Year: 2010

I was at the bookstore browsing for nothing in particular, and I spotted The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion and took it down for a look. There were other Cambridge Companions listed in the front and back, and they were all religious – which is not surprising, since I now see on the CUP site that it is in the series Cambridge Companions to Religion. Not Cambridge Companions to Science, but Cambridge Companions to Religion. Not Cambridge Companions to both religion and science, but Cambridge Companions to Religion – despite the fact that Science gets top billing in the title.

Well that seems to confirm an impression I’m always getting from this Sci&Relig stuff, which is that it’s a religious endeavor, period. The outreach is all on one side. Science doesn’t have any interest in yoking the two, or in trying to create a discipline in which the two are yoked; but religion apparently has an enormous amount of interest in that. Religion, apparently, wants to try to siphon off some of the prestige of science for its own more dubious ventures, and this is one of the wheezes it is currently trying.

I read some of the introduction by the editor, Peter Harrison. In the last paragraph, he says something to the effect that: you may notice that none of the essays defend the idea that science and religion are in conflict; this is not because of any bias but because nobody who knows much about the subject thinks that that idea has any legs.

Uh. Sounds like any bias to me, I thought. So later, I did a little googling – I looked up Peter Harrison. I was wondering, among other things, if I would find any mention of the Templeton Foundation anywhere. Well I won’t keep you in suspense – I did.

Harrison is the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College (which I have to admit is a college I’ve never heard of), and also connected in some way to something called “The Ian Ramsey Centre for science and religion in the University of Oxford.” What the hell is that? you may wonder. It’s “part of the Theology Faculty in the University of Oxford. It has the special aim of promoting high quality teaching and research in the exciting field of science and religion.” Aaaaaaaaand

From 1995 to 2003 the Centre was a beneficiary of the John Templeton Foundation through a grant administered by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley.

And on this page we also find that Peter Harrison is the director of this Centre. A previous director, Dr Arthur Peacocke, won the Templeton Prize in 2001.

So Peter Harrison turns out to have a pretty close connection to Templeton.

By that I don’t mean that he’s a creation or a creature of Templeton – from his bio it’s clear that he’s been interested in religion and philosophy and/or science since he was a student. I just mean that Templeton money seems to have a good deal to do with his career, and that that fact is of interest. Templeton money is successfully promoting the idea of a connection between science and religion, so successfully that it has indirectly helped to produce a book as prestigious as a Cambridge Companion on its pet subject, that treats it in the approved way – a way that disparages the “conflict model” of the relationship between science and religion, and puts a high scholarly gloss on the contentious claim that that model is an old piece of crap.

From Joe Hoffmann’s Three fewer things to say about atheism:

Just as not all atheists are humanists (and vice versa), atheists will differ about the role of the arts, and they will usually do so by asking a “utility” question: what are the arts good for? Does painting get you to the moon? Does poetry or theater improve life-expectancy? The answer to both questions is that a basketball scholarship will get you into Purdue, but not into Phi Beta Kappa.

Heh.

I have one or two more quibbles with Matthew Reisz’s diatribe about atheism and science.

The notion that religion is perniciously simple-minded and locked in an eternal fight with science has been powerfully argued by a number of atheist thinkers, many of them based in the academy, with the charge led by Richard Dawkins in his 2006 best-seller The God Delusion. But what counts as evidence for such a claim?

It’s not really reasonable to give a simplistic version of a “notion” that you claim has been argued by “a number” of people, “many” of whom are academics, and then demand what is the evidence for your own simplistic version of a putative notion that belongs to no one named or quoted or linked. That’s a gotcha rather than a question. In any case, the evidence that various clerics and other religious people have tried to interfere with science is not at all difficult to find; one could start by looking up stem-cell research, or the Texas school board.

Particularly in a society as religious as the US, scientists who are keen to reach out and share their work risk alienating their audience if they are openly contemptuous of religion.

If that’s true, it is some evidence that religion is “locked in an eternal fight with science.” Some scientists are openly contemptuous of religion because the “ways of knowing” of science are so different from those of religion and because scientists cannot count on being free from religious interference. If audiences blackmail scientists by threatening to flounce away in a huff any time scientists are not sufficiently deferential to religion, that is a kind of fight – the kind under discussion in this article, certainly. It is the kind of fight that two different ways of inquiring into the world have when they are incompatible. Historians would have the same fight if religionists were always trying to shut them up or re-write their books for them.

“There is no truth in the idea that being a scientist means being a crusader for atheism, and even many atheist and agnostic scientists are opposed to Richard Dawkins for making their life more difficult,” Giberson adds.

Maybe, but there again, this is a kind of blackmail, and also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Giberson spend a lot of his time writing about atheism and science in such a way as to make the lives of atheist scientists more difficult. He’s always picking fights with atheist scientists (one in particular), and telling them off for not agreeing with religious claims, so he can’t pretend it’s just Richard Dawkins who makes life more difficult for atheist scientists. The fact is, Giberson does that too, and he does it on purpose.

The audio of the Humanisterna seminar in Stockholm has been posted. The first part is pretty cringe-worthy – I find that my way of playing for time is not a Caroline Kennedy level of “you know”s (though I do say it now and then), but the simpler expedient of repeating most of my words two or three times. That’s intelligent.

Well what the hell, you know? You have to figure out how the sentence is going to end and you need time to do that, so rather than just fall silent for a few seconds, obviously it’s much better to say this this this and then proceed. Right? Sure.

But I had just put in 19 hours of travel, after all; I was talking after having been up all night in an uncomfortable position in bad air watching a bad movie, so what can one expect? It gets better after the opening remarks, when Sara asks me questions. That’s Sara Larsson you hear (if you listen). She’s an editor at Fri Tanke and at Sans, the Humanisterna magazine. I’ve asked her to do a diary for B&W and she has said she will, when time allows.

 I haven’t listened to all of it yet – I don’t know if it includes the audience questions part. I hope so; they were lively questions, and interesting.

So even the Times Higher thinks it has a duty to tell the world that there is no tension between science and religion, that they are perfectly harmonious and compatible, and that the only people who think otherwise are militant atheists. The Times Higher – which has some connection to higher education, and thus to intellectual development and the exercise of reason.

Matthew Reisz leans heavily on Karl Giberson for his “information” on this lack of tension. Giberson has co-written a book about six prominent atheist scientists: Dawkins, Gould, Sagan, Hawking, Weinberg, and Wilson. All of them have written something

 setting out their largely unflattering views on God and the godly.Given that they have thereby ventured well beyond their central areas of scholarly expertise, Giberson disputes the accuracy of many of their claims.

And in doing so, Giberson “ventures well beyond his central area of scholarly expertise” – but does Reisz bother to point that out? I leave it to your wisdom to determine.

But that’s bullshit anyway. We hear it seven million times a day, and it’s bullshit. God is a public subject; there are no barriers to entry; so there can’t be any barriers to non-entry either. That’s only fair, and reasonable. There are no credentials required to believe in god, so there should be no credentials required to disbelieve in god. God is like a public park, or like the ocean, or air: god is there for the taking. (Not “God” the person of course, but god the concept.) Public. If it’s public, it’s public. We get to talk about it just as much as believers do. If they get to say god hears their prayers and answers them either yes or no or I’ll think about it, then we get to say show us the postmark.