Several days ago P.Z. Myers offended a lot of people when he posted a map showing what he called the density of “ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed victims of obsolete mythologies in the United States” As he described later, it's a map of the percentage of religious beleivers in the United States.1 Yesterday Sheri Kirshenbaum posted a short piece offhandedly comparing P.Z. to Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh and referring to atheists as fundamentalists. P.Z. complains that Sheri “she ... fails to explain anything about how religion and science are supposed to interact.”
I'm more than a little mystified that these debates become so heated. To me several points are self-evident.
Science is a process that uses empirical observation and experiment to construct empirically testable generalizations about the observable world.2
To gain knowledge of the observable world we use the methods and principles of empirical science.
If God exists, (s)he exists outside the observable world.
To gain knowledge3 of God, if (s)he exists, we depend on religious faith.
Given these (to me) self-evident postulates, it's obvious that science can't say anything about whether or not God exists. Science deals entirely with phenomena in the observable realm, and God if (s)he exists is outside that realm. Dawkins, P.Z., and others go on to conclude that therefore God does not exist. That may be a reasonable conclusion, but it's not a scientific conclusion. It doesn't follow, and can't follow, from any empirical evidence. It is a philosophical conclusion.
It may also be reasonable to argue that any knowledge we have of God isn't really “knowledge,” i.e., justified belief. Again though, the question of whether it is “knowledge” depends on what is necessary to justify belief. We all agree that the methods of science produce justifiable belief about the observable world. It's for philosophers and theologians (not scientists) to argue about whether belief derived from religious faith is justifiable.
So where does this leave us on the question of “how religion and science are supposed to interact”?
Well, as a practicing scientist, I don't change the way I do my day job. If there's an observable phenomenon I want to understand, I construct testable hypotheses, make observations, do experiments, collect data, and see whether the data are consistent with my hypothesis. I publish the results of my work in peer-reviewed journals and try to convince my fellow scientists that I've understood something that hasn't been understood before (or that the understanding they thought they had is wrong). Francis Collins and Richard Dawkins approach understanding the observable world in the same way. Believers and non-believers (I'm one of the latter) live in the same observable world. If we want to understand and control it, the methods and principles of empirical science are the best way.
But what does it all mean? Well, this is where religion come in. For some, like Dawkins, P.Z. and me, “knowledge” based on religious faith doesn't seem like knowledge, but I know many reasonable people who accept the primacy of empirical science for understanding the observable world and accept religious faith as a way of justifying beliefs about God and the domain of the unobservable. Religious faith provides a way of understanding life and providing meaning, an alternative to the “grandeur in this view of life” of which Darwin wrote. I do not find that way of understanding compelling, but I am not prepared to argue that it is unreasonable.
With one important exception: Religious faith cannot substitute for empirical evidence in understanding the observable world. For believers, faith may explain why the observable world is understandable, but it does not explain how the observable world works.
1Interesting that someone who doesn't like framing does it so well.
2If there happen to be any philosophers in the audience, I'm using “observable” to refer to anything that can be connected to “ordinary” observation, even if that connection involves a long train of intervening hypotheses and theories. In that sense, even quarks are observable.
3Patience grasshopper. I'll point out in a moment that religious knowledge may not be knowledge. For now it's sufficient that it's a different kind of knowledge, having a different basis of justification.
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