Michael Shermer gave an engaging lecture Wednesday night at UWA’s Octagon Theatre. Since it was Science Week, he spoke on the scientific method, and the need for skepticism in evaluating ideas.
And I got to ask him a question. I mentioned in this post that I think he’s backed the wrong horse on the science v. religion question. In ‘Why Darwin Matters’, he seemed to lean toward the ‘Non-Overlapping Magesteria Argument’ — that science is science and spirituality is spirituality, and science can’t examine spirituality. Besides the gaping holes in the argument, it’s just an unscientific view. How can you falsify it?
But I didn’t want to fight over that — I’m sure he knows the terrain. No, I was more curious about the strategy of it all. Here was my question:
Me: I’ve enjoyed reading “Why Darwin Matters.” You give three possibilities for the relationship between science and religion. One is the Conflicting Worlds model, the Same Worlds model, and the Shared Worlds. You seem to reject the idea that science is right and religion is wrong, as an extremist position. Instead you seem to say that God is somehow outside of science.
I was wondering if that’s really your view, (audience laughter) or is this some kind of tactic that we use to lull the religious to sleep so that the grown-ups can do their work?
Shermer: A sop (unintelligible), yes. No, I do think it’s important to strategise how to interact with other people. And if you tell somebody that their most cherished beliefs are bullshit, (bright tone) and now let’s go to the ball game and have fun together! (audience laughter) You know, that isn’t probably the best way to win friends and influence people. It’s always good to try to be polite and respectful and whatever — you’re more likely to change their minds. That’s isn’t necessarily why I do it; that’s the way I am.
But the argument I make is that — that’s why I went through that whole business of aliens and Shermer’s Last Law and all that stuff. You can’t possibly find a god. Most people think of god as this supernatural being, that isn’t just some garage tinkerer, that isn’t just a genetic engineer who’s really good at it. That somehow that isn’t going to fulfill what people think when they think about god. So I really don’t… I can’t possibly imagine any experiment that any scientist could ever run and go, “Oh, look! There is a god! Wow!” Or “Nope! There isn’t, ’cause look. Failed the experiment.” Something like that. I just don’t think you could do that.
Now Dawkins makes an interesting argument in ‘The God Delusion’ about probabilities, that, you know, on a range… a scale of one to seven, what’s the likelihood? No, we can’t say for sure that there isn’t a god, but there probably isn’t. That’s a reasonable argument. But there you’re not using science directly to test the godly probabilities. It’s something slightly different than that.
Did he answer my question?
In a way, kind of. I was left with the feeling like he’s just being nice and giving religious folk on the edges a way to accept Darwin and science. Off the point, he argues that you can’t falsify the supernatural, to which I readily agree.
But this touches on what should be a major issue among atheists: How do you change people’s minds? Shermer’s right: confronting people directly about their beliefs won’t change their minds. You know what else doesn’t change people’s minds? Not confronting them directly about their beliefs. Thinking back to my days as a believer, if you’d said that I could keep my beliefs, that they were perfectly good, but that science is good too, I’ll guarantee you I’d have left the discussion thinking exactly what I was thinking before.
So what does change people’s minds? Well, in many cases, nothing. If people really want to believe in ghosts or UFO’s or Reiki, no evidence will shift ’em. But there are a certain number of smart people who are in a belief system, and eventually they’ll notice the contradictions and feel enough cognitive dissonance to reach escape velocity. For these people, we need to foster a climate where science and evidence are regarded as authoritative and where disbelief is supported (intellectually and socially), until they’re ready to make the jump. Shermer’s certainly doing his part in this by giving lectures about science and scepticism, with intelligence and good humour. I’m doing my part in this by pointing out firmly (and repeatedly) that no evidence exists for the supernatural, and inviting people to show me some. I don’t sugar-coat my point of view, but I don’t think that’ll turn anyone off; the deeply committed won’t listen anyway. And I think it’s important to be direct with people.
Education is one way of promoting good views. Ridicule is one way of discouraging bad views. I do both. If you can’t manage it, you’re only using half the tools at your disposal. But do what you’re comfortable with. I’ll be over here holding the Overton Window on my end. Go ahead and slag me off and call me a militant atheist and an extremist, so you can look moderate by comparison. That’s absolutely part of the strategy. I don’t mind; I’ll take it for the team.
Just please remember that the forces of anti-science are not content to just believe what they believe. They want to influence what everyone believes. Religions constantly expend a great deal of energy in proselyting. They send missionaries around the world, they build publishing factories, and they go about promoting their memes in an organised way. So let’s not kid ourselves that they just want to play softball.
24 August 2008 at 2:19 am
“Just please remember that the forces of anti-science are not content to just believe what they believe. They want to influence what everyone believes. Religions constantly expend a great deal of energy in proselyting. They send missionaries around the world, they build publishing factories, and they go about promoting their memes in an organised way. So let’s not kid ourselves that they just want to play softball.”
I know a fair few of them aren’t content to just believe what they believe. That’s actually part of the fault I see in them, when what they believe is unempirical. My lack of belief is also about something unempirical, so it would seem hypocritical of me to not, myself, be content to just believe what I believe.
24 August 2008 at 6:06 am
Well, there is one solution then: Empirical up!
26 August 2008 at 6:39 am
I saw Shermer talk here at the University of Melbourne – the same Darwin talk. I’ve seen it before on the internet, but I basically went there to fangirl and geek out 🙂
A friend tells me that there were multiple pro-ID questions/comments from the audience at the UWA talk. Here there was only one guy, refuting the arguments Shermer makes about the appendix being useless in humans. He (the audience member) said he was a surgeon that wrote the definitive book on what functions the human appendix has, but he wasn’t terribly convincing, and besides, even if he was, that only covers one tiny part of much larger argument.
26 August 2008 at 4:30 pm
I think he did answer your question very succinctly. You ask him to defend his position that God is outside of science. He answers it by essentially saying that because God is a construct, there is no reasonable experiment that can be carried out which would prove that God either exists or does not exist – therefore science is irrelevant to the existence of God or not. Or, another way of saying it is that there is no point trying to settle the reality or not of God through scientific experiment because there is not a sharply defined characteristic of God – so what would you look for or fail to find? So, because science can never carry out a successful experiment, it cannot pretend to be an effective tool in refuting the existence of God – it must remain separate. The fact that many people believe there is a God is not subject to science any more than a ‘thing’ called love could be and yet many people believe there is a thing called love.
27 August 2008 at 12:55 pm
No, I specifically refrained from asking that question, because I wanted to know more about strategy, not hash over that area.
Shermer is talking about proof. People do define gods in ways that place them outside of science, but that’s just them moving the goalposts. I usually talk about evidence, not proof, specifically that there isn’t any.
Let me add something to Shermer’s comment. You can have proof of god. It would be a very easy thing for god to prove his/her/its existence. Just come on over, tell us how he/she/it made the universe, and provide enough details that would explain unanswered scientific questions, or make predictions that would be confirmed by experimental evidence. That would prove it for any scientist out there.
However, Shermer’s still right in that there’s nothing a scientist can do to demonstrate the existence of a god who chooses to hide himself.
And, of course, you can’t disprove god’s existence, as I said earlier.
(I edited this comment.)
29 August 2008 at 11:19 pm
Oh, I see what you mean – but I still think he answered your question as he states that his tactic is to be polite and then to explain (what he describes)
There is a letter in this week’s New Scientist that touches on this issue. The online version cuts off the end of it and my copy is in the room where my mother is currently sleeping but here is what’s available online:
Wonderful cosmos
* 27 August 2008
* James Humphreys
* Magazine issue 2671
Lawrence Krauss states that if science “turns out to suggest that we are alone in a universe without purpose, we must accept that” (2 August, p 52). Science could suggest, then, that atheism is true. But if science could suggest that atheism is true, why could it not suggest that theism is? Krauss rejects this latter possibility, even in principle, saying that “any spiritual enlightenment provided by science is merely in the eye of the beholder”. In other words, the theist, unlike the atheist, cannot hope to base his belief on the objective nature of physical reality. But why should that be?
The problem for Krauss, as I see it, is this: either he must provide an argument which demonstrates how it is that science can support atheism but not theism – and I do not think that he can provide one – or else his argument falls to …
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19926710.200-wonderful-cosmos.html
30 August 2008 at 4:05 am
Haven’t seen this yet, but it’s a bizarre start, don’t you think? Try substituting ‘Thor’ in that paragraph. Why does science support atheism, and not Thor?
People are just odd sometimes.