Religious Scientists Are The Only Ones Who Are Qualified To Report On The Relationship of Science And Religious Belief

An atheist who I respect very highly,  Richard Lewontin, is quoted near the end of that article by Thomas Lessl which I linked to last week, asserting the incompatibility of science and religion.   He is quoted as saying,

Either the world of phenomena is a consequence of the regular operation of repeatable causes and their repeatable effects, operating roughly along the lines of known physical law, or else at every instance all physical regularities may be ruptured and a totally unforeseeable set of events may occur. One must take sides on the issue of whether the sun is sure to rise tomorrow.  We cannot live simultaneously in a world of natural causation and of miracles, for if one miracle can occur, there is no limit.

In another place, his review of Carl Sagan's atheist catechism of scientism,  "A Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark",  Lewontin put the same sentiment into a wider cultural context, the culture of modern scientists, speaking for them in general and admitting that the materialism he assumes carries its own burdens as a believed in faith.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Which is more honest than any such statement in the faith of materialism than I've read from any other atheist-scientists and certainly more honest than the neo-atheist expression of it will ever be.   Lewontin is an honest man, if one who is limited by his own experience and expectations.   That he doesn't KNOW that his mutual exclusion is true but is merely a part of his materialist faith is something I think he realizes,  almost every other atheist I've heard on that topic is either unaware or not honest enough to admit that.   He notes that not everyone sees it their way as he continued,

The mutual exclusion of the material and the demonic has not been true of all cultures and all times. In the great Chinese epic Journey to the West, demons are an alternative form of life, responsible to certain deities, devoted to making trouble for ordinary people, but severely limited. They can be captured, imprisoned, and even killed by someone with superior magic.6 In our own intellectual history, the definitive displacement of divine powers by purely material causes has been a relatively recent changeover, and that icon of modern science, Newton, was at the cusp. It is a cliché of intellectual history that Newton attempted to accommodate God by postulating Him as the Prime Mover Who, having established the mechanical laws and set the whole universe in motion, withdrew from further intervention, leaving it to people like Newton to reveal His plan. But what we might call "Newton's Ploy" did not really get him off the hook. He understood that a defect of his system of mechanics was the lack of any equilibrating force that would return the solar system to its regular set of orbits if there were any slight perturbation. He was therefore forced, although reluctantly, to assume that God intervened from time to time to set things right again. It remained for Laplace, a century later, to produce a mechanics that predicted the stability of the planetary orbits, allowing him the hauteur of his famous reply to Napoleon. When the Emperor observed that there was, in the whole of the Mécanique Céleste, no mention of the author of the universe, he replied, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." One can almost hear a stress on the "I." 

With Lewontin it's almost impossible to do him justice by quote mining the bits you need to make a point because, unlike the points in most atheist expression, his are far more informed by history and a respect for other peoples' thinking and an overriding respect for honesty,  even as he asserts what he believes is true.   I think, though, on this topic, he goes a bit out of character in presuming to identify his ideological predisposition as being a necessity, even as he notes it isn't, when it is merely the product of his experience, which he shares with other atheists.

That he attributes Newton's religious belief as he expressed it as being due to the incomplete nature of what Newton knew can be said of anything that any scientist says.   That he doesn't entertain that an atheist denying the presence of God could well be a statement of ignorance while asserting the opposite isn't too surprising considering that Lewontin is an atheist and a dedicated materialist.   But Newton's own thinking can't be held to be unimportant, naive or inconsequential because Newton is the only one who can tell us about what it was like to be the person who did what Newton did.  You can say the same thing about any other person who both produced valuable and reliable science and who was also religious and, especially, when they, themselves, said that their religious thinking was influential in producing their science.  Much as I respect Lewontin, I'm not going to grant him an expertise on the experience of those scientists greater than those scientists speaking on their own experience.   And any of those other atheist-scientists I've heard on this topic, they ain't no Lewontins.

That it is only atheists who make that claim of the mutual exclusivity between thinking as a scientist and thinking as a religious believer is not an indication that atheism or even their ideological materialism is a necessary attribute of doing science of even the highest order, it is an indication that atheists, no less than the most rigid of doctrinaire religion or political believers, refuse to take facts which don't support their felt beliefs seriously, even when their sense of honesty requires them to admit those exist.

The fact is that a scientist who produces science of the quality of Newton's or Mendel's,  Copernicus, Faraday's.... uses their one and only mind to do both. That a materialist who believes that the vastly interconnected brain could produce both and that there is not some influence of one on the other in the same brain is quite a remarkable lapse in even their own ideological thinking on the matter.

The walls imagined in the compartmentalization of Gould's "non overlapping magisteria" between science and religion are entirely imaginary and in that example, an invention to support a model of brains that suits his purpose.  Other atheists, in fact anyone who talks that way about "minds" or, in the case of most atheists today, "brains" are inventing an imaginary construct for clearly ulterior motives.   Those motives are clearly the motivation of making that model.  And, in every case when atheists do that their motives are clearly ideological, is as clear as it is not to be mentioned.   Their ideology, atheism, obviously informs their purportedly scientific model making, one which they allow to enter into science, even as it is unfounded in the actual phenomenon in real life and has no non-ideology influenced scientific publication.   Atheism is the religious faith which has, actually, been permitted to invade formal science in a way religion has not.

That the typical construct of atheists, even atheist-scientists, produces an exclusive model that is at variance of, not only the history of science but refuted by the writing of even the most eminent of scientists is obvious and a fact.  Any atheist who talks on that is unqualified by their lack of experience of religion, they are falsely making a universal claim to exclude the importance or compatibility of religious experience with science which is merely a product of their own, experience which is irrelevant to the question.   It would be like someone who is born colorblind claiming things about the experience of people who can see color that the work and testimony of color-sighted people proves is not valid and is, in fact, counterfactual.   The history of science and the reports of other scientists of their experience, makes the fact they deny, the compatibility of science and religion,  a fact in the way their merely ideological denial can't overcome.  Not if honesty is the measure.

That the religious belief of those scientists makes them qualified to speak on the relationship of science and religious belief in a way that atheists cannot be is also obvious.   Their production of science while also being religious gives them an authority that atheists can't have on that topic.  They don't have to speculate on the reality of their own experience.   That Lewontin's own profession was founded on the work of a pious priest makes his assertion first quoted above a quite profound logical disconnect, one which is not typical of his very developed thinking on the matter.  Most atheists who spout off on the topic aren't nearly as honest as he is, most are as dogmatic on the topic as are the most ignorant and dishonest of creationist is in their area of interest.   In fact, I think some creationists might be more honest about it than they are.