Reconciling science and religion: doomed to fail

[Galapagos]

New article about reconciling science and religion by Jerry Coyne in The New Republic:

 

Seeing and Believing

Seeing and Believing by Jerry A. Coyne

The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail.

Post Date Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809--the same day as Abraham Lincoln--and published his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species, fifty years later. Every half century, then, a Darwin Year comes around: an occasion to honor his theory of evolution by natural selection, which is surely the most important concept in biology, and perhaps the most revolutionary scientific idea in history. 2009 is such a year, and we biologists are preparing to fan out across the land, giving talks and attending a multitude of DarwinFests. The melancholy part is that we will be speaking more to other scientists than to the American public. For in this country, Darwin is a man of low repute. The ideas that made Darwin's theory so revolutionary are precisely the ones that repel much of religious America, for they imply that, far from having a divinely scripted role in the drama of life, our species is the accidental and contingent result of a purely natural process.

 

And so the culture wars continue between science and religion. On one side we have a scientific establishment and a court system determined to let children learn evolution rather than religious mythology, and on the other side the many Americans who passionately resist those efforts. It is a depressing fact that while 74 percent of Americans believe that angels exist, only 25 percent accept that we evolved from apelike ancestors. Just one in eight of us think that evolution should be taught in the biology classroom without including a creationist alternative. Among thirty-four Western countries surveyed for the acceptance of evolution, the United States ranked a dismal thirty-third, just above Turkey. Throughout our country, school boards are trying to water down the teaching of evolution or sneak creationism in beside it. And the opponents of Darwinism are not limited to snake-handlers from the Bible Belt; they include some people you know. As Karl Giberson notes in Saving Darwin, "Most people in America have a neighbor who thinks the Earth is ten thousand years old."

[...]

 

 

Strong words from Coyne. Excellent article in my opinion, one of the best parts was his shredding of the arguments for the inevitability of "humanoids":

-historic contingency in evolution

-mammals would not even be dominant on Earth if it weren't for the random act of a meteor eradicating the dinosaurs 65mya

-despite all of the convergence, it is difficult to make the case that a trait is inevitable if it only evolved once. plenty of rare and unique traits evolved only in placental mammals and not marsupial mammals in Australia, for example: giraffes neck, elephants nose, flying bats, and primates.

-the random climate change drying out of the African forest allowed our ancestors to leave out into the open plains

 

Coyne concludes this argument with:

In the end, the question of whether human-like creatures were inevitable can be answered only by admitting that we do not know--and adding that most scientific evidence suggests that they were not. Any other answer involves either wishful thinking or theology.

 

 

 

Also, Coyne's new book, "Why Evolution Is True" just released on Amazon this past week, check it out:

Amazon.com: Why Evolution Is True: Jerry A. Coyne: Books http://www.amazon.com/Why-Evolution-True-Jerry-Coyne/dp/0670020532

[HydrogenBond]

There is one possible way to reconcile science and religion. If you look at religion, especially the belief in God, there is no animal parallel. It involves human consciousness, faith and a detachment from physical reality and/or a belief in an alternate reality apart from animal nature. This is uniquely human. Animals need to stay in touch with physical reality for survival. The long standing and conservative nature of religion almost suggests a purely human instinct.

 

For the sake of argument, let us assume this human instinct feature is common to all humans. As an analogy, say it is an analogous to an instinct, like hunger. If we deny any instinct, like repressing hunger, the result should be a form of sublimation, where something else is substituted when the impulse appears. It will still have hunger-eating characteristics, but may look superficially different. This instinct-sublimation could explain the religious war between religion and science. I mean religious war in the sense that the same physiological mechanism is lighting up but then goes in two directions.

 

Reason, although equated with humans, may have an animal parallel. For example, the police dog who finds a lost child through scent. The dog is using if a=b, and b=c, then a=c. We give the dog full autonomy to complete the equation. He is able to filter out faulty data using this logic. This animal parallel suggests the human instinct can either extrapolate further away from animal to areas animals never go, or back down toward animal. Higher level reason is closer to the pure human instinct but slightly below due to animal parallel. The inception of innovation of what may be, but that which can not be proven, may go the other way. But it needs to backtrack toward animal tangible to satisfy the sublimation of science.

 

Possible research would be to isolate this purely human affect in terms of genetic or neurological basis. Then run experiments with scientists and religious people in debate to see if the same thing lights up and then where they begin to diverge.

[Galapagos]

Possible research would be to isolate this purely human affect in terms of genetic or neurological basis. Then run experiments with scientists and religious people in debate to see if the same thing lights up and then where they begin to diverge.

This is the only part of your post I think I really understood, and I think you may be interested in some of the info presented over in this post:

http://hypography.com/forums/245548-post19.html

Specifically the research lead by Sam Harris and published in Annals of Neuroscience on belief and the brain.

What Your Brain Looks Like on Faith - TIME

http://www.samharris.org/images/uploads/Harris_Sheth_Cohen.pdf

Objective: The difference between believing and disbelieving a proposition is one of the most potent regulators of human behavior and emotion. When we accept a statement as true, it becomes the basis for further thought and action; rejected as false, it remains a string of words. The purpose of this study was to differentiate belief, disbelief, and uncertainty at the level of the brain.

 

Methods: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of 14 adults while they judged written statements to be "true" (belief), "false" (disbelief), or "undecidable" (uncertainty). To characterize belief, disbelief, and uncertainty in a content-independent manner, we included statements from a wide range of categories: autobiographical, mathematical, geographical, religious, ethical, semantic, and factual.

Results: The states of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty differentially activated distinct regions of the prefrontal and parietal cortices, as well as the basal ganglia.

Interpretation: Belief and disbelief differ from uncertainty in that both provide information that can subsequently inform behavior and emotion. The mechanism underlying this difference appears to involve the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the caudate. While many areas of higher cognition are likely involved in assessing the truth-value of linguistic propositions, the final acceptance of a statement as "true," or its rejection as "false," seems to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense, and false propositions might actually disgust us..

 

 

----------------

 

 

PZ Myers over at Pharyngula comments on Coyne's writing:

Pharyngula: Coyne on the compatibility of science and religion

Criticizing an unfortunate turn in their books is one thing, but Coyne wins his New Atheist oak leaf cluster for taking it one step further, and making the case that religion and science are antagonistic. Readers here will know that this is also a view I share, and that I also think this pattern of trotting out yet more scientists who go to church is growing old. It does not argue that science and religion are compatible at all — all the coincidence of these ideas in single individuals tells us is that human beings are entirely capable of holding mutually incompatible ideas in their heads at the same time. The question is not whether a person is capable of swiveling between the church pew and the lab bench, but whether religion can tolerate scientific scrutiny, and whether science can thrive under dogma. I say the answer is no. Coyne agrees.

[...]

Coyne is admitting something that most of the scientists I've talked to (and I'll openly confess that that is definitely a biased sample) agree on: we don't believe, and we find no virtue in faith. At the same time, we're struggling with an under- and mis-educated population that believes faith is far more important than reason. So what most scientists do is keep as quiet as possible about it all, or fall under the spell of 'framing'…that is, lying about their position. That is changing.

[C1ay]

Science and religion cannot be reconciled. Science is about fact regardless of belief and religion is about belief regardless of the facts....

[Moontanman]

Science and religion cannot be reconciled. Science is about fact regardless of belief and religion is about belief regardless of the facts....

 

Exactly, good job cutting the the chase Clay!

[HydrogenBond]

Let us work under the assumption religion and science are like water and oil. No matter how much you shake them together they separate out. To form a stable emulsion we need a surfactant and some agitation. When it tries to separate back into two phases, it is harder. Now it is a lotion. But to break an emulsion all you need is an anti-surfactant. Then it is back to step one.

 

the final acceptance of a statement as "true," or its rejection as "false," seems to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula.

 

This primitive brain function is the anti-surfactant since it separate along party lines. This is something both groups have in common. Maybe we can work from there.

[InfiniteNow]

Enjoy.

 

 

YouTube - Skewed views of science http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h9XntsSEro

[Galapagos]

Whoa! Responses given over at edge.org:

 

Edge: DOES THE EMPIRICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE CONTRADICT THE REVELATORY NATURE OF FAITH? - Jerry Coyne

 

I just finished reading, and I think the best responses came from Sam Harris, Stephen Pinker, and Dan Dennett. Sam Harris' piece was hilarious and had me laughing out loud quite a bit, easily some of his best writing in a while.

[C1ay]

Faith....revelatory? That's quite the oxymoron there....

[InfiniteNow]

Sam Harris' piece was hilarious and had me laughing out loud quite a bit, easily some of his best writing in a while.

 

:confused:

 

Yes... Sam totally nailed it. I love that guy. :evil:

[pamela]

I found this interesting

not a reconcilliation but a coexistance

 

Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth

 

This year represents the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (12 February 1809) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work On the Origin of Species in 1859. This backdrop provides a rich opportunity to demonstrate that religion and science have much to offer one another. Please join us and congregations all around the world iin celebrating Evolution Weekend 2009!

 

13 -15 February 2009 -- Evolution Weekend

 

Evolution Weekend is an opportunity for serious discussion and reflection on the relationship between religion and science. One important goal is to elevate the quality of the discussion on this critical topic - to move beyond sound bites. A second critical goal is to demonstrate that religious people from many faiths and locations understand that evolution is sound science and poses no problems for their faith. Finally, as with The Clergy Letter itself, which has now been signed by more than 11,000 members of the Christian clergy in the United States, Evolution Weekend makes it clear that those claiming that people must choose between religion and science are creating a false dichotomy.

 

Through sermons, discussion groups, meaningful conversations and seminars, the leaders listed below will show that religion and science are not adversaries.

 

The Clergy Letter Project

[InfiniteNow]

Why Evolution is True

by Jerry Coyne

 

Must we always cater to the faithful when teaching science?

As long as I have been a scientist, I have lived with my colleagues’ view that one cannot promote the acceptance of evolution in this country without catering to the faithful. This comes from the idea that many religious people who would otherwise accept evolution won’t do so if they think it undermines their faith, promoting atheism or immoral behavior. Thus various organizations promoting the teaching of evolution, including the National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for Science Education, have published booklets or websites that explicitly say that faith and science are compatible. In other words, that is their official position. The view of many other scientists that faith and science (or reason) are incompatible is ignored or disparaged. As evidence for the compatibility, the most frequent reason cited is that many scientists are religious and many of the faithful accept evolution. While this proves compatibility in the trivial sense, it doesn’t show, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, that the two views are philosophically compatible.

 

As an example of the “official position” of some groups on compatibility, an alert reader sent me the URL of a site at The University of California at Berkeley, Understanding Science 101, that discusses the nature of science and how it’s done. There are a lot of good resources at this site, but perusing it I found, to my dismay, a sub-site that pushes the compatibility between science and faith:

 

With the loud protests of a small number of religious groups over teaching scientific concepts like evolution and the Big Bang in public schools, and the equally loud proclamations of a few scientists with personal, anti-religious philosophies, it can sometimes seem as though science and religion are at war. News outlets offer plenty of reports of school board meetings, congressional sessions, and Sunday sermons in which scientists and religious leaders launch attacks at one another. But just how representative are such conflicts? Not very. The attention given to such clashes glosses over the far more numerous cases in which science and religion harmoniously, and even synergistically, coexist. In fact, people of many different faiths and levels of scientific expertise see no contradiction at all between science and religion. Many simply acknowledge that the two institutions deal with different realms of human experience. Science investigates the natural world, while religion deals with the spiritual and supernatural — hence, the two can be complementary. Many religious organizations have issued statements declaring that there need not be any conflict between religious faith and the scientific perspective on evolution.

 

"One of the greatest tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that sceince and religion have to be at war." ---Francis Collins

 

 

Furthermore, contrary to stereotype, one certainly doesn’t have to be an atheist in order to become a scientist. A 2005 survey of scientists at top research universities found that more than 48% had a religious affiliation and more than 75% believe that religions convey important truths. Some scientists — like Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and George Coyne, astronomer and priest — have been outspoken about the satisfaction they find in viewing the world through both a scientific lens and one of personal faith.

 

 

It seems to me that we can defend evolution without having to cater to the faithful at the same time. Why not just show that evolution is TRUE and its alternatives are not? Why kowtow to those whose beliefs many of us find unpalatable, just to sell our discipline? There are, in fact, two disadvantages to the “cater-to-religion” stance.

 

1. By trotting out those “religious scientists”, like Ken Miller, or those “scientific theologians,” like John Haught, we are tacitly putting our imprimatur on their beliefs, including beliefs that God acts in the world today (theism), suspending natural laws. For example, I don’t subscribe to Miller’s belief that God acts immanently in the world, perhaps by influencing events on the quantum level, or that God created the laws of physics so that human-containing planets could evolve. I do not agree with John Haught’s theology. I do not consider any faith that touts God’s intervention in the world (even in the past) as compatible with science. Do my colleagues at the NAS or the NCSE disagree?

 

2. The statement that learning evolution does not influence one’s religious belief is palpably false. There are plenty of statistics that show otherwise, including the negative correlation of scientific achievement with religious belief and the negative correlation among nations in degree of belief in God with degree of acceptance of evolution. All of us know this, but we pretend otherwise. (In my book I note that “enlightened” religion can be compatible with science, but by “englightened” I meant a complete, hands-off deism.) I think it is hypocrisy to pretend that learning evolution will not affect either the nature or degree of one’s faith. It doesn’t always, but it does more often than we admit, and there are obvious reasons why (I won’t belabor these). I hate to see my colleagues pretending that faith and science live in nonoverlapping magisteria. They know better.

 

Because of this, I think that organizations promoting the teaching of evolution should do that, and do that alone. Leave religion and its compatibility with faith to the theologians. That’s not our job. Our job is to show that evolution is true and creationism and ID aren’t. End of story.

 

In 25 years of effort, these organizations don’t seem to have much effect on influencing public opinion about evolution. I think that this may mean that the USA will have to become a lot less religious before acceptance of evolution increases appreciably.

 

Via

[Michael Mooney]

"Religion" per se is about beliefs, based on doctrines which "program" the minds of the believer much like robots.

Spiritual awakening is another animal altogether.

 

Here is my commentary on that from the "Does God Exist" thread (last entry.)

 

Consider the following statement implied in most of the above criticisms of what I call Gnosis :

"Since I have never experienced transcendence of personal consciousness/identity, let alone the direct experience of cosmic or God consciousness, it is impossible and in fact merely false belief or delusion."

 

Do all you critics above endorse the above?

 

I "believe" that science and mystic realization, as above, will one day find common ground and learn to "play well together"... as long as "creationism" doesn't persist in calling itself science!

(I,m half mystic and half lay scientist, and these aspects have coalesced well within... not at war in any sense.)... the dynamic creation of cosmos is an always ongoing project... always "a work in progress." (The key may be found in the "intelligence" between entangled particles in quantum physics... or in how "remote viewing" works... tho still very controversial. Check out "The Intention Experiment"... author escaping memory at the moment.

Michael

[Thunderbird]

Science can purify religion from error and superstition;

religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.

Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish....

We need each other to be what we must be, what we are called to be." (-Pope John Paul II)

[HydrogenBond]

There is one way to reconcile religion and science. It involves applying evolutionary theory and selective advantage. If we look at ancient history, the major cultures of ancient history such as Greece, Rome, Assyria, Babylon, etc., all had religion. One would be hard pressed to find any atheist cultures that had the same level of selective advantage during the transition from pre-human to human. Can anyone give me an example of a dominate ancient culture that was purely atheist? Why the advantage?

[freeztar]

There is one way to reconcile religion and science. It involves applying evolutionary theory and selective advantage.

 

This doesn't even make sense. Evolutionary theory does not apply to cultures or religion. Evolutionary theory applies to biological organisms that inherently change through time.

 

If we look at ancient history, the major cultures of ancient history such as Greece, Rome, Assyria, Babylon, etc., all had religion.

 

I agree, but following that with...

One would be hard pressed to find any atheist cultures that had the same level of selective advantage during the transition from pre-human to human. Can anyone give me an example of a dominate ancient culture that was purely atheist? Why the advantage?

 

...is assigning causation when there is no logical reason to assign causation. You've committed a logical fallacy:

 

Premise 1: The major historical civilizations embraced religion

Premise 2: Historic atheist civilizations are non-existant

Premise 3: Hence, religion is a 'selective advantage' for civilizations.

 

That is not a conciliation. I'm sure religion would see it as such, but science does not accept false deduction. ;)

 

I'm personally willing to concede that religion might have been a useful idealogy in ancient civilizations. It might have even had profound effects on the evolution of modern day humans. *BUT*, it is a specious claim by itself. If you make such claims, please support them with evidence. Otherwise, do not make such claims, whether explicit or implicit.

[sanctus]

Also, HBond, consider that the less advanced a civilisation is the more space is for supernatural things since there are more not understood things. So it is not surprising that all ancient civilations had religion. We know now that until the BigBang it works without any god, just cause-effect things. This may be why atheism is much more easily possible today.