Two weeks ago, we noted the New Republic book review by Dr. Jerry Coyne that argued that faith and science are incompatible. Since then, several writers have challenged Coyne’s argument.
Jim Manzi, in particular, has some interesting thoughts:
Finally we come to a part of Coyne’s argument (quoted by Andrew Sullivan in his blog) that asserts that “real” religious belief, if not certain academic contortions, is contradicted by science:
Unfortunately, some theologians with a deistic bent seem to think that they speak for all the faithful. These were the critics who denounced Dawkins and his colleagues for not grappling with every subtle theological argument for the existence of God, for not steeping themselves in the complex history of theology. Dawkins in particular was attacked for writing The God Delusion as a “middlebrow” book. But that misses the point. He did indeed produce a middlebrow book, but precisely because he was discussing religion as it is lived and practiced by real people. The reason that many liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.
That is, if we strip away all of the falsifiable statements that are made in practice by religions, we are left with something vanishingly close to materialism anyway. But consider, to use Coyne’s own logic of falsification, an obvious counter-example. By about the year 400, Augustine described a view of Creation in which “seeds of potentiality” were established by God, which then unfolded through time in an incomprehensibly complicated set of processes. By the 13th century, Aquinas — working with the thought of Aristotle and Augustine — identified God with ultimate causes, while accepting naturalistic interpretations of secondary causes. Today, the formal position of the Catholic church, incorporating this long train of thought, is that there is no conflict between evolution through natural selection and Catholic theology. So, in this example, we’re describing an orientation supported by those esoteric theologians Augustine and Aquinas, and promulgated today by that so-liberal-he’s-practically-an-atheist Pope Benedict in that weirdo minority Roman Catholic sect. You know, “unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.”
Read it all here. See also posts by Alan Jacobs and Ross Douthat.