Ian Philbrick: Why Science and Atheism Are Incompatible

Ian Philbrick has a piece for the Georgetown Voice that tackles the controversy concerning Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and its host, a professed agnostic with tinges of religious antipathy.  He writes:

Tyson’s perspective is even more relevant to the increasingly antagonistic relationship between science and faith. Perhaps first popularized in American public discourse by the 1925 Scopes so-called “Monkey Trial,” modern “active atheists” (in Tyson’s words) have elevated acrimony to new levels. This activism has been spurred by the emergence of science intellectuals, including Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins, whose vociferous atheism is inextricably wedded to their public personas.

While campaigns, petitions, and protests are certainly the prerogative of individuals, they become dangerous when applied wholesale to a discipline like science that derives its foundational credo and central legitimacy from objective inquiry. While dogma and impartiality can certainly exist as facets of an individual (as can religious belief and scientific rationality), the two are less easily reconciled on an institutional scale. Reconciling active atheism and science becomes a problem of participation and fundamentally conflicting ideology. Science, which must resist pigeonholing and generalization by its skeptical nature, is inherently incompatible with an activist movement that brands all faith practices invalid.

In their wonderful book, Science Held Hostage, Howard van Till, Davis Young and Clarence Menninga highlight the pitfalls of using science either in support of a belief position or an atheist position, instead arguing that science, practiced properly, cannot confer meaning in any sort of ultimate sense. It is simply a vehicle by which we understand the working of the universe.This is my general discomfort with the ID movement: using science, you can never show that God exists.  The movement's only recourse is to try to show that ID exists as a plausible notion, often at the expense of mainstream science.  This has resulted in an almost complete scientific sterility because there is no theoretical basis from which to work.  What sort of hypothetical question could you construct for which the null is "God doesn't exist."

by the same token, atheists, such as Richard Dawkins are out of their depth when dealing with religious subjects because atheism doesn't flow from the scientific enterprise.  Consequently, his book The God Delusion, was not well-received.  Dawkins, it was said, was a good scientist, but a rotten moralizer.

Science is best practiced as it is. It tells us how things work and, within its own confines, how they work, but it does not tell us what their ultimate purpose is. 

What Does The Origin of Life Say About Religion?

Paul O'Donoghue, writing for the Irish Times asks about The ever evolving nature of scepticism. He writes:

Scientists have from time to time been accused of scientism, that is, presuming that science can do no wrong and that it will eventually provide the answers to any questions worth answering. Such accusations have come from traditional opponents of science such as the creationist movement, but the downside of scientism has been pointed out in a more balanced way by others.

Massimo Pigliucci, in his book Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism and the Nature of Science, points critically to episodes of scientism in the writings of well-known and respected scientists such as physicist Steven Weinberg and biologist EO Wilson. Weinberg is scathingly critical of philosophy describing it as a waste of time and even as detrimental to science.

This was tackled some years back by a trio of authors from Calvin College in a book called Science Held Hostage, published by Intervarsity Press (when they were somewhat more open-minded than they currently are). This outlined three instances in which creationism was way off base, scientifically and then how scientists overreached their bounds in declaring no evidence for God. In it, they plead for all to leave science to the scientists and not try to use it to further either a theistic or atheistic cause.I thought the book to be very insightful and one that should sit on the bookshelf of every Christian.  Sadly, it has gone in and out of print in recent years and was not easy to find the last time I checked.

It is interesting that he mentions the somewhat conciliatory position taken by Pigliucci with regard to scientism because just a bit later in the article, we find that Pigliucci is letting scientism in the back door.  He writes:

Pigliucci, in an article in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, points out three reasons as to why an answer to this question is particularly important. Firstly, definitively ascertaining that life originated by natural means would have profound implications for any religious belief, further shrinking the role of any god in human affairs.

How? Given that we live in a physical universe, with physical laws and consequences of them, how else would it start? For those of us who believe in God and don't subscribe to a creation model of "divine fiat," it makes perfect sense for God to have created life in this fashion. Finding this out doesn't shrink God any more than it proclaims from the highest mountain tops that He exists. It just is. We take it on faith that this is God's means of creation. Despite his position earlier, Pigliucci has conflated ultimate causes with proximate causes and he tips his hand when he writes this.

O'Donoghue is correct that we may have the question of the origins of life with us for some time.  Despite what the folks at the Discovery Institute might say, this is no obstacle to evolution.   Even if there was evidence that the earliest life dropped down out of the sky, there is still mountains of evidence that it evolved since that time.