Thursday, May 07, 2009
Call a Canadian!!
Dear Americans,
Have you ever thought about asking an average Canadian what they think of their health care system? Read Call a Canadian on Effect Measure.
Oops! Did New Scientist Goof Again?
New Scientist published an article on Science and art: Still two cultures divided?.
The journal invited six people to comment on the two cultures. Here's the list ....
- Stefan Collini is a professor of literature and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. He edited The Two Cultures (1993, CUP)
- Susan Haack is a professor of philosophy and a professor of law at the University of Miami, Florida
- Harry Collins is professor of sociology at Cardiff University in the UK
- Mary Midgley is a philosopher and writer
- Sandra Harding is a philosopher and professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles
- A. C. Grayling is a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London
Good point. A classic demonstration of the two cultures in action.
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Atheists Serve the Devil!
Who knew? I wonder what the Devil eats for lunch? If I'm going to serve him I'd better find out.
Is he a big tipper?
This is Pat Robertson responding to a question. A caller wants to know how she, a Christian, can get along with her boyfriend, an atheist. Can you guess how the good Christian responds? Think about it, then watch.
[Hat Tip: Friendly Atheist]
How to Frame a Null Hypothesis
A reader has alerted me to an article by Michael White at Adaptive Complexity: Genomic Junk and Transcriptional Noise.With hot, new technologies, biologists are taking higher-resolution snapshots of what's going on inside the cell, but the results are stirring up controversy. One of the most interesting recent discoveries is that transcription is everywhere: DNA is transcribed into RNA all over the genome, even DNA that has long been thought to have a non-functional role. What is all of this transcription for? Does the 'dark matter' of the genome have some cryptic, undiscovered function?If you are interested in what's wrong with science these days then you must read his article.
Unfortunately, in all of the excitement over possible new functions, many biologists have forgotten how to frame a null hypothesis - the default scenario that you expect to see if there is no function to this transcribed DNA. As a result, the literature is teeming with wild, implausible speculation about how our excess DNA might be beneficial to us.
So here, let's step back and look at what we expect from DNA when it's playing absolutely no functional role; in other words, let's look at the null hypothesis of genomic junk and transcriptional noise. We can then take our null hypothesis and use it to look at a fascinating new study of how genomic parasites sculpt transcription in our cells.
The point is not whether you believe that all transcription is adaptive and functional, or whether you believe that most of it is noise. The real point is that it is very bad science to ignore the null hypothesis and publish naive speculation as if it were the only possible explanation.
Whenever you see a paper that fails to address the null hypothesis you can be sure that you are reading bad science. Everything else in the paper is suspect.
The key fact that most scientists are overlooking is that RNA polymerase and the various transcription factors must bind non-specifically at thousands of sites in a random sequence of junk DNA. This is just basic biochemistry of the sort that should be taught in undergraduate classes. Transcription will be initiated by accident at some of these sites even though they are not functional promoters. Again, this is basic biochemistry.
[Image Credit: Horton et al. Principles of Biochemistry 4/e p.657]
Two Cultures in New York City
Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of a lecture by C.P. Snow on The Two Cultures. He said,
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of entropy. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'Not much has changed in fifty years. We still live in a society that is at best scientifically illiterate and, at worst, anti-science.
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, 'Can you read?' — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.
Tomorrow I'll be on my way to New York City to attend a conference on The Two Cultures in the 21st Century. The meeting was organized (in part) by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. It begins with a keynote address by E.O. Wilson followed by four symposia on ...
- The Two Cultures in Historical Perspective: From Aristotle to "Science Wars" and the "Third Culture"
- How to More Effectively Communicate Science Issues to the Public
- Restoring Science to Its Rightful Place in Politics
- A Better Future through Science Citizenship
We all have our stories and our examples of the problem. The one I like to tell is the story about a group of knowledgeable adults at a cocktail party when something mathematical comes up in the conversation. Chances are someone is going to brag about how much they feared math in schools and how little they know about the subject. This will undoubtedly get murmurs of sympathy from many people.
Now imagine that the group was discussing modern literature and I said something similar; "I hated literature in school, I never 'got' the point of these modern writers and why they are so famous. Literature was way too hard for me so I stopped taking literature courses as soon as I could." Do you think there would be murmurs of sympathy and understanding? I doubt it. The group would probably think I'm stupid.
The two cultures problem will only be solved when the proper response to someone who claims to be an idiot in mathematics is the same as to someone who claims to be an idiot about art and literature.
The other problem is when people claim to be knowledgeable about science when they aren't. Chris Matthews of MSNBC has the right idea when he attacks Rep. Mike Pence (Indiana-R) ["You Want to Educate Americans About Science; Do You Believe In Evolution?"]. We can't allow people to pretend they know about science when they reject the core principles of science. If you are ignorant about science then you are ignorant, period.
Today's issue of New Scientist has an article on Science and art: Still two cultures divided? .
On the Origin of Chloroplasts
We know that many species contain chloroplasts. In most cases, these species descend directly from a common ancestor that acquired the chloroplast through an endosymbiotic relationship with a cyanobacterium. The endosymbiotic origin of chloroplasts from cyanobacteria is not in doubt.What is in doubt is whether the original endosymbiosis happened just once or whether there are multiple independent origins of chloroplasts. We also know that some species acquired chloroplasts by fusing with another chloroplast-containing eukaryotic species. How many examples of secondary acquisition are required to explain the phylogeny of species that contain chloroplasts? Are there tertiary and quaternary acquisitions?
Christopher Taylor of Catalogue of Organisms has posted a nice summary of the problems in this field at Crossing the Algal Divide. If you want to keep up with one of the important problems in evolution then this is an excellent place to start.
[Photo Credit: micro*scope]
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Monday's Molecule #120: Winners
UPDATE: The image depicts the genome of a human papillomavirus. The Nobel Laureate is Harald zur Hausen.
This week's winners are Dima Klenchin of the University of Wisconsin and Adam Santoro of the University of Toronto. They were the first of many who got the right answer. This surprises me 'cause I thought it would be harder. I didn't realize how easy it was to get the molecule by searching for "E6" or "E7."
This is a cartoon showing the genes present in a particular DNA molecule. Your task is to identify the kind of DNA molecule being depicted.There is one Nobel Laureate who is most closely identified with this particular type of molecule. You have to identify the Nobel Laureate and what the prize was for.
The first person to identify the molecule and the Nobel Laureate wins a free lunch at the Faculty Club. Previous winners are ineligible for one month from the time they first won the prize.
There are six ineligible candidates for this week's reward: Shumona De of Dalhousie University, Maria Altshuler of the University of Toronto, Mike Fraser of Toronto, Alex Ling of the University of Toronto, Laura Gerth of the University of Notre Dame, and Stefan Tarnawsky of the University of Toronto.
The Canadians continue their total dominance of the rest of the world. That's as it should be.
I still have one extra free lunch donated by a previous winner to a deserving undergraduate so I'm going to continue to award an additional free lunch to the first undergraduate student who can accept it. Please indicate in your email message whether you are an undergraduate and whether you can make it for lunch.
THEME:
Nobel Laureates
Send your guess to Sandwalk (sandwalk (at) bioinfo.med.utoronto.ca) and I'll pick the first email message that correctly identifies the molecule and names the Nobel Laureate(s). Note that I'm not going to repeat Nobel Prizes so you might want to check the list of previous Sandwalk postings by clicking on the link in the theme box.
Correct responses will be posted tomorrow.
How to Teach Evolution?
You're not going to believe this. The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), the Office of Science Education (OSE), and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) sponsored Matt Nisbet to give a lecture on Communicating About Evolution.Who knew that Matt was an expert on evolution? Here's what Matt says about the lecture on his website [Video for NAS Lecture: Communicating about Evolution].
For readers of this blog and followers of the "Framing Science" thesis, the National Academies presentation is the most detailed lecture I have given on how to effectively engage with the public on the relationship between science and religion and the specific topic of evolution. The lecture follows closely articles and book chapters that I have previously published or that are forthcoming.Near the end of his lecture Matt defends the "frame" of emphasizing that religion and science are not in conflict (~50 minutes). In this context, frame is not much different than spin and spin is not much different than lie. The truth is that science and religion are often in conflict. Any statement to the contrary is not the truth.
Matt's views about framing have been so thoroughly rejected by scientists that The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), the Office of Science Education (OSE), and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) should be ashamed of themselves.
See Matt Nisbet Endorses Francis Collins for Presidential Science Advisor - The Kiss of Death for an example of how Nisbet wants to frame the debate.
Do High School Student Want to Become Scientists?
Do High School Student Want to Become Scientists? the answer is, no [Is Canada losing the lab-rat race?]."Look up 'scientist' on Google," the 16-year-old says, "and you will see someone in a lab coat." At the moment, she is considering something with more immediate results, such as physiotherapy.I don't think this is a new problem. Back in the olden days, there also weren't a huge number of high school students who wanted to be scientists. Why should there be a significant number in a typical high school class? At my university there are about 8,000 students entering first year and about 400 or so want to pursue a career in science. That's about right—half of them (200) will be able to enter graduate school when they graduate and that's also about right. It means that a typical high school science class of 25 students will likely have only two or three who want to be scientists.
Ask her biology classmates at Colonel By Secondary School in Ottawa if any of them want to be scientists and only a few tentative hands flicker up. What's worrying is that this is no average high-school science class. It is part of the International Baccalaureate program, chosen from a large pool of applicants. These are students who spend half of their time in labs, working through experiments, not dozing off during lectures - the kind of education most scientists wish they had had. If any group should be producing lab-coat keeners, it should be this one.
Julia Dutaud, 16, sitting in the back in her school-rugby T-shirt, would like to study environmental science - a field growing as rapidly as any - but she wonders if she could make a good living at it: "Going into science would be a nice thing to do," she says. "But we aren't sure how much opportunity we would get after university."
Half the students are planning to be doctors instead, a profession they and their parents consider more stable.
It would be a disaster if half of every high school science class wanted to become scientists because the vast majority would be disappointed.
There's another problem not covered in the Globe and Mail article. In my experience, many students don't begin to understand what a scientist is until they get to university and start seeing them in their natural environment. A surprising number of high school students think you have to be a physician in order to do the cool research on genes and diseases. It's only after they get to university that they learn the difference between a physician and a scientist.
When did you, dear reader, first develop a serious interest in science? Was it in high school or university? Is it a problem that there aren't more high school students who want to become scientists?
Science Education in Alberta
The Alberta legislature is considering a law that allows parents to pull their children out of certain classes if those classes conflict with the family's religion. Many people interpreted this to mean that parents could take their children out of biology classes when evolution is being taught [see Don't Like Evolution in Alberta?].According to an article in The Globe and Mail this may have been an over-reaction [Alberta law imperils teaching of 'religious' topics like evolution, critics fear]. While the opposition parties are incensed and the school teachers are angry, it appears that there is at least one senior government official who knows the difference between science and religion.
Frank Bruseker, head of the Alberta Teachers' Association, said he is also concerned about what the new rules could mean.I hope he (Blackett) is right and not the premier. I hope the new legislation will contain an amendment making it clear that students cannot be taken out of science classes when evolution is covered. It's nice to see so many teachers and politicians in Alberta standing up for science.
He is worried that some parents might think mentioning different classes of worms would constitute a reference to evolution.
And he said no discussion of ancient geologic formations can be had without mentioning the world is billions of years old, much more than a literal reading of the Bible would suggest.
Meanwhile, history and literature from around the world are full of references to religious upheaval.
"Religion is kind of a fuzzy thing, in a sense, in that what some people see as religion others might not," Mr. Bruseker said.
Opposition parties have hammered the government on the issue, saying the province is headed back to the time of the 1925 Scopes trial, in which a high school biology teacher in Tennessee was tried for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution.
Premier Ed Stelmach conceded to reporters last week that the provision could be used to pull students out of classes dealing with evolution if parents preferred their kids be taught what's in the Bible instead.
"The parents would have the opportunity to make that choice," he told a news conference.
But Lindsay Blackett, the minister responsible for human rights, said in an interview that the intention of the law is to allow parents to pull children out only when the curriculum specifically covers religion, something that happens for a few hours each school year.
"It's talking about religion [such as] Hindu, or Muslim, or that type of religion, not ... the curriculum with respect to, for instance, evolution," he said.
"That's science and we're not arguing science."
[Photo Credit: Minister of Culture and Community Spirit]
Politics and the Judicial Branch in America
Since America is a "nation of laws" it becomes very important to pass the "right" laws and to make sure that the American Supreme Court upholds them. To this end, each side of an issue wants to stack the Supreme Court with their sympathizers. Now that one of the members of the Supreme Court has retired, the lobbying to replace him has begun.Eddie Tabash is very interested in the separation of church and state issue and he wants the next Supreme Court justice to be sympathetic to his point of view on the law. Apparently, there are well-qualified judges who would not be sympathetic, so the nomination process becomes highly politicized. Apparently, the Democrats want a judge who will agree with Tabash while the Republicans want a judge who might favor different laws.
Tabash has written a special article on RichardDawkins.net explaining how the process works [ It happened. There is now a Supreme Court vacancy]. It's very helpful for those of us in other countries. The politicization of the Judicial Branch of government seems very bizarre.
[Photo Credit: Tim Dillon, USA TODAY]
Monday, May 04, 2009
Monday's Molecule #120
This is a cartoon showing the genes present in a particular DNA molecule. Your task is to identify the kind of DNA molecule being depicted.There is one Nobel Laureate who is most closely identified with this particular type of molecule. You have to identify the Nobel Laureate and what the prize was for.
The first person to identify the molecule and the Nobel Laureate wins a free lunch at the Faculty Club. Previous winners are ineligible for one month from the time they first won the prize.
There are six ineligible candidates for this week's reward: Shumona De of Dalhousie University, Maria Altshuler of the University of Toronto, Mike Fraser of Toronto, Alex Ling of the University of Toronto, Laura Gerth of the University of Notre Dame, and Stefan Tarnawsky of the University of Toronto.
The Canadians continue their total dominance of the rest of the world. That's as it should be.
I still have one extra free lunch donated by a previous winner to a deserving undergraduate so I'm going to continue to award an additional free lunch to the first undergraduate student who can accept it. Please indicate in your email message whether you are an undergraduate and whether you can make it for lunch.
THEME:
Nobel Laureates
Send your guess to Sandwalk (sandwalk (at) bioinfo.med.utoronto.ca) and I'll pick the first email message that correctly identifies the molecule and names the Nobel Laureate(s). Note that I'm not going to repeat Nobel Prizes so you might want to check the list of previous Sandwalk postings by clicking on the link in the theme box.
Correct responses will be posted tomorrow.
Comments will be blocked for 24 hours.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Theistic Evolution: How Does God Do It?
Theistic Evolution is a form of creationism that limits God's involvement in the creation event. The chief limitation is that most of God's activity have to be consistent with the facts of evolution.Francis Collins has created a website devoted to his concept of BioLogos, which, it turn out, is just another word for Theistic Evolution. The website is funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
Many of us have difficulty understanding how a personal God can be involved in guiding evolution without violating the laws of physics and chemistry. In other words, how is Theistic Evolution/BioLogos compatible with science? This is a key question since we know that major scientific organizations (AAAS, NAS, NCSE) support the notion that science and religion are compatible. In fact, they explicitly support Francis Collins and Theistic Evolution.
Let's see how science and religion are compatible by looking at Question 14 on the BioLogos website [What role could God have in evolution?].
Divine Action is defined as God’s interaction with creation. Due to the understanding that evolution accounts for the diversity of present life forms, it might appear God played no role in the process of evolution. (See Question 26 about The Complexity of Life.) Clearly this contradicts the central doctrine of creation for many faiths. Christianity, for example, professes a God actively involved in creation. Many faiths share the concept of an interactive God, or theism. The opposing belief — the belief in an uninvolved, disinterested God — is deism.Collins sees this a a major problem. According to him, Christians believe in creation and a strictly scientific explanation of evolution seems incompatible with this belief.
Elsewhere on the website, Collins makes it clear that theism is not deism and his view of Theistic Evolution/BioLogos is not deistic. So how does he solve the problem?
Any God worthy of the name has to be capable of miracles, and each of the great Western religions attributes a number of very special miracles to their conception of God. What can science say about a miracle? Nothing. By definition, the miraculous is beyond explanation, beyond our understanding, beyond science.
Ken Miller in "Finding Darwin's God" p. 239Well, it's not very clear to me. There is some hand-waving and some backhanded suggestions but nothing specific is described. In this sense, the Francis Collins version of Theistic Evolution is similar to that of Ken Miller in Finding Darwin's God. Here's the BioLogos version..
Even before Darwin’s contribution to biology, the scientific revolution in physics marked a tremendous advance in our understanding of the world. Scientists discovered that the world’s behavior could be explained and predicted with great accuracy on the basis of physical laws. Nature, as understood at the time, appeared to reliably follow a set of fundamental rules. For example, the motion of planets could be explained as a necessary result of their obedience to the force of gravity. This understanding of the world lent itself to the belief in a rational, consistent creator.This is the potential area of conflict. If science says that evolution obeys the laws of physics and chemistry then there's no room for an interventionist God without violating those rules. And if your God does that then there's a conflict between science and religion. They are not compatible.
But, as Polkinghorne puts it, these laws might also come across as “a gift from the Greeks.”5 Given a second look, they challenge basic theism. For as much as these laws signify a rational creator, their trustworthiness could also imply God’s absence. After all, if the laws of nature can explain almost any phenomenon, how is God involved? In order to understand how God could take an active role, or how the world could have any inherent freedom, the laws of nature must be somehow open or flexible. The world’s future cannot be entirely determined or predictable from any given moment.
What to do? Miller and Collins, and many other theists, opt for a solution where God can intervene at the quantum level without ever being detected. Thus, nature only appears to obey the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry because God is clever enough to disguise his interventions.
The mechanical worldview of the scientific revolution is now a relic. Modern physics has replaced it with a very different picture of the world. With quantum mechanical uncertainty and the chaotic unpredictability of complex systems, the world is now understood to have a certain freedom in its future development. Of course, the question remains whether this openness is a result of nature’s true intrinsic chanciness or the inevitable limit to humans’ understanding. Either way, one thing is clear: a complete and detailed explanation or prediction for nature’s behavior cannot be provided. This was already a problem for Newtonian mechanics; however, it was assumed that in principle, science might eventually provide a complete explanation of any natural event. Now, though, we see that the laws of nature are such that scientific prediction and explanation are ultimately limited.So this is how to make science and religion compatible. Let's restate it so that everyone can grasp the argument,
It is thus perfectly possible that God might influence the creation in subtle ways that are unrecognizable to scientific observation. In this way, modern science opens the door to divine action without the need for law breaking miracles. Given the impossibility of absolute prediction or explanation, the laws of nature no longer preclude God’s action in the world. Our perception of the world opens once again to the possibility of divine interaction.
Despite the uncertainty and unpredictability of the world, we are not forced to reject the earlier understanding of God’s creation as consistent and reliable. After all, the world still exhibits the same orderly behavior that inspired so many faithful scientists of earlier centuries. Regardless of the irregularity of tiny,quantum mechanical, or complex, chaos theoretical, systems, the sun stills rises and sets, the tides ebb and flow, and objects fall to the ground. Nature is reliable enough to reflect God’s faithfulness yet flexible enough to permit God’s involvement.
"... modern science opens the door to divine action without the need for law breaking miracles. Given the impossibility of absolute prediction or explanation, the laws of nature no longer preclude God’s action in the world.."On the surface it seems to work since, by definition, all of God's interventions and guidance are undetectable. Therefore, there can't be any obvious conflict between the purely modern scientific view of evolution and creationism.
Personally, I don't think you can have your cake and eat it too. Once you start attributing events to God's intervention you are conflicting with a strictly materialistic interpretation of those same events. It doesn't matter whether your God is extremely careful to fool scientists into thinking that evolution is natural. The very act of postulating divine intervention in the natural world is not compatible with the scientific way of knowing.
Here's the bottom line, according to Francis Collins.
Our modern understanding of physical laws combined with a proper understanding of God’s relationship to time can be synthesized into a robust theistic worldview. Darrel Falk provides the following perspective:This is how evolution and creationism are compatible. This idea that "God’s spirit guides the progression of life" is the view that major scientific organizations and the NCSE endorse as being compatible with science.
“The Bible tells us that God created, but it does not tell us how, and we need to be careful that we do not force the God of the Universe into one of our human molds. […] What do we learn about the nature of God’s activity from studying the Bible? One thing we learn is that God builds freedom into His creation. […] Just as God builds freedom into our lives today, so freedom may well be a central component of God’s biological world as well. This is not to say that God is not playing a supervisory role in creation in a manner resembling the role God plays in my life and yours. But there is no a priori scriptural reason to assume that the biological world was created one species at a time by the God of the Universe “pushing creation buttons” each time he wanted a new species. […] God’s spirit guides the progression of life. His presence is never far from creation, just as it is never far from the events of my life. Nonetheless God respects my freedom and (I suspect) values freedom in the rest of creation as well.”
[Photo Credit: Francis Collins discusses “The Language of God”]
Saturday, May 02, 2009
What American Science Teachers Can't Say
John Pieret is a The latest ruling on the religion-science front is by a Federal judge in California holding that a public school teacher who called creationism "religious, superstitious nonsense," violated a creationist student's First Amendment rights.Since John has been following the debate on the blogs, he realizes the implications.
The lesson is not restricted to such blatant cases, however. It is clear that a government teacher could not teach that philosophical naturalism is true, as that would clearly render most religions false. And it is more than doubtful that a public school teacher could teach that science was true while, at the same time maintaining that it was in conflict with most religions, since that which is in conflict with the truth is, necessarily, false.This is pretty much what I thought. High school science teachers cannot say that the deluge never happened and they cannot say that the idea of a 10,000 year-old Earth is wrong.1 That would violate the American Constitution.
God Bless America.
1. I don't understand how they can get away with saying that evolution is true, since that statement is logically equivalent to saying that many forms of creationism are superstitious nonsense.
The Accommodationist Postion in Academic Matters
Margaret Somerville has written an essay on Facing up to the dangers of the intolerant university: Bird on an ethics wire. It is published in Academic Matters, the publication of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA).Here's her brief biography as published in the journal.
Margaret Somerville is Samuel Gale Professor in the Faculty of Law and a professor in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University and is the founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. In 2004, she received the UNESCO Avicenna Prize for Ethics in Science and in 2006 delivered the prestigious Massey Lectures.I agree with a lot of what Somerville has to say about rampant political correctness in the universities.
That is where political correctness enters the picture. It excludes politically incorrect values from the “all values are equal” stable. The intense moral relativists will tolerate all values except those they deem to be politically incorrect—which just happen to be the ones that conflict with their values.However, I also agree with Jeffrey Shallit that she applies her own standards inconsistently, such as when she insists that physicians are being "forced" to act against their conscience when treating certain patients [Margaret Somerville in "Academic Matters"].
Political correctness operates by shutting down non-politically correct people’s freedom of speech. Anyone who challenges the politically correct stance is, thereby, automatically labeled as intolerant, a bigot, or hatemonger. The substance of their arguments against a politically correct stance is not addressed; rather people labeled as politically incorrect are, themselves, attacked as being intolerant and hateful simply for making those arguments. This derogatorily -label-the-person-and-dismiss-them-on-the-basis-of-that-label approach is intentionally used as a strategy to suppress strong arguments against any politically correct stance and, also, to avoid dealing with the substance of these arguments.
Shallit is an expert on the difference between real free speech and its imposters.
I'd like to focus on another part of Somerville's essay.
Sixth, not only can we, but we must, cross the secular/religious divide, the science/religion divide and the divide between religions, if we are to find a shared ethics. This is where I believe both the fundamentalist religious people and the fundamentalist neo-atheists are wrong because they demand that we choose between religion and science. We must accommodate both.I'm not sure what this means. I believe that religion is a superstition and I advocate a non-religious society. According to Somerville the "best" thing that could happen is that I will fail to convince people. The worst thing that will happen is that I will succeed but the result will make religion the focus of serious conflict. What a strange choice. The second option is exactly my goal.
Some would like to reduce religion to being seen as nothing more than a personal fantasy or superstition. But that’s not realistic. At best it will fail; at worst it will do serious harm because it will exacerbate the acrimony of the values conflicts and make it more likely, not less likely, that religion will become a focus of serious conflict. Also, because culture and religion are linked, even within democratic, multicultural, pluralistic Western societies, it will increase the number and intensity of the current values clashes and may contribute to culture wars.
I suppose the politically correct thing to do is to accommodate because we certainly can't have a situation where religion is challenged, can we?
Somerville says that religion and culture are linked. That's correct. It's an attitude that I want to change and there's lots of evidence that it is changing in other countries. Did this lead to "culture wars"? Yes, it did in some places—notably the Canadian province of Quebec in the 1960's. What Somerville fails to address is whether the culture wars are a good thing or a bad thing. She seems to be implying that we should not criticize religion because religious people might be upset. Don't we have a word for that kind of thinking?
[Photo Credit: The Catholic Registrar]
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