it's a long one, but it's my last.
On 6/17/05, snitsnat <snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> At 04:14 PM 6/16/2005, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
> >that's what i've been trying to say all along (and carrol gets this, i
> >think) and it's why i have trouble less with a scientist saying "i
> >reject religion" than with a scientist saying "scientists reject
> >religion" or with people on a mailing list deploying either of the
> >latter in an argument about how nonsensical "religion" is because
> >scientists reject it. that's all. it's about the kinds of claims we
> >can make.
>
> But, this is where Yoshie was completely misunderstood -- and I'm starting
> to wonder if what's going on here.
first of all, i have maintained all along -- although yoshie and chuck brown seem to have understood it as "condescension" -- that yoshie and i are in very close agreement on most of this cluster of issues. i think carrol will back me both on my factual claim (that i have maintained this) and on its accuracy (that we are in fact largely in agreement). it seems to me that she and i are arguing over a fairly narrow discursive issue. furthermore, i think the problem has arisen in part because she and joanna both understood me as somehow taking joanna's side in ways that i was not. i may be wrong about that, but that's really what it looks like to me.
>
> chuck0 maintained that we needed in your face antreligious activism to get
> "religion out of my life". You replied sarcastically, "the only reason
> there's still religion in the world is that there's not enough
> anti-religion activism. check."
and i maintain in this case that the sarcasm was deserved, because chuck was being snide and obstreperous. this is not the case with chuck brown when i was pissy with him. and while i honestly appreciate that chuck0 engaged the subsequent dialogue, i never did see a worked-out concrete example of anti-religious direct action, which is what i was after with him.
and my point in the above, btw, was that there's something going on with people's adherence to religion that we have to understand and deal with; that we ought not to dismiss like it's, i don't know, spam. this is the discursive issue. but see also below in response to your query about the nature of religion.
>
> Yoshie replied with a study about scientists beliefs and from that she
> concluded that, if you want to "get religion out of your life," then we
> should promote science education, especially in biology.
yes, and the beliefs were (a) a personal "God" and (b) personal immortality, not in "religion". this matters.
in response to me (i'm the quoted text below), yoshie said:
===
>>and this is why i keep saying that scientists don't reject
>>"religion" or "god", but fairly specific conceptions of religion and
>>god. to claim anything else is to be, well, unscientific.
By that logic, not just scientists but no one else can reject religion, ===
sounds like she's defending the rejection of "religion". if her point was only a logical point, she could have resolved it by answering my question about definition. which, btw, it turns out would have been very, very easy to do -- it just would have meant holding onto a weaker claim. i come to that below.
likewise (again, i am the quoted text):
=====
[me:]
>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.
[yoshie:] Scientists are free to make evaluative statements on the worth of religion or lack thereof, just as the religious are free to make evaluative statementsonof the worth of science or lack thereof. You are free to assent to either or both or neither. The freedom of conscience doesn't guarantee that your belief, religious or scientific or of any other kind, will be held in high regard or even will not be disparaged by others who don't share yours. =====
notice that my point was not that he can't make evaluative statements, only that it *was* an evaluative statement, contrary to her earlier contention that it was merely "descriptive" rather than "prescriptive".
she went on:
=== There is no logical reason that "a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word" can't be a real religious faithful in the deepest sense of the word. However, logic is one thing, and practice is another, so what's logically possible -- simultaneous mastery of science and belief in an actually existing religion -- may not be necessarily very common in reality. ===
there are two things, here. the first is that i was mainly pointing to the arrogance of Atkins and his distinguishing in principle "real" science from "religion" as "alien categories of thinking".
second, the only reason i can think of that yoshie allows herself to slide over into talking about "religion" instead of just specific beliefs (which is what the survey actually asks) is that she wants to defend the stronger claim (real scientists won't be "religious", "in reality" even if it's "logically possible") rather than the weaker ("scientists don't believe in 'God' -- and here this explicitly means a theistic god -- or immortality). if she wanted to defuse this at the get-go, all she had to do was say that she was only claiming most scientists don't subscribe to belief in a theistic god. she didn't do that. why not?
i think it's because of the following. again, me and then yoshie:
===
>*those* scientists' rejection of mainly american/western
>conceptions/practice of religion.
There is no evidence that scientists in or from China, India, Japan, and other non-Western countries are more religious than American scientists (among whom are found many immigrants anyhow). If anything, the opposite is probably the case. ===
here she has to go broadly to "religious" rather than sticking with belief in a personal god if she wants to expand the conclusion. not only is there no empirical evidence presented to support the claim that "the opposite is probably the case", more importantly, her discourse has slid in precisely the way i was pointing to and trying to pin down: namely, the extrapolation from "God" and immortality to "religion"/"religious".
all she ever had to do to answer my question abou defining religion was confine her understanding of it explicitly to belief in a personal god and in personal immortality. if she did that, i missed it. and maybe i did.
>
> Now, your response to Chuck, below, is interesting.
which one? i can't find what you're referring to, here.
> Usually, when that
> statement is put forth, the speaker means "look, all these people believe
> in religion, there must be something to this religion stuff." And usually
> this means that the speaker thinks that
>
> 1. there is something supernatural to believe in and worship because,
> otherwise, people wouldn't have been doing it since dogs ruled the earth.
>
> 2. humans are, by nature, inclined to construct religious belief systems
>
> 3. There is something about human being that means that they will believe
> in something we call religion and it will always be around, even we try to
> social engineer it out of existence. (Often, this is cast in pop
> psychoanlytic terms such that it is dangerous to try to suppress religion
> -- you might get blowback or it will just be a fruitless waste of energy.)
>
> I suppose there's more and I'll leave it to you to fill that in for me, if
> there's another reason why you'd make the claim.
>
> If there's not, I see no reason why the existence of religious belief and
> cont'd religious belief in nominally secular societies is evidence of any
> of the above.
it might be argued that there's something selective about religious belief, but i would much rather argue that human beings desire the meaning they find in religious belief and that we need to help them understand that there can be meaning in life without the god/God they are used to, or their religion. this has to do both with personal understandings of "is there meaning to life?" and in terms of the community function of religious, um, communities. i don't argue that religion is part fo the human essence. only that the need for meaning is (more or less. obviously, i do not subscribe to some metaphysical human essence). i also do not argue that god or religion as we know it is necessary in order for us to find meaning. on the contrary, i fight it every day in my classes.
but my point for a long time in this whole sequence of threads has been that we need to find ways to positively address this need for meaning -- the thing that religion speaks to -- if we're going to bring people along. bashing religion -- whether it's "fundies" or mainstream religionists -- often (not always) does not further that goal, for the most part. so my point has been partly philosophical but by and large strategic. and i think i've been saying this all along. (i should add that i do believe there is a place both for scorn and for humor in this discourse, but it's probably a fairly specific set of places.)
>
> you also wrote:
>
> >it seems to me that the burden of proof is on people who want to make
> >(especially really broad, ambiguous) assertions like "real scientists
> >reject religion" to explain what they mean, not on the rest of us to
> >figure out what they mean (although i've been trying) or to show
> >what's problematic about it before they have to commit to what they
> >mean (which i've also been doing).
>
> did yoshie say that? Yoshie said that a more effective way to get religion
> out of chuck's life might be to increase science education.
so far so good, but i think yoshie claimed more than that, and has indeed maintained more than that through the course of this discussion. see above.
incidentally, chuck's reply was that it's not only education, but direct action. but that's a separate issue.
>
> If a whopping 80% of scientists are nonbelievers -- and I think Yoshie's
> def here is whatever people are describing to themselves as
> belief/nonbelief -- then it looks like pretty good place to start.
but my point here ALL ALONG has been, nonbelievers in what? if you look back at the survey, it does not ask them if they believe in religion or if they are religious. it asks them if they believe in a personal god who acts in history and if they believe in personal immortality. i address this below explicitly.
while those are important religious beliefs for many real religions (in particular in the US, where the survey was done), we simply cannot infer anything about science and "religion" from it unless we qualify religion in the way i have been insisting that we do.
>
> The scientist that got your back up? ""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."
>
> I think you're just reading more into it than he meant. Go write him and
> ask, but I think he was saying "deepest sense of the word" with word being
> _scientist_.
i agree, but in context that only means anything when placed in opposition to religion in a way that i have been maintaining is extremely problematic. it simply doesn't make sense otherwise. moreover, see above where yoshie essentially concedes that it is evaluative. scientists who are religious are not "real" scientists. i'm sure if pressed, he would back off, but that's disingenuous.
here is what i said in a post off-list to yoshie. i begin by quoting her post on the survey. ===== === For the 1914 survey, Leuba mailed his brief questionnaire to a random sample of 400 AMS "great scientists". It asked about the respondent's belief in "a God in intellectual and affective communication with humankind" and in "personal immortality". Respondents had the options of affirming belief, disbelief or agnosticism on each question [1]. Our survey contained precisely the same questions and also asked for anonymous responses. ===
that is simply not the same question as "are you religious" or "do you subscribe to any actually existing religion or religion of your own making?" it's just not. indeed, i think it goes to what exactly has been my point, which is that a very specific set of beliefs was rejected, not "religion", since belief in a personal god is a very specific belief, and one to which many people who think of themselves as religious do not subscribe.
i suggested earlier that theism might be the better term here than religion, and i think this supports my argument. and if you go to the edward wilson quote from several dayss ago, you will see an example of a "greater" and "real" scientist who would have answered the survey questions with a negative, but will still call himself a deist (rather than a theist). =====
in the end i agree -- if this is what you're saying -- that there's been a lot of miscommunication and talking past each other on what amounts to a very narrow area of disagreement.
so i'm done now.
peace.
-- 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