3E: Science Flashcards
Is there always a fight between science and religion?
- Dawkins: faith undermines science
- Believers point to gaps in knowledge that science can’t explain
- Creationists take a literal approach to Genesis
- Galileo: heliocentric, believed everything goes around the sun. Persecuted by the Catholic Church. Took this mick out of the Pope’s viewpoint in his book
Are science and religion nothing to do with each other?
- Religion: why - purpose
- Science: how - mechanics
- Separate domains of understanding
- Dawkins: a wall between religion and science
- Stephen Jay Gould: NOMA - non overlapping magisterium. Separate approaches
Can science and religion learn from each other?
- Points of contact
- POMA: partially overlapped magisterium
- St Augustine: evolution, no time before creation
- Calvin: accommodation
- If evidence contradicts the Bible then look at evidence
- Religion gives us stories that science backs up
- Genetics explain selfishness: so does religion?
Do science and religion both fit together in human understanding?
- Common search for understanding
- ‘2 books’: Book of words is the Bible, and the book of works is nature
- Newton: 4 million words on theology
- Present of Royal Society: clergy, Bishop as first president
What is Dawkins’ view on religion and the relationship between religion and science? (Remember WAGER)
- There is a Wall between religion and science: Gould - NOMA
- Religion is an Abberation: our survival mechanism gone wrong
- God of the Gaps: science now explains things that religion used to
- Religion is the root of Evil: anti-theism - religion is harmful and anti-science. Compares religion to child abuse and a virus
- Rejection of God-hypothesis: there is no good reason to think God explains things
What does Dawkins say our nature comes from?
Genes and nuture passed from memes
What is a meme?
An element of culture that is passed from one person to another by imitation and suggestibility - therefore we inherit all kinds of beliefs and values, including belief in God, the afterlife etc
Why does Dawkins think many ‘real scientists’ claim to be religious?
Because they are afraid of sharing their real beliefs or confuse religion with cultural values
Who are some ‘real scientists’ who are thiests?
Alistair McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath
What book did the McGrath’s write?
‘The Dawkins Delusion’
What does ‘The Dawkins Delusion’ state about a US survey to defend religious scientists?
1916 and 1997 US surveys show that belief in God among scientists have held steady at about 40%. They argue that Dawkins cannot and should not speak for the entire scientific community
What is the name of Dawkins’ book?
‘The God Delusion’ (2006)
What does Dawkins argue in ‘The God Delusion’?
Religion is prone to anti-intellectualism and violence, whereas science unlocks life’s mysteries. He calls religious faith ‘the great cop out’
What are the two qualities that provide survival value and show how people have a psychological disposition that can favour religious belief does Dawkins suggest?
- We have a tendency to obey elders as it increases our safety (but only if the elders are not mistaken)
- We are biologically programmed to assign meaning and purpose to the world, which helps us survive
What is the God of the Gaps argument?
Dawkins questions the God hypothesis (the idea that God can be involved to explain a gap in our knowledge). He notes that theologians often explain gaps in our knowledge by invoking God
How can Intelligent Design be applied to the God of the Gaps Argument?
The view of some contemporary creationists that biological forms of life and irreducible complex so therefore point to a God. The problem with such strategies is that the gaps in our knowledge decrease, God becomes increasingly irrelevant retreating further and further away from daily life
Why do many theologians reject the God of the Gaps approach?
They argue that God is intimately and actively involved in life on earth
How do the McGraths respond to the God of the Gaps argument?
It is not the gaps in our knowledge that require an explanation but the fact that we live in an intelligible universe
How do the Richard Swinburne respond to the God of the Gaps argument?
The best explanation is that the universe has been created by an intelligent Being
What does Dawkins say are the 4 main roles that religion has traditionally filled?
- Explanation: by understanding scientific ideas like natural selection we no longer need religion to explain life
- Exhortation: we don’t have to be religious to be moral and for Dawkins religion has led to violence and segregation
- Consolation: religion isn’t the only way to find consolation as science can help us think of new ways of contemplating
- Inspiration: we don’t need religion to be inspired by the grandeur of nature and the world
How does Dawkins echo Voltaire?
- Voltaire claimed “he who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities”
- Dawkins mirrors this by saying the ‘anti-intellectualism’ of religion and it’s reliance on faith means that people can be manipulated into doing awful things
- he identifies things such as fundamentalist terrorism, the negative impact of religion on issues such as gay rights, women’s equality and abortion, and the way that religion has sometimes appeared to hold back scientific progress on the teaching of evolution as key issues
Why does Dawkins compare religion to child abuse?
It teaches children to abandon reason and priories blind faith. He thinks that even moderate expressions of religion are a problem because they are all rooted in faith, which he calls the ‘great cop out’
Why does Dawkins disagree with the teleological argument?
He says there are two problems with what he called the “God hypothesis” - the conclusion that a designer intervenes in the world.
1. the reason why there is such complexity and intricacy in the world is because of the natural selection and adaptation
2. To say God designed the world just begs the question of who designed God?
What is the ‘Anthropic approach’?
- Proposed by Dawkins: suggest that since we exist, the earth is “life friendly”
- Since there are possibly millions of planets in the universe where life could have developed it is unreasonable to think the conditions friendly to our life could only occur on only one of these
- States that since we are alive and conscious, our planet has to be one of the rare ones capable of sustaining life
- instead of invoking God we might consider the Multiverse hypothesis (there are endless numbers of universes each with different variations, and ours happens to be one with the variations to support life as it is here on earth”
