 Welcome back everybody, welcome back. Find your seats please, find your seats, here we go. Coming up next we have Jerry Coyne is going to do our next presentation. Faith is not a virtue, the incompatibility of science and religion. He's a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. He contributes to the New Republic and he has a fantastic book called Why Evolution is True. It's of course on sale at the bookstore here as our pretty much every speaker's book. So why evolution is true is really killer. His, oh by the way, were there fortune cookies at lunch? Is that true? That's awesome, that's awesome. Love it. Okay, here's the haiku. Science, religion, incompatibility, Ask Galileo. Please welcome Jerry Coyne. Thanks a lot. It's muttered darkly in certain corners of the internet that the JREF tries to avoid religion as among other forms of skepticism. Since I've been here I've seen that dispelled, but I want to add my own bit to it today by talking a little bit about the subject of the book I'm writing now, which is the incompatibility of science and religion, i.e. faith is not a virtue, which typifies that kind of dichotomy. When I talked to DJ about what my topic should be for this meeting, he suggested that I talk about evolution because he said nobody gets tired of evolution. And I responded, well I do, because I've done it for 40 years and I've talked about it and I have a book on it already. So I really wanted to kind of illuminate that and talk about the stuff I was interested in, which is the compatibility of science and religion. And I realized when I decided to do that, that this really does bear on everything that the JREF talks about. Because the incompatibility of science and religion depends critically on the difference between faith and having good reasons for what you believe. And that's the basis for all of the paranormal, psychic, and pseudo phenomena that this foundation has spent its time investigating. And in fact religion is the worst of all these phenomena. If you put religion up against Bigfoot in terms of its harmful effects on society, religion is going to be worse by a thousand-fold. So I don't feel so bad about talking about this today. Oops, sorry. So the fight, okay. Oh, make sure. Last October I debated a theologian, a Lutheran theologian at Charleston, South Carolina on the topic of the relationship between science and religion. And we were each asked to make one statement that summarized our position. And the theologian from Chicago, Dr. Leah Schweitz, said this, faith is a precious gift. And when she said that I suddenly realized, well this is the whole difference between science and religion because in science faith is not a poison gift. It's what Christopher Hitchens called a precious gift. It's what Christopher Hitchens called a poison chalice. It's the inimical thing to science. We want to avoid faith at all possible. And by faith, I'm going to use the definition, I mean Mark Twain's definition is faith is believed in what you know ain't so. But I'll use a little bit more sophisticated definition from the philosopher Walter Kaufman, intense, confident belief that is not based on evidence, sufficient to command ascent from every reasonable person, i.e. faith is believing in things for which there's no good evidence, no evidence, or counter evidence. So the fakers that I'm going to be fighting are not the big footers, the UFOs, the homeopass. It's what I call accommodationists. It's the people who claim that religion and science have this comity, that they go together hand in hand. They're not opposed to each other at all, but they're sort of partners in fighting out the truth about the universe. Religion finds some truth, science finds the other. Together we can find out everything. And that's just blatant fakery, in my point of view. Because, well, it is. If you keep it playing, you won't be able to get finished on time. But I don't think religion has actually found out anything in the 20,000 years it's been going, and I'll point that out to you later. So the fakers I'm going after are what I call the accommodationists, those people who believe in this comity between science and faith. They include the theologians, what I call faithiest, atheists who are nevertheless friendly towards religion. Religion-friendly scientists and science-friendly religionists. And believe me, although I saw somebody on the internet say, coin stock is beating a dead horse, this is a very live horse in the world today. The relationship between science and religion. I looked up over the past 113 years, since 1900, the number of books that have been published on the topic of the relationship between science and religion. And you can see it just goes up exponentially, with 15,500 in the last 30 odd years. That's, by the way, that's a book every 1.1 days. So they're being churned out, and almost all of these books are books that say science and religion are friends and should be buddies and certainly are not at odds with each other. The ultimate cultural imprimatur on this friendship between science and faith is this, but given its own section in the Huffington Post. And almost all of these articles show how these two areas are friendly to one another. Even scientific organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the most prestigious organization of scientists we have in America, repeatedly issue statements that religion and science are not at odds with each other. Here's a statement. I want to read it from the National Academies of Science, saying that science and religion are partners in being able to find human understanding in different ways. By the way, 92% of the members of this organization are atheists, so it's very strange that they would issue a statement like this in the first place. But they're trying to appeal to the constituency of religious people who support science in America. They also make this insupportable statement, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. That's something you hear repeatedly by accommodations, and it's palpably false. The whole Randy Foundation has spent its life examining supernatural entities, or at least the actions of those entities such as Psy, telekinesis, intercessory prayer, miracles, spiritual healings, and things like this. So why do we worry? Why are all these books constantly coming out about the relationship between science and religion? Why do we worry about it if they're really separate phenomena, one in the issue of morals and how to live, the other in the issue of what's true about the universe? And the answer is that they're not independent because both of them are concerned with finding out what is real and true about the universe. They're in opposition to each other, or at least they have a similar mission. And B, people know that they're not compatible, and that's why these books keep coming out trying to convince people that they really are compatible. If there are no incompatibilities between science and religion, why do we have the following? Widespread opposition to evolution? If that's not an incompatibility, I don't know what is. There are many organizations such as Biologous devoted to showing people how religion and science are harmonious. There are lots of theological books I've given you the number devoted to harmonizing science and religion. If you ask Americans at a poll, 55% of them will tell you that science and religion are often at odds with one another. And finally, scientists have about tenfold the rate of atheism as normal, I don't say normal. I've just maligned myself as non-science Americans. And if that's so, why is science so associated with atheism? This shows, at least gives an indication that there are some kind of deep incompatibilities going on. This is further events by a poll that was taken in Newsweek in 2006 when they asked a number of Americans, what would you do if science found a fact that contravene one of the dictates of your religious beliefs? And your choice was, well, I'll believe in my belief and reject the fact. I'll accept the fact and give up my religious belief, at least that tenet. Or I don't know what to do. Can any of you guess what the answer is, the number of people that would reject scientific facts in favor of that? Yeah, I can tell where I am. I hear 85% of stuff, like a bunch of cynics here. Actually, it's close to that, 64%. Now, if this doesn't say that there's a tension between science and religion, and what I'm trying to do is just document this here. I don't know what does. And finally, my own field, attitudes towards evolution in America, shows better than anything else how faith and science are at odds with one another, because what science tells us is palpably incompatible with what the Abrahamic scriptures tell us. And in fact, nearly half of Americans, you can see the statistics, are young earth creationists. They reject everything that science, geology, and biology has told us in the last 150 years. Another third are theistic evolutionists. They accept evolution, but they think God stuck his or her finger in here and there, making mutations, creating new species, et cetera. Intelligent design people are like that. And only 15% between one in six and one in seven Americans accepts the naturalistic view of evolution that is held by scientists like myself. That's a pretty dire result. So I think I've documented the phenomenon enough to know that science and religion aren't really very friendly with one another, especially if they say different things. If scripture tells you something different from what science does. So what I want to do now is basically talk about the nature of the incompatibility as I see it. First of all, I'll define the terms, what science. I mean, you know what science is, so I'll do that very briefly. Religion, one always has to do this. And finally, I'll describe what I see as my notion of compatibility. So science, I refer, I think of science not as a body of facts, but as a methodology for investigating the universe. A methodology that relies on doubt, a replication, being subject to the review of your peers, logic, reason, and predictions. Science is just basically a methodology to get the best guess about what's going on in the universe. And if you can screw science broadly, then even things like plumbing or auto mechanics can be seen as science. When your mechanic is fixing your car, he or she goes about that perfectly scientifically. When the pulmonary finds a leak, perfectly scientifically using principles of hydraulics and gravity and things like that. Science's conclusions are always tentative, although some are more tentative than others. Our truths are always provisional, but it's a methodology. And the best way to describe this methodology, which has been explicitly honed over the last two centuries, is by Richard Feynman, who said, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. Now, you've seen lots of that in the past couple of days, so you have to be very careful about that. Science has an exquisitely honed body of practices to keep you from fooling yourself, to keep you from finding out what you want to find out. This, of course, is the opposite of religion, which encourages you to find out what makes you feel good and what you want to find out. I'm jumping the gun a bit, but you see where I stand. I'll use Dan Dennett's definition of religion. It's a social system whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent whose approval is to be sought. Now, I know this doesn't characterize everything you think is religion, but it does characterize the Abrahamic religions, which is mainly what I'm going to be talking about today. There are two aspects of this kind of religion that are important in my talk. First of all, it usually comes with the feeling that you have a personal relationship with this supernatural agent. And second of all, and this is very important, it usually comes unlike science with a code of conduct, a way that you're supposed to believe, or a way that you shouldn't believe and behave. And there's no doubt in my readings over the past two years on this subject that most theologians, except for apophatic ones like Karen Armstrong or Mark Vernon, think that religion really does hinge on believing certain things to be true about the universe. Here's a statement from the New Testament that testifies to that. If Christ is not risen, then our faith is in vain. But you can read all kinds of theologians, and I won't read these, that will verify this in modern times, that if the beliefs we have, if these foundational beliefs of our faith aren't right, then we shouldn't have our faith. So faith is not just about coming together in church and seeing your buddies and working in Habitat for Humanity. It rests very solidly on certain beliefs about the universe, which of course vary from believer to believer. Religion has a different methodology from science in finding out what's true, and it's basically based, as I said before, on faith, dogma, authority, revelation, and what makes you feel good. And again, this is encompassed in two statements from the New Testament, the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. The assurance of things hoped for means you find out what you want to find out. When I was debating Lutheran theology, I found, although this was not news to any of us, that when you go into the clergy, you often have to swear statements about what you believe is true. In fact, if you're a believer that's going to church, you have to swear things that are going to be true. Lutherans have to swear to a whole bunch of stuff. Here's a whole list of everything that a Lutheran has to swear to believe. You don't have to read that because it's pretty long. When the ministers take their whatever they call their orders in the Lutheran church, and also I believe in the Catholic church, they have to swear certain things. The various creeds like the Athanasian creed, the Nicene creed, the Apostles' creed. These are all statements about you believe and what is true. And this is probably different from what scientists do. When I became an evolutionary biologist, I was not forced to put my hand on the origin of species, and said that I henceforth will swear to believe everything that Darwin said, which is good because a lot of everybody said this wrong. I've taken one of these creeds, the Nicene creed, which many of you probably recited in your youth, Catholics, Lutherans, and others. And I've just put in red everything that is a faith statement, that is actually an epistemic statement about what you believe. So everything in red are things about the universe that religious people maintain are true. That there is a God, that God sent his son down, the son was crucified, resurrected after three days, born of a virgin by the way, is going to come back again and judge the living or the dead, and will have an afterlife, and you will gain that afterlife through belief in Jesus, and baptism alone. These are all empirical statements about the way the world is. Granted, some of these are hard to test, but nevertheless, they are scientific statements. Now, when I'm debating scientists or other people who are accommodations, they always say the same thing to demonstrate that religion and science are compatible. And that is, there's lots of religious scientists and there's lots of religious people who embrace science. So doesn't that show that those two areas are compatible? Here's two of them, Francis Collins on the left, head of the National Institutes of Health, Kenneth Miller, a Catholic on the right, a well-known textbook writer and an ID opponent. These people are both religious and good scientists, so doesn't that mean that religion and science are compatible? And it only means they're compatible in the sense that they're capable of being held together. So if you sort of hold this purile notion of compatibility, then you'd say things like marriage and adultery are compatible, because lots of married people are adulterers, or if you want to anger some more people, you'd say, well, Catholicism and pedophilia are compatible, because lots of Catholic priests are pedophiles. I mean something different from that. This is basically unrealized cognitive dissonance. What I mean by compatibility or the incompatibilities is that science and religion are odds with each other in three areas, methodology, philosophy, and in the outcomes that they realize. So let me talk a bit about methodology. You've already seen the difference in methodology. One of them is based on faith, the other one is based on reason, logic, observation, and rigorous scrutiny and doubt. In science, faith is considered a vice, and religion, faith is considered a virtue. When we do science, back in the early days, religion and the supernatural was considered part of science. Newton thought, for example, that God may affect the motions of the planets. It was soon discovered that we didn't need that hypothesis, and time after time, science has rejected the need for any supernatural hypothesis, as Laplace says, I have no need for that hypothesis. So this is devolved into both a methodological naturalism, that is, we rely solely on natural explanations for natural phenomena, because the supernatural ones have never worked, but it's also become a philosophy at the same time. That is, because the supernatural ones have never worked, we don't believe in them anymore. I mean, if you look for Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster, for 30 years and you don't see it, then you start saying, it's not there. So the criticism of science, we have an a priori rejection of supernatural explanations. It's simply wrong. Science can and has investigated supernatural explanations. We've never substantiated them, so we have this philosophical, as well as methodological viewpoint, that we don't need to embrace the supernatural. As I said, philosophical naturalism is not an a priori assumption of science. This is something you'll find very commonly when you read the Accommodation of Literature. It is a result born of experience. After a while, when you find out you don't need it, you just give up on it. And finally, there's an incompatibility of outcomes between science and religion. If you take what religion says seriously, the dictates of faith and authority and scripture, you see that all these things, at least in the Abrahamic faiths, particularly Christianity and Judaism, are true of special creation and afterlife, conversion, births, libertarian free will, etc. And the Bible could have said stuff like this. I mean, it would not have been out of God's job description to say something about how evolution worked in the Old Testament. It would not have been beyond the can to give people a third grade praisy that animals and plants came from other animals and plants, but that's not the way it worked out. So we have all these incompatibilities of outcomes, as well. Now, when you point out to religious people that their scriptures are simply wrong over and over and over again on scientific issues, they will come back with this right post. But the Bible is not a textbook of science. And when you see that, you should always interpret it in one way. The Bible is not true. That's what they mean when they say that. Well, actually what they mean is, well, the Bible is true in some parts and not in other parts, and I'm the one that can determine which parts are true and which parts aren't true. But the Bible does make statements and certain non-negotiables of faith that are bedrocks of faith. And of course the resurrection and virgin birth and things like that are bedrocks of Christianity. And these are epistemic propositions that are at least in principle within the purview of science. So science and religion have these different ways of dealing with things when they're falsified. So this isn't one of the methodological differences. When a scientific theory is falsified like cold fusion or the faster-than-light neutrinos, it goes into the garbage can of bad ideas. I mean, once good ideas, but not true ideas. If a religious proposition like Adam and Eve or the Great Flood is falsified by science, it becomes a metaphor. It's not thrown away. The Theologians labor mightily to find out that there is some other meaning that God had for it. And here's what that is. But of course that's a game of make-believe that they do themselves. Other methodological ploys that Theologians use that are in methodological opposition to what scientists do. I'll get to those in a minute. Let me just say for a second that the labors of religion and science have produced very different things. And I'd ask you to go back to the 13th century and then now back to the president and say, well, would you prefer to have had science or would you prefer to have religion during that time? And most of you would be dead if we didn't have science. Anybody who's taken antibiotics would be dead. Certainly I would probably be dead right now. Religion does not produce truth. In the 20,000 years that's been going in the two millennia since religion's been going Christianity, we don't know anything more about the nature of the divine or if there is a divine than we did before. We don't know if there is a God, whether there's more than one God. What the nature of said God is, a nice God, is God affected by the world and sort of processed theology. What does God want for us? How should we behave? We don't know anything more than we did in the 15th century. A 15th century theologian would feel pretty much at home in modern theology as well. And of course, the religious statements relying on the different methodologies of faith have come to diametrically opposed conclusions about the way the world is. If you're a Muslim and you think Jesus is God's son, you're going to fry in hell. If you're a Christian, that's the belief that's going to get you to heaven. And we can diagram this. This is sort of evolutionary diagram of religions and you can see from 20,000 years on that they split over and over again. These splits are usually a matter of doctrine or truth. How many wives you should have, should women presiding the clergy, is there a trinity, et cetera? In fact, this is a very superficial diagram and that one branch up at the top under Christianity, there's actually 41,000 branches of Christianity. Okay. Finally, onto a few final observations about the difference between the methodology of religion and science. Religions claims are not refutable. They have constructed now an airtight edifice that makes any refutation of religious epistemic claims impossible. And that means that those claims are not worth taking seriously because nothing you can find can refute them. One of the greatest examples of this is evolution on my topic. Evolution was the greatest god killer that ever happened in the history of science because it dispelled the greatest argument for the existence of God that could not be answered, which was the design argument. Animals and plants are really designed exclusively to fit their environments. Then Darwin came along in 1859 and said, well, that's bunk. It can all happen through this naturalistic process. What do religious people do? They accept it, but most of them don't. And the ones that do say, well, this is, of course, what God wanted all along. This is what I call the I could have had a V8 school of theology. Oh, my God. Theologians forgot this. And here's two examples. Isn't it a tribute to God that the world is not passive party but instead of an inherently active and self-created process? This is the kind of post-factor rationalization that theologians engage in and scientists don't. They expect from a group of people that can rationalize the holocaust as being part of God's plan. I call this the sausage grinder of sophisticated theology in which scientific necessities are transformed into theological virtues. This shows, by the way, that because science has primacy over religion, religion is more or less forced to accept scientific facts. That religion is epistemically better. I mean, I'm sorry, that science is epistemically better than religion. Religious people rationalize John Haught on the afterlife. He says basically in this quote, he doesn't want any scientific evidence for immortality. He would be capitulating for the narrow empiricism that underlies naturalistic belief. What he means is, I don't need no stinking evidence for an afterlife. Instead, the hope for some form of subjective survival is a favorable disposition for nurturing trust and the desire to know. That word salad basically comes down to what's in the Bible. It's the assurance of things that make me comfortable in believing in the first place. If you read theology again and again, your head will start to explode with statements like this. Finally, theologians, when they're put really into a corner by science, they simply make stuff up. Here's John Polkinghorne, a respected scientist and religious person, a physicist, and Nicholas Beal answering the time-worn question, why can't we see God? He's not here anymore. Why is God hidden? Theologians have many answers for this. This is one of the naked presence of divinity but overwhelm us. It would make us not accept God for the right reason. Of course, that's why God keeps himself off stage. It's just a made of answer. When I see stuff like this, it reminds me of the statement by the great atheists from Alabama, Delos, McCown. The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. Like that, the next time you hear a religious person say, you can't prove a negative. Ask him about the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, or ask him to prove, tell him you can prove that I don't have a billion dollars in my bank account. We also have evidence against God if you really want to get down to it, down and dirty. If you fight with the pigs, you get dirty but the pigs like it. There's no evidence for divinity or miracles. We have evidence against intercessory prayer. The evidence that used to be adduced for God has now been dispelled by science. We have this problem of theodicy which is a really tough one. I've never seen a theologian deal adequately with the presence of unjustifiable suffering like brain tumors in children or tsunamis that kill innocent people. Their explanations are laughable if they weren't so sad. These people could be gainfully employed but they're making money making up answers about why God sent tsunamis. And finally, the earth is going to be toast for every billion years. We're all going to be swallowed up by the sun. That doesn't really comport with the plan of a beneficent and caring God. Now, religion will fight back when they're in the corner. They have a number of accusations not trying to maintain that their truth statements are true but they come back and say, science doesn't know everything. Science is wrong. I just wanted to list a few of these because you're going to come up against these knowing other than science. I maintain that there are not if you can screw science broadly as the combination of reason and empirical investigation but I'll be glad to discuss this with you during this conference. Science can't prove that God doesn't exist. Science can't prove anything. We can only make probability statements and the probability is God doesn't exist. Science has been misused. That's something for religion to say. Science gives us no moral grounding. Well, neither does religion if you believe in the youth or for a dilemma. Science fosters the view that science is the only reliable guide to truth. I think it is, basically, if you could stew it broadly. And finally, and this is really ironic, religious people will say, science is a faith like religion. When they're really down to the bottom of the barrel for their arguments, they'll say, see, you're just as bad as we are. And, of course, science is not a faith. It's completely the opposite of faith. We go on what we want to be true. We go on what the evidence tells us. Even though for most of us, it tells us stuff that is different from what we thought to be true in the first place. So, in the end, when you debate these, and as I debated with Leah Switzer and Charleston, can there be a constructive dialogue between science and faith? Well, you know, by listening to this, what the answer is for me, at least, and the answer is certainly not. There can be a discussion, a monologue rather than a dialogue, and it's going to be destructive rather than constructive. Can science contribute to religion? Certainly, it just proves the assertions of religion over and over and over again. It's never done anything to buttress the truth claims of religion. Can religion contribute to science? No way. We have no need of supernatural hypothesis. Religion is an intrusion into the scientific method. And this brings us to the final bit of this talk, which is why does it matter at all? I mean, why can't I just ignore these religious people that say science and religion are friendly? And there's a number of reasons why it does matter. First of all, because even if you're a moderate religious person, a liberal religious person, you're going to have faith and you're going to teach your children to have faith and you're going to teach them, more importantly, that faith is a good thing to have. But it's not, because faith is believing for bad reasons or no reasons in the face of reason. So we should not encourage people, even in the most liberal Episcopalian churches, to have faith in anything. That's what the James Randi Foundation is all about, as far as I can see from my brief stint here. Sam Harris has said, pretending to be certain when one isn't. Indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable is both an intellectual and a moral failing. And it is indeed. I'm glad that it's also a social and a political failing, because religion, unlike science, comes with two things that make it particularly invidious and make it important to draw the distinction between the two. One of them is that many religious people claim they have the absolute truth. And second of all, that absolute truth includes a guide of conduct that comes from God. When you have this combination of absolute certainty and a certainty about what God wants you to do, then your perforce required, almost, to impose your beliefs on the rest of society. And that's why religion is bad. I don't care if somebody believes in Jesus or baptism, as long as they keep it to themselves. But they can't do that, because of these two ideas of absolute truth and code of conduct. And here's two, I'm almost done now. Here's just taken from one church which is considered, I don't know if you hear it, but it's considered not a fundamentalist church, sort of mainstream church, the Catholic church. And this is the kind of positions that come from a church that relies on faith, absolute truth, and scripture that tells you what God wants. Opposition to birth control, opposition to abortion, opposition to divorce, opposition to homosexuality, control of people's sex lives, oppression of women, installation of fear and guilt in children, abuse of children. Every one of these things, all of which are horrible for society, comes from scripture. We have none of these if there wasn't religion and its attendant sense of certainty and its code of conduct. So this is what happens when faith is enabled. And remember the official position of the Catholic Church's evolution is okay. So in the end, all of these things that the Randy Foundation, I can't speak of the foundation, it's a wonderful foundation. All I know is what they do. But all of its investigations and its refutations of these paranormal and pseudo claims basically are accomplished by relying on science rather than faith by relying on evidence and reason and observation instead of believing what you want to believe. And that's the real difference between everything that's attacked here and all of you who are in the process and I'll finish with the quotation which is the best quotation I've ever seen on the relationship between science and religion. It's by the great atheist Robert Engersaw the subject of Susan Jacoby's wonderful new book, The Great Agnostic. This is what he said, there is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child religion sought to strangle it in its cradle. Now that science has attained its youth I'd say its maturity because it's 100 years on now. Now that science has attained its maturity and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling palsy directs us to the athlete let us be friends. It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make to the horse let us agree not to step on each other's feet. Thanks very much. Jerry Cohen Jerry Cohen ladies and gentlemen Yes indeed.