The [in]compatibility of science and religion

[Igel]

132. I find it incoherent.

I have trouble disagreeing with something that's incoherent. I usually wind up agreeing with bits and pieces and disagreeing with bits and pieces. My response to incoherence is, well, incoherent.

"Science" isn't unitary. Lots of stuff are "science" that aren't. Lysenko. Science? A massive screw up not judged to be science now. Then again, the very idea of epigenetics was judged not to be science by those condemning Lysenko during the era of Khrushchevian Lysenkoism. Science keeps morphing, as is appropriate; however, we project back our current attitudes to see only what confirms our bias.

"Religion" includes shamanism and the most obscurantist forms of Islamic fundamentalism. A couple of weeks ago at a fairly fundie church service I was talking to a guy with a PhD from Stanford doing research involving galinstan. He saw no contradiction. There's nothing in his research or indeed his field that he knows about that disputes anything in his religion. On the other hand, I'm fairly sure that there are large parts of what he does that would offend other people calling themselves Xian. "Religion" is often not what the OP's thesis involves; specific forms and varieties of a set of religious tenets, fixed in time and place, are. It's a bad mistake to confuse the general and the specific when the "general" is so absurdly vague and non-specific.

The only problem with the aforementioned church-goer's beliefs is that some of the methods of inquiry that he uses if applied to other fields would provide a contradiction. It's a potential contradiction that he ignores because he has no reason to fret over it. There's no contradiction between *his* science and *his* religion. Yes, I strongly suspect some things would provide a contradiction; then again, perhaps they wouldn't. I have no trouble holding mutually incompatible views, pretty much simultaneously, concerning things of no relevance to me and of no possible practical effect.

Then again, the moral reasoning that his religion would foster, if applied outside of their usual areas, leads to potential weirdness. For example, a number of years ago a set of drawings used in anatomy texts were found to have been done by Nazis using forced subjects. Good science education. They were withdrawn. Was it scientific to withdraw them? Was the knowledge itself tainted? Are we really afraid that if we allowed the drawings to persist that some others would suddenly round up Jews and gays and perform vivisection on them in NYC or LA?

The problem is a kind of absolutist black/white thinking. Can I accept the scientific method, using abduction from empirical evidence to form a testable hypothesis, and restricting my hypotheses to those that are at least theoretically testable? Sure. Can I also be religious and hold beliefs that ignore these hypotheses as resulting from a kind of very useful heuristic, one that certainly provides useful results but not one that needs to be the only possible way of doing things. Sure. I don't need to straitjacket my thinking and believe there's only one way of doing things. Indeed, many scientists have held hypotheses that were for a long time untestable--and spent decades working towards making them testable, finding the evidence to support that which they only suspected or guessed at. Yet their actions belied a faith in the rightness of their suspicions. Sometimes the results are nonexistent. Sometimes they aren't. I'm not going to judge them, nor assume that they all have to think like me or be somehow deficient.