Coyne, Jerry - Seeing and Believing: The neverending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail

03/13/2009

The New Republic, Feb 4 2009

This is a book review of two attempts to show how belief in god and evolution are compatible, one by Giberson "Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution" and other by Miller "Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul". Author believes that these attempts are flawed, as are all attempts to try to have science and religion coexist. The first thing that author discredits is the weak 'god is nature' argument offered by Spinoza, who has a cousin in Einstein's 'god is bewildering wonder' conception. This makes god 'meaningless'-- according to author a true reconciliation must be not through the eyes of liberal theologians but of the common theistic, interactive deity religion.

Author gives his analysis of the 4 traits of creationists:
1) Devout belief in god
2) God miraculously intervened in the development of life
3) One of these interventions was the creation of humans
4) All have some sort of 'irreducible complexity' argument about how evolution couldn't have produced such a complex system incrementally.

Both Miller and Giberson reject the theory of Intelligent Design. They credit the origin of ordinary Americans trying to put this into schools as a type of anti-authoritarian strand in American culture. They also place much of the vehement culture wars around this issue on the virulent atheists like Dawkins and Dennett.

Author claims the biggest part of the argument for compatibility is the evolutionary convergence, the 'niche' that humans occupy-- using a known evolutionary theory that the world constrains practical developments to favor things like wings, eyes, endoskeletons. Yet author argues that humans are a very unlikely convergence, having only evolved 'once, in Africa'.

The other argument for creationists is the 'fine tuning of the universe', which employs the idea that the universe needs to be set up to be 'just right' to allow life to evolve and thrive-- the so-called 'anthropic principle'. Author's reply to this is that science is working on it, and that, so far as we know, it was pretty inefficient to create the entire universe so that 14bn years later, humans would evolve.

Next, author considers Gould's NOMA: Non-Overlapping Magisteria and argues that it would be nice for religion to not make any claims about the natural world, but in practice it does, all the time. Also, if religion offers a type of 'truth', is it falsifiable? Is it anything like the truths offered as explanations for the natural world given by science?

Author believes that both Miller and Giberson eventually display 3/4 of the Creationist tennets: 1-3. The real conflict isn't between religion and science but between religion and 'secular reason'-- the kind of reason that believes that reason has to be shown in most other human pursuits-- and they are 'incompatible' as well. Perhaps they are compatible in the same sense you can commit adultery at the same time as being married, but this just shows that a person can keep contradictory concepts in mind, not that they are compatible, author quips. In the end, author argues that an endeavor that reconciles old-style religion (that includes creationism) is bound to be contradicted and defeated by, science.