08.28.08

Care and feeding of the science idiot

Posted in Science & Religion at 4:24 pm by nemo

Atheism could be science’s contribution to religion
by Matthew Cobb, Jerry Conye
Reposted from: Dawkins site

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7208/full/4541049d.html

A letter to Nature.

Nature 454, 1049. 28 Aug 2008

SIR — We were perplexed by your Editorial on the work of the Templeton Foundation (‘Templeton’s legacy’ Nature 454, 253–254; 2008). Surely science is about finding material explanations of the world — explanations that can inspire those spooky feelings of awe, wonder and reverence in the hyper-evolved human brain. Religion, on the other hand, is about humans thinking that awe, wonder and reverence are the clue to understanding a God-built Universe. (The same is true of religion’s poor cousin, ‘spirituality’, which you slip into your Editorial rather as a creationist uses ‘intelligent design’.) There is a fundamental conflict here, one that can never be reconciled until all religions cease making claims about the nature of reality. The scientific study of religion is indeed full of big questions that need to be addressed, such as why belief in religion is negatively correlated with an acceptance of evolution. One could consider psychological studies of why humans are superstitious and believe impossible things, and comparative sociological studies of religion using materialist explanations of the rise and fall of the world’s belief systems. Perhaps the Templeton Foundation is thinking of funding such research. The outcome of such work, we predict, will not bring science and religion (or ‘spirituality’) any closer to one another. You suggest that science may bring about “advances in theological thinking”. In reality, the only contribution that science can make to the ideas of religion is atheism.

Matthew Cobb Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK e-mail: cobb@manchester.ac.uk

Jerry Coyne Department of Ecology and Evolution, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA

A kind of wilful stupidity has overtaken scientists on the subject of religion. I won’t blame it on Dawkins by any means, but the New Atheist movement seems to have cast still another spell on the science groupies. The question begins with the onset of secularization. But it seems that in a kind degeneration of the original idea that Darwinism, reductionist scientism, and atheism are to coopt that great historical phase.

These discussions tend to confuse the question of religion with the metaphysics of Christianity, or monotheism. But the two are not the same, and the general attack against all religion by those who really are festering over Christian fundamentalism isn’t helping the discussion
And the confusion of scientists over Darwinism is derailing all efforts to come to an understanding of religious issues.

The problem in essence, and I have said this dozens of times, to no avail, is reflected in the history of science and culture in the Enlightenment when the onset of scientism was foreseen and challenged, witness a figure such as Kant.
Understood rightly the thinking of Kant shows us that the question of metaphysics impinges on issues far more fundamental than religion, e.g. the question of freedom. We can’t escape from the realm of religion into scientism, because the result will not even be able to handle the idea of freedom.

The passage beyond religious traditionalism is not the same as passing beyond religion, and scientists could be more helpful if they actually applied some intelligent study to the history of religion, and with something more than the assumptions of Darwinists.

But the cadre of scientists is almost lobotomized at this point and end up in futile slugmatches with the likes of the Templetons.

I should point out in passing the impetus for secularization begins not only with the scientific revolution but with the Protestant Reformation. That is not a partisan statement for protestantism, merely a reminder that the evolution of modernity compromises also the evolution of religion. To what? That is actually a tremendously difficult question, because everyone is in the dark, it seems, on the subject.
Here scientists betray something pedestrian: technical educations that have put them on a diet of scientific wonderbread, with a woeful lack of any knowledge of the greater culture of modernity, what to say of antiquity.
And the result is this kind of superman comic view of science conquering all, when in fact the reality would seem that the great achievements of physics are being used as a philosophic template to produce xerox copy answers to all the questions of the universe, and it won’t work.

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