Film short: Why It's So Hard for Scientists to Believe in God

[iceaura]

I think that it's accurate to say that religion speaks more directly to people's aesthetic and ethical sensibilities than natural science does.

Quite possibly. So do most ads for breakfast cereal.

Religion is about giving people the sense that the events of their lives are meaningful and that it all has some larger context, purpose and goal.

Ends do not justify means, in general.

I think that I agree with exchemist, by and large. Most religious people that I interact with seem to have experience divided into two categories: descriptions and predictions concerning objective physical reality, which is best addressed by the methods of natural science, and subjective psychological personal reality where things like ethics, meaning and beauty are more in the forefront.

And that central blunder, a product of their religious adherences, ripples out into all of our lives. Things like whether a fertilized human egg has a soul, or whether homosexual men have voluntarily given themselves over to perversion and the molesting of boys, or whether God made black people with lower IQs than white people and gave them Africa to live in, or whether rich people should pay high taxes to prevent their accumulation of wealth from harming us all, or whether we should invade Iraq and defend Israel against Muslims and set up torture centers for captured enemies, since they cannot be approached via "objective physical reality", are made without reason or evidence being brought to the forefront.

I'm certainly not convinced that religion must always be in conflict with science.

That is an interesting theoretical question. I certainly hope that a religion can be found for modern science, because it needs one. But whether it "must" or not, in reality it is, all but universally.

It might turn out that the so-called 'incompatibility thesis' is a doctrine of what we might label fundamentalist faith, found among both religious fundies and atheist fundies.

If you can define an atheist fundie, which I doubt, few if any would be scientists.

It seems to me that the vast majority of discourse in the modern west has nothing to do with religion or religious ideas at all. People talk about their jobs, shopping, current events, sports... where to go for lunch. Even ostensibly religious people often don't think about religion very much except on Sunday morning, before football.

And when choosing political representation, setting up building codes, handing out prison sentences and selecting juries, hiring and firing and working with folks, managing the education of the their children, and so forth. The conflict between religion and science currently playing out all over the US does not feature fundies on "both sides". Just one side.

We live in a thoroughly secular age.

In which I can't buy a bottle of booze or a used car on Sunday, the local Congresscritter campaigns almost entirely in the churches and wins, the third shift on one of my job sites is populated by women wrapped head top toe in thick cloth in 80 degree heat, the area of tax base lost to churches and their holdings is larger than the parkland in my town, and so forth.

"The fact that Collins asserts political, social, or intellectual equivalence between the bigots and charlatans and lunatic fundies of the Christian stage currently dominating American media and politics - - - - "

That's a caricature.

No, it isn't. And there lies the problem with this discussion: the refusal of the religious to recognize the situation, the nature and role of religion in US public life.

Dawkins is (or at least was) a very good evolutionary biologist. But somehow he's turned himself into a supposed atheist authority on the subject of religion, without having any formal education in the subject at all that I'm aware of. Some of the things that he says about religion seem almost as crude and ill-informed to my eye as what fundy creationists' proclaim about evolutionary biology.

For example?

One doesn't need a formal education in "the subject" (whatever is meant by that, here) to describe what one can see and hear and run into at almost any time whenever verification is needed. Dawkins simply reports his experience, in my experience - more of a simple sort of journalism than any kind of fancy analysis or claim of "authority".