[Luis Dias]

Cute.

"Religion is diametrically opposed to science/rational thinking."

Is this or is this not your position?  This is the macroscopic view, dealing with large-scale views and large-scale organizations/belief.

Religious thinking is diametrically opposed to empirical thinking.

One is teleological, uses faith, is completely subjective and surrenders to wishful thinking, both in sadomasochism (we are born in sin, etc.) and in egomania (the universe is designed for you).

The other is investigative, trying to weed out every characteristic I've put above, for the sake of actually producing knowledge.

"A religious person is diametricaly opposed to science/rational thinking."

If the first is in fact your position, then this is de-facto your position as well[/quote]

No. A person can hold incoherent and incompatible beliefs perfectly well. And many people do. And are even very happy doing so, and I have zero qualms with it. If you had read what I've been saying, you'd know this by now.

If this is inanely stupid, your whole premise is accompanied by more inane stupidity than most things on Earth.

Simpler than that, your sillogism is wrong. Hope I've clarified it for you.

He seems to be arguing a bit behind the curve. I think if he'd spent more time here he would be well aware that I view the universe as a vast and deterministic (if not discrete) machine in which all human morality and beliefs have been shaped by evolution working in the theater of a blind and purposeless cosmos.

Of course I am aware of this, this is not the problem between you and me.

Unfortunately he's been taught to believe this, rather than to know it. When you wield a tool, you have to know its limitations, or you'll break it on something you can't cut.

You have this habit of pretending to know other people's minds. A scientific mind would never be so bold, a good person would never be so rude. The fact that we disagree on the limits of epistemology does not mean you are entitled to say that I'm the kind of person who didn't think in school, but rather memorized everything.

Science does not deal with the nonfalsifiable. It simply doesn't care about it.

And here you stay forever. Religion may have a very profound core that is unfalsifiable. But many, if not most of their proclamations are anything but nonfalsifiable. I've enumerated a lot of them, but you remain oblivious to them, as if nothing happened.

It can analyze how they arose, of course, and what neural structures underlie them, and what confirmation heuristics maintain them - something I've spoken to at length in this thread - but it says nothing about the beliefs themselves.

Of course it can. How can you make the perfect case and not deduce the obvious sillogism?

But he's having trouble translating this into an argument for the fundamental incompatibility he asserted, and at the rate he's going I don't think he'll manage it.

If you keep ignoring the best points I make, of course you'll never find them. I just hope that most scientists don't exactly behave like you do.

[General Battuta]

A-ha!

And here you stay forever. Religion may have a very profound core that is unfalsifiable. But many, if not most of their proclamations are anything but nonfalsifiable. I've enumerated a lot of them, but you remain oblivious to them, as if nothing happened.

There we go, there we go, there we go. The issue you're hung up on, the reason I've called you a fundamentalist. Religion is belief. It does not exist (for me, the atheist) outside of human heads. And that means that all that defines religions is what people believe. To argue that a believer is not a real believer if they don't believe the right things is to suggest that THERE ARE RIGHT THINGS TO BELIEVE. And when some of these beliefs are non-falsifiable, the only way to select right things is with NON-FALSIFIABLE CLAIMS.

And there: you have made yourself a believer. You cannot argue that the religious people you don't like are 'real', and the religious people you can't find reason to dislike are 'not real', without holding religious belief.

You are free to rant for pages and pages about the incompatibility between science and 'the proclamations', so long as the proclamations have empirical consequences. I don't care; I am well aware of the harm religion has caused in the world. But by admitting that the core of religion is unfalsifiable, you concede there is no fundamental incompatibility between religion and scientific belief. You have opened yourself to the existence of believers who hold no falsifiable claims and thus will never be challenged by the happy simultaneous practice of faith and quality empirical investigation.

If your argument is that religion often interferes with science and produces social ills, you could've saved yourself a few thousand words - I've no disagreement with that. But your claim of fundamental incompatibility is now sunk.

[General Battuta]

Crap about the semantic apocalypse, tangential.

[Stephen Jay Gould on the topic of non-overlapping magisteria, in a pretty decent essay about how the Catholic Church accepted (a little resentfully) evolution and made the case for there being no conflict between science and religion.

Unofficial SJG Archive
   

The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive
   

Unofficial SJG Archive
   

    Nonoverlapping Magisteria

    by Stephen Jay Gould

    I
    ncongruous places often inspire anomalous stories. In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists.

    At lunch, the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. What, they wanted to know, was going on in America with all this talk about "scientific creationism"? One asked me: "Is evolution really in some kind of trouble. and if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both entirely satisfactory and utterly overwhelming. Have I missed something?"

    A lively pastiche of French, Italian, and English conversation then ensued for half an hour or so, but the priests all seemed reassured by my general answer: Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a homegrown phenomenon of American sociocultural history—a splinter movement (unfortunately rather more of a beam these days) of Protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean. We all left satisfied, but I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of Catholic priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief.

    Another story in the same mold: I am often asked whether I ever encounter creationism as a live issue among my Harvard undergraduate students. I reply that only once, in nearly thirty years of teaching, did I experience such an incident. A very sincere and serious freshman student came to my office hours with the following question that had clearly been troubling him deeply: "I am a devout Christian and have never had any reason to doubt evolution, an idea that seems both exciting and particularly well documented. But my roommate, a proselytizing Evangelical, has been insisting with enormous vigor that I cannot be both a real Christian and an evolutionist. So tell me, can a person believe both in God and evolution?" Again, I gulped hard, did my intellectual duty, and reassured him that evolution was both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief—a position I hold sincerely, but still an odd situation for a Jewish agnostic.

    These two stories illustrate a cardinal point, frequently unrecognized but absolutely central to any understanding of the status and impact of the politically potent, fundamentalist doctrine known by its self-proclaimed oxymoron as "scientitic creationism"—the claim that the Bible is literally true, that all organisms were created during six days of twenty-four hours, that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and that evolution must therefore be false. Creationism does not pit science against religion (as my opening stories indicate), for no such conflict exists. Creationism does not raise any unsettled intellectual issues about the nature of biology or the history of life. Creationism is a local and parochial movement, powerful only in the United States among Western nations, and prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that choose to read the Bible as an inerrant document, literally true in every jot and tittle.

    I do not doubt that one could find an occasional nun who would prefer to teach creationism in her parochial school biology class or an occasional orthodox rabbi who does the same in his yeshiva, but creationism based on biblical literalism makes little sense in either Catholicism or Judaism for neither religion maintains any extensive tradition for reading the Bible as literal truth rather than illuminating literature, based partly on metaphor and allegory (essential components of all good writing) and demanding interpretation for proper understanding. Most Protestant groups, of course, take the same position—the fundamentalist fringe notwithstanding.

    The position that I have just outlined by personal stories and general statements represents the standard attitude of all major Western religions (and of Western science) today. (I cannot, through ignorance, speak of Eastern religions, although I suspect that the same position would prevail in most cases.) The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise—science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives. The attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains—for a great book tells us that the truth can make us free and that we will live in optimal harmony with our fellows when we learn to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.

    In the context of this standard position, I was enormously puzzled by a statement issued by Pope John Paul II on October 22, 1996, to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the same body that had sponsored my earlier trip to the Vatican. In this document, entitled "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth," the pope defended both the evidence for evolution and the consistency of the theory with Catholic religious doctrine. Newspapers throughout the world responded with frontpage headlines, as in the New York Times for October 25:

        "Pope Bolsters Church's Support for Scientific View of Evolution."

    Now I know about "slow news days" and I do admit that nothing else was strongly competing for headlines at that particular moment. (The Times could muster nothing more exciting for a lead story than Ross Perot's refusal to take Bob Dole's advice and quit the presidential race.) Still, I couldn't help feeling immensely puzzled by all the attention paid to the pope's statement (while being wryly pleased, of course, for we need all the good press we can get, especially from respected outside sources). The Catholic Church had never opposed evolution and had no reason to do so. Why had the pope issued such a statement at all? And why had the press responded with an orgy of worldwide, front-page coverage?

    I could only conclude at first, and wrongly as I soon learned, that journalists throughout the world must deeply misunderstand the relationship between science and religion, and must therefore be elevating a minor papal comment to unwarranted notice. Perhaps most people really do think that a war exists between science and religion, and that (to cite a particularly newsworthy case) evolution must be intrinsically opposed to Christianity. In such a context, a papal admission of evolution's legitimate status might be regarded as major news indeed—a sort of modern equivalent for a story that never happened, but would have made the biggest journalistic splash of 1640: Pope Urban VIII releases his most famous prisoner from house arrest and humbly apologizes, "Sorry, Signor Galileo… the sun, er, is central."

    But I then discovered that the prominent coverage of papal satisfaction with evolution had not been an error of non-Catholic Anglophone journalists. The Vatican itself had issued the statement as a major news release. And Italian newspapers had featured, if anything, even bigger headlines and longer stories. The conservative Il Giornale, for example, shouted from its masthead: "Pope Says We May Descend from Monkeys."

    Clearly, I was out to lunch. Something novel or surprising must lurk within the papal statement but what could it be?—especially given the accuracy of my primary impression (as I later verified) that the Catholic Church values scientific study, views science as no threat to religion in general or Catholic doctrine in particular, and has long accepted both the legitimacy of evolution as a field of study and the potential harmony of evolutionary conclusions with Catholic faith.

    As a former constituent of Tip O'Neill's, I certainly know that "all politics is local"—and that the Vatican undoubtedly has its own internal reasons, quite opaque to me, for announcing papal support of evolution in a major statement. Still, I knew that I was missing some important key, and I felt frustrated. I then remembered the primary rule of intellectual life: when puzzled, it never hurts to read the primary documents—a rather simple and self-evident principle that has, nonetheless, completely disappeared from large sectors of the American experience.

    I knew that Pope Pius XII (not one of my favorite figures in twentieth-century history, to say the least) had made the primary statement in a 1950 encyclical entitled Humani Generis. I knew the main thrust of his message: Catholics could believe whatever science determined about the evolution of the human body, so long as they accepted that, at some time of his choosing, God had infused the soul into such a creature. I also knew that I had no problem with this statement, for whatever my private beliefs about souls, science cannot touch such a subject and therefore cannot be threatened by any theological position on such a legitimately and intrinsically religious issue. Pope Pius XII, in other words, had properly acknowledged and respected the separate domains of science and theology. Thus, I found myself in total agreement with Humani Generis—but I had never read the document in full (not much of an impediment to stating an opinion these days).

    I quickly got the relevant writings from, of all places, the Internet. (The pope is prominently on-line, but a Luddite like me is not. So I got a computer-literate associate to dredge up the documents. I do love the fracture of stereotypes implied by finding religion so hep and a scientist so square.) Having now read in full both Pope Pius's Humani Generis of 1950 and Pope John Paul's proclamation of October 1996, I finally understand why the recent statement seems so new, revealing, and worthy of all those headlines. And the message could not be more welcome for evolutionists and friends of both science and religion.

    The text of Humani Generis focuses on the magisterium (or teaching authority) of the Church—a word derived not from any concept of majesty or awe but from the different notion of teaching, for magister is Latin for "teacher." We may, I think, adopt this word and concept to express the central point of this essay and the principled resolution of supposed "conflict" or "warfare" between science and religion. No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as NOMA, or "nonoverlapping magisteria").

    The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch cliches, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.

    This resolution might remain all neat and clean if the nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) of science and religion were separated by an extensive no man's land. But, in fact, the two magisteria bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border. Many of our deepest questions call upon aspects of both for different parts of a full answer—and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult. To cite just two broad questions involving both evolutionary facts and moral arguments: Since evolution made us the only earthly creatures with advanced consciousness, what responsibilities are so entailed for our relations with other species? What do our genealogical ties with other organisms imply about the meaning of human life?

    Pius XII's Humani Generis is a highly traditionalist document by a deeply conservative man forced to face all the "isms" and cynicisms that rode the wake of World War II and informed the struggle to rebuild human decency from the ashes of the Holocaust. The encyclical, subtitled "Concerning some false opinions which threaten to undermine the foundations of Catholic doctrine" begins with a statement of embattlement:

        Disagreement and error among men on moral and religious matters have always been a cause of profound sorrow to all good men, but above all to the true and loyal sons of the Church, especially today, when we see the principles of Christian culture being attacked on all sides.

    Pius lashes out, in turn, at various external enemies of the Church: pantheism, existentialism, dialectical materialism, historicism. and of course and preeminently, communism. He then notes with sadness that some well-meaning folks within the Church have fallen into a dangerous relativism—"a theological pacifism and egalitarianism, in which all points of view become equally valid"—in order to include people of wavering faith who yearn for the embrace of Christian religion but do not wish to accept the particularly Catholic magisterium.

    What is this world coming to when these noxious novelties can so discombobulate a revealed and established order? Speaking as a conservative's conservative, Pius laments:

        Novelties of this kind have already borne their deadly fruit in almost all branches of theology.…Some question whether angels are personal beings, and whether matter and spirit differ essentially.…Some even say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation, based on an antiquated philosophic notion of substance, should be so modified that the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist be reduced to a kind of symbolism.

    Pius first mentions evolution to decry a misuse by overextension often promulgated by zealous supporters of the anathematized "isms":

        Some imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution…explains the origin of all things.…Communists gladly subscribe to this opinion so that, when the souls of men have been deprived of every idea of a personal God, they may the more efficaciously defend and propagate their dialectical materialism.

    Pius's major statement on evolution occurs near the end of the encyclical in paragraphs 35 through 37. He accepts the standard model of NOMA and begins by acknowledging that evolution lies in a difficult area where the domains press hard against each other. "It remains for US now to speak about those questions which. although they pertain to the positive sciences, are nevertheless more or less connected with the truths of the Christian faith." [Interestingly, the main thrust of these paragraphs does not address evolution in general but lies in refuting a doctrine that Pius calls "polygenism," or the notion of human ancestry from multiple parents—for he regards such an idea as incompatible with the doctrine of original sin, "which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own." In this one instance, Pius may be transgressing the NOMA principle—but I cannot judge, for I do not understand the details of Catholic theology and therefore do not know how symbolically such a statement may be read. If Pius is arguing that we cannot entertain a theory about derivation of all modern humans from an ancestral population rather than through an ancestral individual (a potential fact) because such an idea would question the doctrine of original sin (a theological construct), then I would declare him out of line for letting the magisterium of religion dictate a conclusion within the magisterium of science.]

    Pius then writes the well-known words that permit Catholics to entertain the evolution of the human body (a factual issue under the magisterium of science), so long as they accept the divine Creation and infusion of the soul (a theological notion under the magisterium of religion):

        The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.

    I had, up to here, found nothing surprising in Humani Generis, and nothing to relieve my puzzlement about the novelty of Pope John Paul's recent statement. But I read further and realized that Pope Pius had said more about evolution, something I had never seen quoted, and that made John Paul's statement most interesting indeed. In short, Pius forcefully proclaimed that while evolution may be legitimate in principle, the theory, in fact, had not been proven and might well be entirely wrong. One gets the strong impression, moreover, that Pius was rooting pretty hard for a verdict of falsity. Continuing directly from the last quotation, Pius advises us about the proper study of evolution:

        However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure.… Some, however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.

    To summarize, Pius generally accepts the NOMA principle of nonoverlapping magisteria in permitting Catholics to entertain the hypothesis of evolution for the human body so long as they accept the divine infusion of the soul. But he then offers some (holy) fatherly advice to scientists about the status of evolution as a scientific concept: the idea is not yet proven, and you all need to be especially cautious because evolution raises many troubling issues right on the border of my magisterium. One may read this second theme in two different ways: either as a gratuitous incursion into a different magisterium or as a helpful perspective from an intelligent and concerned outsider. As a man of good will, and in the interest of conciliation, I am happy to embrace the latter reading.

    In any case, this rarely quoted second claim (that evolution remains both unproven and a bit dangerous)—and not the familiar first argument for the NOMA principle (that Catholics may accept the evolution of the body so long as they embrace the creation of the soul)—defines the novelty and the interest of John Paul's recent statement.

    John Paul begins by summarizing Pius's older encyclical of 195O, and particularly by reaffirming the NOMA principle—nothing new here, and no cause for extended publicity:

        In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII had already stated that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation.

    To emphasize the power of NOMA, John Paul poses a potential problem and a sound resolution: How can we reconcile science's claim for physical continuity in human evolution with Catholicism's insistence that the soul must enter at a moment of divine infusion:

        With man, then, we find ourselves in the presence of an ontological difference, an ontological leap, one could say However, does not the posing of such ontological discontinuity run counter to that physical continuity which seems to be the main thread of research into evolution in the field of physics and chemistry? Consideration of the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seem irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation.

    The novelty and news value of John Paul's statement lies, rather, in his profound revision of Pius's second and rarely quoted claim that evolution, while conceivable in principle and reconcilable with religion, can cite little persuasive evidence, and may well be false. John Paul—states and I can only say amen, and thanks for noticing—that the half century between Pius's surveying the ruins of World War II and his own pontificate heralding the dawn of a new millennium has witnessed such a growth of data, and such a refinement of theory, that evolution can no longer be doubted by people of good will:

        Pius XII added . . . that this opinion [evolution] should not be adopted as though it were a certain, proven doctrine. . . . Today, almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of more than one hypothesis in the theory of evolution. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.

    In conclusion. Pius had grudgingly admitted evolution as a legitimate hypothesis that he regarded as only tentatively supported and potentially (as I suspect he hoped) untrue. John Paul, nearly fifty years later, reaffirms the legitimacy of evolution under the NOMA principle—no news here—but then adds that additional data and theory have placed the factuality of evolution beyond reasonable doubt. Sincere Christians must now accept evolution not merely as a plausible possibility but also as an effectively proven fact. In other words, official Catholic opinion on evolution has moved from "say it ain't so, but we can deal with it if we have to" (Pius's grudging view of 1950) to John Paul's entirely welcoming "it has been proven true; we always celebrate nature's factuality, and we look forward to interesting discussions of theological implications." I happily endorse this turn of events as gospel—literally "good news." I may represent the magisterium of science, but I welcome the support of a primary leader from the other major magisterium of our complex lives. And I recall the wisdom of King Solomon: "As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country (Prov. 25:25).

    Just as religion must bear the cross of its hard-liners. I have some scientific colleagues, including a few prominent enough to wield influence by their writings, who view this rapprochement of the separate magisteria with dismay. To colleagues like me—agnostic scientists who welcome and celebrate thc rapprochement, especially the pope's latest statement—they say: "C'mon, be honest; you know that religion is addle-pated, superstitious, old-fashioned b.s.; you're only making those welcoming noises because religion is so powerful, and we need to be diplomatic in order to assure public support and funding for science." I do not think that this attitude is common among scientists, but such a position fills me with dismay—and I therefore end this essay with a personal statement about religion, as a testimony to what I regard as a virtual consensus among thoughtful scientists (who support the NOMA principle as firmly as the pope does).

    I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball). Much of this fascination lies in the historical paradox that throughout Western history organized religion has fostered both the most unspeakable horrors and the most heart-rending examples of human goodness in the face of personal danger. (The evil, I believe, lies in the occasional confluence of religion with secular power. The Catholic Church has sponsored its share of horrors, from Inquisitions to liquidations—but only because this institution held such secular power during so much of Western history. When my folks held similar power more briefly in Old Testament times, they committed just as many atrocities with many of the same rationales.)

    I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between our magisteria—the NOMA solution. NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectua] grounds, not a mere diplomatic stance. NOMA also cuts both ways. If religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions properly under the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world's empirical constitution. This mutual humility has important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions.

    Religion is too important to too many people for any dismissal or denigration of the comfort still sought by many folks from theology. I may, for example, privately suspect that papal insistence on divine infusion of the soul represents a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature. But I also know that souls represent a subject outside the magisterium of science. My world cannot prove or disprove such a notion, and the concept of souls cannot threaten or impact my domain. Moreover, while I cannot personally accept the Catholic view of souls, I surely honor the metaphorical value of such a concept both for grounding moral discussion and for expressing what we most value about human potentiality: our decency, care, and all the ethical and intellectual struggles that the evolution of consciousness imposed upon us.

    As a moral position (and therefore not as a deduction from my knowledge of nature's factuality), I prefer the "cold bath" theory that nature can be truly "cruel" and "indifferent"—in the utterly inappropriate terms of our ethical discourse—because nature was not constructed as our eventual abode, didn't know we were coming (we are, after all, interlopers of the latest geological microsecond), and doesn't give a damn about us (speaking metaphorically). I regard such a position as liberating, not depressing, because we then become free to conduct moral discourse—and nothing could be more important—in our own terms, spared from the delusion that we might read moral truth passively from nature's factuality.

    But I recognize that such a position frightens many people, and that a more spiritual view of nature retains broad appeal (acknowledging the factuality of evolution and other phenomena, but still seeking some intrinsic meaning in human terms, and from the magisterium of religion). I do appreciate, for example, the struggles of a man who wrote to the New York Times on November 3, 1996, to state both his pain and his endorsement ofJohn Paul's statement:

        Pope John Paul II's acceptance of evolution touches the doubt in my heart. The problem of pain and suffering in a world created by a God who is all love and light is hard enough to bear, even if one is a creationist. But at least a creationist can say that the original creation, coming from the hand of God was good, harmonious, innocent and gentle. What can one say about evolution, even a spiritual theory of evolution? Pain and suffering, mindless cruelty and terror are its means of creation. Evolution's engine is the grinding of predatory teeth upon the screaming, living flesh and bones of prey.… If evolution be true, my faith has rougher seas to sail.

    I don't agree with this man, but we could have a wonderful argument. I would push the "cold bath" theory: he would (presumably) advocate the theme of inherent spiritual meaning in nature, however opaque the signal. But we would both be enlightened and filled with better understanding of these deep and ultimately unanswerable issues. Here, I believe, lies the greatest strength and necessity of NOMA, the nonoverlapping magisteria of science and religion. NOMA permits—indeed enjoins—the prospect of respectful discourse, of constant input from both magisteria toward the common goal of wisdom. If human beings are anything special, we are the creatures that must ponder and talk. Pope John Paul II would surely point out to me that his magisterium has always recognized this distinction, for "in principio, erat verbum"—"In the beginning was the Word."

    Carl Sagan organized and attended the Vatican meeting that introduces this essay; he also shared my concern for fruitful cooperation between the different but vital realms of science and religion. Carl was also one of my dearest friends. I learned of his untimely death on the same day that I read the proofs for this essay. I could only recall Nehru's observations on Gandhi's death—that the light had gone out, and darkness reigned everywhere. But I then contemplated what Carl had done in his short sixty-two years and remembered John Dryden's ode for Henry Purcell, a great musician who died even younger: "He long ere this had tuned the jarring spheres, and left no hell below."

    The days I spent with Carl in Rome were the best of our friendship. We delighted in walking around the Eternal City, feasting on its history and architecture—and its food! Carl took special delight in the anonymity that he still enjoyed in a nation that had not yet aired Cosmos, the greatest media work in popular science of all time.

    I dedicate this essay to his memory. Carl also shared my personal suspicion about the nonexistence of souls—but I cannot think of a better reason for hoping we are wrong than the prospect of spending eternity roaming the cosmos in friendship and conversation with this wonderful soul.

    [ Stephen Jay Gould, "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," Natural History 106 (March 1997): 16-22; Reprinted here with permission from Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, New York: Harmony Books, 1998, pp. 269-283. ]

[Luis Dias]

The unjustified assumption in this paragraph above is the notion that we need to "believe" in this thing called "purposes" in order to live. I've yet to see evidence for this. Usually, when people talk about "purposes", they are describing long-term desires. I have the "purpose" of living a happy life. What does that have to do with belief, one distracted fellow may ask? Well, obviously, nothing, with the sole exception that there is a "belief" that stems from other people's experience, that living "a happy life" is something to fight for. But this isn't a religious belief in something "out of this world".

The reason it is good to live a happy life is because evolution has produced a set of signals to indicate to you when you are living a life which is likely to produce high fitness. This we call happiness.

Which *has* produced* fitness in the past. We are in a different world from the one where evolution guided us from.

That is the empirical reason to seek happiness: because of evolution. That is why we seek happy lives.

It is also a rationally unsustainable position. There is no logical reason to want to be happy, to want to obey the selected behaviors of the fit organism. It occurs because it occurs, meaningless, without teleology. So we assign it teleology.

You were doing so well until now. No, we don't. There is no reason for why I am here. The thinking process is entirely different from that. The thinking is more like "because I'm [randomly] here now, let's try to make the best out of it". I don't need teleology to arrive to a conclusion that, say, if I'm nice to people I'll be happier than if I just kill someone.

We talk about how we want to live happy lives. Why is living a happy life good? (Because those who didn't want to died out, science says). Because living a happy life is worth fighting for, you say. Worth. Value. Belief. We assign these things constantly. Science can tell us where they came from, but it does not bear on our day-to-day deployment.

You are dismissing culture in this simplistic analysis, but I'm sure you are aware of it. I won't presume on your lack of intelligence on this point, albeit knowing that you would.

Ok, I'll accept that I was stretching my case a bit, but I don't think that it isn't necessarily a coincidence that the empirical finding of the mechanisms of evolution, of the wild chaotic and careless nature of the universe, etc., all come at the same time when mankind starts to get that the universe isn't telelological. I'd say that all empirical evidence we garner every day are totally pointing at one sole direction in that case. Only a fundamentalist would cling to the notion that perhaps there is still a case to be made for a teleological universe.

What you're talking about is called the semantic apocalypse, and it is one of my favorite things. Unfortunately for you, it does not bear on the argument at hand, which is the question of whether religion and science are fundamentally incompatible.

There is no empirical case to be made for a teleological universe, because the proposition is untestable. There could be an omnipotent God running it all. We could - of fare more concern to me - be in a simulation running in a Matrioshka brain. Both propositions are (more or less, in the latter case) untestable.

It's not about facts. Incompatible facts are symptoms, not the disease. It's about the ideology, the process behind them both. In those you will find the incompatibilities. The fact that religion seems to you to be reduced to the unseen is not due to its nature, but rather to the conflict between science and religion that has been the case for centuries now (and no, of course I won't name Galileo in a rational discussion like this, because I take it that you actually know history and not caricatures), and to which the faded out nature of religion is a byproduct.

It is still a disease nonetheless.

No, it doesn't seem to be working like that *at all*. And mind you, such thinking *does pollute your mind* if you are trying to understand evolution, etc.

You have repeatedly made this claim using moralistic language and yet you cannot empirically substantiate it. A believer in a God who set the universe in motion - and he need believe nothing more than that, no commandments, nothing past it - may fervently desire to understand God's design, and so be driven to study evolution with great precision and care.

A deist will have less problems than a bible literalist. I've said this too, it's a strawman. A deist is a far less religious person, for he is less inclined to actually believe that the universe was designed with him in mind, that the rituals do mean anything to god, etc., etc. There is still a religious core in his mind, one which may have not issues with evolution, but may have issues if the hypothesis you bring up about the "semantic apocalypse" turns out to actually be a good renderization of what's going on. Will he accept such a conclusion? What will stop him from reaching the most rational conclusion, that his religious beliefs are nothing but the byproduct of a badly designed brain?

These things only matter when they are directly at conflict. One does not falsify the weak force by stating that it is invisible in low energy particle interactions, if you understand what I mean.

Let me one up you then. When you find that religion and metaphysical thinking isn't anything to be substituted for, and that the minimal mind that you'll end up with will be so much better, then you will understand that the last thing I want to do is turn science into religion.

But you can't, because you are in a grave misapprehension. You still think that many (important) themes and questions are forever doomed to be  within the realm of metaphysics, and if someone comes along and tries to state the (rather senseful) proposition that we could actually discuss them in a more proper rigorous manner, you call them religious.

This would be a more compelling argument if I had any religious or metaphysical beliefs. Yet I am a pure materialist.

Oh boy the irony.

Materialism is a metaphysical position. It is the belief that reality is merely material.

Arguably, it's the least problematic metaphysics I'll ever find in the world. But the irony stands.

As such, I understand that there can never, by definition, be an empirical investigation of an omnipotent God, nor of any other non-falsifiable proposition. It is impossible.

Who is exactly proposing the investigation of an incoherently and vaguely defined, and by the believers themselves said to be a "non-existent" entity (since they proclaim that he doesn't exist *in this universe*). What a waste of time that would be.

Anyone who attempts to propose that this is possible has rendered science a religion. This is the crime you are committing; debasing science by using it as an ideology, by applying it to topics it has nothing to say about.

Ridiculous. While it *would* be a waste of time trying to find out such an ill-defined non-phenomena, two points come up to answer the point you bring up. First, it is *not* ridiculous to understand where this belief comes from, and if your research logically undermines the reasons you have to believe in that entity, it is not unreasonable for you to abandon it, and it is therefore not unreasonable to say that science did away with that particular god. You may have qualms with the role of science here, you may say, it only "helped" the person make the jump. I see no difference. If you concede the relative point, that's all I need.

Second, even if someone would be stupid or corageous enough to make such a grandieuse attempt, to render it as "religious" is a giant non-sequitur. Tell it to Victor Stenger, for example. I'll bet that he'll find your renderization of his thesis that god is a "failed hypothesis" as religion nothing more than amateurish trolling.

[General Battuta]

A deist will have less problems than a bible literalist. I've said this too, it's a strawman. A deist is a far less religious person, for he is less inclined to actually believe that the universe was designed with him in mind, that the rituals do mean anything to god, etc., etc. There is still a religious core in his mind, one which may have not issues with evolution, but may have issues if the hypothesis you bring up about the "semantic apocalypse" turns out to actually be a good renderization of what's going on. Will he accept such a conclusion? What will stop him from reaching the most rational conclusion, that his religious beliefs are nothing but the byproduct of a badly designed brain?

Religious statements.

I don't see any points in the rest of your post connected to the argument. Are you or are you not still arguing for a fundamental incompatibility between religion and science? That's the point of contention I am interested in, but you only seem to be arguing for a sociopolitical incompatibility.

[General Battuta]

Are you calling my reasoning fat

[Luis Dias]

Aw ****, you just brough the late SJG into this discussion. How dare you!

I've read him extensively when I was younger. He is utterly wrong, btw. "NOMA" is a philosophical proposal, not a fact of reality. I hope that at least you understand this nuance.

There we go, there we go, there we go. The issue you're hung up on, the reason I've called you a fundamentalist. Religion is belief. It does not exist (for me, the atheist) outside of human heads.

Does anything?

And that means that all that defines religions is what people believe. To argue that a believer is not a real believer if they don't believe the right things is to suggest that THERE ARE RIGHT THINGS TO BELIEVE. And when some of these beliefs are non-falsifiable, the only way to select right things is with NON-FALSIFIABLE CLAIMS.

You don't understand. There *are* no *right things* to believe, unless you accept a religion of your own, like, say, materialism wink wink.

The problem isn't facts. The problem isn't "truths". The problem is the thinking processes. Why do you keep not getting it?

And there: you have made yourself a believer. You cannot argue that the religious people you don't like are 'real', and the religious people you can't find reason to dislike are 'not real', without holding religious belief.

Where did I stated this nonsense? All the empirical reality that is in front of me is quite rich in its variety. I never denied any of that. More precisely I never even mentioned anything about that. What the hell are you drinking now?

You are free to rant for pages and pages about the incompatibility between science and 'the proclamations', so long as the proclamations have empirical consequences. I don't care; I am well aware of the harm religion has caused in the world. But by admitting that the core of religion is unfalsifiable, you concede there is no fundamental incompatibility between religion and scientific belief. You have opened yourself to the existence of believers who hold no falsifiable claims and thus will never be challenged by the happy simultaneous practice of faith and quality empirical investigation.

Did you read the Nietzsche piece called "An History of An Error" that I've brought here? I couldn't care less about the kind of drivel that passes as theological thought, as long as we agree that it is *inside* what should be called *human thought* and that there are (roughly!) two kinds of human thinking. The one which produces knowledge and the one which produces white noise and drags everything else.

This white noise chat about "unfalsifiable THUS I WIN!" reminds me of those children who say that their super hero figures are a gazillion times better than the other children's hero figures. Yeah, sure take the unfalsifiable with you and leave it in the garbage can, where it ****ing belongs, which is what any rational person should say.

If your argument is that religion often interferes with science and produces social ills, you could've saved yourself a few thousand words - I've no disagreement with that. But your claim of fundamental incompatibility is now sunk.

Nope.

[The E]

What is your argument then, Luis? Answers in less than a paragraph welcome. Summarize your points.

[Luis Dias]

A deist will have less problems than a bible literalist. I've said this too, it's a strawman. A deist is a far less religious person, for he is less inclined to actually believe that the universe was designed with him in mind, that the rituals do mean anything to god, etc., etc. There is still a religious core in his mind, one which may have not issues with evolution, but may have issues if the hypothesis you bring up about the "semantic apocalypse" turns out to actually be a good renderization of what's going on. Will he accept such a conclusion? What will stop him from reaching the most rational conclusion, that his religious beliefs are nothing but the byproduct of a badly designed brain?

Religious statements.

Hypothetical statements. You confuse stuff pretty easily. I was just elaborating a wild possibility.

Fact remains that the parts that are religious in your mind are *always* in contradiction with the scientific process. If you have no religious "opinion" on any scientific matters, if religion doesn't inform anything related to science, then of course you have found out an example where they don't interfere with one another, by ****ing fiat.

Are you or are you not still arguing for a fundamental incompatibility between religion and science? That's the point of contention I am interested in, but you only seem to be arguing for a sociopolitical incompatibility.

Thinking processes. Philosophical processes. It doesn't enter your mind, it's as if you have firewalls against wisdom.

[Luis Dias]

What is your argument then, Luis? Answers in less than a paragraph welcome. Summarize your points.

tired. will entertain this request later, or else tomorrow if you don't mind.

[General Battuta]

Fact remains that the parts that are religious in your mind are *always* in contradiction with the scientific process. If you have no religious "opinion" on any scientific matters, if religion doesn't inform anything related to science, then of course you have found out an example where they don't interfere with one another, by ****ing fiat.

Thinking processes. Philosophical processes. It doesn't enter your mind, it's as if you have firewalls against wisdom.

He's cornered himself. He's left to both argue that the thinking processes are incompatible and admit that they're not. Not even in linear order, either!

That, right there, is a restatement of my core point: so long as your religious beliefs concern the nonfalsifiable, they are safe.

[Luis Dias]

We'll see, we'll see. I'm starting to feel the framework popping out of my mind. But I agree that it is not easy, for we probably don't even agree on basic definitions. I'll try to formulate a logical argument. But as I said, not right now, if you don't mind.

[General Battuta]

I don't mind. Have a good night, it's been fun.

[Luis Dias]

so long as your religious beliefs concern the nonfalsifiable, they are safe

Safe like thieves inside a hide out, not safe like there's no contradiction between the thieves and the law.

[Luis Dias]

I don't mind. Have a good night, it's been fun.

Thanks :beer:

[Sushi]

GB, most of this thread is a mad, murky mess, but your Battutism thought experiment is straight-up awesome. 

I do wonder how much of it was influenced by Dr Who though.

Directly inspired by, thank you!

Sounds like I need to catch up... I assume it's something from the newest episodes?

[Scotty]

Yep.  Good episodes.

[watsisname]

Just want to say thanks for the good debate, looking forward to reading more tomorrow.

[Luis Dias]

Okay, let's give it a try.

I'll have little time starting from today to... well I don't really know. My wife is having our third installment of little homo sapiens downloaded to our little home probably tomorrow, and so... well, it will be hell on earth for a few days, until we domesticate and comfort the little chap in this novel but non-teleological world he will be thrown into .

So, after unexcusably starting with the cheapest of excuses, I'll try to make a succint argument for the motion that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. If I fail to impress anyone with it, it's evidently your fault . (for fox news channell... that was a joke)


Now let's start with some definitions.

Iff* we define religion as the human activity where we place the meaning and reason of our lifes inside the metaphysical realm, in any shape or form, usually but not necessarily sourced in the mind of god and transmitted to humans by subjective revelation;

If by "subjective revelation" we mean that "religion experiences" are personal and revealed into the consciousness of the believers without any kind of empirical phenomena actually attached to it;

Iff we define science as the human dialogue about what knowledge can be shared of the empirical universe, by supressing our subjectivity the best we can (Feynman: Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is)

We can also (or should also be able to) say that:

1) science is tendentially an objective conversation, while religion is tendentially a subjective conversation;

2) science is descriptive while religion is awkwardly normative (we could discuss the "awkwardly" in another life);

3) science provides a picture of the universe that is wildly impersonal and un-human, while religion provides a centrally human oriented picture of the world (what the universe wants to tell you and guide you to, etc.);

4) science is investigatorial while religion is revelation;

We can conclude that:

a) Science will always create a conflicting picture of the universe with the religious one every time we further advance on the limits of its inquiry, for the personal will be substituted with the unpersonal and meaningless.

Examples: The earth is not the center of the universe; Our solar system is not the center of the galaxy; Earth is not the center of the solar system; Life is not miraculous, but the design of chance and environmental pressures; Magical thinking substituted by mechanical thinking; The big bang as the direct result of M theory and not a personal will; The abandonement of the absolute morality theory in ethics and in practice; Neuroscientifical detailed findings about how the self is built upon the matter inside the skull.

b) If scientific picture is, by the result of its own non-subjective process, always finding out a purposeless answer for all the phenomena, and if religion is, by the result of its own nature, always teaching us that *everything has a purpose*, then they will always disagree on what is left to find out about the universe and ourselves, and thus will inform their practitioners different attitudes about the yet to be seen (which is indistinguishable from the unseen) .

Examples: Earth can not be but the center of the earth; earth must not orbit the sun; life is meaningful thus not a product of chance; mathematics comes from the divine; the universe was banged from the divine will; consciousness is divine; free will exists; afterlife is heaven and hell; the universe is moral.

c) If scientific attitude is tendentially unbiased and investigatorial, religion attitude is faith-based and authoritative. Revelation was refuted by Hume if you take it in a rational way, thus it can only work if you trust the hearsay, and mostly due to the "authority" of religions hierarchies and / or your favorite theologians' words.

If by faith we substitute "unjustified prejudice", we can see that this is not a good thinking process if you want to do science.

d) Metaphysical proclamations are both legion (infinite in its possibilities) and most of them incompatible between themselves. We can imagine a brain in a vat like we can souls in a celestial court. Metaphysical knowledge is a trick that has fooled mankind for too long, like those equations that never end until you realise that you'll never resolve X due to the way the equation is built, and you keep having self-consistent results without reaching any more closer to the answer you seek than when you began.

Thus, exactly like getting yourself stuck in an equation impossible to resolve, you'll just waste your time with metaphysical thought. There is an infinite number of examples of amazing geniuses in the past who wasted their time with these shenanigans, rather than solving the world's problems.

d 1) Metaphysics is still polluting science as a result of the religious thinking. Many scientists are still realists and / or materialists. Many still think that concepts like "time", "space", "energy", etc., are Real. Many still believe they can speak for Reality (thus ending up making the mistake of turning science into religion). One of the results of this situation is the sheer recent lackluster performance of science, with most (yeah, most) peer-reviewed papers being statistical rubbish, groupthinking and tribalism permeating in journal editorial fightings, and an all-too pervasive hubris in many scientific fields.

Concluding, I think that religious thought, the religious discourse is an enemy of the scientific discourse. From the way of thinking, through their predictions, their views towards the centralism of mankind and their psychological products, they couldn't be more different. If we allow ourselves to hold both discourses, we will only avoid conflict if we compartimentalize them. If we do not, however, short circuits will follow, and neurons will die due to mental havoc. Either way, they are incompatible.

Which does not mean, however, that they should not be held by people. We are apes, and we can't stop being so.


*don't confuse "Iff" by "if", it means "if and only if"

[SypheDMar]

NGTM-1R was right. You should've stopped posting.