Togetherness
One more thing about Mooney and the jollification at the AAAS last week. Mooney keeps talking about dialogue between religion and science, bringing religion and science together. But what actually happened at the jollification, and what Mooney asked about there, was religious people and scientists talking. That’s a different thing. Obviously religious people and scientists can talk any time, and it’s unexceptionable that they do. But the fact that religious people and scientists talk to each other doesn’t mean that religion and science are somehow getting closer together, or even having a dialogue.
Oh don’t be silly, you may say; that’s what they mean – by “bringing religion and science together” they mean religious people and scientists talking to each other. But is it? I’m not so sure. I don’t think it is. I think we’re supposed to think that the two are sort of the same – that accomplishing the one is accomplishing the other.
Maybe this is a good thing, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a sop to believers. Maybe the idea is that if religious people and scientists get together and talk, religious people will get the idea that science isn’t so scary after all, without science having to make itself a little bit more like religion. But on the other hand, maybe it works the other way; maybe the idea is that if religious people and scientists get together and talk, then BioLogos will somehow become part of science, and pretty soon it will be part of the curriculum, and…
Hold my hand, I’m scared.
There’s another thing. It wasn’t actually a dialogue on science and religion – it was a Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion. How did ethics get in there? What’s ethics got to do with science or religion? Why didn’t they throw in ballet and literary criticism while they were at it?
Indeed. Nor does the fact that religious people and scientists (or, religious scientists, or hopelessly befuddled people who happen to do science during the week and gawd on Sundays) “talk to each other” mean that any conversation of value is happening.
That recent “dialogue” was anything but, if we’re to measure the effect such blathering has on the “public understanding/acceptance of science,” which Mooney and Templeton/Biologos claim to care about. The article Jerry Coyne highlighted, “Adam and Eve: Literary or Literal”? You know, the one where Very Earnest people wrestle with whether empirical observation and Genesis can be squared? All very edifying, right? Moving the “dialogue” forward in a “positive way,” yes? I mean, we all know that sophisticated religious people don’t take those stories literally, don’t we?
I’m not sure that we do. But I am sure that the audience for Biologos (at least those who care enough to show up as commenters on the article) is most certainly not evidence for the “sophisticated,” savvy believer we’re constantly told we ought to be taking note of:
Here’s a sampling:
and
and
and
and
But, what do I know? I’m told this is all “helping.”
Whoops. .that was rather long. Mea culpa.
I’m afraid this both defames BioLogos – which has never expressed any interest in imposing religion on science (it’s a home for the scientifically literate superstitious) – and insults scientists.
You know, we’re in a bit of an echo chamber here. Reading through WEIT today, it’s notable how many of us have been thinking about religion since we were kids. Most scientists are not like that. The incompatibility of religion and science is, to them, self-evident, and the topic doesn’t interest them.
That doesn’t mean, though, that they are indifferent to religious interference with science and science education. The intelligent design movement continues to burn through their donors’ money, but the fact is that they have been marginalized to the extent that, contrary to their expectation, no prominent social conservative will express support for their fraudulent enterprise. (Anytime you read anything supporting ID, you’ll find that the writer is a DI fellow.) Such is the influence of scientists unknown to us.
I am confident that the enemies of reason will not prevail.
Looks like we’ve got some wonky italics here.
If Mooney et al. are really serious about bringing religious people and scientists together, why are they only asking religious scientists to speak for “science” in the dialogue and on the panels? If there’s a gap that needs bridging, if religion and science are too far removed from each other, surely it’s worth getting nonreligious scientists to weigh in. It’s not as if atheist scientists are a tiny minority that you can safely ignore. I’m not saying they need to have PZ or Dawkins (although I do think “new atheists” are a demographic worth including), but would a token atheist who is not Chris Mooney be too much to ask for?
I’m also baffled about the inclusion of “ethics” there, but it seems like quite a few scientists like to toss “ethics” to the religious people when they talk about nonoverlapping magisteria. I get the impression of two people negotiating a treaty, or a will, or possessions after a divorce: “We’ll take all the empirical questions. You guys can have, um, ethics and Meaning-and-Purpose. Whatever that is.”
It seems that this whole “Adam and Eve”: Literal or Literary? Thing started (at biologos), because of their trumpeting big time Evangelical pooh bah Bruce Waltke’s coming out, as an advocate of “theistic evolution” at a conference (dialog) they sponsored, (in 2009) explained here:
http://biologos.org/blog/why-must-the-church-come-to-accept-evolution-an-update/
So this guy is in some ways a mirror of Francis Collin’s, (a mega star evangelical, who accepts evolution – whereas Collins is a mega star scientist who believes in the meaning of frozen waterfalls …) and BioLogos was LOVING this … till the evangelicals came after Waltke, and told him to pull it back … which he did. By making a very clear statement, that seems both unambiguous, and completely inconsistent with a scientific view. (of course no one says it is “incompatible” )
Read the link above … for Waltke’s “position”.
In it, Waltke uses the term “historical” … and he states in the post that “Adam and Eve” are “historical” , not literal, not literary … is there some semantic game going on with “literal and historical”?? …
Waltke’s statement though is super clear, unlike the He also states that “humans descended from this historical Adam and Eve” and are “not in a continuum with animals”.
Does anyone know if BioLogos has a “position” on a “historical” Adam and eve, and if they don’t, why they don’t, is the science unclear about this?
It seems a dialog involves, Biologos staff getting big time evangelicals to say things that can be vaguely aligned with high school biology, and in return allowing them to say things that are plainly incompatible with science, which then Biologos sidesteps by “not taking a position”.
Doe Biologos have a “position” on the question of whether humans are in a “continuum” with animals?
Scott:
Well, at the link you just posted, there’s a Darrell Falk in the comments who seems to work at BioLogos. This is what he says:
So they are saying that it’s false that all humans are descended from a single human couple. What it means to be the “spiritual progenitors of humankind” is anyone’s guess.
Incidentally, reading a bunch of the comments on that BioLogos post has made me despair a little. There are a lot of bad old creationist canards there: “the dating methods used by geologists are circular,” “there’s no evidence for MACROevolution,” “who’re you going to believe–God or man?” and so on. Although I would like to believe it’s “a home for the scientifically literate superstitious,” like Ken said, I’m not so sure that’s the case. The BioLogos staff might be, but the commentariat are a different story. When faced with a disparity between the most natural reading of the Bible and current scientific evidence, many of them seem to pick the most natural reading of the Bible as the one that must be true.
Thanks for pointing that out, I didn’t see that from Falk …
Perhaps “spiritual progenitors” means what Harrell, when he says, that Adam and Eve should be seen as “representative of the kind of relationship that God intends to have with all people. ”
If so, the whole, “god is love” thing … is kind of iced. No?
Banished from the Garden, Pains in Childbirth, Cherub at the gate, eating dust … this is representative of the kind of relationship God INTENDS to have.
Nice.
I don’t think Ophelia need worry that Biologos will become part of science – it is far too sectarian for it to escape protest from scientists of different, non-Christian, religions (obviously those of us with no religion don’t count).
I find it ironic that, taking off my philosophical naturalist hat for a second, there might actually be a useful role that could be played by scientists who are friendly towards religion – namely in informing religious people how the findings of science help us tell what parts of their religious stories are probably metaphorical. There is as much scientific data disproving the “Adam and Eve are historical” story as there is disproving the Noah’s Ark story. In fact several centuries of intense scientific research have failed to prove a single ‘miracle’, indicating that all such events described in religious stories should be placed into the “most likely a metaphor” category. What is there to stop a christian friendly scientist from producing a modern day ‘Jeffersons Bible’ ?
I scanned the Wikipedia entry for “Adam and Eve” … and found this winner of a paper:
Gilbert, Scott F.; Zevit, Ziony (Jul 2001). “Congenital human baculum deficiency: the generative bone of Genesis 2:21–23.”. Am J Med Genet 101 (3): 284–5.
Does BioLogos have a position on whether women were formed out of Adam’s rib, or from his baculum?
Which brings a whole new meaning to “picking a bone” … I do know that I’m going to use this the next time I find myself in “dialog” with an evangelical. Gonna be great.
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scott said:
“I scanned the Wikipedia entry for “Adam and Eve” … and found this winner of a paper:
Gilbert, Scott F.; Zevit, Ziony (Jul 2001). “Congenital human baculum deficiency: the generative bone of Genesis 2:21–23.”. Am J Med Genet 101 (3): 284–5.”
If you google the title you can get a pdf of the paper – it’s even more horrifying than the title and reads like an Onion article!
“Our opinion is that Adam did not lose a rib in thecreation of Eve. Any ancient Israelite (or for thatmatter, any American child) would be expected to knowthat there is an equal (and even) number of ribs in bothmen and women. Moreover, ribs lack any intrinsicgenerative capacity. We think it is far more probablethat it was Adam’s baculum that was removed in orderto make Eve. That would explain why human males, ofall the primates and most other mammals, did not haveone”
What was a silly letter like this doing in the American Journal of Medical Genetics?
They should have sent it to a more appropriate journal.
http://sneerreview.blogspot.com/2009/06/nature-accomodationist.html
All dialogue between science and religion is just so much PC codswhallop. Science may not have all the answers, particularly religious or moral ones, but it has understood and demonstrated a conception for measuring reality that all claims of understanding should be subject too and rightly so. What science has inferred, if not said so outright, is that religious claims unable to meet this criteria, are false not because there is no God [necessarily] but because it has no knowledge of God to offer. Yet what science is too blind to notice for itself is that the concept of evidence based, testable cause and effect change are very much a part of the scriptural record. So should God ever decide to expose the difference between theology and revelation, we shall have a unified ideal upon which to make a judgment. And what history, science and religion had agreed was not possible, may have already happened. Faith may yet have the trump card to play! http://www.energon.org.uk
Sorry about italics fail.
If handing ethics to religion is part of the attempted truce, as Michelle suggests – that needs to be corrected! But then I’ve been saying this with dreary regularity at least since Gould made the same terrible mistake in Rocks of Ages. Religion does not get to have ethics. On the contrary, religion needs to give ethics back to secular reason.
The accomodationists seem to be going back and forth between wanting the religious-side and the science-side to engage in Dinner-Table Diplomacy — and wanting to find specific points where science seem to support religion. The appearance, is enough.
Dinner-Table Diplomacy is a matter of getting together with people who disagree on a subject, and working towards a happy consensus to agree to disagree, and change the subject to those beliefs and goals you do have in common. This is the way you can get a lot of things done, and foster good will towards each other.
It’s also a total cop-out, if you’re trying to pretend that the subject is the thing you happen to disagree about. It’s the equivalent of having a political debate between diverse parties, and lobbing only softball questions like “what do you love best about America?” or “I’d like all the candidates to explain how it felt when they became grandparents.” Instead, it’s “Could the religious please explain how they managed to shoehorn science into religion?” and “I’d like to hear the scientists explain how they have no problem with other people having religion.”
And then it’s milk and cookies.
One of my favorite expositions of this is from Steven Pinker.
Well, there is such a thing as scientific ethics: it’s a bad thing to fake your data, to steal somebody else’s work, to present your results using PowerPoint slides, and so forth. The fine points of ethical issues, and the questions of what crosses the line in which circumstances, can make for interesting talk among scientists, but I doubt that such scientific integrity is what any of these panels care about.
Call me a bigot if you must, but here’s my perspective on this:
Superstition and science are as different as watermelon and onions, and are totally incompatible. Full stop.
Religious scientists are as loony as Christian Scientists.