Author: Ophelia Benson

One reason science is epistemically incomatible with religion is the fact that in science it is not legitimate to form strong affirmative beliefs when the evidence is missing or thin. You see this over and over again reading Why Evolution is True – it’s full of ‘we don’t know the answer to this,’ ‘the evidence is not clear about that,’ ‘thirty years ago we had no idea but now the evidence is abundant’ – you get a sense of how cumulative it all is and how gaps remain gaps pending better evidence.

Religion is entirely unlike that – and that’s not a leap, not a worldview, not metaphysics; it’s epistemology. It’s ‘how do you know that?’

Some examples from WEIT –

But if feathers didn’t arise as adaptations for flying, what on earth were they for? Again, we don’t know. [two possibilities]…And what feathers evolved from is even more mysterious. The best guess is that they derive from the same cells that gave rise to reptilian scales, but not everyone agrees. [p 46]

We expect to find, in the genomes of many species, silence, or ‘dead’ genes: genes that were once useful but are no longer intact or expressed. In other words, there should be vestigial genes…Thirty years ago we couldn’t test this prediction because we had no way to read the DNA code. Now, however, it’s quite easy to sequence the complete genome of species…[p 67]

Now, we’re not absolutely sure why some species retain much of their evolutionary history during development. [p78]

One more, on page 44, goes like this:

All these nonflying feathered dinosaur fossils date between 135 and 110 million years ago — later than the 145-million-year old Archaeopteryx. That means that they could not be Archaeopteryx’s direct ancestors, but they could have been its cousins. Feathered dinosaurs probably continued to exist after one of their kin gave rise to birds. We should, then, be able to find even older feathered dinosaurs that were the ancestors of Archaeopteryx. The problem is that feathers are preserved only in special sediments — the fine-grained silt of quiet environments like lake beds or lagoons. And these conditions are very rare. But we can make another testable evolutionary prediction: someday we’ll find fossils of feathered dinosaurs that are older than Archaeopteryx.

And what do you know!

Beats prophesy any day.

Tariq Ramadan explains things.

My position on homosexuality is quite clear…Islam, as Christianity, as Judaism, as even the Dalai Lama…[are] not accepting of homosexuality, saying that this is forbidden according to the principles of our religion…My position, with homosexuals, is to say, “We don’t agree with what you are doing, but we respect who you are,” which I think is the only true liberal position that you can have.

Why no, actually, that’s not the only true liberal position you can have. On the contrary. The true liberal position would be to look carefully at those ‘principles of our religion’ and ask whether they are good principles or not, in secular, human, this-world terms. The true liberal position would be to know that the fact that something is ‘forbidden according to the principles of our religion’ is not necessarily a good reason to disapprove of it, much less to punish or ostracize or threaten it. According to the principles of some (and not a few) religions it is ‘forbidden’ for women to work, or travel without permission, or leave the house. Such ‘principles’ are bad principles and should not be obeyed. The true liberal position would be to realize that no one has managed to offer any real reason for homosexuality to be ‘forbidden’ or for Tariq Ramadan to be telling gay people that he doesn’t agree with what they are doing.

My position on the death penalty, stoning and corporal punishment is once again quite clear. There are texts in the Koran and in the prophetic tradition referring to this. But I have three questions to ask Muslim scholars around the world: What do the texts say, what are the conditions to implement [the punishment], and in which context? As long as you don’t come with a clear answer to this, it’s un-implementable, because what we are doing now is betraying Islam by targeting poor people and women.

Great, isn’t it? ‘There are texts’ – so he can’t (that is, won’t) just say it’s shit and we must have nothing to do with it. No. He has to palter and equivocate and do a little dance. He has to offer a delaying tactic as if it were some bravely defiant stance. Maybe for him in his situation it is, but substantively, it isn’t. Frankly he and his situation aren’t all that important. He may have his reasons for being reluctant to say that stoning is barbaric and should be rejected entirely everywhere in the world – but I don’t care whether he has reasons or not – the important thing is that he didn’t say it. He’s not helpful. He’s certainly not any kind of liberal.

Okay, so life is shit for women in Poland.

When Alicja Tysiac became pregnant in February 2000, three eye specialists told her having another baby could put her eyesight at serious risk. But neither the specialists nor her GP would authorise an abortion. After giving birth later that year, Ms Tysiac suffered a retinal haemorrhage and feared she [might] go blind. She now wears glasses with thick powerful lenses but she cannot see objects more than a metre and a half (5ft) away.

Yeah, so? If she didn’t want to go blind she shouldn’t have gotten pregnant! Not in Poland anyway.

Susan Haack makes a very interesting point in ‘Irreconcilable Differences? The Troubled Marriage of Science and Law. She makes many such points, but one in particular grabbed my attention.

Because of its adversarial character, the legal system tends to draw in as
witnesses scientists who are in a sense marginal – more willing than most of their
colleagues to give an opinion on the basis of less-than-overwhelming evidence;
moreover, the more often he serves as an expert witness, the more unbudgeably
confident a scientist may become in his opinion. An attorney obligated to make
the best possible case for his client will have an incentive to call on those
scientists who are ready to accept an answer to some scientific question as
warranted when others in the field still remain agnostic; and sometimes on
scientists whose involvement in litigation has hardened their initially morecautious
attitudes into unwarranted certainty.

That indicates that good working scientists must form habits of not forming beliefs in general when the evidence is inadequate. Most of us probably don’t form such habits. We’re more used to thinking we’re supposed to choose one way or another. Forming the habit of remaining agnositc when there isn’t enough evidence to decide is quite a good thing. Of course there are some forced choices – but there are also plenty of optional ones.