we have is to limit God's power.
I don't live a completely rational life. If you look at it rationally, such and existence is impossible. We're captive to a considerable extent to our DNA programming to react thus and so when presented with a specific stimulus. Emotions are real (the brain patterns and chemistry can be measured). They're profound - hitting your thumb with a hammer is "profound" at least until the throbbing stops. But the only "knowledge" that emotions empart is DNA expressing biochemistry that has offered a selective advantage to our ancestors. That's where "God" comes from. We need something to yell as an expletive.
". Who the hell are you to tell me what I do or don't do? How would you have the slightest idea of how I live my life?"
You eliminate waste, you eat, you breathe, you (eventually, and hopefully not for a long time) die. Same here. It is my understanding that people are not fully or solely rational beings.
People are not fully or solely rational
Socrates is a person
Therefore . . .
It's quite possible that you strive to rely on reason alone more than most, and even possible that you achieve this goal.
(Interestingly, it's been argued that people with damage to parts of the brain dealing with emotion end up making really bad decisions in some cases (although pretty good ones in others) - but I'm not up on the research, and this may well be flawed in some way).
I didn't mean it as a personal insult, merely a blanket statement about the human condition. My reference to an anthropological perspective refers in part to the fact that much of the discussion I've seen on this issue the last few days has as its starting points, as I said, really vague, somewhat imaginary categories. It makes more sense to see how these things really work, either cross-culturally or within 'our' culture.
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