Faith vs. Fact

author Jerry Coyne is clear science and religion are simply not compatible and he's here now to tell us why here's Jerry Coyne author of faith versus fact why science and religion are incompatible he's also professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago and professor coin it's good to have you on the program again we had you once on before via satellite from Chicago but it's nice to have you in that chair thanks for being here let's end up pretending this is the most unique question you've ever been asked but I'm always curious why did you feel the need to write this book well let's start with my first book why evolution was true which was basically an a religious exposition of the evidence for evolution and I thought well just if people learned what the evidence was and how many fields of science it was drawn from and how multifarious it was that they would surely accept it but as I went around touring and talking about the book I faced a lot of pushback from people and one guy whose story I recount in that book came up to me after one of my talks and said well dr. Clare I'm I'm found your evidence very convincing but I'm still not convinced and that got me thinking well why would somebody find something convincing not be convinced and I realized it was he had religious blinders on which prevented him from receiving my message and I started realize then well I should have realized it because most anti evolutionism in America comes from religion that people if they're brought up with a strict literalist agenda simply won't accept any evidence at all and then and a subsequent talk in the same tour I woman got out up out of the island so she was weeping and tears were running down her face and she said well dr. Klein I believe everything you said about evolution I mean your evidence is incontrovertible but my church tells me it's not true what do I do about this and I didn't know what to do I sort of said lamely well it goes to speak to your spiritual adviser many people can comport science in relationship but then I began to wonder well how did they do that and I started reading the literature on the you know science and religion relationship and I realized that a lot of it was fallacious or tendentious and eventually that research grew into that you're clearly not religious now but were you ever yeah I was raised as a reform Jew but if you're in the States you know that's about that far from being an atheist I went to Hebrew school briefly flunked out and I had a D conversion experience when I was listening to Sergent pepper album you're not being precise no it's in the book yeah I don't the noodles turned you off religion yeah they do and it's nothing that they said or did I was maybe it put me in some kind of frame of mind when I was listening to this album that I still remember it like it was yesterday is lying on the couch and all of a sudden I really realized that everything that I have been taught about God that there was no evidence for that and so my very first deconversion experience was an evidence-based one and I had five minutes of sort of psychic pain when I realized though I'm not going to go to heaven I'm gonna be interred and turn into worm food and then after that I've been you know a non-believer ever since and it's been okay and you were 17 when that happened yeah I was in seventeen the album was 1966 I would have been 17 I think and would that be the moment where you really began to see friction between no science and religion not at all you know basically I became a non-believer but I didn't do anything about it I mean I wasn't vociferous I didn't argue with anybody I just didn't make you know the divine part of my life it was only when I wrote my first book and began to face pushback from religious people about my science that I began to realize well you know the problem is not a lack of evidence for Americans evidence is everywhere with Neil deGrasse Tyson and David Arbor Richard Dawkins you know all these people promulgating evolution you're soaked in science and America it's the religion that prevents people from accepting and I began to realize that the bigger problem is not a lack of education but a set of blinkers installed when certain people by their religion that makes them resistant to science not just evolution but many other forms of science and rationality in general not every scientist though sees a conflict between religion and science we had Martin Rees on this program not correct long ago very highly regarded scientist out of the United Kingdom he does not see any conflict between religion and science but you clearly do yeah but some what you mean by conflict I mean if you construe a lack of conflict as meaning that there are religious scientists I think Martin Rees is actually an agnostic I don't think he's a believer but he thinks there's no conflict if he construe harmony between science and religion is the presence of religious scientists of which of course there are many or the presence of many religious people who like science of which there are many then there's no conflict but that's not what I mean by conflict between science and religion it's a conflict between how you justify and come to have conference and what you believe or what you know have you come to believe that there are some religions in the world that are actually very compatible with science the ones that rely less on the supernatural which there are not that many the Jains for example Confucius Unitarian Universalists who are as far as I can see as close to being atheist as a secular Jew those people use religion mostly to bolster a sense of community and in commenting amongst their fellows they don't really have any beliefs in the supernatural it's those beliefs the supernatural that are the things that really come in conflict with the scientific point of view we've got the results here of a 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center which is a pretty reputable outfit I think and here's what they had to say 83% of the American public believe in God whereas 33% of scientists believe in God so Jerry you're pretty anti-american to begin with here I guess right well I'm not representative of the average American in that respect yeah what do you think accounts for this rather broad disparity between what the general American public thinks and what you scientists believe well there's two explanations for that I'm not sure we know the answer for sure being a scientist I have to confess when I have my doubts but the first one is that people who are not believers are drawings of science as a profession so we're enriched with non-believers from the outset the other explanation and I think both of these actually apply is that as you become a scientist as you learn to instill in your psyche the habits of doubt of questioning of demanding evidence for what you believe you basically give up the childish things that represent it's the supernatural and divine well except that 33 percent of those surveyed who are scientists do believe what you say to them that's true I would say that you're in a state of cognitive dissonance that when you go to church you leave in the church store all the habits of rationality criticality and doubt that you that you use when you enter your laboratory it when you know every throw you abandon all the supernatural beliefs that you hold in church so you're using two different kinds of evidence for what you believe one for your scientific beliefs and one for your religious beliefs I I just don't find that as that's my notion of what incompatibility is what if and I have no idea but what if that 33 percent merely thinks you know I don't have evidence for a higher being I can't say that I believe because I'm following a line of logic or I'm following etc but I'm modest enough to think that it's possible and that and that I don't know everything I mean is that a possible explanation yeah I mean in my book I mentioned the kind of evidence that would convince me that there was not only a God but a Christian go ahead but to say that you know you're so humble that you will believe anything seems to me an extraordinarily degree it's certainly a high degree of being credulous I mean you people don't say humble enough that I won't dismiss Santa Claus or Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster for which there's equally little evidence for that as there is the divine only religion that has this unique position of people saying well we don't have any evidence really for it but I'm not going to dismiss it yeah I think it's because they have an emotional commitment to those beliefs Kenneth Miller professor of biology Brown University wrote in his 2009 book finding Darwin's God the following to be sure genuine faith requires from its adherents a trust in God but it also demands a confidence in the power of the human mind to investigate explore and understand the evolving nature of God's world if a scientist believes God created the world and science is the study of that world where's the conflict well the conflict is and what gives you the confidence that I mean if you read that part again he says that it's a kind of faith analogous to religious faith but sign I mean scientists don't have faith that we're gonna understand the world we have a set of tools that has been employed over five hundred six hundred years that has been successful so the faith that science has is not the same kind of faith that religious people have which is basically as described in Hebrews it's the assurance of you know things you have not seen in the conference and things you don't that you don't have any evidence for we have faith in science because the methods that we use have produced results whereas the religious ways of knowing as you know because every religion has different set of truths that they hold and they're all in conflict with one another they haven't arrived that any Universal or generally accepted truths about nature there are those who make room for religion and let's let's get into that expression right now I think you call it accommodation ISM yes what does that mean to me it means the view that science and religion are mutually compatible in the that they can be admitted together that they can live harmoniously together in the human mind and my contention is that that's a point of view which is false that it's to weigh two different ways of looking at the universe that are not compatible who are the accommodation is today well there's a lot of them I mean every science friendly religionist every scientist who is religious is an accommodationist because they have these two different ways of looking there are also many scientific organizations issue statements saying that science and religion are not incompatible you know we're two separate magisteria they call them that one of them dealing with values and morals the other dealing with the natural world and so many atheists are accommodationist because if we're interested for example in some evolution to an evolution resistant American public and you know more than half of the American public the US public doesn't like evolution then they say we have to placate our religious friends by telling them that science and religion are not at odds with their faith and that way they'll be on our side that way they'll accept evolution the problem is that that strategy hasn't worked very well that's just politics though isn't it it is and in their more candid moments they'll admit this is a tactical method rather than something they really believe in their hearts let's quote another scientist you may have heard of this guy Albert Einstein he seemed to accommodate or at least make room for religion when he wrote in 1932 the most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious it is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavor in art and science he who never had this experience seems to me if not dead then at least blind to sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp whose beauty and sublimely reaches us only indirectly this is religiousness in this sense I am religious what's your view on that well that's a yeah I mean people always quote Einstein saying that because Einstein is regarded as the world's smartest man and if he says that he's religious in any way that somehow justifies religion but what he means by that and that's borne out by the whole history of his statements on religion including those in Walter Eisenberg's biography of Einstein he was he did not believe in a personal God or any kind of theistic God that could intervene in the world he said there very clearly I'm a rabbi once wrote a I'm saying do you believe in God Einstein said no you know no way do I believe in any kind of personal God I sign construed religiousness in the sense of the mysterious the what you can't understand at that time Einstein was grasping with grappling with quantum mechanics these really really mysterious and you know counterintuitive things that still bug on the minds of physicists and when a scientist has a big juicy unresolved problem like that that whose answer may never be known then it conjures up in you well I mean that's what he called religious so to say that Einstein somehow justified Christianity or Judaism or whatever from a statement like that is to misconstrue what he was really meaning as before the stuff that we don't understand is scientists Walter Isaacson who was a guest on this program about six months ago want me to clarify that it was he who wrote the book about Einstein not Isaac burry yeah sorry I get the name that's fine just okay let's do another one here the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould whom you knew I'm sure yes here's our my thesis committee his idea that science and religion do not overlap he wrote as follows science and religion are not in conflict for their teachings occupied distinctly different domains the lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains professional expertise science and the empirical constitution of the universe and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives the attainment of wisdom in a full life requires extensive attention to both domains I mean you think he's wrong but why do you absolutely I mean I go into again in the book it was basically for two reasons first of all he limits religion two meanings morals and values she's just that explicitly in the book religionists have and theologians have not reacted well to that because they will say explicitly that we are basing our religion on certain assertions about the real world that are true for Christianity it's that Jesus was the son of God came to earth and was resurrected for Jews it's other things for Hindus and Muslims it's other claims so it's not just about meeting morals and values it's about those things and the sense of community but they're grounded out certain truths about the world so by and large that claim that religion is restricted to this domain has been rejected not by scientists but by theologians who have rejected Gold's claim the other claim that gold makes which is that religion is the purview of beating of morals and values is also wrong because he neglected the fact that there's a huge history a long history of secular analyses of philosophy and ethics beginning with the ancient Greeks going through Conant Hume Spinoza John Stuart Mill and all the way up to people like Anthony grayling and Peter Singer today who deal with ethics meetings tomorrow's advice without ever mentioning the supernatural or a deity so Gould you know define these realms to be separate but actually look at how they operate they're not there's considerable overlap faith is striking back against well let me put it this way I don't think there's too many rabbis priests ministers or Imams who are on Friday Saturday or Sunday going to be saying go out and buy Jerry's book it's a good yes correct scientism is with us now what is that well scientism is it's a pejorative word if you look it up and they I think it's in the Oxford Dictionary of philosophy it's it says right after bet this is a pejorative term it's meant to do down science and it's it can be construed as a number of things the most common is that science extends its reach beyond its ambit for example that science will tell you what's ethical you know they act in ways that go beyond the boundaries of understanding the natural world so some you know the problem is that these controls of sign or that for example that that literature is meaningless or art is meaningless so we could only understand literature and art through science that's another way that sciencism is defined but when you actually look at how the word is used I think we can plead not guilty in general to that I mean I for one have no problem saying that science can't tell us anything about what's right or wrong it can tell us what is there are few people who disagree with me like Alex Rosenberg but by and large we can't do that as far as the arts and literature I'm a big fan of art and there shouldn't music my contention is they can't tell us what's true about the real world I mean you can't learn anything about the nature of the cosmos by reading war and peace but you can immerse yourself in the fellow-feeling of humans and stuff like that so you know scientism is just a way that religious people try to denigrate science and there's other ways that's construed as well but those are the two main ways and Francis Collins current director National Institutes of Health says science is not the only way of knowing are there other ways of knowing I consider this again on my book very deeply because that was the question that plagued me the most the one I had to think the hardest about can we learn anything about the universe from what I call science broadly construed which does not just the activities of the professional scientists but the kind of science that an auto mechanic uses when he tries to find out where the short is in your car or plumber the the combination of reason and empirical investigation and testing and things like that is there anything that can be found out about the universe beyond that notion of science broadly construed it my answer was no I couldn't think of anything and I posed this question to English professors as well can you tell me anything that we can learn about the real world that's verifiable from literature alone for music alone from art alone and I could never find a yes answer I mean you can find hypotheses in literature you can read Moby Dick and learn how whales are hunted but you know that comes from empirical experience of Herman Melville he watched whales be killed so you don't really you know that requires verification there's plenty of stuff in literature was simply made up and you know so you know if you took that as fact just because it's in a novel which of course is my view of the Bible a fictional work which many people think is fact then you'd be grossly misled let's go full circle here you started by saying you wrote this book because the last book that you wrote was unpersuasive enough with enough people now you've written the second book yeah if people are immune to what you would call evidence or facts what's the point because I think the underlying problem is the problem of faith as a virtue in America if I were to characterize the difference between science and religion I'd say and religion faith is a virtue in science it's a vise so I don't think everybody's immune to that I mean I made enough converts for my first evolution book and I get emails to vouch for that that I know not everybody used to be into it when I'm hoping with this book is to disabuse Americans particularly the ones on the fence on the young ones not the ones who already deeply steeped in faith that faith is no way of knowing anything I mean it may be a way of making you feel better but if you're making statements about the afterlife the nature of the divine particularly when those statements are caused pain like the Church's opposition many churches opposition to use of birth control the Catholic Church's statement that condoms don't prevent AIDS the opposition to vaccinations and medical care by many religions like Christian Science in that case faith is not only not harmless it's it's injurious you actually anticipated my next question is if somebody wants to say that science and faith are compatible what's the harm in that that's the end yeah well in many ways I mean to me the rational way of living which is the rational way of living is to base your beliefs and as strongly as possible and proportionate to the evidence behind them so when you make claims like gape being gay as a choice which is based purely on religious claims not on biology and then prosecute gay people for that that's harm thousands of children in America have died because their parents refuse to accept medical care and biblical grounds how many lives does it take before it convinces us that this kind of faith is is a harmful thing okay sorry thank you winning the argument yeah I think there's no doubt about that if you look at the statistics and again this comes from the Pew organization America's becoming slowly but inexorably more secular so now we're up to 19 percent of nuns which are those people who don't aren't formally affiliated with church that's almost a doubling in the last twenty years I think so I think it won't happen in my lifetime that we will see America arrive at a state similar to that in northern Europe which is mostly unbelievers so wrong America in general maybe but how about the Republican Party in particular well they're a harder case but you know they're gonna come around eventually it's kind of take a couple hundred years it took a couple hundred years in Europe from the Enlightenment and now Northern Europe is largely I mean when people say religion is always going to be with us it's here to stay my answer is Scandinavia because those countries sweet Denmark and Norway are mostly made up of atheists they managed to dispense with religion and still keep their sense of media morals and values people aren't running amuck and Stockholm they've managed to jettison the superstition but keep the humanistic values and I think that and the statistics bear me out and this is what's happening in the United States Jerry a coin has been our guest the name of the book is faith versus fact why science and religion are incompatible it's good to have you here at Evo today thanks so much my pleasure helped Evo create a better world through the power of learning visit support TV org and make a tax-deductible donation today

Channel: TVO Today

Views: 41,513

Keywords: TVO, TVOntario, The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, Gallileo, religion, science, biology

Id: y6T39bz7A4w

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2015