Can science accommodate religion and must religion accommodate science?

1. John S. Wilkins
University of Melbourne, Australia
Can religion
accommodate
science and must
science
accommodate
religion?
* All opinions given here are independent
of anything my university might choose to
think. Not valid in the state of California

2. Accommodation versus Exclusion
Many advocates of science
take one or the other of two
views:
Science and religion are
incompatible – I call this
Exclusivism
Science and religion are
compatible - Exclusivists call
this Accommodationism

3. What is being argued? Three contrasts
1. That there is/is not a single way of knowing about the world
2. That there is/is not a single rational outcome or way of thinking
3. That religion does/does not have necessary irrational or contrary-
to-fact beliefs

4. In this talk I want to
Discuss what the viewpoints actually
claim (to avoid straw arguments)
Discuss how beliefs are formed
Argue that under certain conditions,
science can accommodate religion, and
religion accommodate science, while
under other conditions, they cannot:
When theology is contrary to facts
When religion overrules science
A straw man: easy to knock over

5. What is Exclusivism?
There are several high profile exclusivists. I
shall use
Richard Dawkins (an ethologist)
Jerry Coyne (evolutionary biologist) and
Lawrence Krauss (physicist)
as my sources.
They make three broad claims:
Proreligion Thesis
Conflict Thesis
Irrationalism Thesis
Dawkins
Coyne
Krauss

6. Proreligion Thesis: accommodation = support for
religion
Accommodation[ism] is
“truckling to the faithful”
(Coyne),
“having faith in faith”
(Dawkins, who calls them
“faitheists”) and
self-defeating
supporting or promoting
religion
(Coyne, Dawkins, Krauss and
too many to list)

7. Conflict Thesis: necessary conflict
Science and religion are
incompatible ways of viewing the
world (Coyne, Krauss)
Religion is not another way
of knowing
Religious beliefs will always
tend to trump scientific
claims
This is an old view, formulated in
the 19th century. Historians of
science now reject it

8. Irrationalism Thesis: religious belief = irrationality
It is irrational to believe in
religion if one accepts science
Science rules out any
acceptance of religious claims
to knowledge
One should always believe
what science tells you over
religion
The outcomes of religious
belief are irrational (what
counts as “rational”?)

9. Further argument: Argument from Consensus
Nearly all scientists reject a personal god (Coyne)
Of course this means some don’t
Gerrymandering of surveys: being a member of a religion is not the
same as having religious beliefs
A personal god is not the sole theological alternative
Where was the survey done? (WEIRD?) – e.g., Islamic scientists?
This is a fallacy of argument: Nearly all scientists probably support
the “wrong” football team too
Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic

10. Disproof of God: religion as a failed scientific
hypothesis
Claim: Science shows that God
does not exist (to varying degrees of
certainty)
The basic claim of exclusivism is that
science and religion necessarily
conflict, and to that if science has
validity, religion does not.
This is independent of the theories
discussed, although evolution is
usually the one under consideration.

11. What is Accommodationism?
There is a Strawman Accommodationism, and a number of
Real Accommodationisms
It depends on who is describing it:
Exclusivists often strawman accommodation
Accommodationists try to be more nuanced (usually)

12. Straw Accommodationism holds that
Science and religion are compatible
(compatibilism)
Science and religion need each
other (proreligionism)
Science and religion are
complementary ways of knowing
about the world (complementarism)
[There are religious people who hold
straw man accommodationism too –
Capra, Zukav, etc.]

13. Real Accommodationisms hold that
Sometimes science and religion
need not conflict (denial of the
Conflict Thesis)
It is sometimes rational to be both
religious (of a certain kind) and
pro-science (denial of the
Irrationalist Thesis)
It does not aid in the advance of
scientific understanding to tie it to
atheism or the rejection of religion,
but this is not to promote religion
(denial of the Proreligion Thesis)

14. The actual history of science and religion
Until the late 19thC most scientists were very
religious, and those who weren’t were usually
respectful
Darwin for example, rejected the conflict
thesis
Exceptions in post-Enlightenment
Germany (late 18th century)
Religion is rarely in conflict with science
overall, but often on matters of detail
Example: Heliocentrism not rejected but
the claim it modelled the cosmos was
Example: Catholicism did not reject
evolution, but did reject the idea that
natural selection was sufficient

15. NOMA: to each their own
Gould’s idea that they have different “non-
overlapping magisteria” (NOMA) is historically false,
however
Science and religion do elbow each other for
cultural primacy
Some religions make claims that do contradict
science
The idea of “knowledge” in religion is distinct from
the idea in science
Theological knowledge is knowledge of
doctrine
Science cannot validate or invalidate doctrine

16. Why do we have the beliefs we do?
We do not adopt our beliefs in general due to considered reflection and
attention to the facts
Humans mostly adopt beliefs based on a number of heuristics, handed to us
by evolution
One is “Believe what everyone else believes, because they aren’t dead
yet”
Another is “Believe what the most (socially) successful individuals believe”
A third is “Believe what you see”
These heuristics compete with each other. Most of the time seeing is believing,
but we rarely get to see everything necessary to make science believable, so
we go with authority figures (including scientific authorities)
What criteria do we use?

17. The development of beliefs

18. Empirical inoculation
If a religious tradition holds beliefs that are contrary-to-fact, so much the worse
for that tradition
Unless one treats scientific knowledge as a religious belief
If so, the debate is over
But many religious traditions hold to the One Truth doctrine:
“Truth cannot contradict truth” – Aquinas, Summa Theologica
So they revise doctrine to accommodate new knowledge
Consider the heliocentric theory, theory of mental illness, seismology
Harnack’s 1894 A History of Dogma shows that Christian doctrine is a
dynamic, fluid, adaptive thing
Theology becomes empirically inoculated over time (slower than we might like)

19. Is science able to resolve metaphysical disputes?
Consider the rise of atomism (Dalton’s chemistry, early 19th century):
Classical theology employs the form-substance distinction of Aristotle
(hylomorphism), for instance in the doctrine of transubstantiation
The form (species) of the Host
remains the same, but the
substance is replaced
Substance gives individuality to
objects, form gives the perceptual
properties
By the 1870s, Daltonian atomism
is seen a challenge to this idea
So theologians revise the notion of substance to mean any
underlying metaphysical reality

20. Is science able to resolve metaphysical disputes?
Lawrence Krauss argues that science has answered the question of
why there is something and not nothing
Has he?
Quantum foam is not
nothing
It is something (a
spacetime field) that
has properties
Krauss redefines the
philosophical issues
away

21. What is left after science knows?
It is a truism of logic and mathematics that if you eliminate a finite number of
objects from an infinitely large set of objects, an infinitely large set of objects
remains
Eliminating [some of] the religious claims that have been made does
not eliminate all religious claims
Dawkins even admits this in the God Delusion, saying that he attacks
“folk” beliefs, which is fine
This, however, does not mean that he, nor Krauss, Stenger or any
of the other Exclusionists, show that all religion is false
Just that form or version of religion (e.g., biblical literalism)
“There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave | To tell
us this.” [Hamlet] We knew that already

22. Religion, like any intellectual
and cultural tradition, is in flux
Traditions evolve in culture over time like
species do in biology
Like species, traditions have no essence
It is the nature of traditions that they adapt
to the social ecology in which they exist
So the strategic question is, how will we
confront these traditions so that science is
not constrained or ignored?
By excluding the
religious from science?
A losing strategy
By excluding the
scientific from religious
beliefs? Also a losing
strategy
By accepting anyone
who defends science: a
winning strategy

23. So?
In sum, religion must
accommodate science,
but not science
accommodate religion
And religion always
has, to some degree
Religion is a rational
bet by people acting
under uncertainty
even if the beliefs are
unreasonable
Exclusionism is itself not
a rational bet
It ignores the facts of
strategic
communication
It asserts contrary-to-
fact claims about
actual scientists who
are religious
It assumes without
evidence that religion
is going away

24. The Metaphysical Delusion
That: metaphysics rules our thinking
It does a bit, but not a lot (there are
no real worldviews/paradigms)
Science has metaphysics (but many
scientists are unaware of this)
Religion is not entirely metaphysical
beliefs either (it’s mostly ritual
behaviours)
Rationalists and skeptics give way
too much weight to propositional
beliefs (the Christian bias)

25. Thanks
I hope to have a book published next year that discusses this in more
detail. The working title is Faith, in Reason? Keep an eye out for it.
My blog is evolvingthoughts.net