There are atheists who go beyond declaring personal disbelief in God and insist that any form of god-talk, any notion of higher purpose, is incompatible with a scientific worldview. And there are religious believers who insist that evolution can’t fully account for the creation of human beings.
I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.
If both groups were to truly accept that power, the landscape might look different. Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.
The believers who need to hear this sermon aren’t just adherents of “intelligent design,” who deny that natural selection can explain biological complexity in general. There are also believers with smaller reservations about the Darwinian story. They accept that God used evolution to do his creative work (“theistic evolution”), but think that, even so, he had to step in and provide special ingredients at some point.
Perhaps the most commonly cited ingredient is the human moral sense — the sense that there is such a thing as right and wrong, along with some intuitions about which is which. Even some believers who claim to be Darwinians say that the moral sense will forever defy the explanatory power of natural selection and so leave a special place for God in human creation.
I’m not as sanguine as Bob Wright about the prospects for a truce between fundamentalist atheists and theists. I do believe in a teleology of the universe, and if he can make a scientific case for it, more power to him, but unlike creationists, I have sufficient confidence in my faith that I don’t demand that science validate it.
What was originally meant by “intelligent design” could have been the nucleus of just such a truce.
We’ve seen how well that worked.
“intelligent design” was always intended to be a backdoor way to get the Judeo-Christian god back into the schools. Maybe there are current-day scientists who are closer to the Enlightenment-age Deists (e.g., Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson), but to my knowledge they have never been associated with the ID movement.
And I have to confess that, while I certainly don’t agree with everything that Richard Dawkins has written on ID, I have to agree with him that ID as it is currently constituted would better be named “the argument from personal incredulity” and has no place in a scientific worldview. If somebody wants to come up with falsifiable experiments to test the ID hypothesis, I’ll listen though…
I’ve always wondered why so many feel that one must reject science to embrace religion, or reject religion to embrace science. I don’t believe them to be mutually exclusive as they’re really trying to answer different questions.
I talked about this in detail in my one and only blog post over a year ago..
The problem is that if one applies the mental discipline of science to the problem of higher purpose one comes up with a rational body of ethics that are subject to continuous improvement and refinement – ethics is a science, not a religion. Indeed religion comes out as being an evolutionary stable cultural adaptation, a somewhat successful meme if you will, that may incorporate the wisdom of previous ages.
So can one trust a mind that does not apply the mental disciplines of science to their own ethics to nevertheless apply the mental disciplines of science to science? I have met many who seem to manage such a mental demarcation, but presumably at some level there is a fundamental conflict. In practice that conflict might be rare, however, the potential conflict of interest is as always a cause for concern.
Personally, I doubt a sound scientific understanding of religion is compatible with a rigid belief in religion. And considering the extent to which religion affects the course of human history it is a very critical area in need of extensive scientific research. This will lead to some discomfort for religions that claim to be the only truth, instead of being a positive culture or ideology. I might also note that religions can be somewhat practiced as a science, continually refined and improved for the greater good.
Religions can have a lot of positive benefits, they can greatly promote a number of constructive virtues, as their evolutionary success lays testament to. But the test for religions is ultimate survival, not truth. Beliefs can be useful approximations/simplifications, outsourcing such thinking sparing brain power for other activities – literal truth is not everything.
For certain, incorrectly limited values of “always.”
In fact, it was originally intended — obviously long before you became aware of the phrase — to help Christian believers accept evolution. It was hijacked by irrational fundamentalists (NOT a redundancy, whatever some people may claim) into the bastardized prop it has since become.
The threat of science to religion is twofold. First, it removes the need for religious explanations of external events (disease, weather, origin of species, formation of Earth, etc.). Second, science (in the study of the human brain) can provide alternative, non-supernatural explanations for why religion itself exists and how it is experienced.
Well, I never had much use for Robert Wright, other than as a foil for the generally more intelligent Mickey Kaus. His latest book — or at least the things he has said and written about evolution while hawking his book — similarly leaves me cold.
However, I did find the references to Steven Pinker’s work thought-provoking. I was tempted to begin this comment with “is evolutionary psychology really a science?” and the thought still troubles me. Whatever it is that people who think and write about psychology with the evolutionary paradigm are doing, it is a very different thing from what physicists and mathematicians do. I wonder in particular to what extent anything written in books about evolutionary psychology is falsifiable.
Evolutionary psychology is central to Wright’s argument. I find it hard, for example, to buy into the universality or the moral sense that Wright claims… for example, even in the modern day we see quite a difference in implementation of the moral code between Presbyterians and Wahhabists. I suppose in some sense there may be a “universal moral grammar” a la Chomsky, but again — is this template falsifiable? This all reminds me of the pre-scientific ramblings of Goethe about “being” and “becoming” — or the vitalism of Henri Bergson. Entertaining, yes, but science? I have my doubts….
BBB
It seems perfectly reasonable to accept that God cannot exist within a purely scientific framework. Given that all science is based on observation all one has to do is attribute to God the ability to not be observed — not much of a trick for the creator of the univere, one would think.
But likewise, any negative propositon concerning God is equally beyond the reach of any purely scientific framework. Thus, science has nothing to say on the question of God’s existence.
So, stepping out of a purely scientific framework, which we humans are wont to do, we are free to speculate, cogitate, philosophize about God, pray to, worship or completely ignore God, with no regard whatsoever to any so-called scientific claims about God.
(Amen.)
It seems perfectly reasonable to accept that God cannot exist within a purely scientific framework.
I don’t see why this is. God could, after all, produce perfectly fine objectively observable events the simplest explanation of which would be actions of an extraordinarily powerful purposeful entity. These events could be studied scientifically.
See, for example, Ted Chiang’s story “Hell is the Absence of God” (reviewed at http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/hell.htm).
God could, after all, produce perfectly fine objectively observable events the simplest explanation of which would be actions of an extraordinarily powerful purposeful entity.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the definition of God as “an extraordinarily powerful purposeful entity.” That would seem to admit an awful lot of candidates. It’s certainly a much easier bar to get over than ominpotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.
But, ultimately, this gets to what one’s personal definition of God is, which in itself is as worthy a question as whether or not that God exists.
One irony in all this is that some of the militant athiests are what one would call, “liberal creationists”. Liberal Creationism: The idea that human brains became exempt from the forces of natural selection 50,000 yrs ago and that modern human brains in wildly different environments (or in different genders with different selection pressures) somehow evolved exactly the same.Other athiests that tell the liberal creationist that this might not be true are called cranks, sexists and racists.
An example:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/crank_science_is_as_crank_scie.php