When discussing science & religion, there are two types of people: those for whom historical and anecdotal data can be relevant, and those for whom scientific data are the only data.Perusing old issues of the American Journal of Physics I ran across some letters to the editor concerning a book review of Ian Barbour's Religion in an Age of Science. First, one physicist complains,
...it seems to me that the basic underpinning of most modern religions is unquestioning acceptance of life-after-death as an absolute truth. But this is in direct conflict with the scientific fact that there is no life after death. (One such proof: human memory is stored in the circuitry of the brain and after death this circuitry completed decomposes.) I fault the reviewer for not telling us how Barbour resolves this fundamental conflict between science and Religion.
Another physicist replies,
Professor [so-and-so] makes a number of mistaken claims. The proposition that the human soul is immortal has been subject to rational demonstration since the time of the ancient Greeks--hardly unquestioning acceptance! Instead, he presents his unquestioning acceptance that human memory is limited to the brain, as a fact. How does he know this? It is his materialistic belief that excludes the possibility of a soul. He eliminates a priori any possibility that his assertions can be tested and so renders any claim to the mantle of "scientific" for his position empty.One test for his assertion would be: have people come back to life from death? The scriptures contain numerous accounts, even of one after being 4 days dead. Of course these depend on the evidence of witnesses, but so much in life depends on such evidence, even the credibility of physicists themselves.
(The Greeks subjected resurrection to rational demonstration? How did they do that?)
These letters point to two fundamental roadblocks:
First, the materialist discounts anecdotal and historical evidence (i.e., Scriptures) as unscientific and certainly not strong enough to support the existence of resurrection. (Note the common, Bayseyan assumption that the grander the claim, the greater the evidence needed.) Here the second writer shoots himself in the foot by allowing in all anecdotal evidence. Now he's carrying around Joseph Smith's golden tablets. Yet somewhere in there is a valid point: Not all data are scientific data, nor are historical and anecdotal evidence without merit. Those in the humanities can be just as interested in truth and evidence. In fact, the historian of science must sift evidence and is capable of drawing conclusions just as the scientist is.
A good example is the discovery of solitons by naval engineer John Scott Russel in 1834. He observed a wave travel at high speed down a channel for well over a mile without diminishing. This didn't fit the current theories of wave motion, and giants of the day such as George Stokes denied its very existence. Now solitons are established in theory and experiment and may be found many places in nature and engineering, but for long time their basis was only anecdotal. Not all things which exist fit our current theories, or readily admit to observation and measurement.
Second, the materialist would likely reject the idea that he had made any assumption at all in his materialist beliefs, appealing to that great obfuscator, Occam's Razor, by which one counts (weighs?) assumptions when deciding propositions. The materialist might well reply, "I suppose I did make the assumption that the soul doesn't exist. I also assume fairy dust doesn't exist, but you don't fault me for that."
Yet we need not, and should not, feel compelled to throw out scriptural evidence. Rather we have the harder task of sorting and weighing it. The fairy-dust response is only valid if there exists no evidence for God, the resurrection, etc. There does, just not scientific evidence. (See the first point.)
The debate continues for a few years past those letters. A conservative Christian quotes Ezekiel's dry bones passage as if it were God announcing by megaphone that he does engage in resurrection. (Exillic literary context and imagery be damned!) A setback for the non-materialists, unfortunately. The ensuing discussion includes many old saws, the persecution of Galileo by the Catholic Church and the non-overlapping magisteria. And quite a number of letters cheering for materialist reductionism.
Is it possible for these sides to talk to, and not past, one another?
7 comments:
Oh my goodness, I can't wait until you hear the JP Moreland talks from XSI. He has a degree in chemistry and at least one in philosophy, and he goes to town on these very issues. Extremely thought-provoking.
I can't wait too! Do you suppose when Amy comes up on the 27th she could bring them with her, and I could send them back with her as well?
Nice post, Tim.
Too many glib summaries of the scientific method imply science is about proving hypotheses, whereas science will always be about rejecting improbable hypotheses in favor of more reasonable alternatives. When rejecting a hypothesis, the observer, either explicitly or implicitly, sets a level of confidence with which the rejection is made. To my way of thinking, any reasonable person, whether a believer or a skeptic, would say the cost of falsely rejecting the God hypothesis is incredibly high. To me, this is the neutral territory on which the conversation between the materialist and the non-materialist ought to occur. Far too many people buy into the implausibility argument on the basis of 10 minutes' consideration of a strawman someone sets up and knocks down.
I might quibble a bit with the distinction you make between scientific and anecdotal information. For instance, did the discovery of the theory of solitons cause Russel's initial description to be promoted from an anecdotal account to observational data, or was it always (scientific) data, albeit data awaiting a theoretical framework?
As you say, our task is to weigh and sort the data, and on the question of God, the data are voluminous and of high dimensionality. And the cost of an error is high. Rather than beat scientifically-minded skeptics over the head with evidence they dismiss as not compelling, I would rather ask them what probability they'd assign to the chance they're wrong. Any scientist worth his salt has to give a response that's finite, and that alone ought to start a thoughtful atheist's wheels turning.
Ed, I agree: The analogy with solitons has its limits. The parallel breaks down when we ask whether, say, the historical accounts of the resurrection will ever be augmented by scientific evidence. Probably not.
It's amazing to me how many people think of scientific evidence as the only valid evidence, despite how limited in scope it is, and despite their lack of contact with it. So many important things simply can't be tested scientifically!
Welcome back, btw!
The thing about the greeks might refer to Plato's dialogue Phaedo in which he/Socrates establishes that the soul preexists human life and survives beyond it (the argument is weirdly heavy on the preexistence point). As with all of the Platonic dialogues the reasoning is pretty weird, but in its own way it is a rational demonstration; it's certainly not an appeal to traditional religion.
Josh: Fascinating! That helps put things in context. I would argue the writer of that letter to the editor shouldn't have said the Greeks "demonstrated" the immortality of the soul. But then, I haven't read Plato's argument.
Okay, so here's a quote from a book review in the journal Nature, from June 23, 2011 (p. 446):
"Powerful support for Shermer’s analysis emerges from accounts he gives of highly respected scientists who hold religious beliefs, such as US geneticist Francis Collins. Although religious scientists are few, they are an interesting phenomenon, exhibiting the impermeability of the internal barrier that allows simultaneous commitments to science and faith. This remark will be regarded as outrageous by believing scientists, who think that they are as rational in their temples as in their laboratories, but scarcely any of them would accept the challenge to
mount a controlled experiment to test the major claims of their faith, such as asking the deity to regrow a severed limb for an
accident victim."
It's a book review of Michael Schermer's "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct
Beliefs and Reinforce Them as
Truths" It's no surprise that Schermer sees anything beyond material reductionism as fanciful identification of patterns in the noise. He's a well-known atheist and has certainly made up his mind on this issue.
The two astounding things are (a) the reviewer's complete bias in favor of Schermer's hypothesis; and (b) the complete ignorance he shows of religious belief. Much like Dawkins, he has clearly not taken the time to learn on iota about, e.g., Christian belief, or he wouldn't see demanding miracles of God as a valid test of God's existence. Imagine:
A: So you say your wife is at home this afternoon?
B: Yes.
A: Prove it! Call her and demand she smash all the china and burn all the books in the house. That way when we drive by later on we will have proof of her existence.
B: What?! I can't ask her to do that!
A: Ah-hah! You are unwilling to mount a controlled experiment to test the major claims of your faith in your wife's existence!
The reviewer thinks that any God who exists must be willing to be the servant of his creation? This sort of simple-minded idiocy is, amazingly, not uncommon among atheists in academia. And Collins has actually written in detail about the basis of his beliefs--yet for this reviewer and presumably for Schermer as well it is simply impossible to rationally believe in God. The belief itself disqualifies one from being taken seriously. No matter what Collins has achieved or written; he must be deluded.
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