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Science and Religion Can and Do Mix, Mostly
coondoggie writes "A recent Rice University study found that in one of the more vitriolic social (and increasingly political) battlegrounds, science v. religion, there is more common ground that most folks believe. In fact, according to the study, only 15% of scientists at major U.S. research universities see religion and science as always in conflict."
Discarding scientific knowledge because of a book written originally for a nomadic group of shepherds is ridiculous.
Discarding the moral teachings that have been handed down over thousands of years is equally ridiculous.
The more interesting statistic is the percentage of "religious" people who think that there is conflict.
After having read the article, I am not convinced that the questions asked showed that there was common ground at all. It may well be that scientists recognise that religion and science are orthogonal and therefore do not conflict.
"Science adjusts it’s beliefs based on what’s observed...
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved." -Tim Minchin
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
ALWAYS in conflict? ALWAYS? To anyone who has ever been part of the educational system, and has gotten used to taking multiple choice tests, the word "ALWAYS" when applied to something like science/religion is a big red flag.
Finding that 15% agree with an "always" statement in that context is rather an amazing find.
Ask the question in terms of "overwhelming frequency" or some other next-to-absolutist statement, and you'll get more honest answers. But this report on the study, at least, only presented the "ALWAYS(15)/SOMETIMES(70)/NEVER(15)" range, which doesn't seem useful at all.
With the statement presented, and the specific granularity of statements allowed, this seems more like quote-mining to minimize the perception of conflict than an honest study.
Ryan Fenton
Thomas Aquinas, SUMMA THEOLOGICA, 1265 AD: “Among the philosophical sciences one is speculative the other practical [natural philosophy], nevertheless sacred doctrine [Roman Catholicism] includes both; as God, by one and the same science, knows both Himself and His works.”
This basically states that if you are understanding science properly, you are understanding God's works properly. And conversely, if you understand God's works, you will let science progress to understand God's works, as God and science are one in the same.
That compromise in thinking eventually led to the Renaissance.
The idea that science and religion don't mix is largely an invention of fundamentalist Christianity, starting around 1900 or so. Individuals on both sides of the fence have talked about the compatibility and value of both disciplines - Augustine said hundreds of years ago that we shouldn't discard a truth about the world because of a metaphorical bible story, and Einstein defended the value of religion in a very well articulated paper, although he was quick to point out potential dangers there.
Most scientists I've talked to appreciate just how much we don't know about the world, and aren't the kind of people to push beliefs on others. They have an attitude of live and let live, more or less, which is a fairly reasonable way to go about your life.
The keyword is "always". When you use an absolute, it will change peoples' answers. If you were to ask the same question in the form of "are science and religion sometimes/usually at conflict?", you will see a much different result. That being said, there is really nothing to be seen here.
AccountKiller
Actually, there's much less of a perception that evolution and religion are in conflict in most of the Muslim world than in the US. There are even a number of Muslims who interpret certain verses of the Qur'an as describing evolution. Turkey's really the only country with a history of evolution denial, and they picked it up from the US. Similarly, there are starting to be anti-evolution movements in other Muslim countries, but it's an idea that's been spreading with the influence of American culture.
Similarly, there are starting to be anti-evolution movements in other Muslim countries, but it's an idea that's been spreading with the influence of American culture.
How does that work? I think it more likely that scientific thought and ideas are starting to threaten the more dogmatic in the midst of their culture and they're just repeating the same defensive behaviors that characterize the Western creationist movement for the past couple of centuries. It's one thing when a remote culture has beliefs that compete with your own, it's another thing when those beliefs are growing in strength in your own culture.
The only aspect that I think could be due to US cultural influence is the variety of counter arguments available for the taking. Why do the work of thinking up your own counterarguments when you can reuse some old ones from the creationists?
Of course science and religion can mix and they should!
Let me quote Abdulbaha, son of the founder of the Bahai religion, a growing religious and social movement with more than six million followers:
If religious beliefs and opinions are found contrary to the standards of science, they are mere superstitions and imaginations; for the antithesis of knowledge is ignorance, and the child of ignorance is superstition. Unquestionably there must be agreement between true religion and science. If a question be found contrary to reason, faith and belief in it are impossible, and there is no outcome but wavering and vacillation.
Quite a strong statement for being from a major religious leader a hundred years ago. Also:
This gift [intelligence and reasoning] giveth man the power to discern the truth in all things, leadeth him to that which is right, and helpeth him to discover the secrets of creation
Finally:
Religion and science are the two wings upon which man's intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.
The only reason that science and religion doesn't seem to mix is that too many religious leaders stick to their dogmas and traditions even in face of human and scientific progress. Religions role in this world is to develop and foster spirituality, morality and selflessness so we can create a fair and just society and it can only do so if it keeps evolving and improving with new knowledge and understandings. Christianity developed and changed a lot in the first few hundred years after Jesus with doctrines and writings being added and removed at a high pace. Why are so many churches of today so hellbent on sticking exactly to the way things earlier were? It's simply not healthy.
Ps. I'm not officially a Bahai, but I consider myself a "friend of the faith".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The majority of SCIENTISTS do not have a problem with science and religion.
It is the RELIGIOUS people who have a problem with science. Because it contradicts their religion.
Nice statement of fact there. Too bad there are millions (billions?) of people who do NOT agree with you. Their statements of fact contradict yours.
Don't confuse our personal religion as anything other than your personal religion.
Exactly. They're "wrong" because YOU already "know" what is "right".
And if they don't agree with you ...
And yet around 50% of the US population thinks that "intelligent design" should be taught in schools along with evolution.
It's not the "fundies" who are the problem.
It's anyone who believes that his personal religion is "right" and that others are "wrong".
It's religion vs morality. Yes, to some extent religion can interfere with scientific progress, but not so much these days, in developed nations. Morality however... well, there's no "proof" that one set of values is better than another, so people more easily deny say, women's rights, than they deny something like heliocentrism.
If you want to answer the question "does science conflict with religion?" (leaving out the "always", as it's not clear from the book abstract if that word was really in the survey, or if Michael Cooney's summary added it), you cannot answer it by simply surveying an arbitrary set of scientists. That only gives you the answer to the question "do scientists believe that science conflicts with religion?", or maybe "does the practice of science conflict with having religious beliefs?".
I would say the original question falls under the category of philosophy of science and/or epistemology. Not all scientific practitioners are experts in philosophy of science or epistemology, in fact I'd guess that most are not. Thus, their opinions on the question, while perhaps interesting in their own right, do not offer convincing arguments any more than surveying a random sample of scientists from all domains can offer convincing conclusions about climate change. If you want to that, you ask scientists that specialize in climatology and related disicplines.
The abstract also mentions this:
That sounds very suspect to me. I'd like to know what the definition of "religious" is.. is it a self-reported label, or are specific beliefs queried? And the label "spiritual entrepreneurs" sounds like complete gobbledygook. "Seeking creative ways to work with the tensions between science and faith" does not sound equivalent to a position that science doesn't conflict with religion. In fact, if you have to get creative outside of "traditional religion" to "work with the tensions", that implies that those individuals do recognize a conflict between science and religion. If there's no conflict, you don't need to find creative workarounds.
"How better to better understand the Creator than through the creation?" - Albert Einstein
The game.
Are you only including Muslim countries that are "like Pakistan" in your challenge? That is, only very conservative Muslim countries, with a literacy rate hovering around 57%?
In fact, if you ask moderate, well-educated Muslim scholars, many (most?) will respond in the same way as the Catholic church's position: evolution and speciation is a fact, but that God is somewhere in the process. This line of reasoning has existed in Islam since as early as the 19th century.
There is always a conflict between religion and science. It's just that it's mostly irrelevant for scientists in the USA. And even more irrelevant in Eastern Europe.
Now try to teach evolution in Muslim countries like Pakistan. Go on, try it. We'll pay for your funeral.
I don't suppose you'd care to provide any support that gives your personal opinion more weight than the vast majority of the scientists in the survey? Perhaps you know of a survey in Pakistan? Surely you wouldn't be stating your personal belief as fact without any ermpirical evidence, would you?
Aren't scientists all supposed to be godless atheists? ...According to all the non-scientist atheists out there who want the scientists on their side. ;)
"[Astronomy] is the most noble and sublime of all the sciences, and presents to our view the most astonishing and magnificent objects - whether we consider their immense magnitude, the splendor of their appearance, the vast spaces which surround them, the magnificent apparatus with which some of them are encompassed, the rapidity of their motions, or the display they afford of the omnipotent energy and the intelligence of the Creator." - Rev. Thomas Dick, "The Philosophy of a Future State," 1831.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Newtonian physics say: F=ma. Not F=ma+God's will. To put this way, anybody who think newtonian physics is right and working, implicitely denies any wonders.
it's idiots vs science.
The scientific world rejects idiots. Religion and politics (is there a difference ?) actually need to embrace/recruit them.
Guess who's more numerous.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Actually, I went to catholic school. Jesuits, to be more precise. Out science lab teacher was a priest (quite an old one, 70+ years old). He used to say:
"It is not the duty of religion to say HOW things happen, but WHO is behind it. Science, on the other hand, will tell you HOW, but now WHO is behind it. I see no conflict whatsoever between the Big Bang and my faith. Between evolution and my faith. When I see Darwin's evolution, I see God's hand behind it."
Its not surprising one catholic priest would accept the Big Bang theory given that the theory was proposed by another catholic priest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaitre
Interestingly some leading scientists of the day dismissed the theory because it came from a priest, it "smelled of creationism".
Let's start with the Jews. They have a religion.
Which forks into Christianity.
Which forks into Catholicism (East and West).
Another fork for Islam.
Back to Catholicism - fork for the Protestant Reformation.
Lots of forks for lots of different Protestant sects.
Fork one of those into Mormonism.
Yep! Arguing about whether statement X is in book Y is meaningless. Because it is only the BELIEVERS who look to that book as an authority in the first place. Some of those religions have additional holy books. Some don't.
And amongst the believers, whether statement A takes precedence over statement B in the holy book ... it's only important to the person who BELIEVES that it does.
And, more importantly, the person who "KNOWS" that the others who do not agree that his beliefs and religion and holy book and translation and precedence of statements is "wrong".
Nice point on Scientology, by the way. I hadn't thought about it in those terms before. I'm totally stealing that.
It's really no surprise that *actual* scientists have a more open mind than the self-proclaimed intellectual elite of slashdot.
This is an odd interpretation of the figure.
Religion - even if we limit it to Christianity/Islam/Judaism, which covers most of the US - consists of varied concepts, only some of which directly conflict with scientific knowledge. (The rest isn't necessarily good - some concepts are just morally wrong instead of scientifically.) Science also consists of different disciplines, which do not contradict religious views on the universe equally (natural sciences are most affected, while the greatest biblical affront to mathematics is rounding Pi down to three, and I don't know of any for, eg, sociology).
Taking all that into account, we still have just under one in six of ALL scientists queried considers science to be in conflict with ALL religion ALWAYS.
Interpreting this to mean that science - and particularly natural science, like biology and physics - can coexist with religion, is a bit of a long shot.
That doesn't mean the answers are worth anything.
Can't really cite it as this is from personal experience. I'm Christian but I grew up in west Beirut(mostly among Sunni Muslims but I also have Druze and Chiite friends). One of my most anti-American/Israeli friends is a Chiite originally from a small town in the south whose family is involved politically with Hizbollah. In debates I couldn't even bring up *any* kind of not 100% fundamentalist idea without her saying that I was advocating we completely surrender to Israel. Yes, the indoctrination was that bad. And yet, she embraced Western values like women's rights or capitalism or various cultural things with no problem at all.
People are hypocrites, we know that by now.
I am an engineer and a Catholic. I've come to the following conclusion. God created the universe. The way to look at this statement is as an answer to how the universe was created not as to there is a God what did he do. So the only way to know God is to study science. Learn the rules that govern how his creation works. There can be no conflict because if there is a disagreement between any stance between religions and facts than facts win since they are the direct observations of the universe. Religion is very similar to economics in that it tries to understand humans and society and come up with rules to follow so we can lead happier lives. Sin seems to be built into our being. When you do something that your regret later there is most likely a sin involved. Learning about sins is a way to remind you that what you are thinking about doing you are going to regret later.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The number of backflips you're going through to justify a position is amazing....
How is this any different than confronting someone from a different religious tradition than your own that has different values. You're just moving the debate from "x number of people believe a thing is moral without a higher power" to "x number of people believe a thing is moral based on their religion of choice".
No, it begins with "I choose to subscribe to a philosophy that requires me to believe in a being who may or may not actually exist and refuses to reveal himself because he likes to keep people guessing", and then moves on to "This being who may or may not exist is good".
No, the questionable part if this is: if I meet someone on the street who says he hears voices that give him commands him to kill his children that nobody else can hear, I assume he's schizophrenic, not that he's got an inside line to a supreme being. If it happens in the Bible, it's a revelation, if it happens in reality, it's a mental disease, why is that?
This is the kind of thing that makes non-religious people nervous when it comes to religious people. I'm uncomfortable with the idea that someone might "hear a voice" that instructs them to kill me (or anyone else really), and that they'll be okay with it because it's more important to "serve god" than it is to promote human life, and that they can have a legion of followers who agree with them simply because they said "god told me" instead of "my dog told me" or "aliens told me".
Then it wouldn't be arbitrary. I don't think you'll find a lot of people who'd argue that breaking down a door is somehow wrong because you're damaging property if you're doing it to rescue the people on the other side of it.
An authority figure who nobody can see or hear, and who won't divulge the reason for his command. Yeah, why would anyone think that's irresponsible?
Which brings us back to this; how is anyone to know that it's "god" telling them to do
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
Dude. Did you not read the story up until that point? Abraham is keeping the whole "voices in my head are telling me to sacrifice you" thing hidden from Isaac. If he'd said "God has provided", the jig would have been up - even the densest kid would realize that there's really only one sacrifice available at that point.
Furthermore, your interpretation paints Abraham as a slave and the God he serves as a sadistic bastard. I mean, what kind of absolute douchebag pulls "loyalty" tests like that? It serves no purpose whatsoever, besides making God feel like he's in control. And what kind of mindless drone actually follows such a horrific order?
Why would morality that's handed down from an immortal being change so drastically over time? This seems more like evidence that the whole thing is a bunch of made-up stories by a primitive middle-eastern culture than anything else. If god is omnipotent and infallible, then his definition of what's moral should be immutable. Yet, as you say, it used to be that daughters were property and offering them up for an angry crowd to rape was okay, but now it isn't.
So the only reason that women are people and not property now is technology? Wow, I bet you're a real hit with the ladies....
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.