The advancement of science and spirit
The head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science says it’s a myth that science and religion are inherently incompatible. Yes really.
I was not surprised by the findings of a recent Rice University survey that half of the top 1,700 U.S. scientists described themselves as religious. The scientific community, like any other group, includes people with many world views, from evangelicals to atheists.
Right, because scientists are just a “community,” a “group,” like any other; you get your women and your men, your old and your young, your rich and your poor, and your evangelicals and your atheists. Nothing to do with anything inherent in the work you do or the ways of thinking that that work depends on; no no, it’s just a matter of the endless variety of life. Some scientsts are short, and some are tall; some are atheist, and some are theist. See? It’s like that. Random. A mixture. Just how things sort themselves out.
Let’s hope that Ecklund’s unusually comprehensive assessment will help overturn the myth that scientists reject spirituality, or that science and religion are inherently incompatible.
Nominate that man for a Templeton prize!
Update: I failed to mention, because I didn’t know, because I failed to read the last paragraph [note: always look for the funding on these things! always!], that this shindig was funded partly by the Templeton Foundation.
Here we feckin’ go again. Also, there’s been some serious criticism of Ecklund’s methodology in that survey, but I can’t be arsed to look it up right now.
Ecklund asked so many different types of questions in that survey its pretty easy to find answers favorable to almost every point of view.
One thing to be careful of is the questions of the religious background and ‘spirituality’ of the scientists in the survey. These seem to be very different from the question of belief in Gods – for instance it appears all scientists who described themselves as Jewish are counted as Jewish in the religious sense rather than as ethnically Jewish.
If you actually look into the figures you will not be surprised with the results. Despite the claims of high numbers of religious scientists the actual number of scientists who claim they are certain of the existence of God is less than 10%.
He didn’t mention that result, did he.
Or the percentage of scientists that don’t believe in God – almost 70%, something like a 1000% increase on the percentage of non-belief in the US population at large.
Or the fact that there are almost no evangelical christians who end up as scientists, despite being over 25% of the US population!
Here is one of the set of results from her paper that tends to be ignored by the accomodationists.
http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/8594/ecklund2.jpg
I always find the common practice logic maddening, and I can’t understand how people use it as an argument for philosophical compatibility. Seriously:
1. Many scientists are religious/have religious faith
2. Therefore science and religion/religious faith are compatible.
Imagine I instead said:
1. Many people drink and drive.
2. Therefore, drinking and driving are compatible.
Wouldn’t it be the same gosh-darned thing?
Before actually reading the post, I was about to say that I sympathized with Leshner’s intent. The US is a religiously conservative nation, and we’re falling behind the rest of the world in the proportion of students pursuing study in science, engineering and mathematics. If a sketchy study can be employed to convince superstitious parents that the scientific community is actually friendly to them, I’ll go along with the deceit.
But this piece is disgraceful.
No. These omissions are unacceptable.
Ooh, troubling. You’re really not mincing words now. Not perplexing, though. It’s not a mystery why our state legislatures pander to fundamentalists.
Such tensions can also promote societal progress toward rationality, but only if scientists refuse to allow the conflation of respect for people with respect for ideas.
It absolutely would be the same thing Michael; you’re spot on. That’s what drives so many of us mad when educated people at organizations dedicated to advancing science pretend they don’t know this. And it is pretense, because they do know it. But they’re willing to make that serious misrepresentation for political reasons. They think this will act as the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down with the general public, but they can’t account for the fact that this approach is the only one that’s been used for decades, and the numbers of Americans who still don’t accept evolution isn’t budging.
The plain fact is that we have to acknowledge, and debate, the fact that science and religion are not compatible if we’re to make any progress in moving away from our Third World-esque religious atmosphere. Religion – not just the non-acceptance of evolution – is the problem when it comes to public policy and scientific knowledge among the lay public. More disingenuous, dishonest proclamations from scientific organizations isn’t helping – why do we believe the “avoid the issue and downplay it” method is suddenly going to start working, magically?
Michael de Dora said,
“Many people drink and drive.
Therefore, drinking and driving are compatible.”
Well, if you remove the spirit from your drink its OK – much the same as with your religion.
Also: The Huffington Post religion section, for those who don’t know, is pretty bad. Really bad.
Michael @ 3:
A strident, shrill New Atheist would put it this way:
“Catholicism and pedophilia are compatible.”
And it’s not just the religion section, Michael. The “health” section is the worst festering pile of pseudoscience anywhere. HuffPo: Where Liberals Go to Retire Their Brains.
I’m not sure who says they’re “inherently incompatible”. I’m not even sure what they means. What we say – or what I say at least – is that they are incompatible in a sense. I then gloss that sense by saying how misleading it is to state simply “science and religion are compatible”, how religion needs to thin out its epistemic content or to introduce notions of the capricious way supernatural beings act, and so on, to maintain a formal compatibility with the scientific picture of the world, how the advance of science pushes God into smaller gaps … And finally (or sometimes I say this first to get it out of the way), some religious views are plainly inconsistent with robust scientific findings. All this reflects a general mismatch between the scientific approach to the world and the religious approach, which follows from (1) the fact that they use different methods for discovering the truth and (2) the methods of science do not, historically and contingently, reach the same conclusions as previously reached by religion. It turns out that religion needs to adapt constantly, thinning out its original truth-claims, or it find itself plainly contradicted by science.
All of this then feeds into arguments that the religions of the world are probably false across the board. The evidence is that they use unreliable means of looking for knowledge. Meanwhile, various specific religions are already falsified to the extent they are plainly or less plainly inconsistent with robust elements of the scientific picture of the world.
Call the above “epistemic incompatibility” if you like.
As far as I know, all of us horrible non-accommodationists – me, OB, Jerry, whoever – are telling similar (perhaps not identical, I’m not sure) stories about the sense in which science and religion are incompatible. We don’t claim that no religious view could ever be logically consistent with what is known by science at a particular point in history, but we do object to simplistic, misleading claims that “science and religion are compatible”.
Nothing about the story we tell is falsified by telling us that a lot of scientists are religious. OTOH, the fact that so many scientists are not religious, compared with the general population, is further evidence, if needed, that the story, or something like it, is true. Counting up numbers like this is actually fairly weak evidence either way, but to the extent that any weight can be placed on it … well, it doesn’t help the accommodationists. The evidence seems to be that scientists are less religious than the general population and that any religion they believe tends to be of a thinned out kind.
I’d be interested in how many scientists believe in an anthropomorphised, interventionist god who listens and responds to their prayers, etc. and how many believe in a deist god who just set the universe in motion. The latter, while still philosophically unsound, at least avoids the cognitive dissonance you’d expects from trying to reconcile a practical, naturalistic understanding of the world with the existance of miracles.
Anyone got some figures?
I took “inherently” to mean “not just in the obvious and generally agreed sense that some scientists are religious.” And/or perhaps “epistemologically” or “methodologically” or both. Incompatible in the sense that they’re not equally good ways of finding out stuff – even fuzzy stuff like who loves ya baby.
Shatterface – Ecklund divides them up in that way doesn’t she?
Pew might be another source for figures.
“Anyone got some figures?” Click on the link at the end of the second comment on this thread. These are the figures that Ecklund produced in her study. She doesn’t specifically mention deism but there is one option for belief in “a higher power that is not God” (I know this is somewhat vague but its perhaps the closest answer to deism) and the figure is about 7%. This is less than the figure for scientists who are sure there is a God – about 10%.
I did. The figure for “I have no doubts about God’s existence” is 7.8%. The figure for “I believe there is a higher power, but it is not God” is 8.2%.
Ah, fuck. I was looking at Natural Sciences. My bad.
Does a higher power, but not God, mean a god other than the Jewish/Christian/Muslim god? Or does it mean something else?
MichaelIt means they are technically Jedi.As to the article: His basic statement is outright wrong – on the natural science side 75.2% say in one way or another that they don’t believe in God (The “But not God” is still, “But not God). With the soft sciences it is 69.4% – still a big figure. A further issue here is the phrasing of the survey is basically suspect “There are basic truths in many religions” falls into serious problems when you consider that there are basic truths in ancient Greek mythology.A further point here is if we talk about religious, and I mean takes it seriously, the figures show 50.3% haven’t gone to a service in the last year, 26.5% went once to five times. Why is this important? Funerals and weddings often take place alongside religious services. We aren’t all assuming that scientists exist in social vacuums are we?
Offtopic but WTF: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/06/16/female-genital-mutilation-at-cornell-university
Okay, here is my question – why aren’t my paragraph breaks showing?
I think it is more informative if I provide all the data from her paper so you can get an overview of the results. There are five tables of results – table 3 is linked from comment 2, above.
Here is table 1
http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/1418/ecklundtable1.jpg
(I’ll put the links in separate comments so that it doesn’t set off a spam filter.
Table 2
http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/5641/ecklundtable2.jpg
Table 4
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/5959/ecklundtable4.jpg
Table 5
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/7996/ecklundtable5.jpg
By the way, all this data comes from the paper “Religion among AcademicScientists: Distinctions, Disciplines, and Demographics” 2007
Social Problems, Vol. 54, Issue 2, pp. 289–307
I am linking the results like this because it is very difficult to get hold of the journal itself (at least it wasn’t available on my University Library system which is generally excellent). I actually got the copy of the paper from Matthew Nisbett who emailed the pdf to me after I questioned one of his posts about the results.
Sigmund
That’s a bit odd – you would expect something like that study, which is going to get touted at this stage, to be highly available.
^Didn’t Ecklund go on to write a whole book about it? Or was the book earlier? I didn’t follow it all carefully.
Since Leshner brings his article to a close by speaking about civility, and even about a project that will promote civility and encourage respect ‘despite our differences’, the aim of talking about compatibility/incompatibility seems to be as much about the social conversation, and the fact that religious poeple don’t like the kind of disrespect towards religion they hear from some scientists, disrespect which consists in questioning the objectivity of religious claims. Certainly, no one is saying that, since some religionists are disrespectful of science — and that’s probably an understatement — scientists are insisting on the compatibility of science and religion!
So, it’s clearly a religious issue. Religious believers don’t like to be told that their beliefs are incompatible with science, and they want people to treat them more respectfully. Perhaps some scientists believe that more religious believers would be willing to accept scientific findings if this kind of respect were forthcoming, but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence for this. So, it seems, when you get right down to brass tacks, the whole thing is about encouraging respect for religion. Religion doesn’t like to be told that there are incompatibilities between religious beliefs — and the ground of religious belief — and science. But this whole dispute is becoming just a little ridiculous, is it not? The simple fact that the number of religious believers amonst scientists is significantly less than the number of believers in the population at large seems to point to the fact that there are at least perceived incompatibilities here, so to suggest that the incompatibility of science and religion is simply mythical is quite plainly false. (That’s an interesting word to use in this context, since usually religious believers often take myth to be referring to narratives which reveal the truth about human beings, the world, and god or gods.) At the very least it suggests that there is something here to be investigated, instead of being dismissed with the odd suggestion that we should simply be respectful of each other. Actually, I should have thought that taking seriously a person’s claims to be speaking truth, and trying to determine whether in fact they are, is at least part of what we usually mean when we speak of being respectful. In science or philosophy, checking someone’s evidence or arguments is taking that person’s claims seriously. Doesn’t the same kind of respect apply to religion? And if not, why not? (I think I know the answer to that, but it’s a question that needs to be put to someone like Leshner, whose perch is way out there at the end of a very thin branch.)
I don’t find it particularly odd. Most academics get their papers as pdfs these days, usually through a university library system (its much too expensive to buy copies of papers direct from journals). The universities themselves don’t have an unlimited budget so they will not have a subscription for every journal and the more obscure the journal the more likely it is to be one of those that is unavailable. I presume this is the case here. Of course this is highly dependent on your own particular university library – I remember Paul W, an occasional commenter on here, making a point about one of the results in this paper that is only visible if you get the manuscript so his library must have had it. On the other hand there were plenty of comments from others at the time complaining that it wasnt available from their libraries.
I should have said ‘significantly less proportionately than the number of believers in the population… et seq…’
Russell asked:
“^Didn’t Ecklund go on to write a whole book about it? Or was the book earlier? I didn’t follow it all carefully.”
The book is quite recent, I think it came out this year. The paper is from 2007. Ecklund was on Point of Enquiry with Chris Mooney a couple of months ago talking about the study. Towards the end of the interview she said something that I think illustrates the gulf between accomodationist (which she certainly seems to be) and religious thinking. She said that the results show that it is certainly possible to be religious and work as a scientist so that those from an evangelical background should not worry that their children will become non-religious if they become scientists – they most likely would just change their religion to a more moderate version of christianity. Ecklund said that is if she had no idea that the idea of an evangelical switching to become an episcopalian or catholic would be regarded with anything but utter horror by evangelical parents.
For another perspective, there’s the 2003 Cornell Evolution Project. This was just with “prominent evolutionists”, but they have an interesting presentation.
[…] can find a lively discussion of the AAAS business over at Butterflies and Wheels. This entry was written by whyevolutionistrue and posted on June 17, 2010 at 8:28 am and filed […]
Sigmund
It is more that this is a bit of high interest research – I would expect to see the pdf as being highly available. Even if it was just off of Eckland’s website.
Looking through the graphs leads me to think there were some serious flaws in there. I mean, you do need to separate ethnic Jewish from religious for example.
Ken, thats an interesting survey but I’m scratching my head as to how they drew the conclusion that most evolutionary scientists see no incompatibility between science and religion. From the article they seem to be basing this conclusion on one factor – that most evolutionary scientists think that religion is a result of sociobiological cultural processes. It is a huge leap to make this conlusion from that aspect of the survey. I’m pretty sure that a lot of new atheists who think science and religion are incompatible also see religion as having arisen through cultural evolution. This is an entirely different question to whether current religious teachings and practice are in conflict with the scientific method.
I wonder if these conclusions were tacked on for less than scientific reasons since they are at odds with some of the earlier parts of the article – for example;
“Seeing religion as a sociobiological feature of human evolution, while a plausible hypothesis, denies all worth to religious truths. A recent informal poll of our religious acquaintances suggests that they are not pleased by the thought that their religions originated in sociobiology.”
True enough. And, speaking as a non-philosopher, I though the authors got kind of pissy with the free will thing. It was like, Oh, these biologists, they’re such children.
Did Ms. Benson notice that the Templeton Foundation is one of the granters’ who have contributed money to support this activity? Talk about letting the fox into the chicken coop!
Re Josh Slocum @ #1
Jason Rosenhouse has totally discredited Mr. Ecklunds interpretation of the results of this survey on his blog.
http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2010/05/scientists_and_religion.php
Oh yes, I noticed that, and I already knew it – I think it was an issue when Mooney interviewed Ecklund for Point of Inquiry, for one thing. Conflict of interest, bias, all that.
Oh wait – you mean the AAAS activity? No, I didn’t know that! Oy!
Thanks, SLC.
Interesting, important, even shocking. But somehow, I’m told, this is not helping. But it seems like it is. What gives?
Michael De Dora: Exactly right – I use an example adapted from Bunge all the time and get no (useful) answer, that is: “There are physicians who smoke. Is smoking thereby compatible with health?”
For all that’s been said and can be said about the Templeton Foundation, I don’t think the TF’s money sways scientists or anyone else interested in the science-religion debate to falsify their data or change their beliefs. Rather, I see the TF as an outlet for those who essentially already agree with their mission. This doesn’t preclude the TF from presenting secularists with challenges in highlighting real philosophical and scientific differences between science and religion to the public. But it does mean the TF is furthering the controversy — not creating it. I’d love to hear some thoughts on this because I’ve been contemplating writing about this issue recently.
But Templeton also creates the conditions for the controversy to go on and on and on instead of being resolved, by funding all these Science ‘n’ Religion jamborees.
Michael, I agree with Ophelia. Also, it gives “credibility” and a media-friendly platform to the contentious, but very much loved mainstream narrative that science and religion are not ever, ever, ever in conflict. It acts as a megaphone for scientists who want to club outspoken critics over the head, thus winning political brownie points for being “reasonable,” “moderate,” and “fair.” It thereby helps delegitimize an already unpopular, and dishonestly caricatured and maligned point of view – that there are real, undeniable, epistemic compatibility problems between science and religion.
And its money turns people like Francisco Ayala into (I’m sorry, there’s no nice way to put this) intellectual whores.
Michael, there has never been a point in time when the Discovery Institute has been considered by the scientific community as anything but purely destructive towards science and intellectually bankrupt in their actions and intent. They are denialists by nature and have never tried to engage with the actual scientific arguments they seek to overthrow. Given this background the Templeton Foundation saw fit to financially support some of the major proponents of the Discovery Institute, such as Dembski – only stopping when the movement became politically untenable after the Dover trial.
Is financially supporting the ID movement furthering a controversy or creating one that isn’t there in the first place? It is, at the least, financially supporting people whose only purpose is to create the image of controversy. While it is true that the Templeton Foundation might not financially support the ID movement at this moment in time they did so at a time when the Discovery Institute was known to be purely anti-science and so they cannot plead ignorance.
Josh Slocum said:
“its money turns people like Francisco Ayala into (I’m sorry, there’s no nice way to put this) intellectual whores.”
To be fair to Ayala he has not pocketed the 1.6 million dollars of the Templeton prize – he donated it to his University.
I would argue Ayala was already an “intellectual whore” in your eyes; Templeton just awarded him for it.
The problem isn’t science accommodating religion; it’s the fact that religion keeps pissing in science’s pool.
Scientific statement: The universe began with a Big Ban 14.7 billion years ago.Religious pissing in the pool: Created by an unseen, unmeasurable, incomprehensible sentient creative entity.
Scientific statement: Life on Earth began about 3.7 billion years ago.Religion pissing the pool: Created by an unseen, unmeasurable, incomprehensible sentient creative entity.
Scientific statement: Homo sapiens sapiens emerged as a species about 200,000 years ago.Religion pissing in the pool: Created by an unseen, unmeasurable, incomprehensible sentient creative entity. [With the added claim that this was the time when something called a “soul” was invented and magically installed in the species now and forevermore; thereby rendering every sperm sacred.]
Meh.
And on what basis would you argue that, Michael?
My familiarity with his thoughts and writings prior to the Templeton prize. For what it’s worth, Templeton’s money probably pushed him to further promote his views. But I don’t think Templeton turned him to those views. It instead gave him a bigger stage to continue saying what he’s been saying. No?
It instead gave him a bigger stage to continue saying what he’s been saying. No?
Yes, I agree Michael. Not to be nitpicky (:-), but my point in calling him a whore was that he’s willing to be exploited on a very large stage in exchange for money/credibility/currency with the Templeton set.
Sigmund, I know that he donated the money, but that doesn’t change the dynamic. Whether Ayala personally pockets 1.6 million is irrelevant. He has enjoyed (and deployed) the clout and other social currency that having 1.6 million at one’s disposal can provide. The cash is fungible; he got 1.6 million worth of oomph.
Yes, I agree. My only point here is that Templeton doesn’t create these people. Which I think is a rather important point, actually.
Agreed, Michael.
It doesn’t create the people – but it does create the “dialogues” and conferences and “fellowships” and prizes by which their views are promulgated, even by institutions that are (or used to be) for the purpose of advancing science. That too is an important point.