III. ... and Einstein doesn't help.

Chris:

1. Evolutionary biology does give us predictions which we're able to test (for example, what we've just found out about the Y chromosome).

2. The God of the gaps is one of the most common apologist ways to get religion back into line with science, and it never works.

3. Newton's concept of gravity is that of a physical law, not of a theory, so he only gave us a measurement system, not a theory. Quantum gravitation and the GUT will give us more recognizably testable outgrowths.

4. Einstein's hallmark was that nothing was holy. He often used language that would make him sound more accessible (i.e. "God does not play dice."). One always needs to put that caveat in when bringing up Einstein in a theism debate.

5. This still goes back to one of the hallmarks of religion: you learn things based on faith, not observation. Science (and many other fields of human inquiry that are historically far less destructive than religion) can tell us to keep asking questions. Most of the wiseass atheists I know were at Sunday School at some point in their lives when they were forced to shut up because they were asking too many questions. Now, as you point out, this does not have to be the case, but when you're asking people to take the words of thousand years-dead people as fact, you'll always tend to run into this problem.

5a. Which is not to say that I'm advocating for the wholescale demolition of anything that has to do with religion. Just the religion part. Sure, we can keep the books around to study. We just shouldn't be using them as history books or as infallible texts. And whatever you can say about "it doesn't have to be" whichever way, the major religions (not the marginal ones like Buddhism, which isn't generally even a religion) take their texts as infallible. I think it's probably easier to completely marginalize those bodies that to get them to admit that their stories are actually fairy tales.

6. Again, religion can't, by itself, generate an ethic. Of course, there's interplay between what you've read in the past and what you want to do with your future, so it's a two-way road, but if we decide that asking questions and creating an "ethic of human progress" is a good idea, we can probably reread some religious text to tell us that same thing. But as long as something like that is taught to us like dogma, as religion is, we're going to run into the same massive problems that religion always (=99%) brings.

P.S. In TNG, people are able to work to better themselves and generate human progress without religion, and I don't think anyone watching the show thinks that's an absolutely ridiculous notion, or that it would be impossible for humans to actually do. So, the next random thing I would post would be that scene in ST: First Contact where Picard explains to Lily what the future's all about.

Erin:

1. We can get some testable predictions out of evolutionary biology but much of the (scientific!) work it does is descriptive not predictive in orientation. This is true of the behavioral sciences and economics as well. Lack of predictive power doesn't make an enterprise inherently unscientific. My intention here was just to push a little on your contention that "Science is that which generates testable predictions and this makes it superior to all other modes of understanding." Science is not (just) that which generates testable predictions. Your conception of empiricism as a value-neutral, ahistorical, unproblematic solution to knowledge claims is an oversimplification and idealization of science that ignores the empirical reality of how science is and has been practiced. For more on the contextual location of empiricism (from today's reading for one of my IR classes ...) see Williams, 1998: http://spejt.highwire.org/cgi/content/abstract/4/2/204, pages 210-215. Again, I'm not saying, "reject science"; I love science. I'm the daughter of a scientist. I want to be a (social) scientist when I grow up. I spend my spare time reading National Geographic and watching Cosmos online. I *am* saying that you should subject empiricism and the scientific method to the same rigors of skeptical inquiry that you advocate so ardently. Empircism is every bit as much a context-driven human construct as religion.

2. Please listen to what I'm saying! I never made this argument, I agreed that it's flawed, and it doesn't interact with my thesis that science and religion can produce overlapping ethics in any way.

3. Newtonian physics is not a theory but a research program. At the core of that research program were assumptions that were exempt from empirical refutation if research within that program was to be productive. Yes, science has progressed beyond Newtonian physics (which is why Lakatos uses it as an example in his account of how scientific knowledge changes over time), but that doesn't make it "unscientific" -- except, perhaps, if you define "science" in a narrow, contextually specific, non-empirical way that I'd argue is rather useless. Again, the point here is that science is not a monolithic, exclusively empirical enterprise. Again, that doesn't mean it's "wrong" and it doesn't mean it's inferior to religion -- or even competitive with it. It does mean the debate doesn't end with "science is empirical."

4. Einstein did use religious language to make his arguments more accessible. He was also a brilliant scientist who self-identified as a religious man and a deist. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1607298,00.html.

5. This is an argument against dogma and against lousy Sunday School teachers. It is not an argument against religion. I went to Sunday School and I was explicitly encouraged to engage in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. The anecdotal evidence cuts both ways. If you choose to define religion as "dogma which discourages free thinking and requires that ancient texts be taken as fact" then you're going to win the debate before it begins, simply by framing things in your own terms. But you're going to exclude all non-fundamentalist religion (and yeah, it's out there) from your analysis so your conclusion's going to be pretty damn weak in scope.

5a. The major religions, excluding Islam, do not take their texts as infallible, and I'm not sure what your warrants for this argument are. There are plenty of non-fundamentalist Christians out there who do not think the Bible is the literal word of God and who acknowledge its many contradictions. And, right, by all means, let's marginalize the fundamentalists. They're clearly too stupid and underdeveloped to even try teaching or communicating with. Savages. Plus, marginalizing those we disagree with has a really super track record throughout all of human history ...

6. Religion, in its interaction with practice, does generate an ethic. People act in accordance with religious teachings because they deem them to be adequate guides for moral behavior. It's not a matter of re-reading texts as a post hoc religious justification for action: It's a matter of ethical imperatives that are already there, that encourage questioning and research, and that point in the same direction as science.

Finally, I agree that religion is not a necessary condition for progress or improving the human condition. But given that a great many people are religious, and that religion can serve as a handy heuristic device for promoting scientific research, why not team up when religion points in the direction of pushing ever further the limits of our knowledge?

TO BE CONTINUED ...