Good for Nothing: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible

[C C]

http://inference-review.com/article/good-for-nothing

EXCERPT . . . An evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the author of a bestselling popular book, "Why Evolution Is True," [Jerry] Coyne was appalled by recent religiously-based efforts, harking back to the famous 1925 Scopes trial, to modify or “balance” science teaching in American public schools. [...] With "Faith Versus Fact," he has launched a frontal assault on theistic religion, accompanied by a ringing vindication of the spirit and method of the natural sciences.

Coyne is a little late to the fray, and he lacks Dawkins’s gift for storytelling, Dennett’s philosophical exuberance, Christopher Hitchens’s panache, and Sam Harris’s instinct for the jugular, so he will probably not be acclaimed as the Fifth Horseman of the New Atheism. But "Faith Versus Fact" is a solid, earnest, persuasive book. Coyne has replied to most criticisms of Darwinian theory in "Why Evolution Is True," but at least a few of the most frequent ones should be touched on here, if only to help account for his combativeness in the present book....

[elte]

"Something distinctive about human beings—consciousness, complexity, free will—"

Those things have good explanations.  Consciousness is an emergent property of brain biology and biochemistry.  Complexity is the result of genes and billions of years of evolution.  Freewill is an illusion dependent on consciousness (please refer back to explanation for cosciousness).

[Magical Realist]

THERE IS NO institution that endures for thousands of years unless it serves an essential need. Ignorance, inertia, and indoctrination cannot be the whole story. Religion must be good for something. As an evolutionary theorist, Coyne understands this. Religion, he speculates, is probably an exaptation: an outgrowth of some behavior originally favored by natural selection.

But we must be wary about equating the long-term functionality of an institution with it's moral value. The enslavement of races was a social institution which persisted for thousands of years, providing undeniable economic benefit for societies. But that doesn't justify its existence. If religion has survived so long, it may very well be meeting needs in humans that help them to survive and prosper better--a sort of glue for social bonding and solidarity towards shared goals and values. But we must ask could not the same needs be filled by science and the humanities and the arts? Do humans HAVE to cling to passed down rituals and ancient delusions to inspire them towards altruistic and principled behavior? Does a unifying vision of mankind depend on adherence to some credo or set of doctrines whose only appeal is one to authority? Science itself may offer such a spiritual boon for the scientistically inclined. But it doesn't seem to me capable of answering the deeper philosophical questions such as why am I here, and what must I do. There will always be an aching spiritual hunger in the human soul that longs for meaningful narrative, aesthetic creativity, and a prescriptive morality. Can science fulfill that? I don't know. It remains to be seen.

"Actually, both the spiritual and scientific quests are two complementary inquiries into reality. Any feeling of antagonism between them is a product of a narrow vision. Science deals with what is measurable; religion is the quest for discovering and understanding the immeasurable. A scientist is not intelligent if he denies the existence of the immeasurable. There is nothing that is anti-science but there is a lot that is beyond science. The two quests have to go hand in hand. We not only need to have an understanding of the laws that govern the phenomena occurring in the external world around us but also we need to discover order and harmony in our consciousness. Human understanding is incomplete unless it covers both aspects of reality: matter as well as consciousness."===http://www.pkrishna.org/Science-Spirituality.html

[Yazata]

http://inference-review.com/article/good-for-nothing

EXCERPT . . . An evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the author of a bestselling popular book, "Why Evolution Is True," [Jerry] Coyne was appalled by recent religiously-based efforts, harking back to the famous 1925 Scopes trial, to modify or “balance” science teaching in American public schools.

I agree that religious content shouldn't be added to science classes.

But I have no objection to science teachers noting that some people oppose things like the evolutionary origin of species including human beings, for religious reasons.

And I think that high-school science classes should probably include a philosophical discussion of methodological vs metaphysical naturalism as part of their syllabus, which would simultaneously inform students of why religious doctrines are out of place in science, and about what some of science's boundaries and limitations are. (Jerry Coyne probably should be required to attend those lectures.)  

With "Faith Versus Fact," he has launched a frontal assault on theistic religion, accompanied by a ringing vindication of the spirit and method of the natural sciences.

From the title of his book, and from skimming it at the bookstore, it appears to me that Coyne is a proponent of scientism, the view that the only acceptable intellectual methodology is scientific methodology. So if anything is to count as human knowledge, then it must conform to the methods of science.

The questions that raises should be obvious: what are the methods of science, exactly? Acceptable to whom? Acceptable why? How can mathematics meet that standard? What about logic? For that matter, what about historical understanding and our understanding of the meaning of texts?

Coyne also seems to be a proponent of the 'conflict thesis' in which science and religion are imagined to be locked in some kind of struggle to the death. Unfortunately for Coyne, most historians of science reject that view.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationsh...nd_science

Coyne is a little late to the fray, and he lacks Dawkins’s gift for storytelling, Dennett’s philosophical exuberance, Christopher Hitchens’s panache, and Sam Harris’s instinct for the jugular, so he will probably not be acclaimed as the Fifth Horseman of the New Atheism. But "Faith Versus Fact" is a solid, earnest, persuasive book.

Earnest certainly. Solid and persuasive might be more debatable.

Coyne has replied to most criticisms of Darwinian theory in "Why Evolution Is True," but at least a few of the most frequent ones should be touched on here, if only to help account for his combativeness in the present book....

What does Coyne (the U. Chicago evolutionary biologist) defending Darwinian theory have to do with the question whether science and religion are compatible? Both Coyne and his reviewer seem to think that the issues are somehow interdependent, seemingly oblivious to the fact that many/most religious denominations happily accept biological evolution.

Like many of the more militant atheists, Coyne strikes me as a bit of a fundamentalist himself. Like too many atheists he seems to implicitly assume that 'religion' equates to theism which equates to Christianity which equates to fundamentalist protestantism. (The most hell-fire and damnation preacher would heartily agree with that.)