Author: geoff

David Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, has just published a comprehensive survey of the debate between critics of religion and its apologists. On the one hand, we have “[t]he four horsemen of the current antireligious apocalypse… Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Carl Sagan”. On the other, Barash spotlights those who would seek to reconcile the irreconcilable. Francis Collins, the geneticist and head of the Human Genome Project, comes in for some probing questions:

What, then, is his basis for accepting some Bible stories and not others? If Collins is simply clinging to those tenets that cannot be disproved, while disavowing those that can, then isn’t he indulging in another incarnation of the “god of the gaps” that he very reasonably claims to oppose? What about, say, those loaves and fishes, or the Book of Revelation? And does the director of the Human Genome Project maintain that Jesus of Nazareth was literally born of a virgin and inseminated by the Holy Ghost? If so, then was he haploid or diploid? Is it necessarily churlish to ask what it is, precisely, that a believer (layperson or scientist) believes? In the devil, angels, eternal hellfire, damnation, archangels, incubi and succubi, walking on water, raising Lazarus?

Well worth reading in full.

PZ tears into Nisbet and Mooney for their op-ed in the Washington Post, in which they argue that scientists should shut up and make nice with those who prefer Biblical fairy-tales to evolution. I fully agree with PZ’s “uppity” stance.
Nisbet and Mooney ask:

Can’t science and religion just get along? A “science and religion coexistence” message — conveyed in Sunday sermons by church leaders — might better convince even many devout Christians that evolution is no real threat to their faith.

PZ’s response:

No, science and religion cannot get along. They offer mutually contradictory explanations for the world, and it is bizarrely naive to pretend that people who believe that the literal events of Genesis are an account of the original sin of which we must be redeemed by faith in Jesus can accept a scientific explanation of human origins. The ‘frame’ there is that one side has an account of chance and complexity and an oh-so-awkward affiliation with ancient apes that is based on evidence, and the other side has threats of hellfire if you don’t believe in an Eden, a Fall, and a dead god reborn. Evolution is a strong and explicit threat to that faith.
If Nisbet and Mooney think a non-literal religious faith that allows that humans evolved from apes and are apes is going to be acceptable to every church-going Christian in America, they aren’t very familiar with what we are combating. Proposing that we can sneak support for science into the public’s mind by advocating a lesser heresy than atheism is ludicrously absurd.

Yes, of course there is a minority of religious believers who have found a way to reconcile their faith with science, usually by adopting a symbolic or metaphorical interpretation of their holy texts. If they were in the majority, it might make sense for Dawkins et al to moderate their language, to avoid asking questions about the limits of this symbolism. But according to all recent surveys, they are not in the majority, at least in the USA. And for these people, there is no science – not evolution, not geology, not astrophysics, not biochemistry, not even physics – that is not a threat to their faith.
Evolution is a fact: it is observed every day. The earth is not 6,000 years old. There was no global flood, and no ark: one is incompatible with (literally) mountains of evidence, and the other is logically incoherent. There was a place called Jericho, but in the unlikely event that a person called Joshua actually stood outside it, shouting, the earth did not stop rotating. That’s just for fundamentalist Christians and Jews. For Moslems: every ear of corn does not have 100 grains. Ants do not talk. Semen does not come from between a man’s backbone and ribs. The earth is not flat, and the sun does not set in a small pool of water near the edge. Like the Bible, the Koran contains many statements which are incompatible with science. That’s just a fact.
Politicians in this era are fond of asking what kind of message an action sends. So to Nisbet and Mooney and their pandering ilk, I would ask this: what kind of message does it send to a bright young student in his or her early teens, who is trying to decide whether to embark on a career in science or medicine, if we urge scientists to suppress the facts in deference to mythology? Do those esteemed op-ed writers want more or fewer children to grow up to be physicists, cancer researchers, and geneticists? They talk about the importance of global warming, and presumably they know that renewable power sources such as solar, geothermal, tidal, and wind are going to be critical to addressing our energy problems. Do they want potential geologists to be frightened off, because scientists are discouraged from challenging the biblical accounts of the flood and the age of the earth?
They want to have it both ways, of course. But how do they propose to achieve this? They write:

Simply put, the media, policymakers and members of the public consume scientific information in a vastly different way than the scientists who generate it. If scientists don’t learn how to cope in this often bewildering environment, they will be ceding their ability to contribute to the future of our nation.

But why on earth is this the sole responsibility of science? Do not the media and policymakers and and priests and teachers – yes, and even a professor in the school of communication – all have a moral obligation to educate themselves, to become less scientifically illiterate? Expecting science to do all the work needed to bridge the gulf seems like an abdication of civic responsibility.