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Lurid, I have always loved you.
Heironymus: running down that Edge.org link...
Jesse Bering: “As scientists, we must toil and labor and toil again to silence God.” (Interestingly enough, Bering seems to agree with my assessment that the fcaopacity for belief is one of the things that makes us distinctly human “God is not an idea, nor a cultural invention, not an 'opiate of the masses' or any such thing; God is a way of thinking that was rendered permanent by natural selection.” He later goes on to call God a “biological appendage”. The conclusions that he and I draw from this knowledge are, of course, very different.)
Jordan Pollack, in discussing “Science as just another religion,” betrays a pretty limited understanding of what religion is all about. Philip Anderson, asserting that “The posterior probability of any particular God is pretty small,” similarly mises the point pretty spectacularly, as does Carolyn Porco: “The confrontation between science and formal religion will come to an end when the role played by science in the lives of all people is the same played by religion today.” All science is missing, she says, is ritual. (As if Dawkins is less popular than Mother Teresa because he hasn’t got a funny hat.)
Sam Harris comes out of the gate with this spectacularly wrong-headed charge: “The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.” Note the “always,” there. Always always always. He then calls on the scientific community to start “blasting the hideous fantasies of a prior age with all the facts at their disposal,” before calling religious belief a “hideous obscenity.”
Todd Feinberg, who works with brain-damaged people who’ve become delusional when their nervous systems got fried, says “There is an intimate relationship between my patients' narratives and socially endorsed fairy tales and mythologies.”
Keith Devlin says we are entirely alone: “There is no God; no Intelligent Designer; no higher purpose to our lives.” Then he gets his digs in: “Personally, I have never found this possibility particularly troubling, but my experience has been that most people go to considerable lengths to convince themselves that it is otherwise.” The sheep!
Robert Provine rips the “empirically improbable afterlife and man-in-the-sky cosmological perspectives,” before conceding that faith is a good racket: “What better theological franchise is there than the promise of everlasting life, with deluxe trimmings? Religious followers must invest now with their blood and sweat, with their big payoff not due until the after-life. Postmortal rewards cost theologians nothing--I'll match your heavenly choir and raise you 72 virgins.”
I could go on: Must I go on?
(On the other hand, Scott Atran gets it about right, I think: “[R]eligious fervor is increasing across the world, including in the United States, the world's most economically powerful and scientifically advanced society. An underlying reason is that science treats humans and intentions only as incidental elements in the universe, whereas for religion they are central. Science is not particularly well-suited to deal with people's existential anxieties, including death, deception, sudden catastrophe, loneliness or longing for love or justice. It cannot tell us what we ought to do, only what we can do. Religion thrives because it addresses people's deepest emotional yearnings and society's foundational moral needs, perhaps even more so in complex and mobile societies that are increasingly divorced from nurturing family settings and long familiar environments.” His dangerous idea is that science encourages religion in the long run, and vice versa—and I subscribe to that—it's basically Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" supposition again. |
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