Accelerated Adolescence

I heard him on NPR as well on Science Friday. I was really overwhelmed with his interest in religion as a scientist. He was very aggressively discrediting religion (the topic of his newest book), and saying that he had the "science" to back it up, but really never offered it. I found myself incredibly frustrated because I do respect the theorizing that he's done with psychobiology (I've read the Selfish Gene), but I think that he needs to get his head out of theorizing and back into science - he's more of a science preacher and religious mudslinger, in my mind now, than anything else.

To be fair, there are many people whom I respect less than Dawkins on the other side of the public debate. Therein lies the problem, it's a debate, an argument, it's not an earnest investigation by any party. Pooh for shortsightedness.

The worldview of atheism fits in very nicely with the worldview of science. Yet there are two problems with "following science to its logical conclusion" that there is no God. (1) It is dangerous to extrapolate your results much farther than the range of your original data. In ecology we often talk about the problem of scale. In this case, I think the "God hypothesis" may present a larger scale than we are capable of gathering evidence for. (2) It is not a good idea to alienate those of devout faith. First of all, there are enough scientists who believe in God that there's potential to agitate members of the scientific community. But most importantly, science is so poorly understood and accepted by the general public, and alienating and attacking the worldviews of most of the public certainly isn't going to warm them over to accepting scientific ideas.

With my great interest (and class) on the debates over evolution, I've done a lot of thinking about this last point. Just this week a botany professor (and outspoken atheist) gave a lecture on evolutionary theory in response to a group that is building a young-Earth creationist museum in Kentucky. I was a bit nervous about his lecture, as I knew the prof to be one of the more outspoken and argumentative on this issue among the botany department. I (and every other botanist in attendance) enjoyed his talk immensely. But I spoke to a comparative religion student later about it, and she said that while she agreed with his points and certainly wasn't against evolution, she wished he would have been a little less prone to present science and religion as entirely incompatible. Whichever way you choose to present the relationship of science and religion, it seems almost unavoidable for scientists (biologists especially) to need to take a public position on theology/philosophy in order to bring scientific teachings into public light, because the public wants to know the implications for their religious worldviews if they are going to accept this science stuff. This is a difficult position, because scientists certainly aren't theologians, nor should they need to be.