Re: Faith, Reason, God and Other Imponderables
- From: Rumpelstiltskin <PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2006 01:49:35 GMT
On 25 Jul 2006 14:03:33 -0700, "Florida" <demeter547opine@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Rita wrote:
The New York Times
July 25, 2006
Books on Science
Faith, Reason, God and Other Imponderables
By CORNELIA DEAN
Nowadays, when legislation supporting promising scientific research
falls to religious opposition, the forces of creationism press school
districts to teach doctrine on a par with evolution and even the Big
Bang is denounced as out-of-compliance with Bible-based calculations
for the age of the earth, scientists have to be brave to talk about religion.
Not to denounce it, but to embrace it.
That is what Francis S. Collins, Owen Gingerich and Joan Roughgarden
have done in new books, taking up one side of the stormy argument over
whether faith in God can coexist with faith in the scientific method.
Interesting article, and the conclusion is perfect: "Their work
will speak for itself."
I still agree with those in our merry band who think that the
imponderables take up a sadly disproportionate share of mankind's
sharply limited time, attention span, wealth, and resources.
imho the most credible description of religion and religious
beliefs is the recent research that appears to show that the most
striking experiences of religion take place within individual brains.
That is, people may actually experience certain mystic states or
contact with god, etc., but those experiences cannot be verified and
demonstrated.
How nice that this hypothesis means that - for a change - everyone
is telling the truth, the religionist when he says "Honestly, I truly
touched the ineffable!", and the non-religious who replies "But nobody
else hears your voices."
Tom Paine disposes of this quickly, early in "The Age of
Reason", in the section "concerning missions and revelations"
The whole of the Age of Reason seems to be available
on the web at:
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/
Excerpt: "It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call
anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand,
either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited
to the first communication -- after this it is only an account of
something which that person says was a revelation made to
him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it
cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner;
for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his
word for it that it was made to him."
Excerpt, with ellipses inserted by me: "The Jews say ... The
Christians say ... The Turks say ... Each of those churches
accuses the other of unbelief; and I for my own part, I
disbelieve them all."
I'm on dial-up right now, my DSL modem apparently having
failed. I was thinking before I set up the dial-up that maybe
I didn't really need DSL, but the dial-up is already pretty
intolerable. Otherwise I might redial and pick cut and paste,
but the whole book seems to be there.
For a little comedy, you might check out in Chapter 2 of
part 2 (Paine had been released from the Bastille when he
wrote Part 2, so he had a bible available for reference). He
notes the descent of Joseph from King David as presented
in Matthew versus in Luke. One has 28 ancestors, the other
has 43, for the same time period, of course! Aside from
David and Joseph, there is not a single name in common in
the two lists. And why would Matthew and Luke be
concerned anyway, if Joseph was not really Jesus' father???
I saw on Charlie Rose lately the end of an interview with
Francis S. Collins, who's the head (or something) of the US
human genome project, and is also an evangelical Christian.
He spoke well on the show, but he was only defending
the notion of God as an answer to the fine-tuning-problem
and such things. I personally find many-worlds a simpler
and more persuasive answer to fine-tuning and such problems,
but God is an OK conjecture if the idea of an intellect
arising out of nothing yet capable of planning and creating
the universe seems to someone more reasonable than a
"multiverse" of an infinite or semi-infinite number of universes
in which all things possible will occur somewhere. I personally
find the idea of multiverse arising out of nothing, vast as the
concept is, less incredible than the idea of a guiding
intellect arising out of nothing, but the God conjecture, to the
extent Collins discussed it with Rose, is not completely off the
wall. It's a very long way from God to Evangelical Christianity,
though. I don't see how Collins would be able to argue
Evangelical Christianity on similar grounds without bouncing off
the walls, if he does attempt to argue that at all. He has a book
out entitled "The Language of God" which I'm tempted to look
at. I expect the title is related to his work with the four protein
building blocks, or "letters" of DNA.
My apologies to Rita and her quotations of Cornelia Dean.
I typed the above before I saw that Dean also mentions Collins
below.
With no apology and hardly any arm-waving, they describe their
beliefs, how they came to them and how they reconcile them with their
work in science.
In "The Language of God," Dr. Collins, the geneticist who led the
American government's effort to decipher the human genome, describes
his own journey from atheism to committed Christianity, a faith he
embraced as a young physician.
In "God's Universe," Dr. Gingerich, an emeritus professor of astronomy
at Harvard, tells how he is "personally persuaded that a
superintelligent Creator exists beyond and within the cosmos."
And in "Evolution and Christian Faith," Dr. Roughgarden, the child of
Episcopal missionaries and now an evolutionary biologist at Stanford,
tells of her struggles to fit the individual into the evolutionary
picture - an effort complicated in her case by the fact that she is
transgender, and therefore has views at odds with some conventional
Darwinian thinking about sexual identity.
If his eminence in science were not so unassailable, a fourth author,
the biologist E. O. Wilson of Harvard, might also be taking a chance
by arguing that religion and science ought to take up arms together to
encourage respect for and protection of nature or, as he calls it in
his new book, "The Creation."
Although he writes that he no longer embraces the faith of his
childhood - he describes himself as "a secular humanist" - Dr. Wilson
shapes his book as a "Letter to a Southern Baptist Pastor," in hopes
that if "religion and science could be united on the common ground of
biological conservation, the problem would soon be solved."
Coming as they do from a milieu in which religious belief of any kind
is often dismissed as little more than magical thinking, this is
bravery indeed.
But other new books, taking a different approach, also claim the
mantle of bravery.
In "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon," Daniel C.
Dennett, a philosopher and theorist of cognition at Tufts, refers
again and again to the "brave" researchers (including himself) who
challenge religion. In "The God Delusion," Richard Dawkins, a
professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford, once again
likens religious faith to a disease and sets as his goal convincing
his readers that atheism is "a brave" aspiration.
Of course, just as the professors of faith cannot prove (except to
themselves) that God exists, the advocates for atheism acknowledge
that they cannot prove (not yet, anyway ) that God does not exist.
Instead, Drs. Dawkins and Dennett sound two major themes: a) the
theory of evolution is correct, and creationism and its cousin,
intelligent design, are wrong; and b) a field of research called
evolutionary psychology can explain why religious belief seems to be
universal among Homo sapiens.
But these sermons, which the authors preach with what can fairly be
described as religious fervor, are unsatisfying.
Of course there is no credible scientific challenge to Darwinian
evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life
on earth. So what? The theory of evolution says nothing about the
existence or nonexistence of God. People might argue about what sort
of supreme being would work her will through such a seemingly
haphazard arrangement, but that is not the same as denying that she
exists in the first place.
In any event, as Dr. Gingerich argues, in simultaneously defending
evolution and insisting upon atheism, Dr. Dawkins probably
"single-handedly makes more converts to intelligent design than any of
the leading intelligent design theorists."
And evolutionary psychology as a prism through which to view
contemporary human behavior is open to many challenges. Some have come
from critics who dismiss much of it as little more than "Just-So
Stories" designed to explain or justify the status quo. So it seems
strange to see its logic cited as a weapon against the story-telling
aspects of religion.
All of which leads one to ask, who are these books for? The question
is easy to answer when it comes to Drs. Collins, Roughgarden or
Gingerich. First would be young people raised in religious families,
who as they progress through school suddenly confront scientific
reality that challenges Sunday morning dogma.
"I have been struck," Dr. Roughgarden writes, "by how the 'debate'
over teaching evolution is not about plants and animals but about God
and whether science somehow threatens one's belief in God."
Or as Dr. Collins put it, when religions require belief in
"fundamentally flawed claims" about the world, they force curious and
intelligent congregants to reject science, "effectively committing
intellectual suicide," a choice he calls "terrible and unnecessary."
But does science require the abandonment of faith? Not necessarily,
and certainly not entirely, these authors argue.
Also, people who read these books will realize that it is impossible
to tar all scientists with the brush of amorality. The books challenge
those who fear that science and ethics may end up at war, a
possibility raised by President Bush last week, when he vetoed
legislation supporting stem cell research.
On the other hand, as the (atheist) physicist Steven Weinberg has
famously put it, and as Drs. Dawkins and Dennett remind their readers,
good people tend to do good, evil people tend to do evil, but for a
good person to do evil - "that takes religion."
But it is hard to believe that people who reject science on religious
grounds will stick with the Dennett and Dawkins books, filled as they
are with denunciation not just of their ideas but of themselves.
This is unfortunate because, as Dr. Roughgarden points out, it is
crucial in our society for people of faith, the vast majority of our
population, to understand the issues of contemporary science. "I'd
love to discuss the moral issues of biotechnology within a community
of faith," she writes. "But most church congregations and their
leaders are not prepared for those discussions."
Perhaps another book, "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast," can
help bridge that gap. It is by Lewis Wolpert, a biologist at
University College London. It has been published in England, and it is
to appear in the United States in January.
Dr. Wolpert writes about the way people think about cause and effect,
citing among other work experiments on how we reason, how we assess
risk, and the rules of thumb and biases that guide us when we make
decisions. He is looking into what he calls "causal belief" - the idea
that events or conditions we experience have a cause, possibly a
supernatural cause.
Human reasoning is "beset with logical problems that include
overdependence on authority, overemphasis on coincidence, distortion
of the evidence, circular reasoning, use of anecdotes, ignorance of
science and failures of logic," he writes. And whatever these traits
may say about acceptance of religion, they have a lot to do with
public misunderstanding of science.
So, he concludes, "We have to both respect, if we can, the beliefs of
others, and accept the responsibility to try and change them if the
evidence for them is weak or scientifically improbable."
This is where the scientific method comes in. If scientists are
prepared to state their hypotheses, describe how they tested them, lay
out their data, explain how they analyze their data and the
conclusions they draw from their analyses - then it should not matter
if they pray to Zeus, Jehovah, the Tooth Fairy, or nobody.
Their work will speak for itself.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom: it is the
argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves" -- Wm. Pitt the Younger
.
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