Cornelius Hunter has a particularly odd post up, called: More Warfare Thesis Lies, This Time From CNN. He takes issue with a report by Florence Davey-Attlee, on Vatican seeks to rebrand its relationship with science. His complaint is that it promotes what he calls “the false Warfare Thesis, which pits religion against science” and “is too powerful and alluring to allow the truth to get in the way”. He writes:
The key to a good lie is to leverage the truth as much as possible. In this instance, we have two truths juxtaposed to make a lie. You see Bruno did argue for an infinite universe, and he was burned at the stake. But those are two distinct and separate facts. The implication is that the Church burned Bruno at the stake because of his scientific investigations about the universe—a perfect example of the Warfare Thesis.
Well, I don’t know of any “Warfare Thesis”, but let’s suppose that there is one, and let’s suppose that it consists of the notion that the church has a history of suppressing science. What does Florence Davey-Atlee cite? Well, first she cites Galileo (not mentioned by Hunter). The church threatened Galileo with torture and sentenced to life-time house arrest. For what? For considering it probable that the Earth moves round the sun, not the other way round, despite the fact that the Holy See had proclaimed the view as being contrary to Holy Scripture. Sounds like the church suppressing science to me.
She then says:
Galileo’s fate was very different from that of other scientists at the time of the Inquisition. Some were executed for threatening the church’s teachings. Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno, an Italian philosopher who argued that the universe was infinite, was burned at the stake.
Of course Hunter only quotes that last sentence. It is true that the church did not put Bruno to death by burning at the stake on the grounds of his non-orthodox science. They probably burned him because of his non-orthodox religious views. So I guess that’s alright then. No science suppression there.
The rest of her article is about climate change research (which the church appears not to oppose), stem cell research (which it does), and contraception (which it considers the wrong way to combat HIV/AIDS) and IVF (which it considers an improper form of procreation).
Well, I wasn’t so convinced that the church was at war with science before, but I am starting to think now that the Warfare Thesis may have some merit after all. But be that as it may – what sort of person objects to a report that mistakenly accuses the church of burning a man for science, when in fact they burned him for “heresy”?
What sort of moral lesson are we expected to draw about religion here?
Though there is — in my estimation — much more evidence against “the Warfare Thesis” than there is for it, that doesn’t mean that there was never any conflict, even violent conflict, at all between advocates of some particular scientific theory and defenders of some particular religious doctrine. That Hunter has to go to such ridiculous lengths to sweep the Bruno incident under the rug says a lot about his intellectual integrity.
The church has committed many atrocities in the name of suppressing ideas. To attempt to defend the church by pointing out that one specific atrocity was done in the name of suppressing an allegedly heretical inference from a scientific idea, not the scientific idea per se, while ignoring the fact that the scientific idea itself was suppressed (Galileo) does seem pretty desperate.
Also the quotemining is horrible. He doesn’t even claim that Davey-Attlee overtly lied, but that her juxtaposition of two truths amounts to a lie. But when you take the juxtaposition of the quoted sentence with the preceding one, and with the preceding paragraph, it doesn’t even amount to an error-by-juxtaposition. Bruno did indeed “threaten the church’s teaching”, which is why he was burned. His theory of an infinite universe was directly related to his philosophical speculations, which he insisted were philosophical, not theological, but which the church insisted were theological, and heretical. Which they probably were – where can the doctrines of the atonement and the Trinity fit in a universe of infinite worlds of equal rank to our own?
Three strikes, Cornelius:
You seem to have misread Cornelius. Let me explain it to you:
1: Someone who is presumably a Darwinist said something that is a little bit wrong;
2: Therefore Darwinism is refuted yet again;
3: Therefore ID is proved correct yet again.
4: Gloat, gloat, gloat.
Well, it’s very annoying.
Also, I’d have thought, thoroughly foot-shooting.
“Church is harmless, it only burns people for heresy, not science!”
Fortunately Pope Francis has more sense than Cornelius.
Trumped!
Indeed! As if there were ever any reason to tie anyone to a stake and light a bonfire under them. Sheer barbarity.
Assuming Christianity is coming to terms with science, we have that other religion rising.
I must say it seems a rather over-general thesis. Some religious beliefs are compatible with science and some aren’t. Sometimes churches have suppressed science, sometimes they have encouraged it.
But I don’t see that theism is, in principle, incompatible with science.
And I see that Cornelius’ response to Alan’s objection is to ask if he is “pro-abortion” and Eugen’s is to say “well Stalin did it too”.
Yikes.
Moral philosophy would seem to be moribund over at Darwin’s God.
Moral philosophy is also moribund at Uncommon Descent. That’s one of the many reasons why I’ve stopped commenting there. Mostly, however, I left because I felt bullied by Arrington.
Like Lizzie, I don’t see any incompatibility (whether in principle or in practice) between a theistic metaphysics and any empirically-grounded scientific theory. The incompatibility lies in theistic metaphysics and ‘naturalistic’ (esp. Epicurean) metaphysics. The cdesign proponentists insist that evolutionary theory has some sort of really tight link with Epicurean metaphysics, but much I’ve tried, I am not able to really understand this link as being much more than an imaginative association.
What I wonder, though, is whether Bruno was condemned because he was suspected of being too sympathetic to Epicurean metaphysics.
Depends on what you mean by theism.
If you mean acceptance of a revealed doctrine. science is probably incompatible.
The line between heresy and science is rather indistinct. It depends whether religion has already taken a position on a matter, in which case any contrary evidence-gathering or theorising is automatically beyond the pale. I have little doubt that, had Galileo offered a theory on observation that the modern multiplicity of organisms derived by gradual modification of fewer ancestral forms, it would have been a burnin’ matter. Of course, only an objective-moralist can have legitimate grounds for saying that these (other) objective-moralists were ‘wrong’. 🙂
Yabbut, the line between burning someone alive and not burning someone alive is perfectly clear.
I’d have thought.
*harrumph*
I just meant the notion that there is a creator deity.
Is “theism” just the notion that a deity (for a suitable definition of “deity”…) exists? If so, then sure, there’s no more incompatibility between science and claim-that-deity-exists than there is between science and any other claim-that-X-exists. I’m not sure that this is particularly significant or noteworthy, however, because in practice, most/all adherents of “theism” are absolutely not content to say “Yeah, my deity-of-choice exists” and leave it at that.
In particular, most/all adherents of “theism” have bone-deep, literally dogmatic, literally religious commitments to a variety of claims about the world in which we live (the exact claim(s) being dependent on exactly which religion a particular theist happens to belong to). Theists hold these claims as being absolutely true, end of discussion, and they tend to get quite annoyed when these claims are challenged—or even questioned, however mildly. I think we’re both aware of what sort of nastiness can ensue when theists have the political power to do something about those pesky challengers/questioner, yes?
Meanwhile, science is all about challenging claims, and questioning ‘truths’. And theists don’t like that at all—theists desperately want and need their particular suite of ‘truths’ to be accepted without challenge, without question.
So my point is this: Bare-bones, minimalist, my-deity-of-choice-exists theism may be compatible with science… but real theism, the kind that’s actually practiced by most/all people who call themselves theists, is very definitely not compatible with science.
Just having the notion that there is a creator deity isn’t really religion. That would put you into the category of “spiritual but not religious” we see in so many self-descriptions.
Admittedly, the definition of “religion” apart from a specific creed is a bit ambiguous, but I don’t really know of any specific creed that contains statements about the nature of God or of the world that is actually compatible with science.
There are ranges of incompatibility, some minor, and some completely exclusive, but I don’t think any defined religion is completely compatible with science.
cubist,
Stephen Jay Gould tried to argue compatibility using his “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” idea, but that was always a very weak offering. There is no way you can prevent overlap.
Kantian Naturalist,
What intellectual integrity?
How could Bruno have been a martyr for science if he wasn’t a scientist?
He was a martyr for the freedom to make and publish hypotheses.
The real issue is whether you can question revealed religion without being arrested. Compared to being imprisoned or tortured or executed, being denied a job is a sissy complaint. Why would someone want to hire someone who actively opposes the thing you would hire them for? Atheists do not expect to work as priests.
[WJM mode]if you subscribe to a relativistic moral framework you cannot say which side of that line people ‘ought’ to go.[/WJM mode]
Which rather exposes the ironic heart of the case. It was self-evidently true to the Inquisitors that burning was an appropriate moral response – whether for the burnee’s soul or whatever, I’m not sure. And that despite the injunction “thou shalt not kill”. Subjective-moralists would look on, utterly horrified – and utterly silent, since to demur in this ‘might-makes-right’ scenario would lead the Inquisitors to glance in your direction, tossing the flintbox meaningfully.
Yurgh. I’ve just read the comments.
[eta: on DG, I mean]
They are pretty yurgh.
‘Tis all so simple. If you’re morally outraged at live burning, sign here. Simply practice abstinence, discard the ToE and take up with one of the nicer religions, and we can create a circumstance where every conceptus is loved and wanted, and sperm don’t get their hopes up by being ejaculated into an egg-free zone. We can continue to turn the biomass of the planet into human flesh, exponentially, and no further evils will ensue as a consequence. Sorted.
Cornelius asks for a reference, which is at least decent.
There’s a rather awesome one from the Vatican here.
And if this is correct, then Davey-Attlee wasn’t even slightly wrong. The infinity of worlds was one of the ideas he was required by the Inquisitor to recant and refused.
Unless, of course, live burning at the stake for heresy happens to produce the most successful social system. Then, according to Liz, it is moral by definition.
You don’t have to lampoon yourself, I’ve already got it covered.
Allan Miller,
To put the situation of Galileo of scientist in context we have to know that he used to sell horoscopes, his heliocentric view was in conflict with the well established astronomers (Tycho Brahe), didn´t presented any evidence of his theory and by contrast mocked the pope.
Half of Europe wanted to kill Giordano, he escaped from Switzerland where fouled the calvinists, betrayed the catholics in England, the venetian noble that give him to the Inquisition first received Giordano as his guest bu soon founded him in bed with his wife. Venetian has no balls to kill anybody so prefered to give to the Inquisition do his job.
Nobody cried for Giordanos death, many felt happy.
Was their happiness based on absolute, rational morality?
And what do you conclude from that? That it is morally justified to put people to death by burning them alive? That disagreeing with religious teaching merits capital punishment?
Both Islam and the evangelical Christianity so popular in the USA insist that science is subordinate to dogma, to the extent that much established science must be wrong. So, whatever you glean from history, that religion can and does conflict with science cannot be in doubt.
I think that we have to be really, really careful to make historically grounded claims that are supported by available evidence, and not indulge in over-generalizations. One would need to know a good deal about, say, al-Ghazzali and ibn Sina in order to understand why the Arab world eventually rejected Aristotelianism, or why the European rejection of Aristotelianism led to the birth of “modern science” and why the Arab rejection of Aristotelianism did not. And the turn against modernity in the 20th-century by people like Sayyid Qutb requires its own explanation. Likewise, so does the rise of fundamentalism as a distinctively modernist reaction against modernity.
In my estimation, it would be a serious mistake to identify “fundamentalism” and “religion” — fundamentalism is a peculiar kind of pathology of religion, although no doubt one that it is growing in power and influence, and I do not think that non-fundamentalist people of faith are doing enough to combat it. On the contrary, they seem somewhat shy about doing so, and that’s a real problem.
It’s a problem for revealed religions more than for mystical religions. If your religion is based on claims of direct communication from god, it is susceptible to disproof.
A topical book review has been published recently in The New Yorker:
Moon Man by Adam Gopnik (February 11, 2013)
There’s an epistemological puzzle here, though. Without importing any dogmatic metaphysical assumptions, how does one distinguish between “evidence” and other kinds of “experience”? (Lately I’ve been reading about Peirce’s criticisms of William James as part of my RL research, so this question is foremost in my mind.)
As good empiricists, we want our beliefs to be proportional to the evidence available. Fine and good — and what counts as evidence? Well, it’s just what we observe to be the case, right? But wait! Lots of people claim to have mystical experiences during which they hear and see something that’s divine, transcendent, numinous.
Now, one might say, “naw, that’s just the personal experience of that person — it’s not a public, shareable experience, and that’s why it’s an unreliable guide to objective reality.” And that is, I think, perfectly right as far as it goes. But anyone who adopts that line of thought then needs to have something to say in response to someone who then points out that there are, in fact, communal mystical experiences as well as personal ones.
I do think there’s a good response somewhere in the vicinity, that has something to do with the relation between inquiry and embodiment, but I haven’t yet nailed it down.
Communal experiences are at least as suspect as personal experiences. Mobs can be stupider than individuals. There are even mob medical experiences, where everyone experiences the same hysterical symptoms.
Ok, then how does one establish objectivity, given the commitment to empiricism?
That is precisely the question that science addresses. The centuries long ascendancy of science as a method for obtaining reliable knowledge speaks for itself.
Is it perfect? No. Is it foolproof? No. Like democracy, it is terrible, but better than any alternative.
I’m not disagreeing with anything you’re saying here, but I think there are serious problems with “our” view. How do we know that science is a reliable method? It can’t just be “because it works” without having a lot more to spell out about what “working” really amounts to.
Presumably it has something to do with “passing muster by the lights of the community of inquirers”, but if that was all there was to it, there wouldn’t be much difference between well-confirmed empirical explanations and collective delusions. So what’s the difference that makes a difference?
I’m not a skeptic — I do think that there is an answer, or more precisely a family of answers, to this question — but I’m not really sure just what the answer is. What makes “evidence” different from other kinds of “experience”?
In science, “works” means “makes good predictions” essentially. No?
Dentistry. Medicine, Quartz watches. GPS.
Science is ascendant because it makes possible neat stuff.
That sounds pretty crass, but that’s why ordinary people accept science. I start with dentistry because the humorist P.J. O’Rourke listed that as the reason you wouldn’t want to live in a bygone era.
I think there is a reasonable connection between technology and the reliability of science. Technology is the test, the proof of the pudding.
To the best of my knowledge there are no technologies dependent on ESP, UFOs, spiritualism, or biological intelligent design.
To the extent we design biologically active molecules, we do so using systematized darwinian variation and selection. Not entirely different from the industrialized trial and error methods invented by Edison to develop a practical light bulb.
Petruska, I agree that there’s a deep connection between technology and science — that our explanations of causal relations are embedded in our technologies.
Some philosophers — John Dewey, for example — have argued that the natural philosophers of antiquity weren’t really scientists *because* they lacked the very concept of building devices for testing their speculations (conversely, their technology was based entirely on trial-and-error and wasn’t informed by ‘metaphysical’ explanations). On Dewey’s view — which could be wrong, I suppose — science arises at that historical juncture where speculation is synthesized with technology. The ‘synthesis’ is the very concept of an experiment.
Yes, but there’s still the further philosophical question as to whether a theory makes good predictions because it tells us something about the very nature of reality, or if “telling us something about the very nature of reality” is just an honorific we bestow on theories that make good predictions.
I’m wondering what you mean by “reliable”.
Typically, in science, we expect results to be repeatable by independent investigators. That should usually be enough to ensure reliability (at least as I use that term).
It is subject to a community standard.
And such reliability is good enough for me, too. (I am a pragmatist, after all.) And I do think that “repeatability by independent investigators” is pretty much all that “objective” cashes out as, practically speaking. But why don’t communal mystical experiences meet that standard as well?
And communal mystical experiences don’t meet any such standard? That seems odd. There’s got to be something about the specific kinds of communal standards that bestow upon some experiences the epistemic status of ‘evidence’, no?
There isn’t any standard for communal mystical experience.
Sure, they might agree with “I was moved” or “I was excited”. But there are no standards for such opinions.
In science we have very carefully defined standards, set by international conventions.
This brings up one of my gripes about philosophy. It was already obvious to me in high school, that one of the great achievements of
EuclideanNewtonian science was the establishment of international standards, such as with systems of weights and measures. Yet when I look at the literature of philosophy of science, there is barely a mention.Several years ago, I had a discussion with a member of the philosophy department at our campus. I mentioned that if I place two 1-foot rulers end-to-end, the total length will be 2-feet. He argued that we knew this by induction. To me, this was true by convention (our measuring conventions). How can philosophers of science be so confused about the fundamentals of how science works?
I would have agreed with you that it’s true by convention. Your school should hire me! (Though I don’t think that all societal norms are based on convention — that’s an important aspect of my pragmatism that the UD crowd never got.)
More precisely, I would say that it’s true by convention that a length of thus-and-so counts as “a foot,” and it’s true a priori (but by “convention”??) that 1+1=2.
What seems difficult for a lot of philosophers to fully grok is that the following thoughts are compatible: (a) our measurements of reality are largely a matter of social convention, malleable by our needs and interests, and (b) there is an human-independent reality to which our measurements are answerable. Most philosophers seem to think that if (a) is true, then (b) is not, or if (b) is true, and (a) is not, or not quite, true.
Kantian Naturalist,
One group’s communal mystical experience can contradict another’s.
In any case, I think that objectivity involves more than consensus among independent observers. It also involves consistency among different observations made by the same observer.
I may be fooled by an optical illusion into believing that two lines are of unequal lengths, but I can double-check my perception by measuring the two lines with a ruler.
There seems to be no equivalent way of verifying the truth of mystical experiences.
It’s funny, you know — I haven’t take the time to read Peirce all that seriously yet, but the more I think about these matters, the more I think that the correct solution is basically Peirce’s (and, maybe, Hegel’s): that the truth about a particular matter is what would be agreed upon by all inquirers, were inquiry to proceed unhindered. The insight here is that our cognitive grasping of objective reality, as objective, is bound up with the entire complex process of critical self-examination and responding to criticisms posed by others. Another way of putting the point, I think, is that objective reality is “triangulated” by at least two cognitive agents.
And what prevents mystical experiences, even communal ones, from meeting that bar is that there is no way to manipulate the world in order to test the experiences (Petrushka’s point) and also no way to “triangulate,” because (presumably) either the content of their experiences is identical, or if it is different, there’s no way to test, in a way that satisfy both parties, just whose experience is truth-indicative.
I’ve been dragging us down this path because I think it’s important to notice that a great deal of highly complex social and linguistic interactions have already been presupposed in order for any experience to count as evidence. That’s not a bad thing! I’m as happy as anyone else here to say that we have cognitive grasping of objective reality through scientific evidence. I just think that the story is much more complicated than any straightforward empiricism would have us believe.
Anyway, thanks for indulging me!
I’m probably no good at reading minds. But I think they see (a) as constructing truth out of whole cloth, whereas they should see it as constructing intentionality (creating a connection between symbolic expression and reality).
You are importing… something (more on that in a moment) when you identify experiences as “divine, transcendent, numinous”. It is said that observations are theory-laden, which is true enough. But there are theories and “theories.” There is no interpretative framework in which the terms “divine, transcendent, numinous” can be placed and reliably associated with certain sensations. And, to add insult to injury, such sensations have been induced by stimulating certain areas of the brain or by ingesting certain chemicals. That can be placed in an interpretative framework – a decidedly non-mystical one.