Teeny weeny elfin godlings
I like the way David Barash puts the matter.
the National Academy of Sciences came out with a report titled Science and Creationism, which stated that “…science and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience. Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each.”
…
Pace the National Academy of Sciences, however, I do not demand that “science and religion be combined”—quite the opposite. Rather, let’s acknowledge the truth: Science and religion overlap substantially, notably whenever religion makes “truth claims” about the world. And when that happens, time and again, religion has a long track record of being simply and irretrievably wrong.
That’s good, isn’t it. It’s not that they ought to be combined, it’s that they do overlap. And when they do overlap, religion gets it wrong. That sums it up nicely, and cuts through the usual nonsense.
NOMA is merely another version of “God of the gaps” thinking, which employs the deity as needed to plug the temporary vacancies in our science-generated knowledge. It seems to me that this is neither good science nor good theology, since—in the first case—reliance on the supernatural is simply inconsistent with anything remotely approaching a scientific world-view, and, in the second, such a God would necessarily shrink as our science-based knowledge grows, so that eventually, we’ll be left with a bunch of teeny weeny elfin godlings crammed into an oddly distributed array of little cavities in our otherwise expanding knowledge.
That sounds like the homunculus in the buttocks! In more ways than one.
Hmm… I don’t agree that NOMA is a God of the Gaps position. NOMA, if I am right, usually says that religion has something useful to say about spirituality, morality and so on. I can imagine moral philosophers getting quite irate that some scientists think that religion has any ability to provide expertise in their field. It seems to me that if you list all the areas of human experience that NOMA-supporters say can be left to religion, there are plenty of non-religious people with expertise in those areas.
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And remember, those teeny weeny elfin godlings are invisible, non-material, and are undetectable by observation.
As the Church Lady used to say, “Well, isn’t that convenient!”
They sound a bit like crab-lice in the early stages…
Hey, thanks for the acknowledgment. Because you know what? Biologists, whether or not they wish to tow the…party line, do not get to decline such debates. They go with the territory. Which is not to excuse our cowardice.
Ah, but crab lice didn’t create the universe, did they?
Or maybe they did; there’s probably an unpublished draft of a Douglas Adams novel lying in a drawer somewhere based entirely on that premise.
There’s an idea — I could “discover” such a draft and use it to found a new religion, then retire on the proceeds à la Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard.
I don’t think there’s any aspect to religion (the monotheistic ones at least) that might properly or honestly be called magisterial. But then again, most of us are awed by lesser things.
The problem really begins, Mr Jacobi, when they leave their odd little cavities (no doubt with encouragement from such interested parties as Dr Ruse and Dr Giberson, and start pullulating… ‘pullulate’ – there’s another word for Jerry Coyne, one that is not so much beautiful as am
Sorry, the computer jumped: ‘not so much beautiful as disgusting.’
Brings to mind P.W.Atkins’ pungent comment at the end of his wonderful ‘Creation Revisited’, (and I am away from my library, so I have to paraphrase it, in essence) that ‘with the relentless advance of science, an increasingly lazy God will soon have nothing to do.’ Amen.
I think the NOMA argument is not only a God of the gaps argument, it’s a particularly pernicious one: it tries to wedge God in as the best empirical explanation for human mind, emotions, and behavior. This is nasty because it connects both the God hypothesis AND the advocacy of the God hypothesis to “being good.”
Why don’t some people believe in God? If the case for God is scientifically sound and rationally defensible, then the answer will involve errors in reasoning. But if NOMA places the God explanation into the gap of how we understand “morals and meaning,” then the answer will involve character. Atheists are not intellectually mistaken: they’re morally wrong. That’s worse.