Author: Ophelia Benson

Muriel Gray points out some sad realities.

What new creative solutions were on offer to reconcile the directly opposing ideologies that are obedience to Islam and progressive Western democracy? No big thinking of any kind. Actually, worse than that…Obama informed us that throughout history, “Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality”. Hasn’t it just? Darfur was all a silly misunderstanding, and Sunni and Shia Muslims tolerate each other magnificently. Islam also, the president assured us, overlaps and shares common principles with America, namely the “principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings”. Many of these can currently be seen on view in Afghanistan, northern Nigeria, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Pakistan, to name but a very few.

One possible reply is that what Obama said was aspirational – meant to inspire people to live up to the flattering description, not to say how things really are. But…it’s not a very satisfactory or convincing reply, given the vastness of the gap between the flattering description and how things really are. Since Islam as it is really practiced in the real world in places where it has state power is conspicuously bad at tolerance and the dignity of all human beings, it seems foolhardy to say otherwise. (Would Obama be happy to see an adult Malia living in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or Pakistan? If not…maybe he should hesitate before talking about shared principles of the dignity of all human beings. [If the answer is yes, he’s nuts – but I strongly doubt that the answer is yes.])

By far the greatest disappointment was Obama’s “dealing” with women’s rights as lowly point number six in his speech. In a few short sentences he referred, rightly, to the importance of educating Muslim women, then bizarrely to the importance of keeping American citizens in their hijabs…No mention of the shameful atrocities being carried out worldwide in Islamic countries every single day; nothing of injustice and hopelessness, of the drudgery, powerlessness and virtual enslavement suffered by millions of women and girls in the name of an invented deity. To so sure-footedly ignore what is happening to women right now is nothing short of a disgrace, and his appeasement of this outrage is on a par with appeasing apartheid.

Right. He needs a copy of the book.

Jason Rosenhouse looks at this natural v supernatural problem.

If you hold views about a supernatural realm that have absolutely no empirical consequences whatsoever then you have nothing to fear from science. There are even certain religious systems that posit such a realm. But that is not the sort of faith held by most Christians.

True; so the business about what is ‘beyond’ nature becomes irrelevant.

So long as we are talking about a divine creator in the abstract then there is no conflict with evolution. Deism is not threatened by evolution.

But Deists aren’t the people who freak out about evolution, so they’re not actually the people Mooney is talking about, so again, they are irrelevant.

One more time, science can not rule out the existence of a supernatural realm, but it can certainly make certain ideas about how the supernatural realm interacts with our earthly realm seem highly implausible.

Just so. If it’s entirely beyond and outside, nobody knows, so you can believe anything you want to, but don’t expect anyone to agree with you; if it’s not beyond and outside, then science can investigate it, so the ‘this is where science stops’ claim doesn’t apply.

The clear distinction between methodological and philosophical naturalism is mostly irrelevant to the question of whether science and religion are compatible, since religion typically claims far more than the mere existence of a supernatural realm…Different people can draw different metaphysical conclusions from the same empirical data. The argument is over whether it is reasonable to accept both evolution and traditional Christianity, not over whether it is possible to accept both.

Yes that’s what I meant by the more long-winded “It’s perfectly possible to know that one can’t know X and still believe X. It’s a constant battle, to be sure, and there’s no guarantee that atheists and naturalists won’t always be saying ‘But there’s no good reason to believe that’ – but that’s life as a grown-up, isn’t it.” It’s possible, and that’s all you get. We can’t give you reasonable too, and it’s unreasonable to expect it.

Chris Mooney says why compatibilism matters via a discussion of Robert Pennock’s testimony at the Kitzmiller trial and Judge Jones’s decision.

Jones and Pennock describe science, and its “ground rule” of methodological naturalism, as an inquiry into the workings of the natural world–one assuming the existence of natural laws that we can discern, and naturalistic processes that we can measure and describe. But, they add, there science basically ends. Is there a “supernatural” that is somehow beyond or outside of nature? Science just can’t say.

Why can’t science say? Because a “supernatural” that is somehow beyond or outside of nature is by definition beyond or outside anything we can meaningfully inquire into: ‘meaningfully’ in the sense of being able to get real results. The reasons science can’t say are the reasons no one can say. It’s not as if science can’t say but some other kind of inquiry or investigation or examination can. There is no discipline or branch of knowledge that can say. That which is outside or beyond is outside or beyond – so we know nothing about it. That means all of us – not just scientists, but all of us.

People can of course believe anything they want to about that which is outside or beyond – but that’s not the same thing as being able to say. I think people who say ‘science can’t say’ often tend to blur that distinction, whether deliberately or not. I think saying ‘science can’t say’ leaves an impression that non-science can say, which is mistaken.

Pennock’s testimony, a key basis for all this, draws a core distinction between such methodological naturalism on the one hand, and “philosophical naturalism” (or atheism) on the other. The latter is a stronger view, and goes beyond the limits of science to claim that the natural is all there is, period. This view may well be true; indeed, I personally believe it to be true. But it is a philosophical view, not a scientific one.

Not exactly. Atheism doesn’t necessarily or always claim that the natural is all there is; atheism doesn’t even necessarily or always claim that there is no God; atheism can be and often is just non-theism, which needn’t say anything so definite as that the natural is all there is. Furthermore, even more assertive atheism, or ‘strong’ atheism, doesn’t necessarily claim that the natural is all there is; it often contents itself with pointing out that the natural is all we can know anything about.

In truth I’m not really sure how philosophical naturalism fits here – I’m not sure whether or not it’s true that philosophical naturalism does necessarily say as a matter of definition that the natural is all there is, period, or whether it says simply that we (humans, stuck here in nature) don’t and can’t know anything about the non-natural. I don’t know if its claims are ontological or epistemological. But frankly I’m a little skeptical that many people are philosophical naturalists of the type who say the natural is all there is, period. I suspect that the vast majority say simply that no one knows, and perhaps further that, by definition, no one can know.

Does it matter? Yes, I think so. I think it’s at least possible that if Chris and other accommodationists could take it on board that most atheists and philosophical naturalists don’t actually claim that the natural is all there is, period, but rather that anything beyond nature is beyond us so we simply can’t know anything about it – then there might be less worry about strategy. Because the next bit of Chris’s argument goes:

Crucially, such logic suggests that it is most emphatically possible to accept the results of science’s naturalistic methodology, and yet also retain supernatural beliefs that science cannot touch.

But that’s still true with philosophical naturalism if it is as I have described it. It’s perfectly possible to know that one can’t know X and still believe X. It’s a constant battle, to be sure, and there’s no guarantee that atheists and naturalists won’t always be saying ‘But there’s no good reason to believe that’ – but that’s life as a grown-up, isn’t it.