Yet more science-n-religion
The more you look at this science-and-religion thing, the more Templeton you find. In fact, I wonder if there is any science-and-religion that has nothing to do with Templeton. So consider that a challenge: if you know of any, or find any, let me know.
Mark Jones did a really good post on the subject a few days ago, and he turned up lots of intersections of s-and-r and Templeton. He skipped one though.
Dixon’s also contributed to Science and Religion, New Historical Perspectives, with fellow ISSR members Geoffrey Cantor and Stephen Pumfrey, which has this blurb:
The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion was decisively challenged by John Hedley Brooke in his classic Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1991).
He forgot to check John Hedley Brooke, so I did it. Well what do you know. He’s the current president of the ISSR, and he
held the Andreas Idreos Professorship of Science & Religion and Directorship of the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford from 1999 to 2006…With Margaret Osler and Jitse Van der Meer, he edited Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions.
The (Templetonian) Ian Ramsey Centre tells us
He has lectured at many universities in America, Europe, Australia and the Far East. He has also lectured at Templeton workshops in Adelaide, Berkeley, Manchester, and Toronto. In 1998 he joined the Templeton Oxford Seminars Steering Committee…
The guy is Templetonian up to his eyeballs. There seems to be no one in this “field” who is not.
Thomas Dixon replied again yesterday, which was generous and helpful of him. I think, though, that his work is more theologically-inflected than he wants to say here. Or maybe theologically-inflected isn’t the right way to put it, but it does seem to be part of this overall agenda to make a case that religion and science are “in harmony” and not in conflict – not in conflict in any way. I think they are in epistemic conflict, and Dr Dixon so far has not addressed that aspect of the issue.
It appears to be the case that all the people who are arguing this are from faculties of theology and/or Templeton-funded centres and institutes and the like, and are arguing for a particular conclusion, which is that religion and science are in harmony. I think that conclusion would be convenient for theology and religion, and not at all convenient for science. I think this agenda, if it is an agenda, should be open and public.
Eric MacDonald quoted us a bit from Dr Dixon’s Science and Religion: a Very Short Introduction.
I find it hard not to see it as a piece of religious apologetic, to be quite frank, although its author is an agnostic. I didn’t find the kind of detachment from the religious point of view that I would have expected, and I found it almost pervasive. So, when the Galileo issue was being discussed, there is a lot about realism and anti-realism, and about religion, like science, also wanting to provide knowledge about realities that lie behind the appearances of things. Take this quote, for instance:
In the religious case, what intervenes between the light hitting your retina and your thoughts about the glory of God is the lengthy history of a particular sacred text, and its reading and interpretation within a succession of human communities. …. Religious teachers, as much as scientific ones, try to show their pupils that there is an unseen world behind the observed one. (Locations 325-31)
There is a similar claim in Dr Dixon’s BBC article:
Science and religion have had the kind of close and troubled relationship you would expect between siblings or even spouses. They share not only wonder at the majesty of the world we can see, but also a desire to find out what’s behind it that we can’t.
Like Eric, I think that sounds like religious apologetics. It doesn’t sound like straightforward secular history. It’s flattering to religion. Religion does not have the same kind of desire to find out what’s behind the world we can see that science has. Religion doesn’t find things out; it transmits doctrine, and the doctrine itself is not a product of finding out, but of something more like legislation mixed with mythology.
I think Templeton and the ISSR and the other outfits are working very hard to inject this idea into the broader culture in the US and the UK (and no doubt elsewhere too, but we have names and places for some of the anglophone ones), and I think we should try to shine a strong light on this project.
Ophelia,
Thanks for being persistent on this topic. I think we’re uncovering some interesting stuff here.
There were two organizations that I refered to in the previous More on the Science-n-Religion thread, and I want to point out the following statements on their websites:
The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences: http://www.ctns.org/about.html
As you can see, I’ve emphasized in bold that there is a theological agenda going on here, and not a scientific one.
The European Society for the Study of Science and Theology:
http://www.esssat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=191&Itemid=55
and:
I’ve emphasised again how there is a theological agenda to bring religion and science together.
“As a matter of fact, science has given religion no instruction, it has merely issued prohibitions. It has warned religion that there are certain things it must not meddle with, certain departments on which it must not encroach. In this way religion has been forced farther and farther back, until it is left with what? Not with anything that can be known, or is known; it is left supreme in the kingdom of nowhere, ruling over an empire of nothing at all.
And so long as religion strives for a more tangible possession so long must there be a conflict between science and religion. But—”as the limits of possible cognition are established, the causes of possible conflict will diminish. And a permanent peace will be reached when science becomes fully convinced that its explanations are proximate and relative; while religion becomes fully convinced that the mystery it contemplates is ultimate and absolute.” So, when science has monopolised the entire field of human knowledge, actual and possible, and when religion is satisfied that it knows nothing, and never can know anything of the object of its worship, that it can offer nothing in the shape of counsel or advice, but that its function is to sit in owl-like solemnity, contemplating nothing, meanwhile offering man an eternal conundrum that he must everlastingly give up, then, and not till then, there will be peace between science and religion. And this is called a reconciliation. Mr. Spencer finds two combatants engaged in deadly conflict, he murders one and offers the other the corpse, with the hope that now they will live peacefully together. The scientist is asked to be content with all there is. The religious man is asked to find comfort in the reflection that science must eventually monopolise the entire field of knowledge, but that, in return, religion will be left free to work in an unknowable region, to occupy itself with an unknowable object, and to eternally cry “all is mystery” in an amended philosophic version of the Athanasian Creed.”
-Chapman Cohen (Theism or Atheism)
http://www.ctns.org/about_founder.html
Surprise, dig a bit deeper and Professor Robert J Russell, founder of The Center for Theology and the Natural Science both served previously on the Templeton Foundation Board of Advisors, and won the PCRS/Templeton Grant (surprise surprise). He was also Vice president of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology (surprise surprise).
Arthur Peacocke, one of the founders of The European Society for the Study of Science and Theology, also (surprise surprise) was a winner of a Templeton Grant.
Antje Jackelén, another founding member of ESSSAT, is the current president of ESSSAT, and founding member of the International Society for Religion and Science (ISSR).
Anyway, to get an idea about the literally jawdropping amount of money being handed out by the Templeton Foundation, and just how vast the empire is with religion interfering with science, please go here:
http://mediamattersaction.org/transparency/organization/John_Templeton_Foundation/grants
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Yet more science-n-religion http://dlvr.it/6qZfV […]
‘theologically inflected’? Don’t you mean ‘theologically infected’? Or were you just being polite?
Ah, well spotted Ophelia! And interesting further links Egbert.
I don’t want to get too paranoid about this – it’s easy to see conspiracies where there are none – but it’s the ‘science and religion’ phrase that alerts me. ‘Science and Religion’, not ‘Religion and Science’. A little thing, but indicative of the meme that is being promulgated, I think. Because NAs and gnus have had a lot of success at pointing out the raw conflict at the heart of the theist science project, they want to make it appear that, in fact, there is a lot of harmony between science and theist beliefs because, well, look at all these articles, programs and papers on the subject.
So, looking at a number of these articles, books and societies where that phrase is used, I’ve been surprised if Templeton isn’t involved in some capacity, somewhere in the background. Because they nearly always are.
“The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion was decisively challenged….” That adverb just doesn’t fit. A battle or a defeat or evidence can be decisive, but a challenge? Just a weasel word, designed to give the impression that the “challenge” proved something.
Yes I want to avoid paranoia too. It seems to me to be perfectly possible that there is straightforward history on this subject – it’s just that I haven’t seen any yet.
I’ve just started reading a book I found at a used bookstore a few days ago, published by Johns Hopkins – it could be secular, and simply inquiring as opposed to agenda-driven…but so far I’ve found some pretty tendentious ways of wording things, and I suspect that it’s not. To be continued.
Ophelia, I’m glad to see you’re not letting this go. I think this is a particularly important issue, because, so far as I can see now, anyway, there is a concerted attempt at writing revisionist history here. I will look at this more closely in my essay when I get to it, but the way that Thomas Dixon ‘rewrites’ (I think that is the right word) the story of Galileo’s condemnation and retraction is a very important first step towards rewriting history in a way not dissimilar to those who seek to rewrite the history of Nazism so that the Holocaust no longer looms so large. That’s a deliberately chosen comparison, because I think there is a serious degree of denialism going on. It might be thought, morally, to be in another league altogether, and so it is, but if you consider how Alister McGrath, for instance, white washes the Ancien Regime, and condemns the French Revolution because of the Terror, there are moral equivalences here that are, to too large a degree, being ignored.
To a large extent the “field” of “Science and Religion” is tied up with the PoMo movement of the eighties and nineties of the last century (and of course tied up with the very questionable “philosophy” of science of Thomas Kuhn). (It’s rather interesting, after having read so much fin de siecle stuff to have actually lived through a fin de siecle!) This is still something I need to work on, but I suspect that there is a real analogy between the denialism of the ‘science and religion’ crowd and the denialism of things like the ‘Institute for Historical Review’, only the latter is a marginalised bunch of anti-Jewish nuts, and the “field” of “Science and Religion” is on the way to becoming a respected academic speciality. So far as I can tell, anyway, “Science and Religion”, as a field of study, belongs, not to departments of history in the academy, but to theology departments (which, I would further argue, have no place at the university), since its obvious aim is not, as suggested, to show that there is are real areas of common ground between religion and science, but to show that religion can, with some mental gymnastics, be shown to be in some kind of harmony with science, and not to be philosophically inconsistent with it, as I think is the case. One of the things which convinces me of this is the fact that in Thomas Dixon’s book, one area of science is completely lacking, and that is the scientific study of religion itself. But this, in itself, indicates that what is taking place is really theology, and not a genuine inter-disciplinary study. But, as I say, I want to work this up a bit.
I did a little more research not only on Templeton but the top 50 foundations. And there is definitely something unique about Templeton. Most other foundations really are philanthropic, funding a great many worthy causes. The only exceptions were Lilly Endowment, Duke Endowment and the Robertson Foundation that seem to concentrate on religious organizations.
But Templeton does not do anything philanthropic, it uses considerable funds, often millions of dollars in fool’s errands. Wasted scientific researches, PR campaigns, book campaigns, the promotion of theology and science, right wing think tanks, etc. It also seems to have had a billion dollars of its assets disappear recently, since the death of John Templeton.
It’s difficult to call it a conspiracy, since you can find out what its been up to thanks to the link to mediamatters. It really does astonish me just how much money has been wasted away on such wasted efforts when there are major problems out there which could do with the money Templeton wastes. And Templeton puts his money everywhere and anywhere to do with religion into science.
In my opinion, nothing summarises this other than as Christopher Hitchens would say, ‘Religion poisons everything’ and that is exactly what Templeton is doing, it’s poisoning academia.
http://mediamattersaction.org/transparency/organization/John_Templeton_Foundation/grants
Thanks Egbert. Man…it takes forever to scroll down through the endless list of grants, and each of those has its own list – that’s a staggering number of grants.
Eric, right, but I think there is some presence in history departments too – but I’m not sure. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. This book – Science and Religion: a historical introduction ed. Gary B Frengren, Johns Hopkins 2002 – looks like history, but may well be a mix of history and theology, or a mix of history and other disciplines (since William Dembski wrote one article – !) including theology. The fact that it’s not clear would of course be part of the point. Sneaky bastards.
Interesting observations Eric; I look forward to more of your analysis.
Thanks for the link Egbert – quite a list!
A brief (unscientific!) analysis finds 240 references to ‘science and religion’ and only 24 of ‘religion and science’. I *think* that’s significant; we know that Templeton accommodate, but I think this hints of theism masquerading as science, else I would expect an equal amount of ‘religion and science’. Well, it’s an hypothesis that looks to me borne out by some of the papers I’ve seen from Templeton funded organisations.
A minor quibble with Dixon’s BBC article: religions generally do not seek to “find out”, but to know. The idea that lightning was the weapon of Zeus may have originated from a sense of wonder regarding the natural world, but the idea itself was merely an ad hoc explanation. This is a critical difference between religion and science. Religion seeks a comfortable (or even an uncomfortable) certainty at whatever cost, because people are encouraged to become psychologically dependent upon those answers. Within the practice of science, however, correspondence with the observable world is a very strong value, and so methods of resolving doubt within science are much more strongly geared towards producing real knowledge.
So I agree that the epistemic conflict is largely being ignored.
Templeton has been supporting a program of panel discussions on this for years in Ohio (note links to previous discussions in the sidebar). The program is currently run through the Department of Entomology at the Ohio State University, where the chair, Susan Fisher, is a prominent accommodationist. That department is also home to Glen Needham, a creationist (probably young earth) active in the effort to stuff ID creationism into the Ohio Science Standards some years ago and in the effort in 2005 to illegitimately slip a Ph.D. in science education to Bryan Leonard, a creationist (see here for an overview of that IDebacle).
Ophelia, re your remark:
No, I have no problem with this being a subject of history. That’s not a problem at all. In fact, if that were all it was then there would be no problem. But what is being suggested is that there is a special field of study, not history, not theology, perhaps not science, called ‘Science and Religion.’ This is what I want to question.
Of course, there are historical questions to be studied about the relationship between science and religion, or between religion and science. There are historical questions about religion’s relationships with all sorts of things: women, men, prostitution, sexuality, suffering, etc. You can write histories about anything, like histories of pets, histories of children’s games, etc., so the fact that the relationship between religion and science should be studied historically is fine.
Where I have the problem, and it comes out in what I said above, is the idea that there is a distinct field of study, an academic discipline, devoted to the study of science and religion. Religion has nothing to do with science, nor science with religion. This should be very clear. Even the idea that science can’t ask why questions — such as Why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing?– the so-called Big Questions, while it may be true (though Hawking would beg to differ), doesn’t give religion an advantage over science, doesn’t suggest that religion investigates parts of reality that science does not touch.
Indeed, there is no evidence that religion studies something that is real. Religious experience, so far as that goes, is just human experience which has been interpreted in terms of a supernatural reality. Originally, it was perhaps not thought of as supernatural at all, but just a kind of anthropomorphising of natural agency. And this is the problem, as I see it, with the suggestion that there is a field of study called “Science and Religion”. It’s the camel’s head in the tent. If you accept the head you’ll soon have to accept the hump (or the humps — which camels have — since we don’t really distinguish, any more, between dromedaries and camels) as well.
This obviously brings to mind another Templeton project, the book “Galileo Goes to Jail and other Myths about Science and Religion”.
There is an alliance of convenience between theists and postmodernists. It must be convenience alone since PoMo is a radical form of philosophical skepticism in all the various versions I’ve seen. What this amounts to is the postmodernist says that science truth claims are social constructions and theistic claims are, too. So theists interpret this as somehow favoring them. They’re right in a purely tactical sense. It works like political campaign advertising: drive down turnout, swaddle all discussion of issues in an impenetrable fog of dumbth, and live to fight another day.
Andrew G, that book already exists, I spotted a copy at the public library the other day and grabbed it.
Eric, quite – and in fact it does seem to be a sub-topic within history and historiography (inquiry into how historians inquired into the subject in the past). I think the Johns Hopkins book is at least partly genuine history and historiography – genuine in the sense of non-apologetic. Article 1 has a whiff of apologetics about it but article 2 doesn’t. Article 2 is actually genuinely interesting – I’ve always liked historiography.
Thanks for that, Richard.
It’s tempting to think there should be such a thing as a Templetonwatch site, so that we could have one central place to put all this.
All: don’t miss RBH’s comment (14), which got held up for a bit because of links.
Fallibilistic, truth-seeking inquiry — in science, philosophy, history, sociology, or whatever — bears only a passing resemblance to theology in any form. Yes, there are theological books and papers and conferences which include discussions which to a casual or biased observer seem to be truth-seeking, but they are not. Theology never engages in genuine argumentation, where conclusions are always in question and must be supported by the best available evidence and reasoning. Instead, theologians rationalize: They pick and choose bits of evidence and reasoning which support their pre-conceived and never-to-be-genuinely-questioned “conclusions,” and tease out various implications of those “conclusions” without ever questioning their truth; they ignore or suppress all evidence and reasoning which fails to support a desired “conclusion,” and avoid any and all undesirable implications of their “conclusions” with equal care. This, I presume, is why Eric McDonald thinks (comment #9 above) that theology deserves no place within universities: Theology is a fundamentally dishonest discipline, desperately pretending to do what it manifestly does not — engage in truth-seeking inquiry.
Neither academia nor academics are perfect, of course, and certainly individual scholars and even whole sub-fields of academic inquiry can slide and have slid from genuine truth-seeking argumentation to self-serving rationalization. But when they do so, they fail — and they are seen to have failed, and their failures are exposed and criticized by others in their discipline, or by other disciplines, or by future generations of scholars. Theologians never “fail” in this sense, and are almost never called to task by other theologians for their failure to adhere to standards of truth-seeking inquiry, because the entire discipline depends on and consists in rationalization instead of genuine truth-seeking argumentation to begin with. That’s why we see the same tired and long-disproved pseudo-arguments trotted out by theologians again and again and again with only the slightest surface-level variations. (I wonder, has anyone compiled a comprehensive “Index of tired old theological arguments” to parallel the TalkOrigins “Index of Creationist Claims”?) Intellectually honest inquiry demands new arguments when the old ones are refuted.
Certainly it is possible, and indeed quite common, for academics to engage in genuinely truth-seeking inquiry into religion using the methods of anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and so on — but theology does not and cannot by its very nature belong on that list. The closer a given theologian comes to honest inquiry, the further he or she gets from the “theo-” in theology — until eventually that theologian’s conception of “God” becomes little more than a metaphor, and one is forced to wonder why the otherwise honest inquirer continues to use the word. (The prime example of such an otherwise honest theologian would be John Selby Spong, but there are very few others like him.) Perhaps the most dishonest theologian of all is the one who admits most or all of the arguments that render “God” into naught but a loose metaphor for a vague feeling, but then continues to pretend that — somehow or other — profound and important truths that ought to guide our lives somehow spring from and rely upon the airy nothing to which “God” is reduced to by their own admission. (Karen Armstrong is perhaps the most egregious example, but there are many of her ilk.)
Thus, everyone pushing this “Science and Religion” clap-trap is lying, perhaps to themselves as well as others. What they are trying to bring together is not science and religion, but science and theology. They are not engaged in any sort of intellectually honest, truth-seeking inquiry into the intersection of science and religion, such as the scientific or historical study of religious beliefs and institutions. Instead, they are trying very, very hard to ignore — and to encourage others to ignore — the profound and fundamental conflict between theology’s perpetual and inevitable rationalizing and science’s demand for honest reasoning: That’s why theologians never, ever mention “the E-word” — epistemology. (Well, perhaps with one exception.)
Excellent thought. I had toyed with a separate blog, but I don’t think I’d have time to update it – there’s so much Templetonia. But I’m going to keep a weather eye out for it, and keep checking suspicious articles.
Yes, I was thinking of a pooled resources site, inspired by RBH and Panda’s Thumb (my thinking was inspired by them, I mean). A commons thing. A kind of unBioLogos.
So can anyone identify personnel/program overlaps? It seems that postmodern philosophers of science, having been marginalized for some fifteen years, would love to have access to Templeton money, but may not be a good fit.
I’m not worried about that. This is about theologically liberal Christian academics trying to evade the incompatibility of science and religion while marking a boundary between themselves and fundamentalists. Although they welcome interested scientists, they’re not trying to undermine science. Frankly, most of the discord around science and religion is being sown by secular accommodationists.
Ken:
True. Very true.
Jerry A, Coyne has weighed into this debate with an article on USA Today:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2010-10-11-column11_ST_N.htm
To be honest, Dixon’s quoted writings feel to me as though I’m reading an atheist’s high school essay on religion that’s trying to find some gentle common ground. It certainly comes off as a bit forced and artificial, but I actually read it more as apologizing for being ecumenical generally than religion in particular.
Well, to be fair, I think we have to remember that Dixon’s book is in the Very Short Introductions series, so it is deliberately short and deliberately elementary. But I do think there is a fairly widespread tendency to reread the historical relationship between science and religion in an indulgent way: excusing the church’s repressive response to science in its infancy, when it was both less obvious that the findings of science were sound, and when the church itself was readjusting itself to a new cultural climate in which it no longer played the dominant role in leading the intellectual life of Europe.
However, to those who suggest that the discord around science and religion is mainly the product of secular accommodationists, with the greatest respect I don’t think this is true. Certainly, there are accommodationist noises coming from more secular people, but they are responding, I think, to a fairly large-scale project amongst the religious to claim a kind of retrospective role as leaders of the intellectual ferment of early modern Europe (and its satellites).
You can see this, for example, in the kinds of claims that are made for Islamic civilisation, and its role in preserving and extending Greek philosophy and science. I really don’t know enough about it to say, but it seems to me that, as legatees of a fairly advanced Christian/Zoroastrian civilisation, Islam’s contribution to “Islamic” science may have been less than is sometimes claimed. In fact, during the height of the Muslim imperial period administration and civil affairs were carried out largely by more accomplished non-Muslims, and I think it is arguable that the loss of power and energy in Islamic “civilisation” coincides largely with increased Islamisation of what had once been a sophisticated intellectual civilisation. But this is only a guess based on a fairly limited exposure to the secondary literature.
In the same way, the fact that most seventeenth century scientists were also believers does not necessarily mean that religion itself contributed much to early scientific discovery. In fact, Newton seems to have made a fairly sharp distinction between his role as scientist (natural philosopher), and his role as a student of biblical prophecy, and other arcane matters having to do with religion. But we can see how this transformed even religious thought when we consider that Bishop Butler, in his Analogy of Religion (1736), begins by pointing out how dependent we are on probabilistic reasoning. Until then, religious thought had been unrepentantly apodictic and absolute. This was, in itself, an accommodation of religion to scientific priorities, and this tendency has strengthened since the 18th century.
What we are seeing now, by an intellectually beleaguered religious establishment, accustomed to playing second fiddle to science, is — I suspect largely because of Islam’s rather high-profile impact in the West, and the rather spectatular success of the evangelical drive in the US — a renewed sense of religion’s importance, and the possibility of reaching some kind of accord with science as, in a way, science’s trusted older brother, with its own vital contribution to make to the cultural project of which science is only a part. That’s why there is so much emphasis placed on religion’s complementarity.
Unfortunately, I suspect, secular accommodationists are those who don’t see how the role that religion has played in Western civilisation can be replaced by anything else. (Think here of the disagreement between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine who embody this dispute in some of the most energetic prose written during the Enlightenment.) To some extent I can understand the concern, because cultural entities like religions are not the products of thought, however rational, but are, in a sense, the organic outcome of centuries of development and common life. And the history of revolutionary attempts to replace such organic social arrangements with more rationally constructed ones has not been encouraging.
I’ve also toyed with the idea of creating a site exposing the Templeton Foundation. The thing that worries me, however, is potential legal action. If a “Templeton Watch” website started to make an impact on their reputation, I wouldn’t put it past them to bring out the lawyers. They certainly have what it takes to win a lawsuit (i.e. lots of money).
“the history of revolutionary attempts to replace such organic social arrangements with more rationally constructed ones has not been encouraging.”
In Europe there have been two different approaches to replacing normative religious thought amongst the public. The first was the deliberate moves of state communism – something that clearly failed if we examine how quickly the populations of Russia, Poland or Serbia reverted to the previously silent religions of their regions. The second approach has been a more gradual approach seen in Scandinavia and western Europe, that has led to more open criticism of church and removal of religious dogma as something widely interpreted as moral. I suspect the Catholic churches attitude to family planning caused such discord amongst those who live in modern industrial societies that it was inevitable for respect in the church to erode – land before the child sex allegations were revealed. In Scandinavia a greater emphasis on socialistic welfare systems made the church there unnecessary and the increase in prosperity and education of society has allowed for an introspection that doesn’t help the religious who seem to do a lot better during times of strife.
Civilisation is advanced through technology and reason. How has religion or ‘revelation’ ever advanced civilisation? How did Christianity, for example, ever advance civilisation? When civilisations or cultures fall, we certainly see the rise of new religions, even state religions. North Korea, for example, is stuck in a time loop dating back fifty years to the USSR era, because it fosters a state religion and a cult of personality.
All these things would be excellent points to make as a historian. What began the industrial revolution, was it reason or revelation? What put man on the moon, or put your PC onto your desktop, your iphone in your pocket? Did the invention of the printing press advance education? Did religion and prayer defeat the bubonic plague?
Sigmund, I had thought to mention the gradual change that has taken place in the Scandavian countries as an example of where things might go from here in places like Canada and the US. Unfortunately, since during times of prosperity North American society in general has not taken that route (though Canada has at least socialised medicine to a large extent), the likelihood of a kind of welfare socialism developing here now is fairly remote. I have not had the chance to look very closely at how the community support system in Denmark and Sweden (I hear less of Norway) has developed so that the religious community has tended to erode; but, certainly, the income disparity and uncertainty of life in North America for large numbers of people has greatly strengthened religious community, so that it looks as though there may not now be an available surrogate. My point is simply that religion obviously plays an important social role, and that for unbelievers to ignore that role is shortsighted. I think many do.
Egbert, I hope your comments weren’t aimed at me in particular, because I did not really question the things that you are affirming, though I think it is only fair to point out that, while technology and reason may be thought to have contributed to the growth of early civilisations, the glue that held people together for great communal projects was, to a large, degree, religious. I think that there are reasonably thought to be substitutes for this role that would more humanely foster human flourishing, but technology and reason are probably not sufficient in themselves to perform it, vital and indispensable as they are.
G (@ comment 20, which got delayed because of links, sorry) – having read some of this Johns Hopkins collection of S & R articles, I don’t think everyone in the enterprise is secretly doing theology. Lots of people are, but there is some genyoowine history in this collection.
Ah, yes, but then it has to be ‘the history of science and religion’, or the history of the relationships between science and religion, not ‘science and religion’ simplicter. That’s the devious part, because the suggestion is that there is an equivalence here, that each in its own ‘magisterium’ is carrying on the work of rational enquiry, and I think this cannot be said about religion, or at least about the “objects” of religion, the referents of religious language, or the inferred entities of theology or “religious experience”.
I was just listening to the Point Of Inquiry podcast of the debate between PZ and Mooney “moderated” by Jennifer Michael Hecht. She did such a bad job of it, rambling accommodationist rants, tag-teaming with Mooney against PZ etc. that I wondered if she didn’t know the role of a moderator or whether she had an agenda.
A quick look on her website turned up this:
“Jennifer Michael Hecht was the 2008 Templeton Research Fellow.”
They really are getting in everywhere.
@ Ophelia #32: If I were a dishonest, agenda-pushing theologian engaged in a desperate attempt to make my attempts to co-opt the prestige of science under the guise of encouraging cooperation look intellectually and academically legitimate, I would certainly make every effort to publish non-theological history and sociology and such in my anthologies. I’ll wager good money that, even so, any genyoowine history published in the book you cite has been carefully chosen not to highlight any of the real and substantial ways in which religious persons and institutions have opposed the progress of science where it intruded on their dogmas – or that if any of the historians do focus on specific incidents such as l’affaire Galileo, they dishonestly play down the fundamental hostility to free and open-ended truth-seeking exhibited by the Church and its agents throughout.
It occurred to me yesterday that this Templeton stuff comes up so much that no one even has to imply or to suggest that there’s anything wrong with being associated with Templeton. There’s so much of it that you can really just keep up what you’ve been doing, pointing out anyone trying to make nice between science and religion who has Templeton ties. The fact that they have tentacles wiggling away under every rock you’ve checked so far is, I think, enough without idle speculation about wider goals or anything. You’d have to already be committed to their agenda not to see something creepy about them, I think.
“So and so is another advocate for science/religion compatibility receiving money from Templeton. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.” The readers can draw their own conclusions.
OFF TOPIC:
Can science and religion coexist peacefully? This is a good question to start an interesting discussion. See how it was answered by many smart people at my website:
http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/life/donotmix.html
Ludwik Kowalski
Professor Emeritus
Montclair State University