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Sunday, 19 June 2005
Reality check
Here are some juicy tidbits from biology professor PZ Myers:
[S]cience does challenge religious convictions. Literalism is nonsense; the young earth malarkey is idiocy; any claim of direct, observable divine action in the history of life on earth is extremely dubious and steadily decreasing in probability. The religious are going to have to get used to it. Where reality conflicts with dogma and doctrine, I know what side I'm going to be on.
Where and when reality conflicts with anything we believe, anything we think we know, there is no contest.
There is no evidence for gods of any kind, so it would be exceedingly silly to incorporate them into our theories. There's also no evidence for Cthulhu, Thor, Marvin the Martian, or sentient gas clouds spitting DNA at us. Science doesn't bother with those hypotheses, either, but neither do scientists mince words when someone comes whining that we have to teach our kids about their great theory of Martian Marvintervention—we just say no. Come back when you've got some reasonable evidence.
Until then, we should teach that naturalism and materialism are adequate explanations for worldly phenomena.
At the very least Myers, as a scientist, is calling for methodological naturalism in schools. I'm just wondering if he personally goes as far as espousing ontological naturalism. (For an explanation of these two types of naturalism see articles by philosophers Barbara Forrest and Michael Martin)
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