This month’s Physics Today has an article by Murray Peshkin on “Addressing the Public About Science and Religion”, that is both a nice change of pace (as physicists don’t do much of that sort of thing), and a reminder of why a lot of physicists don’t do that sort of thing. It’s not that he says anything stupid– quite the contrary, his remarks are sensible and moderate. The problem is that, well, his remarks are sensible and moderate, and thus unlikely to please extremists at either end of the debate.
The key paragraph is probably:
Science and religion have different assumptions, different rules of inference, and different definitions of truth or reality. The fence that surrounds science is the test by experiment. That fence is both the greatest strength and the most fundamental limitation of science, and it needs to be respected from both sides. Scientists may have opinions about religion, but they cannot honestly invoke the authority of science when they try to apply the logic of science on the other side of the fence. Similarly, creationists and advocates of intelligent design should not pretend to be conducting a scientific argument.
As a science-vs.-religion piece, it’s not a particularly outstanding example of the genre, but it’s a little unusual for Physics Today, and thus probably worth noting.
(Caveat Lector: If you follow the Physics Today link, you may well be asked to participate in a poll about their web site before you can read the article. Apologies to anyone offended by this, but hey, you can register for a drawing to win an iPod…)
Peshkin is an honest and naive article. He finishes in the right mode, noting, via that theory is about action. And he stops there, humbly calling this observation “a scold” and not comparing it with the frozen contemplative concept of dogma, for instance (or with the frozen science of divulgation magazines, which are not far from a religion of the science).
This was very well captured by Lucretius, who even if unmathematically tryes to argue the Ancient Science instead of presenting it as a set of dogmas. But it should be naive to say that this position is neutral: note the first pages of the book, aiming explicitly against religion. Benjamin Farrington (you could have heard of him in Schroedinger essay “Are there quantum jumps?”) does a good attempt to explain the politic and religious implications of the Greek science when jumping from Democritus to Epicurus… Science gets a disturbing travel companion.
“Scientists may have opinions about religion, but they cannot honestly invoke the authority of science when they try to apply the logic of science on the other side of the fence.”
Not to go all PZ Meyers here (and I’m certainly not going to venture into the fray over at Pharyngula on this subject, as the signal to noise is about 100 dB too low over there for my taste), but I’ve heard statements of this sort over and over again, and I’ve never understood them. Why would the scientific method apply to every single question about the composition and behavior of the universe except for the existence of a god? What exempts that particular question from the methods of scientific enquiry that have produced such spectacular results otherwise?
I do mean this to be a serious question, not flame-bait. Unlike Meyers, I don’t despise religion, and I understand the value of some of its community-building aspects. However, I am deeply confused by this separation that many (otherwise) reasonable people attempt to make between scientific enquiry and religion. Insisting on this separation certainly has a practical value for those looking to defuse conflict, but I just don’t see how it can be defended as anything other than a polite fiction.