You claim incompatibility, and allude to a more general referent for that incompatibility, but rely only on personal almost aesthetic reasons to support your claim. So they seem incompatible to you. And you admit that at a rigorous level scientiic knowledge is different to pin down. Then why should you deny incompatibility to others more skeptical than you of how knowledge might evolve?
Science as operationalized through Popper simply cannot refute a one-off historical, personal experience that would otherwise defy known laws of physics. You should be more forthright in acknowledging that your claim about the incompatibility of science and religion is not itself scientific except in the sense that you are a scientist not a trivial sense, but not definitive!
It seems in your conception the supernatural must exist within the confines of nature, rather than outside of nature, and even deny anything outside of nature. It seems to you nature is a monism so all is amenable to science, whereas religion is a dualism where all may or may not be, and not just concern the unknown, but possibly the unknowable. Is there anything more? Religion is about the more.
That is something religion and science share. It came from an interview he had with someone who brought up the science vs. I believe in God and I consider myself religious. The purpose of Science is to prove that nothing runs on magic. The purpose of Religion is to prove that everything runs on magic. My Bible would contain some facts about mathematics, physics, astronomy that are easy to verify. I could tell about the solar system, the planets, the masses of the planets, about nearby solar systems, about particles, the masses of particles, incuding the mass of the Higgs boson, etc.
Then every new scientific result would confirm the truth of the Bible. Sean, your blog page is showing adverts for two brands: What is brand Templeton? I suggest that it is selling the same commodity that the Discovery Institute is selling: They are selling two brands of religious ideology. One claims to be science; the other claims that religion and science fit together like hand in glove.
Both ideologies believe that science should be used to serve the purpose of religion. The comments here show that there are many possible philosophical views on the compatibility of science and religion. I believe that the interest of science would be better served if scientific organisations did not take sides on controversial religio-philosophical questions. It is immaterial to the practice and teaching of good science whether it is compatible with any religion. I know people who think that we are probably living in a simulation call this the Matrix religion.
The theory is that, as computer power increases, the ability to simulate the world planet, solar system, whatever to any desired degree with grow, and at some point the of number people in simulations will dominate the number people out of simulations will dominate the number of people out of them. The conclusion is that we are highly likely to be in a simulation. Is this consistent with science?
There is no evidence for it, but there is not exactly evidence against it either. In the matrix religion the entity controlling the simulation has many of the attributes of a deity. Like pronouncing the R in idea. Physics describes the reality we live in. I think that scientism is a really weird word to pronounce it just feels funny on my tongue for some reason , and an unnecessary one at that, since Metaphysical Naturalism already covers scientism.
I see that scientism has a great many potential different meanings. In fact, the word is so broad, that it can mean practically anything. If you consider the history of religion and not a particular static subset of it, then religion is a logical institutional evolutionary adaptation. Are there any social groups you are a member of that have no idiosyncrasies? Now think; What is the purpose of these particular habits, other than to define ones group as distinct.
In fact, the more illogical the belief systems, the more effective they are at distinguishing those most defined by their faith and those just wanting to be part of the group. Then there is the evolutionary process by which this entity further distills its core message, while still maintaining some necessary contact with the outside, thus legitimizing the existence of the institution with its long history and giving its adherents what they prize most, a sense of immortality, or association with it.
Science and religion may not be compatible, but they are complementary, in the way that Democrats and Republicans are not compatible, but they are complimentary. One is inherently about bottom up process and the other is about top down order. Contradictions are what give reality its multidimensionality. As for God, the logical flaw in monotheism is that the universal state of the absolute would be the elemental, not the ideal, so a spiritual absolute would be the raw essence of awareness from which life rises, not an ideal form of it from which humans fell.
It just happens to be politically convenient to assert the ideal is also the source, thus giving all legitimacy to top down order and none to that messy bottom up process. Science today is thoroughly naturalistic. Any movements to the contrary are fervently and noisily resisted. The supernatural, we are told most firmly, has no place in science. For practical reasons, it may make sense for scientists to talk about natural causes only, for natural causes are what they are interested in.
What does NOT make sense is to turn this into an argument that claims that science therefore proves that natural causes are the ONLY causes. In fact it is almost tautological to say this. Current scientific dogma cannot incoporate supernatural phenomena for whatever science can study and analyze is defined as natural. For instance, magnetism was once thought of as an occult force, but in becoming analyzable and quantifiable, in coming under the aegis of science, it came to be thought of as natural. In the nineteenth century, it became very popular to try to verify the existence of spirits scientifically.
People would set up scientific apparatus to try to detect changes in electrical charges or currents or other physical phenomena in an effort to find scientific evidence for the existence of spirits. If they had found such evidence, however, the spirit would now be an object of scientific study. It would then no longer be supernatural. From the perspective of a naturalist, it would be just another, albeit bizarre, phenomenon of the world. When there is scientific evidence for any thing, then that thing is considered to be something in this world, and it is studied as if it were natural.
Whatever might be supernatural, if it is genuinely supernatural i. Consequently, science is unalble to disprove the spritual, for if the spiritual agency does something in this world, then the evidence for the spiritual agency is precisely the evidence for what is defined as a natural activity. The current dogma is that whatever science discovers is natural.
Of poetics and possibility: Richard Kearney's post-metaphysical God
Folks, this way of looking at the world is NOT based on an an argument: In short, Sean et. They have just defined their world in such a way that they close themselves to the possiblity that God exists. In many ways, religion is armchair theorizing about the unknown and possibly unknowable, speculation in other words. Even natural theories are often initially speculative and untestable and must be explored and investigated before drawing any conclusions. All are considerations of more. More is always a possibility and one we should always be open for.
Speculation can be interesting and useful to our way of thinking even if not knowable or provable. Those of us who are teachers have an opportunity and indeed a responsibility to educate students. I suspect that my responses often disappoint students. Some maybe be trying to provoke an argument. But I believe that many of them are genuinely curious because they are struggling with this issue themselves.
How I reply has the potential to change not only their own religious beliefs, but also the scope of religion in their world view, i. I do give examples of questions that I believe are best addressed by scientific, experiments, observations, and models along with examples of questions that I can not see how one could answer scientifically. If students leave a class better appreciating the power of the scientific process and what sorts of questions science is well-suited to address, so that they revise their views on the appropriate scope of religion, then I would consider that a remarkably educational experience.
That reason is simply because atheist scientists like yourself do not understand what God is. Did it happen once or twice, as a miracle? However, to reduce God to a hypothesis that can be tested empirically makes no more sense than to reduce a symphony, or a work of art, to a hypothesis that can be tested empirically. There are more ways of knowing than science. There are more fields of human intellectual endeavor than science.
Scientists would do well to remember this— those who recognize it in the first place, anyway. You would agree that there are things in science which were accepted by all scientists which have since been shown to be wrong. Consider the Steady-State Universe which was a dominant view , or the geocentric Universe.
Given that the broadly accepted tenets of science can be seen to be wrong without having to undermine all of science, why not the same with religion? Our understanding of religion, just like our understanding of science, evolves. Some of the evolution of religion has been informed by science, but not all of it. Meredith 35 excellent comment, by the way! Was he insisting that each parable he told was the literal recounting of something that really happened? Yet, he thought that some might take some meaning out of the stories he told. We always add meaning and understanding to something as we read it in different contexts after the fact.
Rob, thinking that resurrections or other miracles might occasionally happen, even non-systematically, is in my view not good science. I disagree heartily with those who would argue that science, or only approaching life from a scientific perspective is devoid of passion and emotion.
Science is a method of understanding the world around us, but tells us nothing a priori about the way we experience the world i. On the contrary to what you say, I find that an accurate understanding of the world only adds to my pleasure. As the neuroscientist who studies the brains of people in love says, there is nothing in the reductionist viewpoint that subtracts from her own feelings of love — in fact to know that the brain patterns of people still in love after 60 years are the same as those who are just married makes it all the more beautiful.
Sean, I almost always love your posts, but every time you post about religion it drives me maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad. The most science — or rational thought in general — can do in the face of a nondisprovable is say: But it sure looks like it. What am I missing? Have I been smoking too much Karl Popper?
1. What are science and religion, and how do they interrelate?
Religions are not even compatible with each other so how can they be compatible with science? All religions contain a supernatural component. A scientist will be inconsistent if they are also religious as how do they know what hat they are wearing when they are doing science? Does a religious scientist put one hat on when in the lab and another hat on when in a church? How does a religious scientist know to change hats at the correct time? I have to disagree. I think religion and science are incompatible simply because one relies on faith, the ability to accept an idea base on little or no evidence, and one relies on evidence, and carefully structured logic using that evidence, to justify the acceptance of an idea.
They are fundamentally incompatible in the way the practitioners view the world. Religious people can, and most certainly do, use logic and evidence in their everyday lives; however, to me most of them have accepted a incorrect assumption from the start. The historical fact is that no-one considered these to be allegorical until science started making them look very unlikely.
YOU say they are allegorical. The Big Accommodationism Debate: The idea that religion is, at its core, a category of explanation, including explaining the physical world needs to be examined deep and hard. If I want to know something about science, I go to the experts — the scientists. If I want to know something about religion, I go, of course, to the masses of lay believers.
It makes a lot of sense. However, the difficulty lay in conceptualising such a society: Why would people keep the promises they make, if they did not fear punishment in the hereafter? Neither commerce nor industry would be possible; ruin and desolation would be the fate of such a nation of atheists. Even here, the ground was prepared by the Christian missionaries.
Almost a century before the famous debate between Bayle and Voltaire, the Jesuits were embroiled in a controversy with the Franciscan and Dominican orders about this issue. To these Christians, as well as the massive reading public that followed these disputes avidly for nearly a century, it was not a debate about a hypothetical society. Instead, it was about an old and civilized culture: The accumulating travel reports about the Africas and the Americas were suggesting that most of the native peoples there knew neither of God nor of the Devil.
When the Christian missionaries met the Chinese culture, however, the issue took on an explosive form. The Confucian thought did not appear to countenance either God or the Devil. The latter, a religion of the illiterate masses, was mostly written off as gross idolatry. What about the Confucian doctrine? Fuelled partially by the rivalry between different orders within the Catholic Church the Jesuits on the one side and the Franciscans and the Dominicans ranged on the other , and partially by the genuine need to understand an alien culture, the conflict and the dispute required the intervention not merely of Sorbonne but of the Holy See itself.
See the brilliant work of Kors , which should be read as a correction to Manuel , What was at stake in this discussion, which lasted a century, conducted both in the pages of the popular press and through scholarly tracts? Let me allow two Jesuit fathers from the eighteenth century to come forward and testify. The first is Louis Le Comte:. Would it not be…dangerous [for religion] to [say] that the ancient Chinese, like those of the present, were atheists? For would not the Libertines draw great advantage from the confession that would be made to them, that in so vast, so ancient, so enlightened, so solidly established, and so flourishing an Empire, [measured] either by the multitude of its inhabitants or by the invention of almost all the arts, the Divinity never had been acknowledged?
What would become thus of the arguments that the holy fathers, in proving the existence of God, drew from the consent of all peoples, in whom they claimed that nature had so deeply imprinted the idea of Him, that nothing could erase it. And, above all, why would they have gone to all the trouble of assembling with so much care all the testimonies that they could find in the books of the gentile philosophers to establish this truth, if they had not believed that it was extremely important to use it in that way…?
Cited in Kors Almost a hundred years into this furious debate, Joseph Lafite wrote a tract summarising the discussion. Pleading the cause of the Jesuits, he warns his fellow-brethren to take heed:. One of the strongest proofs against [the atheists]…is the unanimous consent of all peoples in acknowledging a Supreme being…This argument would give way, however, if it were true that there is a multitude of nations… that have no idea of any God…From that, the atheist would seem to reason correctly by concluding that if there is almost an entire world of people that have no religion, that found among other peoples is the work of human discretion and is a contrivance of legislators who created it to control people by fear, the mother of superstition ibid: The blindness here is that Sean Carroll is accepting the Christian narrative of the world as a universal and correct description of human culture.
The Heathen pretty much did the same. Furthermore, I have yet to find a religion taken as a personal thing, anyway that does not have at least one incompatible-with-science-view. Holding some sort of vague mind-body dualism is not as wrong as the stuff with the year old universe creationists. Religion is more than what the wacky right wingers in America or the bearded priests in Iran make it out to be. You should open your eyes to its inner meaning, that is, a psychological map to higher state of consciousness, instead of ranting about obvious things such as the incompatibility of fundamentalism with science.
What you call religion has nothing to do with religion. It seems to me that it is possible to have a religion with no claims of miracles, even if in practice this is usually not the case. Plus someone could perhaps conceive of a God who created all moments of time at once, but in just such a way that one moment is related to the next according to physical laws of how the world should evolve. The issue is the role of traditions rather than logic. What would Isaac Newton think of this blog? It is interesting to consider the influence puritans had on science, as well as the other way around.
There are only so many hours in a day to reconcile ideas, if they can be reconciled — since when is that any different than classical physicists not wanting to wrestle with Einstein and Bohr? It is a messy and multi-generational process. It is also unavoidably political.
Oh gee, that is not politically correct. Does anyone think that a nation of tenant farmers would build Fermilab? Some thought that illiteracy was a good thing, and sought to preserve it. I wonder how far Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens would get if people were illiterate. My athiestical credentials are having been sent home from sunday school on the first day with a note to my mother — I had asked why we have to cover our eyes while Sister Mary drew a circle to represent the perfection of God. But credit where credit is due. In the big picture my complaints were small potatos.
Of course it has. However, there is no guarantee that the simulation would be neutral, in other words, that the entity or entities doing the simulation might not intervene in various ways. You could even make arguments to say that intervention is likely and so that the interventionist simulations would dominate the neutral ones, implying that we are highly likely to be living in an interventionist matrix universe.
I am not saying that I believe in any of this, but these arguments can be made. You will, no doubt, note the similarity between living in a nterventionist matrix universe and the world-view of many religions. I am going to go out on a limb here and predict that, as science continues to advance, there will be matrix universe religions, or existing religions will evolve in that direction. Why would God create the universe with dinosaur bones in the rocks? That sounds highly arbitrary and unlikely, but saying that the simulation had to begin with a consistent set of initial conditions sounds much more scientific and reasonable.
I would not count on the inability of religion, and the religious impulse, to accommodate itself to the advance of science and technology, and this is just one of the ways that I could see that happening. Since there is NO empirical science supporting evolution, evolution needs to be referred to the religion of Humanism http: After all, what would be the difference between a Matrix manipulation and a miraculous intervention from God?
None that I can see — we would still have no way to distinguish between reality and simulation. Do all forms of religion make objective claims about the world? I know people who take religion as a kind of poetry—an aesthetic experience where content is subordinate to form.
But this raises the question of whether poetry is compatable with science? As a writer of fiction and poetry, this is a serious question, and one not altogether unrelated to science and religion. If not, why not? Walter Pater believed that all art should aspire to the condition of music: Is a deliberate misrepresentation of a scientific priciple an aesthetic flaw as well? That is an interesting historical insight. It goes further in examining how science and religion do co-exist and conflict in the same society, than facile denunciations of miracle claims.
Those claims do serve an obvious social function, as a form of mental indoctrination, or rite of initiation into the group. Sean is a very focused and mentally disciplined individual, so maybe there is a personal quandary being played out, possibly trying to reconcile the rigor of his Catholic upbringing, with the rational worldview it has lead him to. He might consider advancing a more nuanced inquiry, given the depth of his knowledge of both.
The dictum of doing unto others, as you would have them do unto you, is moral relativism at its most basic. If I weigh my actions against God, it is a matter of how I and my particular sect defines God, but if I weigh my actions against the rest of reality, then it pushes back in a very fundamental fashion. Karma is that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Good and bad are the elemental binary code of biology, the attraction of the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental, not just some conflict between the forces of light and dark.
If science really wants to replace religion, it has to do more than just serve as a foil for reactionaries. As SA states in 14 the particular events with Jesus and Moses science has very little to say. I wanted to add a little more to that. Instead you want to reserve the term for supernatural occurrences. The reason that Jesus being resurrected is a religious claim of the supernatural is that the laws of the natural world presumably say such an event is impossible. It can reasonably be asked if we could ever find a supernatural event, as we find events that violate the laws of science all the time which we then use to make better laws of science.
The best description I could have for a supernatural event is one in which repeatable experiments give a consistent outcomes except in very rare and isolated cases. But I feel that the idea of miracles as being an exception to natural law does undermine the idea that science says particular miracles did not happen.
So I think that the accommodation argument is slightly better than you have presented them here. Wrong, it is simply not science at all. Science requires reproducibility, which is not the case with one-off things like miracles. Science cannot say anything about miracles if the results are not traceable by evidence that can be investigated in the here and now. To say that thinking that miracles might occcasionally happen is not good science confuses science with philosophy i.
And if you say that science encompasses all reality, then this is not a scientific statement either, but a philosophical one as well. To believe that a good scientist must assume philosophical naturalism the natural world is all there is , instead of just following methodological naturalism always search for natural causes in your work is wrong.
Certainly, all religious scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, would disagree with such a belief. I believe God should be defined through science and math. That being said when you lump all religious people into a stereotype how is it any different than sexism, racism etc? Science is a fabulous methodology for exploring all the stuff in creation i. And in that astounding silence is the fundament of all being, the mystery which some people call God, the Creator, etc. The remainder do not. Although the subject has been very poorly studied to date, there are indications this perception has a genetic basis.
In case you are interested, the United Church of Christ published a letter last year on the importance of religion and science engaging each other more intelligently. You can find it here. Link to the letter on the left at the Pastoral Letter tab. Link to a sermon I wrote in response is in the main body of the text. Responding to Sean Carroll: The Intersection Discover Magazine. As usual, a fairly ridiculous and uninformed conversation about science and religion by someone based in Western religion and philosophy. Hence the need to defend the notion of faith and whether there is a God or not against science.
Please read anything by Ken Wilber or even the Dalai Lama for that matter. American Buddhism in particular moved on from this conversation years ago. However, it requires a much more sophisticated understanding of what is the domain and truth claims of religious experience and what is the domain and truth claims of science. These two are not incompatible, just different. Organized religion, on the other hand, especially Western religion, which uses symbols of consciousness in a mostly unconscious way, is almost always a crock and highly dangerous to boot. It also stops a more profound spiritual evolution based on doubt, curiosity, and the need to personally verify received wisdom.
Eastern religion has as much basis for its existence as western religion — i. After all, what was it that got Adam kicked out of paradise? Actually, it was nothing more than pure unadulterated curiosity, and the innate desire to know. Apparently, Adam very quickly understood the importance of an informed, inquiring, mind and Eve as well, especially in how she would share the forbidden fruit of knowledge with him; first people? Science IS a religion but, religion IS NOT a science… Seriously though, you will find that the two subjects of science and religion mesh quite well as soon as you take the BS out of religion and science finally comes to grips with the quantum relm, one day when my time comes I can ask GOD how he invented the torsion field….
Science and Religion are Not Compatible. This argument is a pointless pursuit, unless the goal is to provide yet another avenue for people to eventually scream in all caps at each other. The foundation science rests on is arguably made of facts, the purpose is to bolster the foundation. If by incompatible you also mean that the combining of the two shows the worst of both, I agree. All my close relatives are religious, tending towards the fundamentalist side of the spectrum.
I was brought up hearing the same sermons and reading the same bible. B I understand calculus better than most of them — why am I necessarily the one whose understanding is limited? If religion claims special revelations unachievable to atheist thinkers, or miracles attributable to the requested intercession of supernatural agents, then it is unscientific in this universe. If it is just allegory, then it is unnecessary.
I can read Mencken or Mark Twain instead. While visiting relatives a few years ago, I went to Sunday church with them. I have three cable channels which are all that sort of religion, all the time and more on Sunday. The deists so far have zero full-time channels, as do the atheists. When the deists and atheists have equal time, or the theists have better evidence, I will reassess my non-accommodationist view.
In the meantime, being told that I am a hater who has dim understanding reinforces my view. I still am confused about one thing, Sean. The scientific process is the gold standard for the determination of truth in our day and age. And it would be an important and highly cited result if it could be convincingly made.
However, whatever the issue, why should I take seriously what a few armchair philosophers who happen to be scientists think on this issue? As a recent example, I can argue to my friends and family, that yes, you should really believe that the land around Juneau is rising — I can read a number of peer-reviewed articles about it in JGR by otherwise well-cited researchers, and I can read those articles and make [some] sense of their hypotheses and the tests of those hypotheses. I simply cannot use the same tools even JGR, which seems like a relevant place to start!
We should concentrate on public education about the scientific process, and about things that we actually CAN state with scientific certainty. Some of those things will conflict with what some religions say. People can evaluate for themselves how it affects their faith. There are many religions and many views of science. So, is the correct statement: I prefer to look at it this way: A religionist believes in their own personal religion. That is, they believe their religion is TRUE. Well, equivalent religions that believe the same truths are really the same religion.
But I believe that anyone who says they do know is lying. Awareness based on the specifity of a species limits the individual but allows collectives to be aware of phenomenon that are not readily apparent. Science and even religion are dynamic and constantly changing with respect to time. To say that religion and science can never be reconciled is arrogant, shortsighted, and foolish. The initial reference frame we share knock on wood is what validates a theory or claim as truth or natural law. Most theologians already make accomodations for extraterrestrial life including the Vatican, Jews, and Muslims.
Religion is based on theory just a much as science is even if the faithful are unwilling to admit it. Observe the religious person long enough and inevitably they change. I beleive that as our understanding of the human nervous system grows, our understanding of religion will be justified by science and that the discoveries along the way about the rest of the physical universe will help unify the two.
Are you saying that Southern Baptism is not a religion? What he means by messing with the definition of religion is confusing the reason any individual may participate with — which is exactly what you do by talking about belief in some vague higher power, or respect for tradition, or access to certain states of consciousness as religion. Those are personal reasons for adhering to a religion, but the religion itself is the set of practices and beliefs that the people share in common.
Science can very clearly say that much of religious belief is ludicrous, but because in practice there is so much emotion tied to it that people cannot even accept factual evidence in conflict with what they believe. This is a problem not unique to the religious mindset, just particularly embodied by it — perfected one may say.
Takeaway; The meme is adaptable and profoundly tribal. As an example, Japuji Sahib, the main text of the Sikhs disclaimer: I am not a Sikh , states how the nature of reality is mysterious, the unity in supreme reality etc. Religion is, depending upon cultures and countries and customs, a very differently understood word. If there is a creator, he probably knows quite well the physical laws that hold the universe together, so, as the architect of the universe he would be able to apply these laws to his creation.
Maybe you need to get out a little more. Let me try to answer. Carroll is making this type of argument in saying that science and religion are incompatible. Clearly, many religionists, including such distinguished early Christian church figures as Saint Augustine and medieval authorities such as Thomas Aquinas did not mistake allegorical truth for scientific fact. So it is simply a mistake to assume that religious allegory was always interpreted as science.
However, it is highly probable that the poorly educated did so. If you are interested in European history, you might consider looking into the emergence of modern science in the so-called scientific revolution in the 17th century. Galileo was a major figure in that scientific revolution.
Rather, his fight was with Aristotelian science and Aristotelian philosophy that had been absorbed into Catholicism as unassailable dogma. In other words, the big fight was between old science and new science, not science vs. Another thing you might consider looking into was the relationship between religious allegory and Hellenistic science in the late classical age.
Judaism and especially Christianity came of age in cultures permeated with Hellenistic rationalism, the precursor to modern science. What this means is that for classically educated Christian — and later Islamic — elites the difference between allegory and what then considered natural philosophy was no great mystery. It reduces that which religion talks about to a scientific model. Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean.
He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects. Sean, thanks for articulating such a well reasoned article.
It implies that all contracts social, business, and legal are dependent on the existence of some mythological being. Right now, contracts are violated, when they are, the government steps in imposes legal remedies. If you are discussing Morality, this also does not need a God.
Morality is nothing more than a people determining what is correct behavior and what a social group stands for. Morality is not immutable. Even if we look at the U. Same goes for other parts of the world. Some moral codes sometimes appear universal, e. Religion is really a creation of social organization. Religion allows a society to very economically maintain order without having to put a policeman on each and every corner and in every building.
It also serves the state in that it creates bogeymen to instill fear into the population and keep that population tuned to whoever their leader might be. In the end, religion is a tool that societies use for controlling their population and maintaining order. Is there a God? There might be but that being cannot be the one of our various legends and myths. This God, must be beyond all space and time after it created this universe and everything in it.
1. Preliminaries: The Face Value Theory
Is that God personally interested in our comings and goings, NO! The Bible, Upanishads, Koran, the stories of Mt. Olympus, all are of the same stripe and equally valid. Great post, very clear, plain language, really excellent writing … but. Hardly any religious people are against it. However the car dealerships their employees want a day off that most other people have off.
They would never propose changing this blue law, and if anybody did who would? Religion and religious communities can be good and powerful in many peoples lives. However, some religions make claims which are demonstrably untrue YEC, etc. Your resolution to this dilemma is to discard religion lock, stock and barrel or throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
There are other possibilities, however. This most assuredly is a form of religion which is incompatible with a scientific worldview. It is not, however, definitional for all forms of religion. A belief in or acceptance of some church dogma or divine revelation via a received text is not completely normative for religion, either.
By that effort, we may be able to change the definition of what religion is from one that is compatible with what the average person on the street may currently define it to be into a more open definition, where dogma and revelation are NOT trying to tell us untrue things about the world.
For case histories, please see some local Unitarians. They may be able to tell you that you CAN have a religion without dogma or revelation. And you know that religion CAN be re-defined. Maybe it would be a good time to cut away the diseased and unhealthy parts of religion rather than to shoot the patient. Listen, strange men living in the sky distributing psalms is no basis for a system of rational inquiry. Supreme descriptive power derives from a methodical verification of theories, not from some farcical interpretation of ancient books.
Come and see the intolerance inherent in the system! Oh, what a give-away. Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? Did you see him repressing me? I recommend taking a glance at the book Practicing Science, Living Faith. It is a collection of twelve interviews with leading scientists with a myriad of backgrounds that engages questions like those you mention. I did a significant research project for a class in exploring how folks manage to integrate religious beliefs with science.
While I admittedly went in with my own person bias toward integration, I was surprised to see how many other scientists have similar views. Religion comes in many flavours, including some non-theistic ones. It is a wider and more complex category than you imply, and is not necessarily captured in silly statements about cosmology. For him religion is about consciousness, and he has embraced physics and backed neurological research into what the monks are up to. He has been perfectly happy to ditch the Buddhist cosmology, replacing it with the explanations that science offers, and relegating the older accounts to the realm of venerable myth and metaphor.
Where does this put him? The historical Buddha made no claims whatsoever about God or the Soul.
Cosmic Variance
He was one among many non-theist religious thinkers of that time. When all is stripped away, religion is about neurology producing a change in consciousness — in a living human, in a social context. Anyone who has experienced an altered state, howsoever caused, knows this. The rest is culture and commerce. I placed my response on my blog: Jesus died and was resurrected, etc. We just understand the physiology better now. Science has no way to test by its usual methods either the claim that God exists or that Jesus was resurrected.
The problem with your transportation analogy to clarify compatibility is that the trip we are really on is multigenerational and has many phases. So I see religion and science as two legs of the journey. It remains to be seen whether religion understood broadly can evolve into something that compliments science. It does for some it seemed to for Einstein and Oppenheimer, but they were not your classic bible thumpers , even if the absurd national debate largely fails to take this into account. If religion can do this, it can be compatible with science.
To switch metaphors, science is better than religion at collapsing the wave function of truth. When people had only religion, they kept trying to use it to back their behavior with certainty. In that respect, science and religion are incompatible. But as we know, the results you get from collapsing the wave function are of statistical value. Statistics point you toward possibilities and the recognition of new possibilities establishes new wave functions to probe. If you believe that the world you inhabit is a reflection of God, then understanding that reflection gives you some insight into the kind of God you have.
So the question of compatibility between science and religion at this point is really a question of perspective. The latter, I suspect, include some of those very same quantum physicists who Sean is so equally certain are mistaken. More of the same: This discussion will not change the mind of a single person. Fresh debate on an old topic: Addressing the essay and some of the comments: I can best describe it, through my research, as individuals who have experienced a personal, spiritual awareness, to differing degrees, at some time, many times, or continually in their lives.
The only changing factor is the type of religions practiced by varying groups. And the common denominator is the Spiritual experience. Social studies like all sciences, is quantitative and relevant. The majority of people in the world are not inferior mathematical improbability.
Before scientists developed their views on cosmology and origins of the world, Western cultures already had an elaborate doctrine of creation, based on Biblical texts e. This doctrine of creation has the following interrelated features: Differently put, God did not need any pre-existing materials to make the world, unlike, e.
Rather, God created the world freely. This introduces a radical asymmetry between creator and creature: Third, the doctrine of creation holds that creation is essentially good this is repeatedly affirmed in Genesis 1. The world does contain evil, but God does not directly cause this evil to exist. Moreover, God does not merely passively sustain creation, but rather plays an active role in it, using special divine actions e.
Fourth, God made provisions for the end of the world, and will create a new heaven and earth, in this way eradicating evil. Related to the doctrine of creation are views on divine action. Theologians commonly draw a distinction between general and special divine action. Unfortunately, there is no universally accepted definition of these two concepts in the fields of theology or science and religion. One way to distinguish them Wildman Drawing this distinction allows for creatures to be autonomous and indicates that God does not micromanage every detail of creation. Still, the distinction is not always clear-cut, as some phenomena are difficult to classify as either general or special divine action.
Alston makes a related distinction between direct and indirect divine acts. God brings about direct acts without the use of natural causes, whereas indirect acts are achieved through natural causes. Using this distinction, there are four possible kinds of actions that God could do: God could not act in the world at all, God could act only directly, God could act only indirectly, or God could act both directly and indirectly.
In the science and religion literature, there are two central questions on creation and divine action. To what extent are the Christian doctrine of creation and traditional views of divine action compatible with science? How can these concepts be understood within a scientific context, e. Note that the doctrine of creation says nothing about the age of the Earth, nor that it specifies a mode of creation. This allows for a wide range of possible views within science and religion, of which Young Earth Creationism is but one that is consistent with scripture.
The theory seems to support creatio ex nihilo as it specifies that the universe originated from an extremely hot and dense state around The net result of scientific findings since the seventeenth century has been that God was increasingly pushed into the margins. This encroachment of science on the territory of religion happened in two ways: While the doctrine of creation does not contain details of the mode and timing of creation, the Bible was regarded as authoritative. Second, the emerging concept of scientific laws in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physics seemed to leave no room for special divine action.
These two challenges will be discussed below, along with proposed solutions in the contemporary science and religion literature. Christian authors have traditionally used the Bible as a source of historical information. Biblical exegesis of the creation narratives, especially Genesis 1 and 2 and some other scattered passages, such as in the Book of Job , remains fraught with difficulties.
Are these texts to be interpreted in a historical, metaphorical, or poetic fashion, and what are we to make of the fact that the order of creation differs between these accounts Harris ? Although such literalist interpretations of the Biblical creation narratives were not uncommon, and are still used by Young Earth creationists today, theologians before Ussher already offered alternative, non-literalist readings of the biblical materials e. From the seventeenth century onward, the Christian doctrine of creation came under pressure from geology, with findings suggesting that the Earth was significantly older than BCE.
From the eighteenth century on, natural philosophers, such as de Maillet, Lamarck, Chambers, and Darwin, proposed transmutationist what would now be called evolutionary theories, which seem incompatible with scriptural interpretations of the special creation of species. Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett have outlined a divine action spectrum to clarify the distinct positions about creation and divine action in the contemporary science and religion literature.
They discern two dimensions in this spectrum: At one extreme are creationists. Like other theists, they believe God has created the world and its fundamental laws, and that God occasionally performs special divine actions miracles that intervene in the fabric of laws. Creationists deny any role of natural selection in the origin of species. Within creationism, there are Old and Young Earth creationism, with the former accepting geology and rejecting evolutionary biology, and the latter rejecting both.
Next to creationism is Intelligent Design, which affirms divine intervention in natural processes. Intelligent Design creationists e. Like other creationists, they deny a significant role for natural selection in shaping organic complexity and they affirm an interventionist account of divine action. For political reasons they do not label their intelligent designer as God, as they hope to circumvent the constitutional separation of church and state in the US which prohibits teaching religious doctrines in public schools Forrest and Gross Theistic evolutionists hold a non-interventionist approach to divine action: God creates indirectly, through the laws of nature e.
For example, the theologian John Haught regards divine providence as self-giving love, and natural selection and other natural processes as manifestations of this love, as they foster autonomy and independence. While theistic evolutionists allow for special divine action, particularly the miracle of the Incarnation in Christ e. God has laid out the laws of nature and lets it run like clockwork without further interference. Deism is still a long distance from ontological materialism, the idea that the material world is all there is. Views on divine action were influenced by developments in physics and their philosophical interpretation.
In the seventeenth century, natural philosophers, such as Robert Boyle and John Wilkins, developed a mechanistic view of the world as governed by orderly and lawlike processes. Laws, understood as immutable and stable, created difficulties for the concept of special divine action Pannenberg How could God act in a world that was determined by laws? One way to regard miracles and other forms of special divine action is to see them as actions that somehow suspend or ignore the laws of nature. This concept of divine action is commonly labeled interventionist. Interventionism regards the world as causally deterministic, so God has to create room for special divine actions.
By contrast, non-interventionist forms of divine action e. In the seventeenth century, the explanation of the workings of nature in terms of elegant physical laws suggested the ingenuity of a divine designer. For example, Samuel Clarke cited in Schliesser Another conclusion that the new laws-based physics suggested was that the universe was able to run smoothly without requiring an intervening God. The increasingly deterministic understanding of the universe, ruled by deterministic causal laws as, for example, outlined by Pierre-Simon Laplace — , seemed to leave no room for special divine action, which is a key element of the traditional Christian doctrine of creation.
Newton resisted interpretations like these in an addendum to the Principia in Alston argued, contra authors such as Polkinghorne , that mechanistic, pre-twentieth century physics is compatible with divine action and divine free will. In such a mechanistic world, every event is an indirect divine act. Advances in twentieth-century physics, including the theories of general and special relativity, chaos theory, and quantum theory, overturned the mechanical clockwork view of creation.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, chaos theory and quantum physics have been explored as possible avenues to reinterpret divine action. One difficulty with this model is that it moves from our knowledge of the world to assumptions about how the world is: Robert Russell proposed that God acts in quantum events. This would allow God to directly act in nature without having to contravene the laws of nature, and is therefore a non-interventionist model.
Since, under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, there are no natural efficient causes at the quantum level, God is not reduced to a natural cause. Murphy outlined a similar bottom-up model where God acts in the space provided by quantum indeterminacy. After all, it is not even clear whether quantum theory would allow for free human action, let alone divine action, which we do not know much about Jaeger a. Next to this, William Carroll , building on Thomistic philosophy, argues that authors such as Murphy and Polkinghorne are making a category mistake: God is not a cause in a way creatures are causes, competing with natural causes, and God does not need indeterminacy in order to act in the world.
Rather, as primary cause God supports and grounds secondary causes. While this solution is compatible with determinism indeed, on this view, the precise details of physics do not matter much , it blurs the distinction between general and special divine action. Moreover, the Incarnation suggests that the idea of God as a cause among natural causes is not an alien idea in theology, and that God at least sometimes acts as a natural cause Sollereder There has been a debate on the question to what extent randomness is a genuine feature of creation, and how divine action and chance interrelate.
Chance and stochasticity are important features of evolutionary theory the non-random retention of random variations. In a famous thought experiment, Gould imagined that we could rewind the tape of life back to the time of the Burgess Shale million years ago ; the chance we would end up with anything like the present-day life forms is vanishingly small.
However, Simon Conway Morris has argued species very similar to the ones we know now including human-like intelligent species would evolve under a broad range of conditions. Under a theist interpretation, randomness could either be a merely apparent aspect of creation, or a genuine feature. Plantinga suggests that randomness is a physicalist interpretation of the evidence. God may have guided every mutation along the evolutionary process. In this way, God could. By contrast, some authors see stochasticity as a genuine design feature, and not just as a physicalist gloss.
Their challenge is to explain how divine providence is compatible with genuine randomness. Under a deistic view, one could simply say that God started the universe off and did not interfere with how it went, but that option is not open to the theist, and most authors in the field of science and religion are theists, rather than deists. Elizabeth Johnson , using a Thomistic view of divine action, argues that divine providence and true randomness are compatible: God gives creatures true causal powers, thus making creation more excellent than if they lacked such powers, and random occurrences are also secondary causes; chance is a form of divine creativity that creates novelty, variety, and freedom.
One implication of this view is that God may be a risk taker—although, if God has a providential plan for possible outcomes, there is unpredictability but not risk. Johnson uses metaphors of risk taking that, on the whole, leave the creator in a position of control creation, then, is like jazz improvisation , but it is, to her, a risk nonetheless. Why would God take risks? There are several solutions to this question. The free will theodicy says that a creation that exhibits stochasticity can be truly free and autonomous:.
Authentic love requires freedom, not manipulation. Such freedom is best supplied by the open contingency of evolution, and not by strings of divine direction attached to every living creature. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have similar creation stories, which ultimately go back to the first book of the Hebrew Bible Genesis. According to Genesis, humans are the result of a special act of creation. Genesis 1 offers an account of the creation of the world in six days, with the creation of human beings on the sixth day.
Islam has a creation narrative similar to Genesis 2, with Adam being fashioned out of clay. These handcrafted humans are regarded as the ancestors of all living humans today. Humans occupy a privileged position in these creation accounts. In Christianity, Judaism, and some strands of Islam, humans are created in the image of God imago Dei. There are at least three different ways in which image-bearing is understood Cortez According to the functionalist account, humans are in the image of God by virtue of things they do, such as having dominion over nature.
The structuralist account emphasizes characteristics that humans uniquely possess, such as reason. The relational interpretation sees the image as a special relationship between God and humanity. Humans also occupy a special place in creation as a result of the fall. By eating from the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil they fell from this state, and death, manual labor, as well as pain in childbirth were introduced.
The Augustinian interpretation of original sin also emphasizes the distorting effects of sin on our reasoning capacities the so-called noetic effects of sin. As a result of sin, our original perceptual and reasoning capacities have been marred. Whereas Augustine believed that the prelapsarian state was one of perfection, Irenaeus second century saw Adam and Eve prior to the fall as innocent, like children still in development. Scientific findings and theories relevant to human origins come from a range of disciplines, in particular geology, paleoanthropology the study of ancestral hominins, using fossils and other evidence , archaeology, and evolutionary biology.
These findings challenge traditional religious accounts of humanity, including the special creation of humanity, the imago Dei , the historical Adam and Eve, and original sin. In natural philosophy, the dethroning of humanity from its position as a specially created species predates Darwin and can already be found in early transmutationist publications. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed chimpanzees as the ancestors to humans in his Philosophie Zoologique He proposed that the first organisms arose through spontaneous generation, and that all subsequent organisms evolved from them.
He argued that humans have a single evolutionary origin: Darwin was initially reluctant to publish on human origins. In the twentieth century, paleoanthropologists debated whether humans separated from the other great apes at the time wrongly classified into the paraphyletic group Pongidae long ago, about 15 million years ago, or relatively recently, about 5 million years ago.
Molecular clocks—first immune responses e. The discovery of many hominin fossils, including Ardipithecus ramidus 4. These finds are now also supplemented by detailed analysis of ancient DNA extracted from fossil remains, bringing to light a previously unknown species of hominin the Denisovans who lived in Siberia up to about 40, years ago.
Taken together, this evidence indicates that humans did not evolve in a simple linear fashion, but that human evolution resembles an intricate branching tree with many dead ends, in line with the evolution of other species. In the light of these scientific findings, contemporary science and religion authors have reconsidered the questions of human uniqueness and imago Dei , the Incarnation, and the historicity of original sin.
Some authors have attempted to reinterpret human uniqueness as a number of species-specific cognitive and behavioral adaptations. For example, van Huyssteen considers the ability of humans to engage in cultural and symbolic behavior, which became prevalent in the Upper Paleolithic, as a key feature of uniquely human behavior. Other theologians have opted to broaden the notion of imago Dei.
Given what we know about the capacities for morality and reason in non-human animals, Celia Deane-Drummond and Oliver Putz reject an ontological distinction between humans and non-human animals, and argue for a reconceptualization of the imago Dei to include at least some nonhuman animals. Joshua Moritz raises the question of whether extinct hominin species, such as Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis , which co-existed with Homo sapiens for some part of prehistory, partook in the divine image.
There is also discussion of how we can understand the Incarnation the belief that Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, became incarnate with the evidence we have of human evolution.
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For instance, Peacocke regarded Jesus as the point where humanity is perfect for the first time. Teilhard de Chardin had a teleological, progressivist interpretation of evolution, according to which Christ is the progression and culmination of what evolution has been working toward even though the historical Jesus lived years ago. According to Teilhard, evil is still horrible but no longer incomprehensible; it becomes a natural feature of creation—since God chose evolution as his mode of creation, evil arises as an inevitable byproduct.
Deane-Drummond , however, points out that this interpretation is problematic: Teilhard worked within a Spencerian progressivist model of evolution, and he was anthropocentric, seeing humanity as the culmination of evolution. Current evolutionary theory has repudiated the Spencerian progressivist view, and adheres to a stricter Darwinian model. Deane-Drummond, who regards human morality as lying on a continuum with the social behavior of other animals, conceptualizes the fall as a mythical, rather than a historical event.
She regards Christ as incarnate wisdom, situated in a theodrama that plays against the backdrop of an evolving creation. As a human being, Christ is connected to the rest of creation, as we all are, through common descent. By saving us, he saves the whole of creation. Debates on the fall and the historical Adam have centered on how these narratives can be understood in the light of contemporary science. On the face of it, limitations of our cognitive capacities can be naturalistically explained as a result of biological constraints, so there seems little explanatory gain to appeal to the narrative of the fall.
Some have attempted to interpret the concepts of sin and fall in ways that are compatible with paleoanthropology. Peter van Inwagen , for example, holds that God could have providentially guided hominin evolution until there was a tightly-knit community of primates, endowed with reason, language, and free will, and this community was in close union with God.
At some point in history, these hominins somehow abused their free will to distance themselves from God. For van Inwagen, the fall was a fall from perfection, following the Augustinian tradition. John Schneider , on the other hand, argues that there is no genetic or paleoanthropological evidence for such a community of superhuman beings. Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt favor an Irenaean, rather than an Augustinian interpretation of the fall narrative, which does not involve a historical Adam, and emphasizes original innocence as the state that humans had prior to sinning.
This final section will look at two examples of work in science and religion that have received attention in the recent literature, and that probably will be important in the coming years: Other areas of increasing interest include the theistic multiverse, consciousness, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism. Even before Darwin formulated his theory of natural selection, Victorian authors fretted over the implications of evolutionary theory for morality and religion.
Evolutionary theorists from Darwin onward argued that human morality is continuous with social behaviors in nonhuman animals, and that we can explain moral sentiments as the result of natural selection. This capacity has evolutionary precursors in the ability of nonhuman animals to empathize, cooperate, reconcile, and engage in fair play e. Since we can explain ethical beliefs and behaviors as a result of their long-term fitness consequences, we do not need to invoke ethical realism as an explanation.
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Some ask whether evolutionary challenges to moral beliefs apply in an analogous way to religious beliefs see Bergmann and Kain , especially part III. Others have examined whether evolutionary ethics makes appeals to God in ethical matters redundant. John Hare , for example, has argued that this is not the case, because evolutionary ethics can only explain why we do things that ultimately benefit us, even if indirectly e.
According to Hare , evolutionary ethics does not explain our sense of moral obligation that goes beyond biological self-interest, as evolutionary theory predicts that we would always rank biological self-interest over moral obligations. Therefore, theism provides a more coherent explanation of why we feel we have to follow up on moral obligations. Intriguingly, theologians and scientists have begun to collaborate in the field of evolutionary ethics. For example, the theologian Sarah Coakley has cooperated with the mathematician and biologist Martin Nowak to understand altruism and game theory in a broader theological and scientific context Nowak and Coakley The cognitive science of religion examines the cognitive basis of religious beliefs.
Recent work in the field of science and religion has examined the implications of this research for the justification of religious beliefs. De Cruz and De Smedt propose that arguments in natural theology are also influenced by evolved cognitive dispositions. For example, the design argument may derive its intuitive appeal from an evolved, early-developed propensity in humans to ascribe purpose and design to objects in their environment. This complicates natural theological projects, which rely on a distinction between the origins of a religious belief and their justification through reasoned argument.
Kelly Clark and Justin L. Barrett argue that the cognitive science of religion offers the prospect of an empirically-informed Reidian defense of religious belief. Thomas Reid proposed that we are justified in holding beliefs that arise from cognitive faculties universally present in humans which give rise to spontaneous, non-inferential beliefs. If cognitive scientists are right in proposing that belief in God arises naturally from the workings of our minds, we are prima facie justified in believing in God Clark and Barrett John Wilkins and Paul Griffiths argue that the evolved origins of religious beliefs can figure in an evolutionary debunking argument against religious belief, which they formulate along the lines of Guy Kahane The evolutionary process X does not track the truth of propositions like p.
Wilkins and Griffiths hold that the epistemic premise can sometimes be resisted: However, they hold that this move does not work for religious and moral beliefs, because such beliefs are assumed not to be the result of truth-tracking cognitive processes. Comte, Auguste cosmological argument Hume, David: This research was supported by a small book and research grant of the Special Divine Action Project, specialdivineaction. Religion and Science First published Tue Jan 17, What are science and religion, and how do they interrelate?
Science and religion in Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism 2. Contemporary connections between science and religion 3. Future directions in science and religion 4. Science and religion in Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism As noted, most studies on the relationship between science and religion have focused on science and Christianity, with only a small number of publications devoted to other religious traditions e.
As Robert Hooke wrote in the introduction to his Micrographia: For example, Clark writes, Exclude God from the definition of science and, in one fell definitional swoop, you exclude the greatest natural philosophers of the so-called scientific revolution—Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Boyle, and Newton to name just a few. Contemporary connections between science and religion Current work in the field of science and religion encompasses a wealth of topics, including free will, ethics, human nature, and consciousness.
In this way, God could guide the course of evolutionary history by causing the right mutations to arise at the right time and preserving the forms of life that lead to the results he intends. The free will theodicy says that a creation that exhibits stochasticity can be truly free and autonomous: Future directions in science and religion This final section will look at two examples of work in science and religion that have received attention in the recent literature, and that probably will be important in the coming years: The evolutionary process X does not track the truth of propositions like p Conclusion: Pakistan Philosophical Congress, New York City Press, pp.
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