The invisible activist god
Laurence Krauss says God and science don’t mix.
He has joined his friend Ken Miller in telling school boards that ‘one does not have to be an atheist to accept evolutionary biology as a reality. And I have pointed to my friend Ken as an example.’
This statement of fact appears to separate me from my other friends, Messrs. Harris and Dawkins. Yet this separation is illusory. It reflects the misperception that the recent crop of vocal atheist-scientist-writers are somehow “atheist absolutists” who remain in a “cultural and historical vacuum” — in the words of a recent Nature magazine editorial. But this accusation is unfair. Messrs. Harris and Dawkins are simply being honest when they point out the inconsistency of belief in an activist god with modern science…Though the scientific process may be compatible with the vague idea of some relaxed deity who merely established the universe and let it proceed from there, it is in fact rationally incompatible with the detailed tenets of most of the world’s organized religions.
Cue the defense of ‘pluralist naturalism’ – whatever that is.
The most interesting thing to me about this is the apparent about-face Krauss has done on accommodationism. Compare his WSJ article with this earlier response to Coyne’s New Republic article at edge.org.
Heh. Good point, Josh. But that’s what I love about serious, thoughtful skeptics/critical thinkers; presented with superior evidence and arguments, they realize they must either come up with better counterarguments or – *gasp* – change their minds!
Kudos to Krauss.
Just to show how irrational Christianity (or any other religion) is, Francis Collins (in a recent address – see: So I became a Christian on that basis) actually uses CS Lewis as the apologetic basis for his own faith. Anyone who has read Beverluis knows that this simply won’t do. Would Collins, I wonder, be satisfied with such a weak foundation for what he claims to know about the natural world? Not likely. There he is willing to work his ass off to show what is and is not sound. But religion can be based on the part time musings of an Oxford don whose main study was literature. Bizarre.
Quite right, G. Predictably, Chris Mooney is spinning Krauss’ piece to his own favor. That man is a bottomless well of emotional-commitment-driven conclusions and willful dishonesty.
Ha – snap, Josh – I just did a post on Chris’s spinning, without having seen your comment. Fortunately Tom Clark and Russell Blackford were on hand to say no there’s not a big ol’ Grand Canyon between science and philosophy that nobody can jump across not nohow.