A Grand Bargain Over Evolution

THE “war” between science and religion is notable for the amount of civil disobedience on both sides. Most scientists and most religious believers refuse to be drafted into the fight. Whether out of a live-and-let-live philosophy, or a belief that religion and science are actually compatible, or a heartfelt indifference to the question, they’re choosing to sit this one out.

Still, the war continues, and it’s not just a sideshow. There are intensely motivated and vocal people on both sides making serious and conflicting claims.

There are atheists who go beyond declaring personal disbelief in God and insist that any form of god-talk, any notion of higher purpose, is incompatible with a scientific worldview. And there are religious believers who insist that evolution can’t fully account for the creation of human beings.

I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/opinion/23wright.html?th&emc=th

That doesn't sound plausible to me. I don't remember science nerds protesting outside the school board meeting...

We start off with the old triangulation nonsense. The author of course pictures himself right in the sensible middle, so therefore anyone else is an "extremist." To see the fallacy here, let's consider another issue. Suppose someone holds the position that abortion is wrong and should be illegal, except in the cases of rape or incest. That person could then say that there are two camps that are BOTH wrong - the pro-choice extremists who think abortion should always be legal, and the anti-choice extremists who think it should always be illegal. Would the vast majority of DUers who support legal abortion consider themselves extremists on this issue? I kinda doubt it. But that's how Wright is trying to frame things.

Or consider a less political issue. Suppose one group of people say that electricity is caused by introducing electrical potential between two terminals, creating the flow of electrons. Another group says that tiny elves run through the wires to do the work. Are both of these groups extreme? Or is one correct, and one completely wrong?

From there it just gets worse, with special pleading, false dichotomies, equivocation, and featuring a special appearance by the laughable watchmaker analogy.

"God" isn't a concept to be studied by science. Leaving a hole to put a god into is doing a great disrespect to our intellect.

I'm tired of this false dichotomy of science vs. religion. One is about evidence and one is about faith..Thats two pretty contradictory concepts. If you ask me, there is no overlap
Oh and this bullshit that all scientists are atheists. Not true. I've met plenty of rational scientists who also have religious beliefs but they know that they are different and separate.
As a scientist it is not my place to tell others what or what not to "believe". Just as religious people have NO RIGHT to tell me how to run my experiments.

There is some overlap if a believer makes a claim which can be tested.

For example, "God answers prayers for healing." or "God made the Earth 6000 years ago."

Both of those religious claims can be tested.

There may be other overlaps as well.

The whole idea that there is no overlap has been debunked, more than once.

as a scientist, if those "beliefs" contradict established scientific fact. As a doctor, would you not tell parents who "believed" that prayer would cure their daughter's diabetes that their belief was flat wrong and very dangerous? As a meteorologist, would you not tell the governor of Georgia that praying does not bring rain, no matter how much he "believes" it? This turning of a blind eye to a very REAL dichotomy by some scientists amounts to nothing less than blatant intellectual cowardice.

It is NOT my place to say or speak on it. Anymore than it is for me to announce before testing a hypothesis what I expect the results to be.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. Science is about evidence and and relgion is about faith. Neither is compatible. Now if someone claims some testable hypothesis is proof of god...thats a different story.
But almost all the believers I've met (and its likely because I live in a very liberal area) know that science is something entirely different from faith.
I'm also of the mind that if we don't go around sticking our noses in relgious beliefs many won't go around sticking their noses in our scientific method. How many kids are being dissuaded from interest in science because their relgious background is telling them that only fundie atheists study it? Sorry, but I have met so many people who are well capable of keeping their biases separate. And the feeling that science is necessary to disprove god/religion is another sort of bias, one a good scientist should not have.
In other words, I think we should worry about what we can test. Not what we can't NOT prove.

I guess I think the ideal scientist would be an apathetic agnostic: I don't know and I don't care..:)

but almost all of the believers you've met do NOT know that science is something entirely different from faith. I'd be more than willing to bet that at least some of the things they accept as tenets of their faith involve truth claims about the physical world, which clearly overlaps with scientific, rational inquiry. And the appearance of "keeping their biases separate" is nothing more than a cop-out. They've struck a cognitive compromise in their own minds that allows them to appear at least superficially rational and "liberal", while still clinging to the need to call something god, and avoiding the fearful stigma of unashamed atheism, but deep down, the conflict is unresolved.

If someone's concept of "God" involves something that can influence, and be influenced by, events in the physical world, then it absolutely IS a concept to be studied by science. And since that includes the "God" concept of the vast majority of religious believers in the world (except for those who keep morphing their notion of "God" specifically to evade that argument), your argument is pretty hollow.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=214x216367

Posted yesterday.

The OP in this thread apparently thinks the article in question is hot shit, not laughable old tripe.