Religion & Law

Religious Science

By John Pieret

Christopher Schoen of u n d e r v e r s e makes an excellent point about how little the incompatibilist "atheist-scientists," as Jerry Coyne calls them, actually use empiric fact or science when describing the religion they deride.

Specifically, Chris, in a post titled "Is Neo-Atheism a Pseudo Science?" discusses physicist Sean Carroll's piece at his blog, Cosmic Variance, and Coyne's laudatory post at Why Evolution Is True and how they characterize "typical" religious belief in vague terms, without any appeal to actual studies of religion and the nature or effect of religious belief:

To the extent this kind of work is done at all it tends not to support the "incompatibilist" position. Anthropologist Scott Atran has tried to look empirically, scientifically, at the phenomena we lump together under the rubric of "religion." His field study of jihadi suicide bombers, for example, has cast serious doubt on many of the causal factors that supposedly link religious fervor and piety to violence and other social evils. On the other hand I have not seen Carroll, Coyne, Dawkins, Hitchens, Weinberg, or any of the others who make these kind of claims make any appeals to science whatsoever, and I suspect it is because there is no science that confirms the kind of folk wisdom that says it's "perfectly evident" that religion is intrinsically antagonistic to reason and human rights.

Too, too many scientists are making too, too many unsubstantiated claims about what religion is and how it functions in our culture for this conversation to be fruitful and increase our understanding of how faith and reason interact. My question to them is this: if the most vociferous defenders of the scientific method won't bother themselves to use it in this passionate defense, then who will?

Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on June 23, 2009 (boomark / email).