Guest Post (by Harrow):The Top 4 Things Wrong With (Ilya's) Blog Post Number 1

While I applaud the launch of this blog, it’s a shame that it had to begin with a post so laden with inaccuracies and bits of “conventional” wisdom that’s just plain bunk. It may take a book length treatise to disabuse you, dear reader, of all of the inaccuracies in that brief blog post (coincidentally, if it really does take something that long, feel free to check out my senior thesis.)

In the interest of time, let me just mention the top 4 most egregious errors/bits of baloney:

1. “Science purports to explore the nature of the physical universe, with all of its encompassing laws and processes. Religion claims to explore the metaphysical universe, by definition a section of human knowledge unknowable by scientific means.”

This sounds good, and frankly most people – who don’t give this statement more than a moment’s thought – do hold this view, which states that, as the biologist Stephen Jay Gould said, religion and science occupy “nonoverlapping magisteria.” But this is just an empirically false claim. Among the scientific (i.e. non-“metaphysical”) claims made in the Christian Bible are:

The relationship between man and the animal kingdom. Compare Genesis Chaps. 1 and 2 with Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The age of Earth. Compare the approx. 6,000 years of the Bible with the 4.6 billion years based on multiple scientific techniques.

The occurrence of a world-wide flood. Compare the story of Noah’s Ark to the geological record indicating such an event didn’t happen.

The relationship between the Earth and the Sun. Compare Joshua 10:12 (where Joshua asks the sun to stop revolving around the Earth) with the modern knowledge that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

The list goes on. The point is that there are scientific claims in the Bible, the most important being the creation of the Earth and the existence of animals and humans, which is directly in conflict with modern evolutionary theory. What the author must mean – indeed, the only thing that it can make sense for him to mean – is something like “the lessons drawn from an allegorical reading of the Bible are about morality and the nature of existence, and religious teachings are the best resources to use to help us answer those questions.” But this is a vastly different claim than the original. For one, he should admit that most religious people around the world do believe in the literal truth of their religious texts and that, when one does this, man claims directly contradict scientific knowledge. That’s just a fact. And second, some find the morality in the Bible deeply loathsome, and disagree with it vehemently. I won’t get into that here, though.

In fact, both sides of this debate need to recognize the truth of this collision course. Darwin’s powerful and elegant theory is so disconcerting to religious people – and gives rise to movements like creationism and Intelligent Design – precisely because it forces those people to realize that sometimes science and religious do clash head on. It really is either/or. Perhaps the author should vote for Obama if he would rather live in a fantasy world where differences just evaporate when people get in a room and think about how they’ve really been discussing two different things, and can’t we all just get along? Indeed, that would be nice. But it’s not our world. If the Bible and Darwin didn’t truly clash – if we could wish away the dilemma, by saying religious is about X and science is about Y – there wouldn’t really be much of a controversy, now would there?

I simply can’t stress this enough: the claim that Darwin’s theory and Genesis 1 (and the “other” Creation account in Genesis 2) “speak of different things in different languages without the aid of an obvious Rosetta stone” is just 180 degrees from the truth. They both speak of precisely how humans got here, and the relationship betweens humans and animals. And they offer vastly different answers and accounts. In the end, one of them is the right relationship, and here’s a hint: it’s not the one that Pat Robertson espouses.

2. “Dogmatic religious fundamentalists should not burden themselves with a scientific defense of supra-scientific matters of ‘God.’”

This is a normative statement about theology disguised as an innocent-sounding plea to just get along. Here’s the situation: the Bible says something; let’s take the claims that there was a world-wide flood, wiping out all of humanity and much of the animal kingdom save a select few. The author would like to tell those religious believers not to worry about whether there’s any evidence for such a flood, he thinks they should just listen to the Book or ignore it. But there are two options: either the flood happened or it didn’t. Some people are actually interested in looking at the Earth and seeing if we can answer the question, but Ilya doesn’t want to be bothered with that. But why not? Why is that claim – a massive flood wiped out much of the planet – outside the “domain” of either science or religion? Scientists look for evidence of long-ago climate changes all the time. They’re not allowed to look for whether such a flood actually happened?

3. “Dawkins…incredibly allows for the possibility of intelligent design as the source of life as we know it.”

Why is this incredible? Any intellectually honest scientist knows that we have never been able to create living structures from mere “stews” of organic molecules in our labs (at least, we haven’t done so yet). Perhaps the initial seed of life on Earth did come from a comet, or some alien civilization. The point of science is simply to look for evidence either way, and test and prod and improve and revise. If the evidence for that is there, great! Now we’ve increased the store of human knowledge. But that doesn’t mean that he believes at all in anything resembling the God in the Judeo-Christian Bible. Not for one second. The statement that Dawkins’ hypothetical, testable alien seed-of-life is “another man’s diety,” is downright insulting. Dawkins’ “designer” would be essentially the exact opposite of anything at all described in major religious literature.

4. “Einstein wanted to ‘know God’s thoughts, the rest are details.’ I wonder if Princeton would still grant him Tenure under today’s scientific orthodoxy.”

This is a nice little quote to drop. But a second’s research about what Einstein meant by “God’s thoughts” reveals that he was diametrically against anything resembling organized religion, and in fact fully endorsed the view of the world that science provides. The only sense in which he can be labeled religious is that he saw a kind of inherent beauty in things like symmetry and simplicity, and he simply unified those characteristics under the moniker “God.” Here are a few snippets that indicate what he really meant by “God’s thoughts” in that quote:

1929: “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

1950: “My position concerning God is that of an agnostic.”

And the doozy, from 1954: “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” (emphasis added)

So, in fact, we can stop wondering, since that little non-sequiter at the end is inaccurate on two counts, one small, one large: for one, Princeton never granted him tenure (while in the U.S., he was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is in Princeton, NJ but unaffiliated with Princeton U.). But second, and far more important, Einstein, does, in fact, share the views of most Ivy League science faculty today; that is, if one self-identifies as religious at all (and, clearly, Einstein self-identified as an agnostic), it is a sense of “religious” so far removed from any semblance of organized religion as to be unrecognizable.

In sum: “kumbaya, let’s all just get along, you take your Darwin, I take my Jesus” sounds nice. But there really is a clash between the two, and a choice to be made: it’s not at all “as if one were comparing the physical density of metal to the compassion one may have for stray animals.” Rather, it’s much more as if one were comparing two Presidential candidates: they both want the same job, and only one can win. I hope the author realizes someday that he will need to get in the voting booth and make a choice.