Selling Out Science

[Ian David]

OP-ED
Selling Out Science
Sam Harris

The following op-ed is from Volume 26, Issue 1 of Free Inquiry


With the miasma of “Intelligent Design” slowly poisoning our intellectual discourse, it is amazing to consider that a significant percentage of scientists—40 percent!—still believe that reason and faith are compatible. Science, we are often told, “cannot prove that God does not exist”; religion and science “address different questions”; there are two “magisteria” given for human contemplation, and, as luck would have it, they do not overlap. The United States is now the most technologically advanced society in the history of the world, and yet nearly half of its citizens—45 percent—and some considerable number of its leaders will probably ignore the current debate over “Intelligent Design”—because they are old-school creationists who believe that our species was made out of dirt in the year 4004 b.c.e. by the hand of an almighty god.


There is a conflict between science and religion, and it is zero-sum. Surely it is time that scientists and other intellectuals stopped disguising this fact. Indeed, the incompatibility of reason and faith has been a self-evident feature of human cognition and public discourse for centuries. Either one has good reasons for what one strongly believes, or one does not. People of all creeds naturally recognize the primacy of reasons and resort to reasoning and evidence wherever they can. When rational inquiry supports the creed, it is always championed; when it poses a threat, it is derided. It is only when the evidence for a religious doctrine is thin or nonexistent, or there is compelling evidence against it, that its adherents invoke “faith.” Otherwise, they simply cite the reasons for their beliefs (“The New Testament confirms Old Testament prophecy,” “I saw the face of Jesus in a window,” “We prayed, and our daughter’s cancer went into remission”). Such reasons are generally inadequate, but they are better than no reasons at all. Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail. In a world that has been shattered—utterly—by mutually incompatible religious beliefs . . . in a nation that is growing increasingly beholden to Iron Age conceptions of God, the end of history, the return of Jesus, and the immortality of the soul . . . this lazy partitioning of our discourse into matters of reason and matters of faith is now unconscionable.

It would be one thing if the appeasers of religious irrationality today were all cranks, but many are not. No less a scientist than Francis Collins (the director of the Human Genome Project for the United States) is now happily encamped on the wrong side in the culture war. While Collins knows better than to endorse Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolutionary theory, his authority as a scientist comes swaddled in piety:


"I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature. . . . If God, who is all powerful and who is not limited by space and time, chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create you and me, who are we to say that wasn’t an absolutely elegant plan? . . . Science’s tools will never prove or disprove God’s existence."

More:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=harris_26_1

Sam Harris is the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. He can be reached through his Web site at
www.samharris.org.

E-mail this article to a friend
http://www.secularhumanism.org/email.php?section=library&page=harris_26_1

[Birthmark]

1. Gods can be disproven

...at least to the same degree as we've disproven Creationism. The meta-concept of "GOD" can't be, of course, due to the fact that that concept actually has no definition that can be tested. However, there are many gods that CAN be disproven, including some versions of the Christian god, either logically or based upon evidence if real world claims that can be tested are made for a particular god.

On the whole, though, I agree with the article. :)

[Crazy Dave]

3. You ever notice how boiling red in the face a person gets when...

>>as we've disproven Creationism<< is brought to their attention?

I had a guy ready to totally implode one day and he did result to name calling when I, in my opinion proved my case by showing him proof that even bacteria evolves and adapts to survive and get stronger. Look at all the new strains of illnesses, immune to the old vaccines, etc. Simple as that is to see you still got folks wanting to re-live the "Crusades" again.

[Crazy Dave]

2. I've told people....

This is more important with more damaging long term effects than the "it's a Christmas/Holiday Tree" war which in my opinion is a clever distraction. Get it in the media, get people consumed in it, worrying and losing sleep over it, then when nobody's looking....shove intelligent design right up their poop-chutes and they'll never know what hit them and they'll be wondering how in the world it got snuck by them so easily.

Priorities!

[yellowcanine]

4. Author is only correct if one subscribes to the faith = belief paradigm

If one instead sees faith as the act of trusting God and acting accordingly science is not a threat - indeed science is celebrated as a way of better understanding God's creation. It is possible to have faith and trust God without really understanding who God is. We can have faith that God will reveal himself/herself to us as we have need, that he/she will not abandon us. That is faith, not believing something that contradicts what our rational mind tells us true.

[papau]

9. Very True - there is no problem between Science and trusting God

:-)

[Celebration]

5. Culture War

Only the extremists want a culture war. Most of us want a place where people can practice their belief systems or lack of belief systems without either interference or promotion by the government--it's that simple. This has nothing to do with science until one set of extremists tries to pretend that religion and philosophy ARE science. But let's face it--science is not religion or philosophy either. I've had it with culture wars. The war in Iraq is already too much to handle.

[htuttle]

6. He's wrong about at least one thing

We are no longer the 'most technologically advanced society on Earth'. By any measure, Japan is far more advanced than we are, and I'd put several Scandanavian countries right up there, too.

Don't tell the 'children' about that, though...

[Crazy Dave]

8. >>Japan is far more advanced than we are

They should be. The majority of Japan's engineers and scientists study and get their degrees from US universities.

[comradebillyboy]

7. Mr. Harris States:

"It would be one thing if the appeasers of religious irrationality today were all cranks, but many are not. No less a scientist than Francis Collins (the director of the Human Genome Project for the United States) is now happily encamped on the wrong side in the culture war. While Collins knows better than to endorse Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolutionary theory, his authority as a scientist comes swaddled in piety:


"I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature. . . . If God, who is all powerful and who is not limited by space and time, chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create you and me, who are we to say that wasn’t an absolutely elegant plan? . . . Science’s tools will never prove or disprove God’s existence.""

Now I am an athiest with a solid scientific education, but to demand that all scientists forgo faith is a bit absurd. This kind of sillyness gives us athiests a bad name. Pope Ratzo wrote the current Catholic doctrine on science which fully accepts evolution and big bang cosmology.

Here's what Ratzo writes, and this is the official Catholic Church doctrine:

"62. The endeavor to understand the universe has marked human culture in every period and in nearly every society. In the perspective of the Christian faith, this endeavor is precisely an instance of the stewardship which human beings exercise in accordance with God's plan. Without embracing a discredited concordism, Christians have the responsibility to locate the modern scientific understanding of the universe within the context of the theology of creation. The place of human beings in the history of this evolving universe, as it has been charted by modern sciences, can only be seen in its complete reality in the light of faith, as a personal history of the engagement of the triune God with creaturely persons.
63. According to the widely accepted scientific account, the universe erupted 15 billion years ago in an explosion called the “Big Bang” and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Later there gradually emerged the conditions necessary for the formation of atoms, still later the condensation of galaxies and stars, and about 10 billion years later the formation of planets. In our own solar system and on earth (formed about 4.5 billion years ago), the conditions have been favorable to the emergence of life. While there is little consensus among scientists about how the origin of this first microscopic life is to be explained, there is general agreement among them that the first organism dwelt on this planet about 3.5-4 billion years ago. Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism. Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution. While the story of human origins is complex and subject to revision, physical anthropology and molecular biology combine to make a convincing case for the origin of the human species in Africa about 150,000 years ago in a humanoid population of common genetic lineage. However it is to be explained, the decisive factor in human origins was a continually increasing brain size, culminating in that of homo sapiens. With the development of the human brain, the nature and rate of evolution were permanently altered: with the introduction of the uniquely human factors of consciousness, intentionality, freedom and creativity, biological evolution was recast as social and cultural evolution." see INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL COMMISSION
COMMUNION AND STEWARDSHIP:Human Persons Created in the Image of God


Seems like a pretty reasonable position to me. In the United States maybe as much as 10% of the population are athiests. We are not in a position to demand, nor would it be ethical to demand that all scientists reject religious faith. All we can legitimatly ask is that scientists adhere to the established scientific method.

Athiests have no more right to demand ideological purity than do fundamentalist christians.

[papau]

10. :-)

:-)

[Ian David]

11. Darksided! Darksided! n/t