In a somewhat non-reflective moment, some scientists appear to have ramped up prejudice and stereotyping in the name of open-minded tolerance and honesty. Others were more disciplined in their comments.
The New York Times carried an article yesteday, excerpted here:
New York Times online
November 21 2006
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
by George Johnson
Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.
She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”
She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.
There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)
A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.
After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.
That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine,” was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.
...With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?
“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”
“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”
Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.
“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”
That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”
By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”
“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”
His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science....”
Commentary
As one with a foot firmly in both camps, I think there are several lessons here.
First, respectful conversation is important, not only between "sides" but within each group.
That means starting by not demonizing the other person or their perspective or mental model, and in particular by not demonizing their intentions. There are some people with anger-managment problems, some with sinister agendas, and some crazies, but most people are well-intentioned. Most objections are friendly obejctions, not the start of world war III. Can we start there?
Second, as mentioned in earlier posts here, even within an engineering community, such as a nuclear reactor control room, discussions that challenge mental models are very difficult and can become emotional, to the extent that people identify themselves with their positions. This has been extensively documented, in books such as "Getting to Yes" by the Harvard Negotiation Project. Again, let's start there and learn how to create "safety cultures" where we can talk to each other without fighting, about any subject. Most of us have zero formal training on conflict-management.
Third, it seems that most people, regardless of education, have difficulty seeing the end of their own expertise and the start of areas where their experience is a poor guide. And, unfortunately, there is a "Nobel prize effect" where the more public success one has had with a model, the harder it becomes in the future to challenge that model. People tend to get locked into a model, with a huge accumulation of supportive evidence and a very weak accumulation of contrary evidence.
Fourth, there is a conflict between how knowledge is accessed. I discussed this before in a post on the difference between academics and businessmen, but it's largely true as well for the difference between scientists and theologists. Academics typically are oriented around small-scale open-loop symbol-structures, and can battle for years over tiny discrepancies; businessmen and theologists are oriented around large-scale, closed-loop massively-parallel image structures, where pointwise problems are insignificant, what matters is the overall diagnostic impression and the action taken based on that. Academics, in general, care about details they call "facts." Religion cares primarily (aside from extremists) about activities in the real world called "actions."
The relationship between the two is not some linear translation or rotation or other affine transformation - it is more like a fourier transform or hologram. There is no reason that qualified observers making accurate observations using the two systems would agree on overlays of their measurements.
For the scientific readers of this post, that whole conflict, essentially between Newtonian calculus and Laplacian calculus, needs to be teased out of the equation first to see what remains.
In the one, we define a function by a whole series of pointwise values of y(x). In the other, we define a function by its components, somewhat akin to hierarchical jpegs - so the first fact is not to nail down say, the value of y at x=zero, but to nail-down "what is the average value of y over the range in question?" The Newtonian crowd (scientists) start screaming because the value of y(zero) 's Fourier component number one is clearly "wrong", ignoring the fact that they haven't even defined y(most points) which is also "wrong."
For example, a theoretical scientist may develop a nuclear weapon, or restore the smallpox DNA sequence, or reconstitute the 1918 avian flue virus, but disclaim responsibility for how that technology is used from that point forward. A non-scientist might ask, responsibly, "What the
This is not to advocate a Luddite approach. It's to note that "science" does not operate in a vacuum, isolated from other effects or events. Science, and scientists operate in society and have very real social impacts with their actions. The fact that so many scientists wash their hands of these clearly related downstream effects of their actions is very disturbing to other very rational people, some of whom are scientists, some of whom are in the "religion" camp.
We get "How can you live with a wrong fact!" versus "How can you live with a wrong action?!"
In fact, the battle over "facts" in the stories religions have as part of their belief systems is a red-herring. Within religions, and I've wasted a thousand hours on this pitfal, some people just spend all their time arguing over minor semantic distinctions, and avoiding dealing with the crux of the matter, namely the social irresponsibility of their own behavior.
It appears that "science" is seen by some people as a reprieve, a liberty, a license to be "free" of any accountability or responsiblity for their own actions. This message may not be intended by most scientists, but it is the way their work is taken by many, including many business and political leaders. In reality, as science advances to non-linear complex systems adequate to start grappling with social issues, the feedback loops that humans have with society and each other will become very clear and, ultimately, normative. We may be within a decade of that realization.
At that point, there may be much more realization of convergence, regarding how humans "should" behave towards each other, if we want, say, to survive as a species at all.
In the meantime, be respectful.
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