In the various pieces of babble about the latest Pew in the news story, I heard a lot of nonsense about what the Pew numbers were. Of course the big claims are about how we are being de-religionized which is claimed as the great leap forward for atheism, though the numbers hardly show that. One of my bigger conclusions is that despite the claim that the huge leap forward for atheism, going from 1.6% of the population in 2007's reporting to just barely breaking the 3% mark seven years later being due to increased science literacy, the claims of atheists show that a good number of the most ardent of those can't even read a survey report and get that right.
Everyone wants to be able to tie up all of these things in a tidy little package of slogans and aphorisms about which people can write things, say things in the media and online and make believe their tidy little factoids suffice to represent reality, when what those do is to distort reality which is not tidy, not reducible to aphorisms and slogans that can be moved around like Colorforms or building blocks to create a semblance of reality. They aren't even like numbers you can put in in equations and come up with some hidden, inner reality. But that will get me into the pseudo-scientific methods of sociology and polling and that's relevant but I don't have the time for it just now. See, I can't do it either.
One of the things I heard was the Diane Rehm show on public radio, which, although it included some frustratingly wrong information, at least had representatives from Pew to report their report, along with other people. I don't recall if it was some background to the Pew report or if it was from the NPR "poll" of its listeners which attributed a loss of religion to the contention that religion and science are incompatible. If it was the NPR "data" that showed that, it was kind of a hoot since the NPR "poll" was a non-scientific, I'd say a totally anti-scientific "poll" of the type which is so often the target of organized trolling online. As I recall the report of their "results" on the radio gave their response numbers of atheists at about ten times that of the Pew percentage of the general population. Though I would never call any kind of opinion survey an application of science, I wondered what any kind of real life evidence there could be for that.
I wondered if there has ever been a comparison between the scores of standardized testing between religious schools and the general population and, as of this morning and a quick search, I found this National Center for Educational Statistics study of test scores which show that the results for all religious schools are not the same but that Catholic and Lutheran public schools have a significantly higher combined math score than the general public.
Mathematics
In the first set of analyses, all private schools were again compared to all public schools. The average private school mean mathematics score was 12.3 points higher than the average public school mean mathematics score, corresponding to an effect size of .38. After adjusting for selected student characteristics, the difference in means was nearly zero and not significant. In the second set, Catholic, Lutheran, and Conservative Christian schools were each compared to all public schools. While the results for Catholic schools, both with and without adjustments, were very similar to the corresponding results for all private schools, the results for the other two types differed.
The initial difference between Lutheran schools and all public schools was substantially larger (19.5 points) than was the case for all private schools. The average difference in adjusted mean mathematics scores between the two types of schools was 4.9 points and significantly different from zero. On the other hand, the initial difference between Conservative Christian schools and all public schools was substantially smaller (5.1 points) and not significant. The average difference in adjusted school means between Conservative Christian schools and all public schools was -7.6 points (i.e., a higher average school mean for public schools) and was significantly different from zero.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm only somewhat less skeptical about the use of standardized testing to measure actual competence than I am opinion polling to tell us anything, but if you're going to make assertions about the incompatibility of religion and science then you would expect there to be some indication of that incompatibility in such data. I would guess that, while private schools are in varying ways not a representative sample of all students, some definitely selecting on the basis of behavior and perhaps intelligence, if that incompatibility were real it would tend to lessen the difference in that particular score. If there would be a difference in scores of different topics in science might be interesting to know and I might get around to looking for those numbers, if they exist.
The undeniable fact is that a very large percentage of scientists are also real and at times active members of religions. Some have written as much or more on religion as they have science, especially some of the greatest names of science in the past and even well into the allegedly atheist "Enlightenment" period. Those people simply shouldn't have been able to exist, their religion would have had to damage the quality of their science if that kind of conflict were there. Its obvious absence in the minds of those religious scientists must stand as definitive contradiction to the statement that "science refutes religion" or "religion conflicts with science". The existence of those scientists and their science must stand as an absolute contradiction of those statements, science and religion exist in such proximity in no other place than in such minds, they would have to exhibit the war between the two in their lives. Yet they don't.
But the commonly made assertion of atheists and others that "religion contradicts science" or "science refutes religion" is a statement that is too general to have any meaning. In a very real sense, to talk generally about "science" as if it were a uniform, non-conflicting entity is clearly false. Within any "branch of science" there are held theories that conflict and are incompatible. The controversies, conflicts and intellectual wars within science disproves the idea that science at any given time is any one thing. And what is true at any one time is even more true of "a science" in history as ideas that are held to be scientifically sound and true are over turned and abandoned or refuted. So the statement "science conflicts with science" and "science refutes science" are indisputably true.
If you want to promote the idea that any intellectually respectable person will have to abandon religion because "science" and "religion" can be said to be in conflict and that "science refutes religion" anyone could use the conflict within science to denigrate and deny science. Which, of course people do most dangerously in the denial of man made climate change, the destruction of the environment and even in the denial of the fact of evolution. The motives of that denial are generally not honesty or a desire to know the truth but are economic and, especially in the United States, the corporate media creating ideological and political divides through lying about science on behalf of rich people who are psychotically and pathologically more interested in amassing billions of dollars they can never spend on behalf of getting their own way even if it means the extinction of the human species and many if not all of life on Earth. And if you think that's an exaggeration, review how the freest of unrestrained media has done exactly what I just said it did as the plebs have been distracted by other diversions such as the war on religion, another phony and artificial conflict ginned up by ideologues more interested in getting their way than in pursuing the truth or accurate information.
What you can say about the falseness of "science" as one thing about which you can make the most universal and firm statements is ever so much more false when you make firm and universal statements about "religion". Religion is far more varied from top to bottom than science is. Unlike science which is alleged to practice a uniform set of methods which are subject to rigorous review (an exaggerated ideal in practice) cannot be said of "religion" which is a word used to mash together "things" which conflict in every way. The Roman Imperial, state religion certainly was not the same kind of "thing" as the religion of the Jews, the material, all too human gods of Roman Imperialism, including actual, living people, were entirely different from the immaterial God worshiped by the Jews, their resulting moral teachings and practices were as different. And they were different from the Greek religion with its gods far more similar and, in some cases, practically identical to the Roman gods. And those religions were not like other religions.
And what you can say about any one science having internal major differences is as true within any religion. Even as theoretically unified a religion as Catholicism has major divisions within it and even among people who will insist that they are faithful members of the religion. Today, as it can get you excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church for having anything to do with it, there are people who recognize the ordination of women as priests and bishops who refuse to deny their Roman Catholicism. While the comment thread at Youtubes will rail furiously against them, calling themselves Catholics, they're not going to stop doing so. If the hierarchy of the all male clergy Catholic church will eventually come round to accepting the apostolic validity of their ordination is unknowable. The legitimacy of some popes in the past is still disputed and an open question, after all.
This post must seem rambling and messy and that is because the practice of assembling the universal entities "religion" and "science" in order to make generalized and often false statements about the two is a dishonest denial of massive complexity and frequently massive disparity. To make the statements about the alleged conflict of science and religion is to practice a particularly false, vulgar and dishonest form of that reduction well past the point of absurdity. Yet that very practice is widely held to be a mark of sophistication and intellectual attainment. Call it "sociology" or "theory", "modernism" "science", what it is is stupid, lazy, dishonest in both its practices and its motives and primitively and baldly based in ideological beliefs and preferences. It is stupid and should be a mark of the stupidity of the people who do it.
Science and religion are incompatible. Let's start with Gregor Mendel, the monk; or George LeMaitre, the Jesuit priest.
ReplyDeleteNewton, a layman, decided to dabble in theology and define a clockwork universe which would explain the existence of God to man. He ended up doing a great deal more harm than good, but the end of all his exploring, to quote Eliot, was to establish God as part of the Universe. Karen Armstrong argues Newton's quest is what led to the division between science and religion today. I think she has a strong argument in her favor there.
That science and religion are incompatible is a given in Anglo-American philosophies, although more and more the Continental schools are being heard on this side of the Atlantic. Still, as I say, most people with no knowledge of the fields (theology, philosophy of religion, philosophy in general) are still on the cutting edge of the 19th century.
When they aren't bluntly on the bleeding edge of 19th century empire (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris the Anglophile (in this regard, at least)). Funny how all those arguments for atheism become just more examples of the will to power.
Not that any of those three would get the reference.....
I remember seeing a British TV movie made about Gregor Mendel which presented him as being an oddball who had to struggle against his abbott - who in real life built him a green house, provided him with assistants and a plot of land to carry out his research - and his community who, somehow, elected him as abbott even as the Darwin circle was not reading his paper, which he had sent them and which they could have read at any time. I think it was a Brit production, one of those ones where everyone has an upper class Brit accent, even the peasants like Mendel was before he was given a science education as a novice.
ReplyDeleteI do think that Newton was seriously misguided in some ways but others tried to tie themselves in knots trying to reduce God into being merely an aspect of the created universe. I haven't read Armstrong's book but it sounds to me that, as could be expected from trying to shoehorn God into the physical universe, it was religion that suffered the damage from the attempt.
Between the anti-religious anglophiles and the Rhodes Scholar types, the British elite have been recolonizing the United States. That's one of the things I like most about Marilynne Robinson is that she takes the accomplishments of American culture and history as being as important is our sins are. I recommend her book Mother Country to everyone I speak to, did it just yesterday afternoon, as a matter of fact.
Meanwhile, we are in a benighted age. I don't think the rise in non-religion and the death of liberalism are at all different phenomena, I think the weakening and lapses in religion are the reason for the increase in Mammonism.
Armstrong's thesis (in brief, and as I recall it) is that Newton wanted to prove God was effective in the universe through the "mechanism" of the universe as he identified it.
DeleteBut it was a short step to deciding the clock didn't need the clockmaker around to keep it running. So before long God was squeezed out of the universe, and the division between science and religion arose and solidified.
For Armstrong, that split became inevitable once God stopped being transcendent, and became merely a part of the cosmos as humans know it.
This aspect of God, the "metaphysical," is under hot contention today. I was just reading Kant on metaphysics, and the term itself is subject to some contention just on the matter of what is "metaphysical."
But that's another discussion entirely.....
I remember seeing a British TV movie made about Gregor Mendel which presented him as being an oddball who had to struggle against his abbott - who in real life built him a green house, provided him with assistants and a plot of land to carry out his research - and his community who, somehow, elected him as abbott even as the Darwin circle was not reading his paper, which he had sent them and which they could have read at any time. I think it was a Brit production, one of those ones where everyone has an upper class Brit accent, even the peasants like Mendel was before he was given a science education as a novice.
ReplyDeleteI do think that Newton was seriously misguided in some ways but others tried to tie themselves in knots trying to reduce God into being merely an aspect of the created universe. I haven't read Armstrong's book but it sounds to me that, as could be expected from trying to shoehorn God into the physical universe, it was religion that suffered the damage from the attempt.
Between the anti-religious anglophiles and the Rhodes Scholar types, the British elite have been recolonizing the United States. That's one of the things I like most about Marilynne Robinson is that she takes the accomplishments of American culture and history as being as important is our sins are. I recommend her book Mother Country to everyone I speak to, did it just yesterday afternoon, as a matter of fact.
Meanwhile, we are in a benighted age. I don't think the rise in non-religion and the death of liberalism are at all different phenomena, I think the weakening and lapses in religion are the reason for the increase in Mammonism.