The scientific study of religion, part IV

[I'm in Baltimore for a meeting on the scientific study of religion. What follows are just some random notes and observations from the sessions I actually attended, and are not necessarily representative of the entire meeting, given of course that I picked the topics that tickled my curiosity.]

This is the last session from the meeting on which I will report. It had a special format, which is actually typical at this type of conference. An author, in this case Elaine Ecklund, who wrote "Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think" (Oxford Press), is exposed to a number of critics analyzing her book and then responds. I have not read the book, so what follows is entirely a reflection of what I heard during the session itself. The critics were Martin Makary (Johns Hopkins University), Nancy Nason-Clark (University of New Brunswick) and John Evans (University of California-San Diego).

The author started with a brief introduction to the book. It features ten social and natural scientists who were interviewed in depth and followed through their work, coupled with a broader survey of about 1,600 scientists at elite universities. The survey shows, for instance, that a surprising number of atheists consider themselves "spiritual." Anyway, I guess there is not much an author can say about a book in five minutes.

The first commenter was Makary, who said he grew up in a fundamentalist family where disputing the literal 7-day creation story amounted to rejecting all of Scripture. Some platitudes about science and religion "working hand in hand" followed, together with an apologia for Francis Collins as the quintessential example of a religious scientist. Maybe god worked his way through directed evolution, and after all, Galileo was not an atheist (at this point my blood started boiling, but never mind that).

Next was Nason-Clark, who actually broadly speaking addressed the book's content. After a self-promotional detour, she praised the interview approach around which the book is constructed. Clark then launched into personal anecdotes about scientists she knows personally. One of them was a strong atheist, who has become more tolerant of spirituality after a brush with cancer (though he remains an atheist). Another is a closet believer, afraid that his work will be discounted by colleagues because of his faith. Clark then continued with a long winded series of irrelevant observations about the arrogance of natural scientists and their considering the social sciences inferior and/or irrelevant.

Finally, we moved to Evans, who started out by mentioning a series of studies over decades showing that scientists are sharply less religious compared to the general public. Evans claimed that these studies are of dubious significance because they do not go in depth enough, unlike the book under consideration. Apparently the picture of the "elite" scientists emerging from the book is that most of them are not anti-religious a la Dawkins, but rather adopt one version or another of Gould's (in)famous non-overlapping magisteria. At least Evans provided a critique of the book, for instance saying that the author implicitly defines religion as non-science, and that she overestimates the degree of religiosity or spirituality of the scientists interviewed. Evans thinks that the non-religiosity of scientists does not derive from cognitive dissonance about different approaches to understand the world, but it is rather rooted in a different moral perspective, with scientists seeing religion as a social competitor. (I have no idea what he bases this on, and it certainly doesn't reflect my personal experience.)

What was interesting about this session was that - with the partial exception of Evans' remarks - it was intellectually vacuous and smelling terribly of political correctness. Scientists were chastised for being ignorant of religious diversity (though of course no data was presented to back up this sweeping claim), and for focusing too much on Protestantism, the major religion that actually does make epistemic claims about the world (apparently both author and panelists are not aware that this is a situation peculiar to the US, where Protestants are in fact a threat to public science education. This is still largely not the situation, and has not been the case historically, in Europe).

During the rebuttal, the author even went so far as to suggest that we need science "safe zones" on campus, where people feel comfortable challenging scientism, the view that science informs the entirety of one's worldview. (Readers of this blog know that I am no friend of scientism, but this discussion made me feel a little bit more sympathetic to Dawkins and co.)

One of the few interesting points raised (by the book's author) is the relationship between and perceived relative value of quantitative vs qualitative research. The social sciences are shifting toward what she called an over-quantification of their disciplines, in an effort to "play the game with the big boys" (i.e., the natural scientists). Here I do agree that there is room for both approaches, because certain questions and analyses do not lend themselves to quantitative treatment without losing much of what is interesting in the subject matter. But that's a discussion for another time, and has little to do with the question of scientists' attitude toward religion anyway.

Overall, it seems to me that the divide between the two cultures is unfortunately still very much alive and well. And while I usually criticize natural scientists for the part they play in it, in this case I didn't get much of a positive feeling from the other side either. Oh well, more work to be done.