So… anyway… I’m looking forward to it. I imagine other Eastern Tennesseans will enjoy it as well. Matter of fact, [...]]]> I guess I’ll have to subscribe to the blog until I can get around to the book, but June Griffin makes her first appearance in Chapter 2, so it is going to have to be read.

So… anyway… I’m looking forward to it. I imagine other Eastern Tennesseans will enjoy it as well. Matter of fact, I expect it will do well with the national audience it seems to be targeted to.

Read full post, see embedded content, and comment here!
Posted in: Books, Religion, Sci/Tech
Post tags: Compatibilism, Religion, Science

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

See, Dawkins made these statements that express one of the important notions of accommodationism: No, I don’t think they’re incompatible if only because there are many [...]]]> I noticed Chris Mooney’s enthusiastic post earlier this week where he relayed some Accommodationist sounding words from Richard Dawkins. I expected that it would draw some return fire, and now it has.

See, Dawkins made these statements that express one of the important notions of accommodationism:

No, I don’t think they’re incompatible if only because there are many intelligent evolutionary scientists who also believe in God–to name only Francis Collins as an outstanding example.[...]

This book [of Dawkins'] more or less begins by accepting that there is that compatibility.

Accommodationism, or compatibilism, as I define it, consists of two notions:
1) It is possible to really believe in the supernatural (and/or other non-scientific claims about the world) and at the same time truly understand science and use it to obtain rational belief.
2) It is not necessarily unreasonable to do both: in other words, it is possible to hold a world view that is internally consistent and has room for both types of belief. It’s important to note that this doesn’t imply of accommodationism that it holds religious belief to be reasonable – I am an accommodationist and do not hold religious belief to be reasonable. It merely remains respectfully agnostic on the question of whether religious belief is countra-reasonable, and insists that religious belief can be held in a consistent world view that also has room for complete belief in and acceptance of science.

There is a third criterion that is important to Dawkins and Coyne, but not to me: their view of accommodationism is that it should hold that religious belief is compatible as a system of knowledge with scientific belief… in other words that the two can be integrated seamlessly. If I felt that consideration were an important part of the definition of accommodationism, I would not be an accommodationist. It is doubtful that any of the major blogospheric players in the debate would be, since it is trivial and obvious that religious belief uses a set of rules contrary to the rules of science.

This is the source of confusion. Because Dawkins out and said he accepts the first criterion of accommodationism, and by referring to Collins and others as “intelligent”, implying that he understands and accepts the second, Dawkins identifies himself as an Accommodationist by the standards important to Chris Mooney, Josh Rosenau, and my own humble self. Yet, he has the right to define the term his own way and to accept or reject the label at his leisure. And, by his definition – which apparently is important to him – he is not.

A simple solution, since there is controversy over how to define the word, is to throw out the term “Accommodationist”, and make other labels. One would include the two criteria we all endorse – call it “Gouldism” maybe – and the other would include only the third criterion that no one endorses – call it “Synonism”, since to accept it would effectively make science and religion into the same endeavor. But then what would we all have to argue about?

Read full post, see embedded content, and comment here!
Posted in: Philosophy, Religion, Sci/Tech
Post tags: Accommodationism, Compatibilism

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Read full post, see embedded content, and comment here! Posted in: Religion, Sci/Tech Post tags: Compatibilism

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from [...]]]> Another biology blog on religion… but at least he’s talking sense.

Read full post, see embedded content, and comment here!
Posted in: Religion, Sci/Tech
Post tags: Compatibilism

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

This post by anti-accomodationist Jerry Coyne deserves an answer. But, I gave that answer as a comment on this post by anti-accomodationist Larry Moran. I’ll summarize what I said there:

I see no reason to think it impossible for some people to accept one class of ideas only with evidence, and another class of ideas [...]]]> Hi.

This post by anti-accomodationist Jerry Coyne deserves an answer. But, I gave that answer as a comment on this post by anti-accomodationist Larry Moran. I’ll summarize what I said there:

I see no reason to think it impossible for some people to accept one class of ideas only with evidence, and another class of ideas only on faith.

I find it amazing that so many people believe this is impossible… ummm… without any evidence that it is so.

I say, stake out a territory for science in the empirical and natural – where it is truly authoritative – and let the philosophers & theologians wage the territory wars on such subjects as morality, purpose, meaning, and the supernatural. Science has a very nice territory staked out with nature and the empirical, and should defend that territory to the death. What stake does science have in those soft territories of the theologians and philosophers?

That isn’t to say that I won’t take up a side in the philosophical & religious dispute… it’s just that I won’t bring science into it unless someone makes an empirically testable claim about nature.

Read full post, see embedded content, and comment here!
Posted in: Religion, Sci/Tech
Post tags: Compatibilism

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

But a million dollar prize for recognizing that science can’t “fully understand” nature, and for asserting that underlying realities can be “glimpsed” through art, and presumably understood through religion is, [...]]]> Ok – I’m all for compatibilism. I’m all for using analogies from other realms of experience such as art to explain compartmentalization of science and religion.

But a million dollar prize for recognizing that science can’t “fully understand” nature, and for asserting that underlying realities can be “glimpsed” through art, and presumably understood through religion is, to me, outrageous. Even from an outfit like the Templeton Foundation.

Congratulations to Bernard d’Espagnat on winning this prize, but shame on Templeton for awarding it to him for this.

Asked whether that entails a kind of mysticism, d’Espagnat responds that “science isn’t everything” and that we are already accustomed to the idea that “when we hear beautiful music, or see paintings, or read poetry, [we get] a faint glimpse of a reality that underlies empirical reality.” In the possibility of a veiled reality that is perceived in different and fragmentary ways through science, art, and spirituality, d’Espagnat also sees, perhaps, a way to reconcile the apparently conflicting visions of reality that science and religion provide.

Smackdown is held for the final paragraph, and it’s just what I was thinking:

D’Espagnat’s writings on quantum mechanics lay out with great clarity the genuine puzzles that quantum mechanics presents, says Jeffrey Bub of the University of Maryland, College Park. But he’s skeptical about finding common ground among notions of reality from art, science, and spirituality. As he puts it, if there’s something about the physical world that quantum mechanics isn’t telling you, “it doesn’t follow that those gaps can be filled with poetry.“

Art – music, poetry, visual, performing – all of it has value and speaks to an emergent experience that is unique, more or less, to humans. Perhaps the same is true of religion. Not one of these appears to include tools for understanding an underlying objective reality that helps the quarks dance.

If there is a “revealed” religious truth, it may be confirmed by science, though it never has been. Or it may be unavailable for objective inspection. In that case it can only be known through faith in the revelatory process: faith that the words or experience by which it is learned are reliable indicators of real and transcendent truth. That faith can be problematic, and surely lies behind the non-compatibilist thinking of many. But it’s available if it’s what you want. It just lacks mechanisms for ensuring objective reliability.

Read full post, see embedded content, and comment here!
Posted in: Religion, Sci/Tech
Post tags: Compatibilism

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh