Faith Versus Fact - Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible

Zusatztext 41172108 Informationen zum Autor For the past twenty-plus years, Jerry Coyne has been a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution where he specializes in evolutionary genetics Klappentext For the past twenty-plus years! Jerry Coyne has been a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution where he specializes in evolutionary genetics PREFACE The Genesis of This Book —Neil deGrasse Tyson In February 2013, I debated a young Lutheran theologian on a hot-button topic: “Are science and religion compatible?” The site was the historic Circular Congregational Church in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the oldest churches in the American South. After both of us gave our twenty-minute spiels (she argued “yes,” while I said “no”), we were asked to sum up our views in a single sentence. I can’t remember my own précis, but I clearly recall the theologian’s words: “We must always remember that faith is a gift.” This was one of those l’esprit d’escalier, or “wit of the staircase,” moments, when you come up with the perfect response—but only well after the opportunity has passed. For shortly after the debate was over, I not only remembered that Gift is the German word for “poison,” but saw clearly that the theologian’s parting words undercut her very thesis that science and religion are compatible. Whatever I actually said, what I should have said was this: “Faith may be a gift in religion, but in science it’s poison, for faith is no way to find truth.” This book gives me a chance to say that now. It is about the different ways that science and religion regard faith, ways that make them incompatible for discovering what’s true about our universe. My thesis is that religion and science compete in many ways to describe reality—they both make “existence claims” about what is real—but use different tools to meet this goal. And I argue that the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—is unreliable and leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions. Indeed, by relying on faith rather than evidence, religion renders itself incapable of finding truth. I maintain, then—and here I diverge from the many “accommodationists” who see religion and science, if not harmonious or complementary, at least as not in conflict—that religion and science are engaged in a kind of war: a war for understanding, a war about whether we should have good reasons for what we accept as true. Although this book deals with the conflict between religion and science, I see this as only one battle in a wider war—a war between rationality and superstition. Religion is but a single brand of superstition (others include beliefs in astrology, paranormal phenomena, homeopathy, and spiritual healing), but it is the most widespread and harmful form of superstition. And science is but one form of rationality (philosophy and mathematics are others), but it is a highly developed form, and the only one capable of describing and understanding reality. All superstitions that purport to give truths are actually forms of pseudoscience, and all use similar tactics to immunize themselves against disproof. As we’ll see, advocates of pseudosciences like homeopathy or ESP often support their beliefs using the same arguments employed by theologians to defend their faith. While the science-versus-religion debate is one battle in the war between rationality and irrationality, I concentrate on it for several reasons. First, the controversy has become more widespread and visible, most likely because of a new element in the criticism of religion. The most novel aspect of “New Atheism”—the form of disbelief that distinguishes the views of writers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins from...

Product details

• Authors: Jerry a Coyne, Jerry A. Coyne
• Publisher: Penguin Books Uk
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 25.06.2015
• EAN: 9780670026531
• ISBN: 978-0-670-02653-1
• No. of pages: 200
• Dimensions: 165 mm x 238 mm x 30 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Religion/theology; Faith versus Fact; Jerry Coyne; Science; Religion