Faith vs. science: Still news!
So the New York Times, in its wisdom (you have to cite it that way or things get nasty) has discovered that there are scientists willing to admit to belief in God! ("Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science", today.) Even more incredibly, there seem to be other scientists who don't believe in God and who can be induced to give fairly vitriolic statements to that effect to the Times. Nothing like covering a reality in all its baffling complexity. I bet the Wall Street Journal's just sick after that recent editorial, "Every Single Last Scientist is a Godless Heathen."
Some of the potential questions this article buries were addressed more compellingly in a series of interviews done by online publication The Edge and which appeared in the Times and several other media around the new year. The Edge, gracefully schooling print media as is the wont of those who publish online (cough, preen), asked more than 100 scientists and thinkers to answer the question "What do you believe, but cannot prove?" Though the question is open-ended--and some respondents did apply it to their own fields of inquiry--a surprising number took the opportunity to express views on some aspect of religious belief. In fact, the question was suggested by a psychologist whose answer described religious belief as a human deception fostered by natural selection. Robert Sapolsky, Scott Atran, Susan Blackmore, Sam Harris, and Clifford Pickover are among those who gave thoughtful, bite-size reflections having to do with concepts like God, belief, and free will.
What weirds me out is that Edge's slate of respondents includes nearly the entire faculty of my own college department. I guess my education was more complete than I knew. Without realizing it, I've already been exposed to a hefty fraction of those the Edge calls "the pre-eminent intellectuals of our time", of whom, I should note, a disproportionately small number are women, and a disproportionately large number of these women child psychologists. (One thing I believe and can't prove without tiresome and didactic investigation is that those who claim under-representation of perspectives or identities in panels, syllabi, etc. "reflects what's out there" are at best too lazy to correct their misperception.)
No, what really weirds me out is that, as I'm coming to finish the C.S. Lewis space trilogy, the news media exhibits signs of a serious Hideous Strength moment. Yesterday, disembodied heads. Today, scientists advocating religion's demise. Tomorrow, icky gender generalizations and a likeable protagonist's disintegration into an heroic cipher--whoops, tipped my hand, I finished the books. Anybody up for a more in-depth discussion? Perhaps, indeed, tomorrow . . .
posted by Theologienne @ 10:20 PM
Share
2 Comments:
The., dear, you really must recruit some more commenters. Rich, provocative posts like these demand discussion, and it is far beyond my mere mortal powers to keep up. (Nonetheless, keep up the good work!)
Science and religion, eh? I ought to be able to address all controversies there in the five minutes before I go cook dinner. Actually, I'm just going to throw up a quick gloss of some thoughts that have been bouncing around for a few days, and that will have to be that.
The religion, science, and belief questions are pretty messy, and I think that's because science and religion both occupy a lot of the same psychic space. Some apologists try to smooth over the rough spots by claiming that science and religion are complimentary and compatible views on the universe, just dealing with different domains. I think that's too simple. I'd say the two have at least three crucial things in common.
First, both science and religion make pretty strong claims to possessing unique truths, and they are quite hostile to critiques of those truths by observers outside their framework and to critiques of their truth-gathering methods themselves. In many cases, the truths asserted don't overlap, and there is no conflict. No major religious traditions make competing claims to science's answers to why water boils or the sky is blue. However, in those areas where science and religion make competing claims--i.e., evolution vs. literalist Genesis--sparks fly. There is no way to resolve these conflicts, either, because the premises of the two camps on the ultimate source of truth--observation vs. revelation--are quite simply incompatible.
A second similarity, noted mostly in passing, is that both science and religion in typical practice share a common weakness--a tendancy towards the anthropomorphic fallacy. Both the religious and the scientists tend to find themselves in the universe. We describe God as having human emotions because those are things we understand. In the Christian tradition, we say not only that God was like us, but that God was one of us! Similarly, the laws of science, while often unexpected or counterintuitive, ultimately rely on the models developed by very human scientists, and hence subject to all the limitations of any cultural product. (It's remarkable that science is as predictive as it is!)
Finally, and this is where the "Beliefs of Scientists" article gets its cachet, both science and religion ultimately require faith from their adherents. The role of faith in religion will be abundantly clear to readers of this weblog. However, I claim that a sort of faith is also required both of scientists and of those who aver the truth of scientific statements. The "scientific method" requires that hypotheses be tested by observations. But who among us can personally conduct all the experiments required to verify the scientific canon? Few of us will even confirm the parts of science we understand, let alone the esoteric conclusions that require multimillion dollar experiments. What I'm saying is I can understand how a nonscientist might weigh competing truth claims by scientists and religious people and find the science on the short end. Since this hypothetical person hasn't seen the science, and maybe only has a rough idea of its justification, the immediate evidence of the words in the Bible might seem more compelling. This layperson is applying something like the scientific method, albeit one encompassing a wider range of data than may be allowed in the lab. Even scientists can be assumed to be taking many things "on faith."
I think the real loser here is science. Kuhn reminded us of what a human endeavor science is, but the rhetoric of science is still predicated on Enlightment kinds of certainty--what Derrida called logocentricism, taking a swipe at St. John on the way. And scientists can get pretty hostile when it's suggested that their conclusions are something other than dispassionate certainties. Some of the vitriol from the scientific camp over intelligent design comes from this. While ID is not anything like real science, the scientific establishment seems keen on asserting that human descent from less complex forms is an airtight Law. Thus, those that poke holes and ask questions are greeted with vitriol unbecoming to such a "dispassionate" pursuit of truth: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/2005-07-27/news/feature.html
My, this commenting business takes awhile. I have thoughts on more recent posts, never fear; but they will have to wait for another day.
Recruit more commenters! Well, I never. And here I was assuming that all my loyal readers are talking Theologienne up to all their thinking friends. As a Catholic, I like to think that this blog's evangelism lies in its good works. Just kidding, but seriously, thank God you're here, O. I liked your point about science and religion occupying the same psychic space. Perhaps our cognitions really only have room for one major System of the World, as Newton called it--so either your science or your religion decks the other, or you must struggle to fit them together. It also seems to be the case that people can't believe in more than one faith without making them fit together. Pantheism and monotheism seem pretty conflicting, but there are people who are fine with the notion that the Holy Spirit inhabits the trees, and that's why they're God. I myself would give that conjecture more attention than the idea that light is a particle and also a wave. Please!
I don't think you're saying that we shouldn't conceive of God as having human emotions (though correct me at will), but I was surprised at how strongly discomforted the idea made me. Anything we know without emotion, whether computers or the sea, can be given a savage and destructive cast. I wonder if that's why the God of the Hebrew Bible is often seen as more forbidding than the God of the New Testament? I think it's fair to conjecture that the writers of the Hebrew Bible would have seen God as less human than the evangelists who believed God was a human and the father of a human.
Actually, on second thought, my idea of what it means to be human, or a fully rounded person, is coloring the evidence there. Qualities like jealousy and anger and retribution, which God displays to Moses and Noah, are emotions just like the love and pride God shows to Jesus. They're both human ways of acting; I was just valuing one image of God over another. Well, it was a cunning theory while it lasted!
Post a Comment
<< Home