Nothing decisive to say
Outside the world of nature, however, science has no authority, no statements to make, no business whatsoever taking one position or another. Science has nothing decisive to say about values, whether economic, aesthetic or moral; nothing to say about the meaning of life or its purpose.
Notice how quickly he moves from an emphatic absolute in the first sentence – no business whatsoever – to a qualified one in the second – nothing decisive to say. As Susan Haack says, there’s the bit where he says it and the bit where he takes it back. Science may have nothing decisive to say about values, but that’s not the same thing as having nothing to say at all, and of course science has a lot to contribute to inquiry into values economic, aesthetic and moral. (No, it’s not clear what he means by economic values, but never mind.)
Science has nothing to say, either, about religious beliefs, except when these beliefs transcend the proper scope of religion and make assertions about the natural world that contradict scientific knowledge.
But those beliefs nearly always do, of course. Ayala wants us to think that god-talk is not about the natural world, but of course it is unless the god is so Elsewhere that it makes no difference to anything (and nobody knows its name is god).
People of faith need not be troubled that science is materialistic. The materialism of science asserts its limits, not its universality. The methods and scope of science remain within the world of matter. It cannot make assertions beyond that world.
Whereas ‘people of faith’ can, because they have permission to just make stuff up? Okay…if that’s what you want.
Religion concerns the meaning and purpose of the world and human life, the proper relation of people to their Creator and to each other, the moral values that inspire and govern their lives.
See? There he goes – that’s an assertion about the natural world. If we have a ‘Creator’ then it created us, and that makes it part of the natural world. It can’t be radically separate from the natural world but still create something that is thoroughly embedded in the natural world. What would it do? Mail the blueprint from wherever it is to some agent in the natural world? But even then it would at some point come into contact with the natural world; if it didn’t the mail would never get picked up.
But of course Ayala won the enormous bulging Templeton Prize, and I did not, so he must be right
And, as expected, Francisco has nothing to say about assertions of supernatural agency nor any of the other claims to extraordinary knowledge that actually define religions.
If Ayala had said, I know that Jesus Christ died for our redemption, I would have fallen out of my chair. But he didn’t. And he wouldn’t. He’s a scientist. A scientist who feels compelled, for some reason, to defend the indefensible.
Of course; he didn’t say anything anyone can actually get to grips with, just the usual cloud of foam.
But I can just quote Barbara Forrest at him. Yes, Barbara Forrest, I tell you.
So there!
I call people like this the Newfangled Atheists. You see, the vast majority of believers do want to make empirical claims. They believe in magic. And when the new atheists argue with people who are representative of the majority of believers, both sides understand each other–they just disagree. But when people like Ayala, or Karen Armstrong, or Madelaine Bunting weigh in, they sound like the Vorlon ambassador with his translator turned off. They bring news from their homeworld of academic theology. Their merest wisp of a deistic god is not what anyone worships or prays to–they are, at most, philosophically enraptured by a Platonic form, or an equation. Most, however, are atheists but… And recently, a Baptist minister set Armstrong straight on exactly this point.
OK, a contest. Cite the most insane sentence you’ve read from a Newfangled Atheist. I’ll start. Tina Beattie:
Beat that.
But Ayala has it exactly right, there is nothing outside of the world of nature.
If he wants to mentally masturbate to the sound of pleasantly tinkling tautologies that’s fine if done in private but impolite when performed in public.
@4 – that’s faith? I thought it was existentialism!
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I really wonder if Ayala would really want to live in a world where rational, empirical analysis has no role to play in interrogating “economic, aesthetic, or moral” values. Just imagine what an utterly capricious nightmare it would be, especially since ceding those three types of value to irrationality would undermine any hope of understanding the political and legal realms that rely upon them.
Luckily that’s not the way it works in the real world. Societies may be swimming in false consciousness but even then most people are forced to take immediate material circumstances into account, though they may be analyzing things badly. All but the most fanatical religions constantly compromise their “truths” to suit realities, and thankfully so or else humanity would have been wiped out long before now.
When was anything decisive ever said about morals?
Postulating stuff “beyond matter” runs into problems with conservation laws, too – if there were some mysterious other stuff poking in from time to time, you’d think we’d notice.
Descartes knew this.
NOMA makes no sense in terms of theistic religions since it claims there are no interaction between the supernatural magisteria and the natural magisteria. If that is the case then where do theistic beliefs come from? How did the Bible, Koran, Mormon book, Dianetics etc, come about? It can’t have been communicated by “God” since that would be an interference in the natural magisteria – wouldn’t it?
As for the meaning of life? I think science has a pretty good answer already – it is a biochemical entropy catalyst (it is a way a natural system, in certain circumstances, can increase the overall entropy of the system – in other words a way of hastening the eventual heat death of the universe).
The title of the article, that religion and science have nothing to do with each other, is a very VERY recent phenomenon, and still not 100% true. For most of history religion has been all too willing to dictate the nature of reality. Where heaven is. What bodies are made of. How old the earth is. It took science to say this was all wrong, and to push religion back to its last hiding place – where their definition of god has changed so much that he only exists where the natural world can’t find him. Science and religion have had everything to do with each other until science “won” and religion changed to accommodate. In a way you have to commend religion’s ability to adapt to the new, educated world.
It seems to me that the real heart of the debate over the relationship between science and religion is coming down to being specific and consistent about categories. If God is some sort of conscious, creative, loving, pervading yet transcendent intentional force, wouldn’t that put it in the same category as ESP and PK? It’s a hypothesis about the nature of reality, with purported evidence to back it.
An intentional force is not an aesthetic or moral value. Saying “God exists” is not like saying “I love my mother” or “it is good to be kind to one another.” It’s more like saying “brains are tools with ghosts in them” or “it is possible to bend spoons using nothing but willpower.”
The real danger to reasoning like Ayala’s isn’t atheism. It’s clarity. To be clear, is death to religion.
That quote by Beattie is silly. Faith isn’t “a willingness to inhabit the darkness of knowing that there are some things we cannot know.” People don’t shrug things off things they accept on faith. Faith is instead a heavy personal commitment to always be — and want to be — the sort of person who believes X, so that you spin and twist all observations into fitting into your chosen explanation. What you find, will confirm what you already believed. And, if you find the opposite, it will only confirm it even more. Because, that’s just the loyal, clever, skilled sort of person you are: when it comes to having faith, confirmation bias is your Olympic sport.
I give Ayala an 8.3
So not only do we have an unverified Creator, we also have a ‘proper’ relationship to him. And it is almost certainly a ‘him’.
And religion will tell us what that proper relationship is. What part of, ‘No, thanks’ do they not understand?
Wow, Sastra, 8.3?! This is a poor high school essay, say 5.5? I have to be up front. I find everything that this man (Ayala) writes on the subject of science and religion irritating.
(i) Ayala is simplistic, almost childlike in his simplicity. There is no nuance, or shaded distinctions. He simple doesn’t know enough.
(ii) Ayala, abandoning science or reason, does not base his position on evidence; it’s sheer assertion. He quotes the anondyne NAS statement on science and religion as an authority, but all the NAS does is to assert that science has nothing to do with meaning and value and that some scientists are also religious believers. Big deal! This is exactly what Ayala says, but that’s what he has to show!
(iii) Ayala misrepresents positions that he criticises. For example, Dawkins does not deny the existence of value, for he explicitly affirms that humans create value, and can struggle against the robotic selfishness of the mindless replicators. Provine, with whose work I am not familiar, apparently denies the existence of absolute value, or inherent value, that is, value inhering in something independently of our valuing it, or value which is indifferent, say, to consequences. That seems about right to me. But it is not a denial of value.
(iv) Ayala tends to redefine religion to consist with his own understanding of the limits of science. Science cannot trespass on religion’s turf, and religion cannot trespass on science’s turf, by definition.
Again, this is sheer assertion. Is this a matter of definition? If so, why his definition? If not, how might he show this to be true? It is not a religious statement, nor is it a scientific one. What kind of a statement is it? It is not clear that it is a logical or a semantic statement, because, as he says:
which leads us to:
(v) Ayala does not explain how we come to know about God or gods. If God (or the gods or goddesses) is known, must this not, in some respect, be as a result of something observed directly, or indirectly, by our senses? How else could we come to know about God or the gods? Do we have, and has Ayala located, a special organ for perceiving/knowing God or gods? He apparently thinks it to be a realm of knowledge of some sort, but what sort? Where do we find the source or confirmation of this kind of knowledge? If we cannot find it in the natural world, what other world does Ayala know? Ayala tells us that “Genesis is a book of religious revelations and of religious teachings.” Teachings I understand, but revelations? How are these conveyed? How verified? Whence? And if they make no difference to the natural world, how do we come to know them?
(vi) Ayala puts questions of value and meaning in the domain of religion, yet religions themselves differ on questions of meaning and value, so that it is clear that there must be a higher order reflection on these things. Related to this is Ayala’s claim that religion trespassing in the domain of science is a “categorical” mistake. While this is a possible use of the word ‘categorical’, it is generally called a “category” mistake or error. While this complaint is a bit pedantic, it does indicate that Ayala, though in fact doing neither religion nor science, is doing philosophy, and not doing it very well. There is no reason to accept his claim that values and meaning belong to religion. What is it that gives religion authority? Is it the truth of religion? How is this demonstrated? There are far more reasonable ways of trying to understand values and meaning, where an effort is made to understand these things, and where appeal is not made simply to authority (which is what so-called revelations indubitably are).
(vii) Ayala makes a distinction between explanation and interpretation. Religion may interpret a tsunami as the actions of an angry god, say, but this would not be an explanation. Only science can offer explanations. But in what way does an interpretation differ from an explanation? As Boyer points out in his book Religion Explained, people who believe in the evil eye, also believe in natural processes. The doorcase fell and killed a man because the termites had eaten away the wood until it was too weak to stand, but it fell when it did because of the evil eye! In what way is this not also an explanation of something that happens in the natural world? Same with evolution. Some religious believers think evolution is the way that God creates. Ayala thinks it is the way that God creates! (In this way we escape, he thinks – mirabile dictu! – the problem of evil.) If this is the way that God creates, is it not also an explanation of the way that things come to be?
The deeper problem here is simply that Ayala seems to misunderstand the importance of science. He shoves all human concerns into the domain of religion, but the importance of science is that it demands reasons for believing in something. It does not simply surrender everything to authority. Ayala quotes Augustine, for example, as an authority on the Bible. If an interpretation of the Bible “is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning” then it is an incorrect understanding of the Bible. That is, even when it’s wrong, the Bible is right! Ayala doesn’t see that that’s what Augustine is saying, but I’m afraid it is. And what, pray tell, is ‘clear and certain reasoning’? Since Augustine uses this idea to argue against heretics, and is prepared, as is Aquinas, to see heretics removed from the community by death, is Ayala quite sure that Augustine is the kind of authority he wants to appeal to here?
Nah! If Ayala has the nerve to complain about the 5.5, and wants me to reconsider, I think I’ll mark him down to 4.5?!
This is another way Templeton has a pernicious effect on public discourse. Ayala is just making it up, and not even working very hard at it, yet because he won that stupid meretricious prize, he gets to say it in high-visibility places. Templeton bestows visibility on facile bullshit, and for lots of people it bestows credibility along with it.
Eric MacDonald #14 wrote:
But you forget what’s being rated: liberal apologetics. Poor explanations, category errors, vague handwaving, simple-minded assumptions, sheer assertions, opportunistic re-definitions, strawman misrepresentations — I tell you, Ayala has the complete package here. “Irritating to atheists” is a feature, not a bug. At least an 8.3.
They say that Noel Coward once visited Liberace backstage, and said to him “What you do … you do very well.”
Good on you, Sastra! My irony meter is way off when it comes to Ayala! Can’t stand this simpering idiot! He may be a good scientist. He should stick to it. But he is good, I grant you, at being irritating. Love the Noel Coward story!
IF : There is anything “outside the world of Nature”
THEN: Will someone please produce a convincing demonstration that such things exist?
ELSE: Please go away, and stop wasting our time?