Article How religion impedes science: a new historical study (Jerry Coyne)

[C C]

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/12/1...new-study/

EXCERPTS: This paper purports to demonstrate ... an incompatibility between science and religion using data, but the data are correlative without any indication of causation, and the data have some problems. To be sure, the data are provocative, and author Matías Cabello may be on to something, but right now the paper is at SSRN (Social Science Research Network) and doesn’t appear to have been published or peer-reviewed. You can see it by clicking the title below or download paper here. If you’re interested, read it and form your own opinion...

[...] For a long time historians of science, the most prominent of which was the late Ronald Numbers, maintained that the “conflict hypothesis”—that religion and science were in historical conflict—was dead wrong.

[...] Caballo ponders why opposition to the “conflict hypothesis” (which, by the way, is embraced by a majority of Americans) is so strong among academics.  His theory is that academics see a lot of religious scientists, and from that conclude that there can be no conflict. To that I’d respond, “those people demonstrate compartmentalization, not compatibility.”

Instead, I’d say that people like Numbers and Ruse adopt the “no conflict” hypothesis because it is more or less a “woke” point of view: it goes along with the virtue-flaunting idea that you can have your Jesus and Darwin, too... (MORE - details)

[Magical Realist]

If religion is impeding science, it's doing a really bad job of it. Science has been progressing like gangbusters for the past 300 years and shows no signs of being obstructed by anything. Indeed since the arrival of the Internet and the global sharing of information, I'd say the progress of science is even accelerating at an exponential pace.

Of course that's not to say science would win any popularity contests against religion even today. Just ask any crowd of average citizens about the Big Bang and the evolution of humanity from primates. But it has never promised to fill in the gaps of meaninglessness and moral ambiguity opened up by the increasing disillusionment with established religious dogma. Science after all is a learned and practiced methodology, not a purpose-giving belief system. A way of understanding the world that is useful and reliable and self-updating and amazingly accurate. And there is nothing in religion that would necessarily impede that fundamentally noble and heroic enterprise.

What IS impeded however is the view that science is a belief system about what is ultimately real and true, as embodied in the philosophical positions of materialism and atheism and naturalism. This is not science per se but rather scientism. The claim that we have epistemic access to the nature of reality itself and ultimate truths by virtue of sheer scientific fiat. And it is this that finds itself in conflict with religion and indeed most all spiritualities. Because in the end it is based as much on faith and the thoughtless submission to authority as religion has been.

Hence the ideological skeptics and militant atheists attacking religion as a superstitious worldview in need of being supplanted by the one true worldview of science. The old values of piety and inner solace must be replaced with new values--the values of reason and stoic self-discipline and critical thinking. The holy canon of revealed truth and doctrine exchanged now for a peer-approved and mathematically-proven body of abstract theories and laws. Hence the fanatical moralism and intellectual hubris of scientism's faithful adherents, mocking and gleefully debunking all non-materialistic beliefs and claims of supernatural experience simply because they don't hold up to the scrutiny of reductive analysis and empirical evidence. As if they were ever supposed to to begin with.

"In one of his most famous quotes, Tesla said: “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

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