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David P. Barash, an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington, writes in the NYT that every year he gives his students The Talk, not as you might expect, about sex, but about evolution and religion. According to Barash many students worry about reconciling their beliefs with evolutionary science and just as many Americans don’t grasp the fact that evolution is not merely a “theory,” but the underpinning of all biological science, a substantial minority of his students are troubled to discover that their beliefs conflict with the course material. "There are a couple of ways to talk about evolution and religion," says Barash. "The least controversial is to suggest that they are in fact compatible." Stephen Jay Gould called them "nonoverlapping magisteria," noma for short, with the former concerned with facts and the latter with values." But Barash says magisteria are not nearly as nonoverlapping as some of them might wish. "As evolutionary science has progressed, the available space for religious faith has narrowed: It has demolished two previously potent pillars of religious faith and undermined belief in an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God."
The twofold demolition begins by defeating what modern creationists call the argument from complexity - that just as the existence of a complex structure like a watch demands the existence of a watchmaker, the existence of complex organisms requires a supernatural creator. "Since Darwin, however, we have come to understand that an entirely natural and undirected process, namely random variation plus natural selection, contains all that is needed to generate extraordinary levels of non-randomness. Living things are indeed wonderfully complex, but altogether within the range of a statistically powerful, entirely mechanical phenomenon." Next to go is the illusion of centrality. "The most potent take-home message of evolution is the not-so-simple fact that, even though species are identifiable (just as individuals generally are), there is an underlying linkage among them — literally and phylogenetically, via traceable historical connectedness. Moreover, no literally supernatural trait has ever been found in Homo sapiens; we are perfectly good animals, natural as can be and indistinguishable from the rest of the living world at the level of structure as well as physiological mechanism." Finally there is a third consequence of evolutionary insights: a powerful critique of theodicy, the effort to reconcile belief in an omnipresent, omni-benevolent God with the fact of unmerited suffering. "But just a smidgen of biological insight makes it clear that, although the natural world can be marvelous, it is also filled with ethical horrors: predation, parasitism, fratricide, infanticide, disease, pain, old age and death — and that suffering (like joy) is built into the nature of things. The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator."
Barash concludes The Talk by saying that, although they don’t have to discard their religion in order to inform themselves about biology (or even to pass his course), if they insist on retaining and respecting both, they will have to undertake some challenging mental gymnastic routines. "And while I respect their beliefs, the entire point of The Talk is to make clear that, at least for this biologist, it is no longer acceptable for science to be the one doing those routines."
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 01 2014, @07:28AM
Err, no. They have revealed that human perceptions of "love", "beauty" or "justice" are correlated with perfectly measurable electro-chemical reactions in the brain.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 01 2014, @07:47AM
Of course they "are correlated with perfectly measurable electro-chemical reactions in the brain." That is the only place these concepts actually exist. Since they only exist inside the human brain what is wrong with measuring them in the brain?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 01 2014, @08:09AM
That's a believe.
And yes, I do believe that, too, but I'm able to distinguish between hard facts (there are strong correlations between certain processes in the brain and the mental states, the quantum mechanical wave function is an appropriate tool to predict outcomes of experiments) and personal believes (the mental states are those brain processes, the quantum mechanical wave function is real).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 01 2014, @08:06PM
Is it a belief or a definition? I think it's probably a definition. One can describe all the characteristics of some particular sorts of beauty, symmetry, use of shading, etc. and I don't find that any of them or even all of them taken together mean beauty of that particular sort. Beauty is the emotional reaction that I experience on perceiving it.
OTOH, I'm also aware that some people appear to have a definition of beauty the exists externally, and is independent of their emotional reaction. (I'm not sure I believe that they actually do this in practice, but they use the term in that way, so that's their definition.)
So I think that this is probably a matter of definition rather than of belief.
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(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday October 01 2014, @09:12AM
The difference is that equalling e.g. love with these reactions asserts that consciousness is only based on these reactions, which appears to be a likely assumption, but is not yet proven. Imagine you could emulate the behaviour of the brain with a circuit. Would this be conscious live? If so, what if you replace a part of this artificial brain with a computer simulation, just adding some connections to behave externally like the artificial chips did. Would this still be conscious live? If so, where is the limit? Where do the calculations become live?
I don't think science has any answer to this question (yet), and therefore it is a bit premature to assert that these electro-chemical reactions are all and everything there is to emotions, even though I understand the assumtion.
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(Score: 2) by monster on Wednesday October 01 2014, @04:03PM
Wasn't it that those who argue that there is something more than the physical part are those who must prove it?
Turing test? Also, take the opposite option: The Matrix. Is it a conscious live if the physical substrate is an human being, but the world is feeded to him by a computer simulation?
Anyway, that's already stepping in phylosophy's territory, not science.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday October 01 2014, @06:15PM
And why would that be? Whoever claims to have specific knpwlesge and expects othera to beleive it needs to prove it, no matter if it is a positive or a negative assertion. I'm only assertinh that it is not yet known if there is more or not, and people should reapect each others believes.
Philosophy is roughly translated love for analytical thinking. It is not comparable to physics as it is often based on hypothesis or axioms, but I would consider it a science similar to mathematics.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 01 2014, @08:13PM
Philosophy that was precise enough that arguments could be tested for following the rules of inference and absence of contradiction would have grounds for being considered an aspect of Mathematics (which I do not consider to be a science...though it's a borderline case, and I understand those who do). A science I consider to be something that depends for verification not on logical argument, but rather on observational confirmation of its predictions.
Note that math is a lot more precise than science will ever be. It's proofs are more guaranteed, and its disproofs more certain. But it has no physical interpretation. Once you mix in a physical interpretation you enter the area of science. But science has existed without math (except informal logic), and math still exists without any physical interpretation.
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