It’s easier to see if you point out that religion isn’t the only thing that can’t be a part of science without distorting science. Politics shouldn’t be as the co-owner of this blog demonstrated so well. Professional rivalry frequently has damaged science, personal ideology (not just religious) often has. Scientists insisting on a position they previously took can defend it into the fires of total, enraged irrationality when it’s been superseded by another position.

Being a Trekie shouldn’t enter into science, though I’ve got a feeling some of the more extravagant claims made by some of the most popular figures in the “new atheism” might have had a lot more to do with sci-fi than sci. Some of Dawkins’ pronouncements about probability of the the extraterrestrial presence of Darwinism (his word, not mine) are anything but science. Having more math than science, I’m pretty disturbed about how the word “probability” gets thrown around by those in science about things about which there is absolutely no evidence to submit that branch of applied math to. It’s even worse in the wannabes on the science themed blogs and beyond.

It depends on where the you’re asking about coexistence. In formal science nothing but the evidence of observation, measurement, analysis, review and reproduction of results belongs there. In public school classrooms, science or other subjects, the wall of separation must be maintained.

In the mind of an individual, including many scientists, science and religion can coexist quite well. Many of them with more impressive records in research and publication than many of the anti-religious bigots who are telling them they can’t manage their own lives.

In so far as religion is concerned, there is nothing about having a faith in a religion that prevents a believer for believing a deity or more created and manages the universe in full compliance with what science has been able to tell us about the physical universe. Most of those who accept evolution by natural selection (and other mechanisms if they keep up with modern evolutionary biology) believe that was how God did it. And many of those people know that their faith has no place within formal science or the public schools.

I won’t go into those religious fundamentalists except to point out many of them have a career in a science, just that they don’t make good evolutionary biologists. Parts of science are as unable to coexist with their religion as religion is for atheist-fundamentalists.

Nevertheless, it remains a fact that all natural science, including evolution, is by definition an atheist enterprise. I don’t mean you have to be an atheist to be a scientist, nor do I even claim that practicing is likely to make you an atheist. What I mean is that science does not posit the existence of a supernatural being; explanations depending on or even including such beings are not scientific explanations.

It is fair, therefore, when someone is making factual claims about the world, for someone to point out that those factual claims are not supported by the scientific evidence. This may be because the claims directly contradict the evidence, because the methodology is flawed, or simply because there is not enough evidence gathered. It is fair to criticize such claims whether they invoke a god or not. When these claims are mixed together into the same pot as a bunch of *good* science, the good science lends credibility to the bad science, and I think it’s fair to point that out as well.

Had NCSE never gone out of their way to suggest that religion and science are compatible, I doubt anyone would have taken them to task for not making the inverse claim. Similarly, had Giberson and Miller not written books following a bunch of good scientific discussion with supernatural claims, I don’t think Jerry Coyne would have written a review saying “the books were good, but the authors are still believers”. In other words, it’s fair to request that scientists refrain from making definitive atheist claims when they’re practicing science, but it is then just as fair to request that they refrain from making theist claims under the same circumstances.

Criticising religious doctrines is not your thing, so fine. That should be sufficient.

One need not be a religious fundamentalist to find such arguments less than satisfying. Indeed, one need not be religious at all. Media coverage notwithstanding, theistic evolution has been shunned by leading evolutionary biologists, 87 percent of whom deny the existence of God and 90 percent of whom reject the idea that evolution is directed toward an “ultimate purpose” according to a 2003 survey.

newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2009/06/broaden_the_debate_over_faith_and_evolution.html

Of course it’s also relevant that many clerics don’t find a problem with evolution (and “rightly so” or “wrongly so” is impossible to say under any universal objective standard), but it does not change the fact that, in practical terms, high level biology has no need for the god hypothesis, and largely discards it for that reason.

Theistic evolution is not shunned, it is found to be superfluous.

Certainly there is some truth to the notion that superfluous ideas like “god” are not inimical to science, and vice versa. They’re still superfluous, though, which is typically not taken as a compliment, or as supportive of the “superfluous idea.”

On the other hand, what I most dislike about so much of the rhetoric about science and religion being incompatible (or at least superfluous to science–which is also taken as an insult by a number of theists) is how it so often focuses upon evolution. The fact is that all of science is without need for the “god hypothesis,” and areas like neuroscience may stand in more particular opposition to Western religions than evolution ever could. If the opposition is being argued, it should be done from all of science, not the one area that many theists like to fault, without recognition that every other area is as “atheistic” in practice as evolutionary science is.

Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592

Er… you could just as well say “There is nothing wrong in equating scientist with being male because there is nothing wrong with being male.”

Sheril’s point is that there *is* something wrong with equating godlessness with scientist– specifically, they aren’t the same thing, so it’s a false equation.

“New Atheist criticism: to lessen the moral authority and hegemony of religion in our society.”