Somebody uploaded a video on YouTube to send a message that scientists ought not believe in God. The speaker is Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He is an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York.
Some of the lecture was cut out, so I will not hold Tyson responsible for the error I’m about to describe. If I did, I would be guilty of the same error that I’m about to describe (drawing a conclusion on incomplete evidence). I will instead direct my comments toward the person who uploaded the video, who apparently intended us to conclude from it that religion hinders science. By extension, what I have to say here applies also to everyone else who has made the same mistake in any comparable way. And that includes a lot of people.
What I want to say is that this message about religion hindering science is completely unscientific; and the more it gets propagated, the more science is hindered.
Here’s why I say that. The error of which I speak is very painfully clear in this video, and it is quite specifically a scientific error. What the video does is to propose, on the basis of one snippet of history, that belief in God is harmful to the progress of science.
This is a statement that belongs in the field of social psychology and/or sociology. The claim goes like this: If a person (society) believes in God, the result in that person (society) will be deleterious to the progress of science.
I want to know where that has been scientifically measured and assessed.
The test could be run. The study could be done, though it would be difficult. It would require a good-sized representative sampling, measurement of their religiosity, and a correlative measurement of their attitudes toward, knowledge of, and contribution to science.
I want to know where that study has been conducted.
It would be a difficult study, because religiosity is a varied phenomenon, and it’s likely that a global measure of religiosity would obscure important detailed variables that would affect the outcome. Or in other words, it’s naive to assume that variances in Buddhist religiosity would have the same effect on scientific attitudes as variances in Muslim religiosity; and the same for all other religions. So the study would have to operationalize the relevant dimensions of religiosity and determine which of them correlate with attitudes toward science.
I want to know where that operationalizing work has been done.
“Science” is also a multi-dimensional term, and to claim that there is some correlation between religiosity and attitudes toward science calls for the question, which science? Is this a matter of attitudes toward science globally? Does it differ for different branches of science? Does it have something to do with scientific method, scientific assumptions, etc? These things need operational definitions for the sake of good correlational research.
I want to know where that operationalizing work has been done.
Every scientist knows that correlation does not prove causation; yet in the social sciences, where correlational findings support robust theory, it’s possible to draw at least tentative conclusions. Absent such theory, correlation absolutely cannot show causation. In the case of religiosity and science, a truly robust theory would have to depend on the above-mentioned operationalizing work in both religion and science.
I want to know where to find that robust theory in any scientifically responsible stage of development.
Every scientist knows that small and unrepresentative samples lead to erroneous conclusions. Most of the claims I’ve seen of science hindering religion are based on anecdotes or minor snippets from deep history; or from a single class of religious objection to one minority branch of the sciences (theories relating to evolution and the age of the universe).
I want to know where a truly representative study has been conducted.
The video presented above makes every one of these scientific mistakes. The conclusion it presents, while claiming to support science, is profoundly unscientific. It draws a conclusion that belief in God is bad for science, without operationalizing that belief, without parsing out the relevant sub-variables in belief, and on the basis of one single snippet of history, a tiny and unrepresentative sample, to which no scientifically responsible theory has been applied.
Every scientist worth his or her salt (I am no longer claiming “every scientist”) knows that making unscientific claims, while speaking in the role of a scientist, undermines science. It misrepresents the way in which scientific knowledge is generated. Because the information for such claims comes from unscientific carelessness, there is a very large chance the claims are completely wrong; and science is not in the business of generating and propagating falsehoods.
The video above undermines science in exactly that way.
And until the proper studies have been run, every single person who claims, “religion hinders science,” is hindering science by making scientifically unsubstantiated, theory-free and evidence-free claims.
In conclusion: the mantra of today’s scientistic atheism is that all knowledge properly comes from properly conducted science. They also claim that religious belief interferes with science. Let’s all get in the habit of asking them, Where is the science to support that claim?
Also at Thinking Christian
April 4th, 2012 | 12:24 pm | #1
It’s also interesting to note that at the end, he compares Jewish Nobel prize winners (~25%) with Muslim Nobel prize winners (~1%). It seems to me that one conclusion you could draw from this is that different religious communities foster a very different relationship to science. The one conclusion this statistic does NOT lend itself to is the very one that he draws, namely, that belief in God is inherently opposed to scientific progress. And it’s very odd that at the very end of his talk, he almost issues a fatwa against religious believers: “I don’t want to know why 85% of the members of the US Academy of Sciences don’t believe in God; I want to know why 15% of them do.” That challenge – that really, we should get rid of that 15% – is hardly a goal supported by his own evidence.
April 5th, 2012 | 10:40 pm | #2
Is it possible Christianity could prove science with the miraculous? Science needs to be quanitifable. Why do scientist seem to reject documented miracles?
April 12th, 2012 | 6:35 am | #3
Science seeks to understand truth. After repeated attempts to falsify that truth fail, truth tends to pile up onto itself into law until someone knocks that truth down and the process of falsifying that new truth begins again. Scientific truth is never meant to be whole, just probable.
Was human capital diverted by the practice of religion attacking people in the pursuit of scientific truth? As a non-academic, it appears that only historians have that answer.
April 12th, 2012 | 10:19 am | #4
Eric, the difficulty with your closing question is that it is not just academic historians who are supplying that answer. The overwhelming impression I got as I was growing up was that religion has hindered science all along the way. This “conflict thesis,” it turns out is being rejected by more and more historians, while a growing number of them are finding that Christianity contributed a lot to the development of science.
One way to look at this is through a comment someone once made to me. This was a believer in Christ, and a well educated one. He said, “You’ve got to admit, the church made some mistakes with science in the Middle Ages, like Galileo.” I said to him, “Galileo is not such a clear-cut case as we’ve been led to believe, but set that aside for now. Besides Galileo, name the other one.”
April 12th, 2012 | 1:03 pm | #5
The traditional allegedly naturalistic argument against the existence of God is “There is no room for God to exist in the reality we know, and we KNOW reality.” The problem with that assertion is that the claim that materialists “know reality” is constantly being undermined by scientific discoveries, which are constantly demonstrating that the realm of knowledge mankind does NOT possess is always larger than the knowledge we claim to have.
A good example is modern physics and cosmology. In just the last couple of decades, scientists have concluded that some 75 to 80 percent of the mass of each galaxy is some mysterious “Dark Matter” which has gravitational mass but does not interact with ordinary matter or electromagnetic radiation in any detectable way. Dark Matter plus regular matter is only about 20% of the total matter-energy of the universe, because there is a pervasive “Dark Energy” which is accelerating the expansion of the universe and is unlike any of the forms of energy we have studied. So some 90% of the universe is stuff concerning which the ignorance of science is far more than the knowledge of science.
Similarly, serious interpretations of quantum physics argue that there are an infinite number of universes, at different stages in their life cycles, and which may have completely different values of the many fundamental constants of nature which, within a narrow range of values, can ensure the possibility of living things. Among an infinity of universes, where 90% of the stuff in them is utterly indescribable by science, there is plenty of room for phenomena, and even persons, whom scientists are ignorant of but who nevertheless exist in reality.
Modern science renders the claim of scientists to possess comprehensive knowledge of reality, a corollary of which is the preclusion of the existence of God, an utter nullity.
April 17th, 2012 | 11:28 am | #6
Let’s also not forget the variety of scientific methods. The “scientific method” is of modest use today. Several model structures dominate the landscape for the evaluation of evidence. What is most disturbing is the incoherence that demands empiricism of the theist while minimizing empiricism in general use. (A. Plantinga addressed this in his recent book.)
Eric has stated correctly the inductive nature of much of science. It is about the inference to the best explanation. But is it always so dialectical — tear down the new paradigm? Maybe — but that’s a matter of historical analysis. The problem is — models are largely non-falsifiable. They are not like The Method where a negative constraint can show one to be false. Instead they require alteration to the model, and that gets far more complicated. (I need to read up on modern concepts of falsifiability as Popper’s material applied, generally speaking, to a different system.)
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