[lbo-talk] Appeal to Ignorance

Jeffrey Fisher jeff.jfisher at gmail.com
Mon Jun 13 08:51:04 PDT 2005


On 6/13/05, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> --- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> Observe the past tense in your statement. Since the
> dawn of
> modernity, science, even when it is practiced in a
> relatively
> religious country such as the United States, has
> required no
> particular belief in any kind of God or gods -- if it
> did, atheists
> and agnostics here would have trouble participating in
> science, let
> alone excelling in it.
>
> ---
>
> Incidentally, while it is probably true that lack of
> religious belief correlates with being a scientist in
> the West, I'm not sure that it is the case in the
> former Soviet Union. I edited an article for the
> Russian Academy of Sciences recently arguing that the
> Orthodox Church needs to get more involved in science
> (the author drew a parallel with the push that
> Protestantism gave to rationalism in the Reformation).
>

and let's not forget that one does not reject "religion" any more than one can coherently reject "science" . . . one rejects the religions one finds, or the conception(s) of religion one finds. if that makes sense, then we need to think of "scientists'" rejection of "religion" as *those* scientists' rejection of mainly american/western conceptions/practice of religion.

right? so is there a correlation between being a scientist and being atheist? well, it sure looks like it. but what exactly is that suppposed to tell us? if we go back to the article yoshie posted, and the specific quotation that has exercised several of us (including, but only joanna -- and me, for that matter), we can see that far from being the innocent "descriptive" yoshie painted it as, only an utterly tone-deaf reader would miss the sarcastic dismissal of still-religious scientists as what we have begun on this list to call "residue". thus:

=== Similarly, Oxford University scientist Peter Atkins commented on our 1996 survey, "You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don't think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge." ===

clearly, "real scientist in the deepest sense of the word" is evaluative. let's not pretend otherwise.

now, it may well be that many of those scientists are bad scientists or bad religionists. i have seen a number of scientists who are silly religious fundamentalists. i know they are out there. my guess, however, is that if they are in the NAS, they are probably not bad scientists, so who knows really in what way they are religious.

but the clear implication of the quotation is that one cannot rationally be both scientific and religious, "because they are such alien categories of thought". and this all goes back to the same point i've been making all along: the false dichotomy between religion and science, which rests on misconceptions of both. and let's remember that, just like one need not be either religious or areligious in order to be a scientist, one need not be versed in the philosophy of science in order to do good science, any more than studying the philosophy of science would (by itself) make one a good scientist.

j

-- Among medieval and modern philosophers, anxious to establish the religious significance of God, an unfortunate habit has prevailed of paying to Him metaphysical compliments.

- Alfred North Whitehead



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