Customer Reviews

Science and Religion

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I attended the "Science and Religion" symposium held in Atlanta in 2001 and it was excellent. But this book is much more than a mere summary of the symposium. The book also includes many contributions by authors who did not attend, such as a chapter on Nonoverlapping Magisteria by the late Stephen Jay Gould and a chapter on Intelligent design by William A. Dembski.

At issue is whether religion and science have anything to say to each other and what happens when they tread on each other's turf. It has been argued that science has no business intruding into the realm of religion. But the nature of "science" is poorly understood by many people. It is not a body of knowledge, but rather a means of acquiring knowledge. Some religious claims cannot be be addressed by science because no means are available to investigate them. But on those issues where a means does exist, science has consistently forced religion to retreat and revise itself.

This book should be required reading by any school granting degrees in science, and it should be placed in every high school library.

Science and religion are NOT "Nonoverlapping Magisteria." Religion does make claims that science can neither rebut nor even investigate. But it also makes claims that can be and have been disproven. Either the transportation of a Catholic saint/goddess directly to the sky without passing GO and without collecting $200 was a verifiable fact of history, or it did not happen. The dogma that a god played a role in the origin of the universe is religion, and as such is not subject to scientific investigation. The claim that the universe is less than ten thousand years old has nothing to do with religion. It is bad science.
But dogmatic religion is one thing. The belief that the universe was intelligently designed, but not necessarily by the god of religion, is something else. Arguments for Intelligent Design are presented by believers, and rebutted by scientists.
Why is belief in religion so much higher among the less educated, and so much lower among natural scientists? More than one author offers a credible answer.
Other books have considered the question of whether science and religion are compatible, but never so effectively. While "Science and Religion" will not cure incurables, it will give the pragmatically religious something to think about. Buy it or borrow it, but read it.

A MUST READ for anyone interested about magisteria of science and religion. Well written essays (as one would expect with Kurtz as the editor) presenting both sides of this discussion. Never more relevant than today when religionists are making the claim about "biblical science", "creation science" (an oxymoron) ad infinitum. America can be a strange land where mythology and fact are allowed to mingle in some minds. This book will make you THINK.

I am not a Christian but I still was offended by the one-sidedness of this collection of essays, most of which first appeared in Skeptical Inquirer. The volume is titled "Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?" but a more honest title would be something like "Scientists' Views of Religion: How to Leave it Behind". Out of the 39 essays, I counted barely a handful that defended religious views. There is a place for such a collection, but editors should have been more honest about their bias. That said, the essays did provide insight into the 'science overcomes religion' perspective. Especially helpful was Gould's essay presenting his famous 'non-overlapping magisteria' argument (that religion and science are not incompatable because they preside over entirely separate domains of values vs facts), and a rejoinder by Dawkins.

A number of views on the subject. Quite interesting. My own view is that religion and science can coexist. It's the radical views that get in the way of intelligent thinking!

This is an all star collection of essays by some very eminent scientists and others, including Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, James Lovelock, Daniel Dennett, etc. Thrown in for "balance" or fairness are essays by some others who espouse views decidedly not congenial with those of Editor Paul Kurtz, who is the founder of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

Most noticeable among the latter is William A. Dembski a mathematician and a well known proponent of Intelligent Design. I want to start with his essay which is entitled, "Skepticism's Prospects for Unseating Intelligent Design."

Immediately in the title we see employed one of the familiar tactics of the now discredited creationists, namely a statement presented slyly as "a given" about something that is in fact untrue. Dembski has skeptics (or actually evolutionary biology) attempting to "unseat" Intelligent Design. This is bit like the tail trying to wag the dog. The main thrust of Dembski's argument is that more Americas believe in design than in evolution. This "counting heads" sort of argument is obviously not science. It is an attempt to politicize science, to make what is true dependent upon what a majority of people think is true.

Dembski writes, "To allow an unevolved intelligence a place in the world is, according to skepticism, to send the world into a tailspin. It is to exchange unbroken natural law for caprice and thereby destroy science." (p. 91)

This is insincere since what Dembski really is saying is "To allow God a place..." Science would be glad to allow God a place in the world if it were somehow established that God exists. So far, after many, many centuries of trying, no one has been able to provide any evidence that God exists. Furthermore if God should become scientifically manifested, the skeptic's world would not be thrown into a tailspin. Rather skeptics would have a little less to be skeptical about!

What Dembski is really asserting here is the simple statement "If God exists, then skeptics think science will be destroyed." It's really laughable how the euphemistic expressions for God that the Intelligence Designers contort themselves into tend to turn their prose into babblelese.

Dembski finishes with some bogus claims for ID, some satirical "action points" for skeptics, and then returns to his main theme: "Poll after poll indicates that for most people evolution does not provide a compelling vision of life and the world." (p. 97)

Well, science move aside! The people have voted! Reminds me of the bumper sticker, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."

More typical of the profound thought and expression in the book is the brilliant essay by Steven Weinberg entitled, "A Designer Universe?" This essay includes the famous statement: "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil--that takes religion." (p. 40)

Another nice Weinbergian expression is this as a kind of comment on the idea that God gave humans free will as a way to account for evil in the world while maintaining an all powerful and benevolent God: "It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors?" (p. 38)

Still another is this as a counter to the idea of God the Designer: "if...you believe in a God who is jealous, or loving, or intelligent, or whimsical, then you still must confront the question `Why?'" (p. 38) Consequently, such a God is not the entire answer and really begs the question, "Who designed him?"

This point is generalized by asking "Why is this theory compelling and not another? Why quantum mechanics and not Newtonian mechanics?" Weinberg concludes, "So there seems to be an irreducible mystery that science will not eliminate." (p. 33) This mystery, this uncertainty, is what creationists would like to eliminate. But I believe the mystery is part of the human condition and something to revel in, not something to sweep under the rug with authoritarian certainty.

Another outstanding essay is by Victor J. Stenger, "Anthropic Design: Does the Cosmos Show Evidence of Purpose?" He concludes with this beautiful view of the cosmos: "The hundred billion galaxies of our visible universe, each with a hundred billion stars, is but a grain of sand on the Sahara that exists beyond our horizon, grown out of that single, original bubble of false vacuum. An endless number of such bubbles can very well exist, each itself nothing but a grain of sand on the Sahara of all existence. On such a Sahara, nothing is too improbable to have happened by chance." (p. 45)


One of the most straightforward and appealing statements in favor of science is this from David A. Shotwell in his essay "From the Anthropic Principle to the Supernatural": "If you admit the supernatural into your calculations, anything goes. That is why a supernatural explanation is useless to a scientist, however pious he may be on Sundays. It provides no direction for research, suggests no testable hypotheses, and gives no reason to expect one result rather than another...." (p. 49)

I'm running out of space, but be sure and read Daniel Dennett's profound and witty homage to science entitled "Why Getting It Right Matters: How Science Prevails." Here's a quote: "Alongside our tools for agriculture, building, warfare, and transportation, we have created a technology of truth: science." (p. 156)

Here's another about "a standard of truth [from Plato] to be aspired to by all truth seekers." This standard is "heavily relied upon, even in matters of life and death--by the most vigorous opponents of science. (Or do you know a church that keeps track of its flock, and their donations, without benefit of arithmetic?)" (p. 157)

Nearly all the essays in this collection are either transcripts of papers read at a "Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?" conference or reprints of essays that originally appeared in either the "Skeptical Inquirer" or "Free Inquiry." As such, they're addressed to an educated, nonprofessional audience. But for the most part, they're rigorously argued pieces that challenge the reader to take a close look at the relationship between scientific and the religious worldviews.

The minority opinion among the authors, most famously expressed in Stephen Jay Gould's essay (pp. 191-203) defending his NOMA (nonoverlapping magisteria) thesis, is that science and religion aren't incompatible because they ask separate questions, science dealing with facts and religion with values. Paul Kurtz argues (pp. 351-59) for a different kind of compatibility, one that recognizes that religious language is aesthetic but wholly mythical, and thus offers no serious challenge to religion. But most of the authors collected here tend to agree to one degree or another with Jacob Pandian's ("The Dangerous Quest for Cooperation between Science and Religion") suggestion that academic departments of religion be renamed "departments of superstition (p. 171), or Steven Weinberg's ("A Designer Universe?") claim that he's "all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment" (p. 40).

The overriding reason for dismissing the truth-value of religious claims is the authors' commitment to methodological naturalism, and the merits of that methodology is defended again and again in their essays. Part I uses the method to deny the cogency of design and cosmological arguments for the existence of God. Part II uses the method to criticize ID and creationism. Part III offers the most explicit defenses of naturalism found in the volume. Part IV focuses on the NOMA thesis. Part V applies the naturalist/physicalist method to questions of after-death existence. Part VI offers natural history explanations for the popularity of religious belief. Part VI offers essays that find great meaning and purposefulness in looking at the world through the lens of methodological naturalism.

As one would imagine, the quality of the articles is uneven--the contributions by Feynman and Lovelock, for example, are so flimsy that one wonders why they were included in the first place--but overall quite good. Especially noteworthy are the essays by Victor Stenger on the anthropic principle, Quentin Smith on big bang, Dennett on scientific method, the debate between Gould and Dawkins on NOMA, and Morton Hunt on the biological roots of God-belief. Editor Paul Kurtz's introduction to the collection is excellent.

My only reservation about the collection is that none of the authors really do a critical meta-analysis of methodological naturalism. An argument could be made that such an inquiry is outside the volume's scope. But it seems to me that an essay devoted to an explicit scrutiny of the strengths and limitations of naturalism as a method--and perhaps also a comparison of it methodological to ontological naturalism--would've been helpful.

When I ordered this book from Amazon I was very suspicious that the essays would be disrespectful, scornful, and would twist facts and write half-truths like politicians do when they are running for election. I wondered why I was wasting my money. I myself am a believer in a personal God. I have always felt sad that religion and science have a recent history of antagonism, instead of mutual respect for their own spheres. Both sides are attempting to search for truth whether it is of the material world or of the subtle ethereal spiritual world. A few of the essays were written by a few of the 39% of scientists that are also believers. Usually they belong to the main-line churches. The other are written by atheists or near atheists. I was very surprised and pleased because the articles were by and large very clear, fair, respectful, and written with integrity. The writers would calmly, clearly explain their own view and often explain the reasoning or logic of the "other side" as well for fairness and contrast. Now I can understand better why many scientists and people in general are disbelievers and I respect them. But their descriptions of the universe filled me with awe, and I still am a Believer.

This is probably the best collection of writings/speeches/lectures ever compiled on the subject of religion's incompatability with science.
It is a "must read" for anyone struggling to believe the unbelievable. When you finish these chapters, you will NOT believe the unbelievable.

Excellent, rational, well reasoned arguments, addressing the root cause for the past and ongoing "war" between science and religion; i.e. that war that only exists between the rational methodology of science - seeking the understanding of the physical world - and that of the irrational psuedo science - anchored in fundalmentalism - now masquerading with its new monica: "creation science".