Category Archives: Reason and Religion

Elaine Ecklund’s Militant Campaign

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I haven’t said much about Elaine Ecklund, the Templeton funded “researcher” who tries to show in a paper and a book and in interviews and online snippets and tidbits that science and religion are not so opposed to one another amongst scientists at elite US universities as the public has been led to suppose. Indeed, in her latest sally into the battle she brings up her reserve, supposing to deal atheists who oppose the accommodation of science and religion a knock-out blow. The schwerpunkt of the attack is directed towards atheists with children who go to church and sit alongside religious believers. One thing that should be noticed about Ecklund’s strategy is that, while she keeps bringing her reserves into the fight, the original data set (more about that in a moment) that she is working with consists in 275 interviews with “elite scientists” taken in 2007. That’s a full four years ago, and she’s still bringing “new” insights to bear even now, four years later, based on the original dataset! Templeton certainly got its money’s worth out of Elaine Ecklund, but did Ecklund contribute anything genuine to the issue of the relationship between science and religion? This we have cause to doubt.

As the blogger Sigmund says, in a post guested by Jerry Coyne over at the website “Why Evolution is True“:

 … Ecklund has continued to hammer on at her dataset, determined to prove that it is not quite the mortal blow to science-religion compatibility that her own figures suggest. One cannot, however, fault her for sheer determination, or indeed imagination, in how she tackled this dilemma.  After deciding that belief in God is not a critical point, nor indeed is adherence to traditional religious practice, Ecklund recently settled on the idea that it is the question of “spirituality” that proves the compatibility of science and religion.

As Sigmund points out, very clearly, even Ecklund’s dataset does not support her conclusions, and if you factor in the fact that Ecklund chooses to talk about spirituality rather than about religion as such, it is unclear just what conclusions can be said to be supported by the evidence she provides.

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It was really about the supernatural all along …

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Julian Baggini has put up the next installment in his series of articles on the common ground between atheism and religion. Actually, the point and purpose of the articles seems to be evolving as we go along. The first in the series (which was entitled, “Heathen’s progress, part 1: stalemate) was published on 30 September this year, and here is how he began:

In a debate that has been full of controversy and rancour, there is one assertion that surely most can agree with without dispute: the God wars have reached a tedious impasse, with all sides resorting to repetition of the same old arguments, which are met with familiar, unsatisfactory responses. This is a stalemate, with the emphasis firmly on “stale”. My heart sinks whenever I am invited to talk or write about the existence of God, whether science is compatible with faith, or whether religion is the root of all evil. I struggle to say something new, knowing that this is such well-trodden ground, the earth is packed too firmly for any new light to get in. The only hope is to start digging it up.

I think it is only fair to point out that he still hasn’t made much progress, and that the ”stalemate” — if that is what it was — is still at stalemate, whether it’s still stale or not is hard to say.

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Darwin and Loss of Faith: Science and Religion

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I never read Darwin’s Origin until I was around 60 years old. I attribute this both to the poverty of my education and to the widespread denial of the overwhelming significance of science for religious faith in the society in which I grew to be a man. I see, in people like John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke, Ian Barbour and Paul Davies, holdovers from the age and time when it was thought, wrongly, that religion and science could continue on their own paths quite independently of each other as compatible ways of knowing about reality. It was still just possible to do that during the 1940s and 1950s, and on into the early 1960s of the last century, and for anyone who was brought up religious during those years it was still possible not to have encountered the religious conflict with science – which was, at the time, still a muted discussion taking place along the disputed borderlands between science and religion.

As a consequence, reading the Origin was a revelation to me. While I did not comprehend everything Darwin has to say in that great book — his frequent detailed geological descriptions simply flew over my head — it was obvious that what I did understand was in immediate conflict with religious faith as I understood it. I had already, by that time, begun to move away from any supernatural understanding of the objects of “faith”. I had never, to my certain knowledge, believed in an afterlife, but the central doctrines of Christianity still existed for me in a shadowland somewhere between belief and unbelief. I had tried, for a time, after becoming an Anglican in 1974, to hold to a fairly conservative anglo-catholicism, and even wrote a booklet about my conservative, catholic conception of Anglicanism which was published for some years by an ultra-conservative high church group in the dioceses of Nova Scotia and Fredericton (New Brunswick). This view of the church soon palled, as I found it more and more difficult to squeeze myself into spaces too small for someone trained as a philosopher to dwell in comfortably.

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How Theologians Play With Words

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Warning! This is much longer than it set out to be!

In celebration of World Philosophy Day (of whose existence I was lamentably ignorant!) Wiley-Blackwell sent me a number of free special issues of various journals published by Wiley-Blackwell as well as a selection of various articles published in some other journals published by or related to the Wiley-Blackwell group of companies. One of them was published in New Blackfriars (which I stopped receiving years ago when an editor was sacked because, as I understand it, he was becoming too “liberal” in his theology). It is entitled “The New Atheism: Its Virtues and its Vices.” Of course, it piqued my interest, so I read it, and noticed, once again, how theology plays with words. This is the kind of thing that Jerry Coyne means when he alleges that theology “makes stuff up,” and I think, after considering what Brian Davies, OP, has to say, it will become clear just to what extent this is true.

I want to begin by considering the following.

When it comes [writes Davies] to what makes New Atheism new, the third point I want to note is that its exponents largely seem to write with little reference to the history of theology. They often talk about something called ‘religion’ and (especially in the case of Dawkins and Hitchens), they focus on what they call ‘belief in God’. But, we might ask, ‘Which religion?’ and ‘Whose God?’ My impression is that the fathers of New Atheism have not much studied the fathers of Old Atheism or the fathers of theism in its classical Christian form. [20]

The questions ‘Whose God?’, ‘Which religion?’ are meant to distract us, just as the similar questions of Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, are meant to do. One of the problems with religion is that there are so many of them. One of the problems with the concept of god is that there are simply too many of them too. To individuate or identify something as rarefied as a god is not an easy thing to do, and the idea is that we can do it with words. But defining ‘god’ is a bit like defining ‘number’. In Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead, if I remember correctly, define number in terms of the class of all classes that are similar to it. This makes the idea of number very elusive, and the idea of a god is even more elusive. Most of us can count, and count alike, though we  might count in tens or twenties or twos or twelves. But with gods it is all over the place, and agreement is hard to reach. Even Christians, who presumably believe in and worship the same god, cannot really agree, and are divided up into thousands of denominations, and then new denomnations, because someone thought there should be just one!

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Knowledge, not Mystery

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Walter Brueggemanm, Professor Emeritus of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary, has a piece on the Day of the Lord in yesterday’s HuffPo Religion entitled: “Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18: The Great Day of the Lord Is Near.” Since Brueggemann is a reputable OT scholar, and so, we might think, not just a fundamentalist crazy, perhaps his comments on the following verses from Zephaniah, chapter 1, will repay closer study:

7 Be silent before the Sovereign LORD, for the day of the LORD is near. The LORD has prepared a sacrifice; he has consecrated those he has invited.

14 The great day of the LORD is near –  near and coming quickly. Listen! The cry on the day of the LORD will be bitter, the shouting of the warrior there. 15 That day will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of trouble and ruin, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness, 16 a day of trumpet and battle cry against the fortified cities and against the corner towers. 17 I will bring distress on the people and they will walk like blind men, because they have sinned against the LORD. Their blood will be poured out  like dust and their entrails like filth. 18 Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the LORD’s wrath.  In the fire of his jealousy the whole world will be consumed, for he will make a sudden end of all who live in the earth. [New International Version]

First of all, notice what these verses are about in their plain literal meaning. They are about a coming defeat in battle, “a day of trouble and ruin, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness, a day of trumpet and battle cry against the fortified cities and against the corner towers.” Note the words I have put in italics. This is not a general prophecy about a coming doom; it is a prophecy of a coming defeat in battle.

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Julian Baggini on Mystification

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I began writing this post by saying that it would be unusually short. However, I find it difficult to say what I want to say in a brief compass, so I thought I’d add this introduction to make it just a bit longer!

On this morning’s Guardian Comment is Free page is the latest in Julian Baggini’s series on the new heathenism. As the series progresses Baggini approaches closer and closer to the new atheist position. As I understand it an important aspect of the new atheist approach to religion is to be forthright in the criticism of religion, thus being less concerned about the offence that such criticism may cause, and, at the same time, to insist that supporters of religion state their position clearly, and with as little ambiguity and slippage of meaning as possible.

Baggini’s new article is entitled: “‘You just don’t understand my religion’ is not good enough.” This is a move that John Haught made in his debate with Jerry Coyne, where he tells Jerry that he doesn’t believe in “Jerry’s god” either. However, the point really is that the religious believer must make clear precisely what he or she means by the locution ‘god’ right up front, and very few believers do this. As Antony Flew says in his famous book, God and Philosophy, the identity of God must be clear from the outset, otherwise the argument is really about nothing. However, not only did Haught not identify the god he was speaking about, he really poisoned the well from the start by saying that only through personal transformation can one come to know God. In other words, Haught is saying, nothing that Jerry is about to say can in any sense be about God, because Coyne, by definition, has not had the religious experience of personal transformation which is a necessary condition for understanding what we mean when we speak of God.

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Q&A: Haught on God: Bitter, Impolite and Wrong

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I think we need to begin this with a clip from the Q&A session to start us off. In his address Dr. Haught said, as I recorded earlier:

Science decided, at the beginning of the modern age, that it would not talk about god, meaning, purpose, value; it was going to leave all those things out. Science is a self-limiting method which tells us a lot of important things about the world, but not everything.

This is, as Jerry Coyne points out, completely untrue. Science decided no such thing. Indeed, those who deal with the history of science from a religious point of view insist that the foundations of science were laid by Christianity. While I think this is untrue, at no point was it decided to leave out god, meaning, purpose and value. As Jerry Coyne points out, the god hypothesis was only abandoned gradually:

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This is very important. The assumption that science decided to leave out questions of god, meaning, purpose and value is a caricature of the history of science, and Haught, who claims to be making a serious attempt to show the compatibility of science and religion, must know this. If he doesn’t, and he really thinks that science made such a decision — how does “science” do this, by the way? — then his misunderstanding of the relation of science and religion is total.

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The Tempest in John Haught’s Teapot

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After watching the Haught-Coyne debate I am left wondering what reason Haught had to be so stirred up that he had refused (though he has now recanted, and the video is accessible here) to have the video of the debate posted online for others to see. Of more concern are the reasons he gives. In his open letter to Jerry Coyne Haught says this of his reasons for being reluctant to have the video of the debate made public:

It has to do with you alone, Jerry, not anyone else, including myself. I have had wonderful conversations with many scientific skeptics over the years, but my meeting with you was exceptionally dismaying and unproductive. I mentioned to you personally already that in my view, the discussion in Kentucky seldom rose to the level of a truly academic encounter.

Quite aside from the fact that this is an invidious public attack on Professor Coyne; to anyone who has watched the encounter this is simply ludicrous. I can see why he would not have wanted his own contribution widely disseminated. It is flat, turgid, and scarcely intelligible.

It is hard to credit Haught’s suggestion that Coyne

… did not want to debate me, but simply to lay out [his] own way of looking at science and religion.

But then to go on to suggest, as he does, that Jerry Coyne’s speech is a personal attack, is a ridiculous accusation. Coyne goes out-of-the-way to draw the fangs of his own debate, by remarking at the outset that he intends to address questions raised in Haught’s books, “not to go after him personally,” but because he a pre-eminent scholar of the relationship between science and religion, and also because he was there to defend himself. Haught doubts whether he is pre-eminent in this domain in the United States, but he is unquestionably very prominent. Here is a list of books published by Haught which directly address the relationship of science and religion:

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The healthy mind lives with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only with as much as there is

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Since Mark Jones linked Julian Baggini’s latest article in the new heathenism series, aptly titled “What is this foolish lust for uncertainty,” I wanted to add this post, but since I was away all day yesterday, it had to wait until now. Baggini points out that a lot of people, in a phrase borrowed by Mark Vernon from John Habgood (onetime Archbishop of York), are critical of the “lust for certainty” possessed by both believers and unbelievers, and then Baggini goes him one better, and criticises instead the “lust for uncertainty” that seems to characterise so many who are reluctant to stand by conclusions reasonably arrived at or statements justly believed to be true.

Of course, lest he should fail in his ongoing mission to discomfit the new atheists, Baggini couldn’t help but throw in the following (just to show that he hasn’t lost any of his original animus towards unbelievers who have become uncomfortably assertive about their disbelief):

Vernon’s advocacy of passionate agnosticism offers soothing camomile tea to those jittery after the triple espressos of the new atheists and religious fundamentalists.

Again suggesting, as it does, that the new atheists belong to an extremist fringe occupied, at the other extreme, by religious fundamentalists, leaves the new atheist (if s/he wants to claim that dignity) marginalised and discredited. But, surely, Baggini himself would be hard-pressed to find a new atheist who is all assertion and no qualification; it’s just handy to have an intellectual dumpster around so that you can feel pretty secure yourself from the justified criticism of others, as you disavow, virtuously, the extremes that you want to contrast with your own sweet reason.

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The Evangelical Rejection of Reason

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The title of this post is the also the title of a New York Times article by Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens. I wouldn’t have raised it at this point — Jerry Coyne has already commented on the Giberson-Stephens OpEd — if it were not for the fact that the NYT published a catena of letters on the subject in yesterday’s edition under the heading, “Can Science and Faith Exist Together?”

Of course, it goes without saying that science and faith can exist together. Indeed, any number of contradictions seems to be able to be held by one mind at the same time; human beings are past masters of the art of self-deception. The real question is whether science and faith can be held together without contradiction, and to this question the answer is far more tentative than religious believers wish or their busy “scholars” can establish, buttressed by Templeton funding or not.

Giberson and Stephens titled their article “The Evangelical Rejection of Reason,” and that, it has to be said, is like waving red flags around tormented bulls. Mark Looy, whose name seems to be missing an ‘n’, writes:

Accepting the Bible as God’s literal truth doesn’t mean that we discount science. It does mean that we interpret scientific evidence from the biblical viewpoint. We evaluate the same evidence as evolutionists, but they interpret it from their viewpoint. Evidence isn’t labeled with dates and facts; we arrive at conclusions about the unobservable past based on our pre-existing beliefs. This exercise also involves reason.

Apparently he thinks that, the past being unobservable, the only way to speak about it is by basing what we say on pre-existing beliefs, thus short-circuiting the entire project of critical history, and basing one’s conclusions on the emanations of one’s own brain, aided by words written down in the past, of which, apparently, it is enough to say, in the absence of any evidence whatever, that they are the literal truth. Not only is this an exercise that involves no reason at all, it explicitly rejects the use of reason, for the study of ancient texts is itself a critical historical study, which includes not only a mastery of the languages in which the texts were originally written, but archaeology, the redactional history of the texts themselves, the study their meaning and function the communities that composed them, collected them and edited them, how they have functioned in the various communities in which they came to be treated as sacred, and how they have been modified in transmission — especially during the period when every book had to be transcribed laboriously by hand. It includes the study of variant texts — of which there are often many, and sometimes in passages crucial to their canonical function — as well as the vagaries of translation, which itself raises serious questions about what it could mean to say of the text itself that it is or contains the literal truth.

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