Idle gossip between religion and science
BioLogos, it tells us, “explores, promotes, and celebrates the integration of science and Christian faith.” Here it is doing that.
Just as we can maintain the created order is God’s good creation warped by the fall, in a similar way we can maintain that Scripture—given through and to a fallen world through fallen men—is both beautiful and broken. No less than the creation, Scripture’s human authors, and the book that they wrote, stands in need of redemption.
That’s the integration of science and faith. Except for the science part.
BioLogos says it really does want to connect and join and link up the two.
BioLogos addresses the escalating culture war between science and faith, promoting dialog and exploring the harmony between the two.
But then it publishes material like “After Inerrancy” which is bound to be anathema to most scientists, so what do they mean by it? How do they think handwaving about how to read “Scripture” is promoting dialogue between science and religion? In what sense is it exploring the harmony between the two?
BioLogos represents the harmony of science and faith. It addresses the central themes of science and religion and emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with scientific discoveries about the origins of the universe and life.
Maybe that gives us a hint.
It does it by limiting science to discoveries, while carefully not mentioning methodology and epistemology. It’s ok – there are just some Discoveries, and believers can chew them carefully one hundred times and then digest them without perturbation. Discoveries are discrete and fenced-off and can be manipulated until they no longer seem to interfere with cherished beliefs. How to discover discoveries, and how to evaluate discoveries and purported discoveries – that’s another story; that could lead to unpleasant questions about the “discoveries” that underlie religious beliefs. So BioLogos doesn’t go into all that. At least not on the About page it doesn’t.
Jerry Coyne discussed this yesterday.
Science and religion have as much harmony as c a c# played simultaneously. No matter how many times you assert that it’s harmony, it’s just a screechy racket.
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And BioLogos will never, ever go into such matters. Those whose aim is to “reconcile” beliefs grounded in faith with beliefs grounded in evidence and reason cannot afford to address epistemology in any serious way. Epistemology is about justifying one’s claims, and faith is about accepting claims in the absence of justification, so the faithful – simply by choosing to accept some claims on the basis of faith, without which they would not be “the faithful” – have no choice but to wall off those claims from epistemology. The BioLogos crew’s attempts to reconcile science with their Christian dogma can only proceed when epistemological considerations are safely ignored, allowing both scientific and religious claims to be treated like isolated factoids to be freely massaged or reinterpreted or cherry-picked as needed to give the surface appearance of compatibility.
It’s silly enough for an organization to have as its explicitly stated goal the “reconciliation” of science – the most rigorous approach to justifying claims about the world ever conceived – with a whole raft of unjustified and often unjustifiable religious claims. But since the only possible way BioLogos can “reconcile” the two is by ignoring justification entirely whenever it suits them, their necessarily self-contradictory attempts to offer overarching justification for having such a goal, and their attempts to justify using this or that particular means to achieve that goal, are especially worthy of derision. BioLogos was never and can never be anything but a farce.
Mightn’t BioLogos start nearer step one by seeking to “harmonize” the various religions of the world and then to “harmonize” the various flavors (tens of thousands of them) of christianity?
Not all religions and perhaps not even all christians hold that God’s creation was marred by the “fall.” So wouldn’t it be nice if BioLogos came up with a harmonizing explanation of why there is evil in a world created by a perfect god? Nobody else has been able to expostulate such harmony, and so BioLogos has a real opportunity here.
I’m sure that with that task completed, defining the “harmony” of science and religion(s) will be a piece of cake.
@Josh: But C and C# can sound good together. Throw in a G# and an F and you get a pretty tasty major seventh chord. Just saying.
My senior year of high school, when I switched to trombone, I remember we played a piece that had a minor second in it. It was, as Gordon suggested it might, part of a major 7th chord. IIRC, 3rd trombone had the fifth, 2nd trombone had the major 7th, and 1st trombone had the root note, but the high one, i.e. half a step above 2nd trombone. It was a real eye-opener for me, that a minor 2nd could actually sound really cool, even harmonious and “pretty”.
I would say that, generally speaking, I would shy away from taking any particular musical construction and saying it could never be harmonious. You might be surprised.
(To out music-geek Gordon, I would insist that you really ought to call it an E# rather than an F in that context :p )
@Josh:
Not a Jimi Hendrix fan I take it? Throw in a G, make the C almost an octave above the C#, and you get A7#9. Ride it when you get back from the “D” in A blues. It’ll sound great.
so…to make the metaphor work: the B# of religion harmonizes with the C# of science, but only when combined with the E# of wooly thinking and the G# of gullibility and/or the G of , erm, taking lots of psychedelic drugs while playing an upside down guitar really loud. Or something.
Ha, nice.
You can pretty much play any two notes against each other as long as you resolve any tension resulting from the superposition. So if I had to make the metaphor work, I would say something like this:
Apparent incompatibilities between truth claims create cognitive dissonance, similar to how notes from incompatible keys create dissonance when they’re played over one another. In the case of religion, however, there is no way to resolve the dissonance between competing ideas — in the best case, one can say that there’s a harmony between two apparently incompatible ideas that our limited minds cannot discern. Science, on the other hand, is dedicated to resolving tensions between incompatible truth claims by comparing the implications of those claims with empirical data.
From what I understand, though, psychedelic drugs really can help people harmonize science and religion. For a few hours at a time, anyway.