Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to Rationalist Picking the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, I am your host, Massimo Fuel Duty. And with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galef. Julia, what are we going to talk about today on today's episode?

We're going to take a look at a phrase that's come up quite a bit recently in public debate over the compatibility between science and religion. And that's the term accommodationist. It's a label that gets applied to people who argue that either a scientific worldview is compatible with a religious one or that at the very least, science can't fully disprove religion. Do you want to give some examples of the people you feel best?

Characterize the sort of group of accommodationists and their counterparts, the anti accommodationist?

Yeah, it's a complex landscape, right. And I think it's relatively easy to to identify some of the characters, the main characters that have been part of this debate. So people like Chris Mooney, for instance, who is an atheist, but who has very recently, for instance, gotten money for that from the Templeton Foundation for some of his writings, which is a controversial thing in and of itself. As you know, the Templeton Foundation is this large organization that gives a lot of money to scientists who, shall we say, write favorably about religion.

That's not the way they put it. Their money is supposed to be furthering the scientific understanding of science. In reality, they're being given the Templeton Prize, which is hefted, the Nobel Prize at this point, and a series of grants. That's what money got a grant not not the prize to scientists or writers who are sort of more or less sympathetic toward a reconciliation between science and religion. So so money has been accused of being an accommodationist. John Wilkins, who is a philosopher of science, has also been explicitly accused of being a combination, is I am being accused of being in the same category.

And I'm guessing that people like Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education will fall into that category as well. Then there are people like Ken Miller, my colleague at Brown University, who has been a prominent fighter against intelligent design and other forms of creationism. He couldn't really be accused of being an accommodation is because he is, in fact, a Catholic. He's not an atheist. So it obviously is on the other side of that of that debate.

And then there is the side that is represented by what I would call the purists in this in this arena, which I think definitely include Jerry Coyne, who is a evolutionary biology biologist at the University of Chicago, Pizzi Myers of the Frangela blog. And I would think Richard Dawkins. I don't think the Dawkins himself has actually entered the fray directly. A lot of people on his website have commented on this. But I think it's fair from Dawkins writings and from his appearances over the last two or three years to put him into certainly closer to the purists say they're not than the accommodationists.

I don't think anybody would accuse Dawkins of being an accommodationist for sure. So that's the landscape, I think, more or less.

So what are the purists say that you think is is fundamentally misguided in this debate?

Well, the best examples of that are, in fact, I think Dawkins himself and particularly Jerry Coyne, it seems like the position that the purists are taking is that science is sufficient to debunk or disprove or reject religious claims. Now, of course, Dawkins book The God Delusion, in which he explicitly says at the beginning of the book that science is capable of rejecting the God hypothesis. Now, he did put a caveat in there. If you actually read the book carefully, he says, well, I'm not an atheist, as in I know 100 percent that there is no God.

I'm but I'm pretty close to that. And the reason I'm pretty close to that is because of my understanding of science. So it comes as close as possible to sort of purist position. Jerry Coyne s come up with these examples that squarely put him into the purist camp. For instance, recently he has written about dismissing this idea of the 900 foot Jesus. He says, look, it is silly to think that science cannot reject religious claims because, you know, frankly, if we if we were all of a sudden to witness a 900 foot tall Jesus walking down the streets of London, it would be really idiotic to maintain it.

At that point. You would have empirical evidence of of some kind of supernatural process and those kind of positions, both the Dawkins idea that science can, in fact, reject religious claims, broadly speaking, and the COIN idea that, of course, that could be evidence in favor of the supernatural that we could examine empirically, I find very epistemological in a very philosophically naive.

OK, let me just quickly make a distinction between.

Religious claims that of some kind of God or supernatural power that doesn't interact with our world and then specific religious claims about phenomena that that are theoretically observable, like miracles that occur or the effectiveness of prayer or the reality of the Shroud of Turin being Jesus's burial shroud.

That's right.

And that's an important distinction. And I don't think anybody that I know of at least makes the claim that even even within the accommodationist camp, nobody makes the claim that science cannot reject specific claims, empirical claims by religious people. So, for instance, if you say the Earth is 6000 years old, then you're just wrong. It's geology tells us otherwise. It's billions of years old. And so that is definitely a claim that if you if made by a religious person, is in fact refutable directly on the basis of empirical evidence and our scientific understanding of how the world works.

But the thing is that contrary to what the purists seem to think, that rejection of that specific religious claim does not amount to a rejection of not only religion in general, but even on that particular virgin religion. And the reason for that is a nice little concept called last Thursday. And the last Thursday is this idea that I've actually heard by being proposed by several creationists that, well, you know, the world looks like it's six, you know, four billion years old.

And it looks like there is a lot of fossils in that had been scattered throughout for a long period of time. But in fact, God created it last Thursday. And and it put things in a range of things in a way that makes it look like the earth is all just to test your faith.

Now, that statement completely rescues even even fundamentalist religious claims. And there is absolutely nothing that a scientist can say about that claim.

Now, it's a silly claim and it also creates very serious theological problems. You know, what kind of God would go around scattering fossils just to test your faith, but on scientific grounds? It is absolutely impossible to attack because it doesn't matter that you show to that person that the fossil record is more consistent with billions of years of evolution. It really simply doesn't matter because the guys just told you that all of that is an illusion. If you think about it, this is kind of analogous to the radical skepticism in philosophy.

You know, this idea that where was in our studios here in Greenwich Village and we're looking at each other and it's not, by the way, where you could make the argument that you don't actually that I don't actually exist, that I'm a figment of your imagination. Right. Well, there is nothing I can do to prove to you that I exist. I could question why you would want to imagine being here and having doing this kind of thing rather than being somebody else somewhere else and having fun.

But the fact is, you couldn't reject their claim because there's no physical evidence that could possibly convince you. Even if I get up and slap you in the face and you feel pain, that pain is still created inside your brain. You can still be in the matrix like illusion. There's no empirical evidence at all that prevails against radical skepticism. And the situation is similar, I think, here. Right.

So a lot of our commenters address the idea of last Thursday's.

I mean, I think they made sort of two main responses to what you were saying. The first is that that it's a straw man that scientists actually think last Thursday, some could actually be disproved. Mittman says all serious scientists and certainly people of the caliber you Masimo are arguing against know that there's never a 100 percent certainty and that last Thursday Azem is irrefutable.

But if you say that it makes the God question philosophical, then no question in science can be answered by science as the same ad hoc cop out can be formulated for everything.

That's exactly right. Exactly. That's exactly right. And that's one of the things actually the commenter has hit the nail right on the head. What I think people like Jerry Coyne and I suspect to some extent Richard Dawkins do, in fact, is to overestimate the epistemological boundaries of science. It is to broaden them beyond beyond what is reasonable. The commenter is precisely right. You can make the same exact argument against anything that science does, which would be a radical critique of science.

Now, nobody would take that critique seriously, but that doesn't mean that the critique does not hold in sort of in in in a matter of principle.

So then wouldn't you say that it's science to the degree that scientists can disprove anything they can disprove last Thursday? Is that I mean, that's what we mean by disprove. We mean it contradicts all of the other knowledge, all the other well substantiated knowledge that we've learned about the world.

No, I think the point well, I think the point is, is subtle but important. Science cannot disprove autism. Science can disprove the specific specific position that the earth is 6000 years old. That one we can do. But if somebody plays. Last Thursday, Thursday is more a variation thereof card. That's where science stops, science cannot say anything about that sort of that sort of solution or the sort of critique. It's not a little of science.

I mean, a lot of my colleagues, unfortunately, take this as saying, oh, this is somehow it. The implication is that it's a fault of science. It's not a fault of science. It is a limit, I suppose, in the sense that what these kind of arguments tell us is that science be precisely because it is based on empirically testable hypotheses, cannot address fundamental metaphysical issues in science, has to take certain things for granted, one of which is the existence of a physical reality.

You cannot prove the existence of a physical reality, the science. You have to take it for granted. Now, somebody could say, well, that's a limitation of science. OK, it is. But, you know, we don't get off the ground with science unless we do that. So we just just like in mathematics, you have to step back and you cannot prove. Well, the existence of a physical reality is something that you have to take for granted within science and within within empiricism.

You cannot prove it with that system, with that approach.

So you'd agree that that the supernatural claims are are no different in in this problem from any other claim that science tests.

Well, what is. No, there is a distinction there between the specific claims about the supernatural. Again, those can be some of those can be rejected by science. And then there is the broader claim that is more of a metaphysical claim as well. But there is a supernatural out there and the supernatural there cannot be touched by science we can't touch. It is to say, look, if you stay within the empirical ground, what you're saying is silly.

But as soon as you leave the empirical ground, that's where science stops.

OK, well, that was another common thread in the comment section that a lot of countries felt that that the idea that there are people who who think that science can can support what's called philosophical naturalism. Yes. That that there is nothing but the natural world. There's no such supernatural realm out there. The commenter said that no one, no scientist really believes that coin.

In fact, who you cited as one of the purists on his blog, he says, As I've said ad nauseum, not every form of faith is incompatible with science. In my New Republic article from 2007, I claim that pure DSM, which accepts a hands off God who doesn't intrude into the workings of the universe, is absolutely compatible with science. The problem is that hardly anybody is a pure deist. It's when you get into theistic faiths, those in which gods tweak the world from time to time that we find incompatibilities.

Yeah, but that's that's actually, interestingly, a straw man that kind himself created because the discussion has never been about ideas. We all agree that science can't do anything about ideas. And in fact, this doesn't say anything at all and dismisses the idea that there might have been some kind of conscious creator of the universe, but that after the universe was created, the said creator retired or when an island take a vacation or something, it doesn't do anything at all.

It doesn't intervene in the universe.

Well, we all agree that science has nothing to do with that kind of claim. We also all agree, presumably, that there are very few disputes around. It's not like this is exactly a very popular movement among modern modern religions. This is really not the problem, neither epistemological nor for science nor nor for philosophy. The problem is, of course, specific claims by by religious people, especially the ones that deal either with intelligent design in general or in particular with young earth creationism.

And again, I think that what Jerry and to some extent of in Dawkins dancing idea to appreciate or seem to willfully ignore is that there is a subtle but important distinction between saying I can reject specific claims and empirical grounds.

But that rejection comes with a caveat in the cabinet is if in fact I agree without proof that there is a physical universe and agree without proof that what I'm doing is working without the epistemological limits of science, the religious person can always say that he's going to reject those those assumptions.

He's going to say that God can do, by definition, whatever he wants and therefore, whatever empirical observation you make is compatible with the idea that the existence of God. So you can you you mentioned a minute ago intercessory prayer. Right. So there are studies that show that intercessory prayer, not surprisingly, doesn't work.

Does that amount to a rejection of the idea that there is a God that answers prayers? No, because God can by definition, answer prayers, whatever the hell he pleases, which means that God presumably is realizing that there is an experimenter who is doing an experiment, a controlled experiment right on God and God is pissed off at the experimenter in question. And so says, you know what, I'm not going to answer any of these prayers because you're doing you, except.

As soon as you stop doing the experiment, I will, in fact, answer your prayers. Now, that's a position that I can't do anything about. There is no way to test it. It's the kind of claim that is simply outside of the boundaries of science. I don't think that's the limitation. You know, that's a bad thing for science. I think it's great that science sticks to empirically verifiable claims. What is not verifiable in the case of religion is the entire framework is the supernatural framework is not verifiable, specific claims you can you can address.

But the religion is always has this trump card of saying, yeah, but God wanted it that way. And you can change the empirical results anytime he wants. And there is nothing you can do about it.

And you can invoke that sort of supernatural, I don't know, trump card for anything.

It doesn't even have to be religion. One commenter, Kele, said he was recently listening to a podcast that had a debate between a homeopath and a skeptic. And one thing that homeopath tried to do was dismissed the calls of a lack of causal mechanism by decrying the skeptic as a materialist and saying that, you know, the skeptic couldn't appreciate that homeopathy works, but not through a material agent and says it's easy to see what was done here. It's completely abated.

Any scientific criticism by putting the causal mechanism beyond the realms of science, same as the last Thursday, as mentioned above.

That's right. That's exactly right. Now, there are two answers to that. Right? One can say, well, no, that's unfair. You have to stick to the rules. You know, you can't you cannot use that trump card. That's not going to convince any religious person. There's not going to convince any any homeopath, and it's not going to convince anybody who believes in psychic powers and all that. I mean, there is an equivalent with psychic powers and things like the lab at the end clairvoyance.

All right. There is there is an old argument. Whenever whenever skeptics check, try to check time to test for paranormal phenomena. There's an old argument that says that the skeptics themselves produce vibes that somehow interfere with the paranormal phenomena. And so you can every time there is a skeptic around, you can't test them. Well, isn't that convenient now?

You're the only sane reaction that is to say, look, then then we're simply not talking the same language. You are not you are obviously not interested in a test of what you are what you are claiming. So that's the end of the discussion. You cannot deceptive cannot go on and say, well, let me test that claim that skeptics have a negative influence. You cannot do that.

But I'm not even sure that it makes sense to say that we have we can't say it's we can't show that it's wrong because it's not even necessarily coherent. I'm not even sure that it's a coherent thing to say that something exists, but not in the material world precisely. It's causal, but not in a scientific way. Precisely. So we're just not even wrong.

That's right. So when you're talking about things like you're not even wrong, we're talking about things like incoherence, then you enter the territory of philosophy, not of science. You're doing you're doing epistemology or you're doing philosophy of science, which is the main difference that I have with Jerry and Richard and Richard Dawkins.

Let me go back to your point about naturalism, because the serious aspect of this discussion comes up and comes up whenever we are talking about people like Ken Miller, for instance, who is certainly not a young Earth creationist. You know, he is a Catholic and he believes in some sort of version of the Catholic God. He also is an evolutionary biologist. And so the question with the accommodation is that the charge of accommodation is me, is why is it that that people like myself and Eugenie Scott think that it's a good idea to have to interact with people like Ken Miller, who, by the way, I criticized in on our blog on rationally speaking, there are a couple of posts by me criticizing Miller and can actually responding to those to those claims.

So it's not like criticism of these people is beyond the pale, but we need to understand what the difference is. So when Eugenie Scott and I claimed that the important distinction about science is the one between mythological naturalism and philosophical naturalism, what we're saying is that all you need to do in order to be a scientist is to use the methodological assumption that there is no supernatural. You don't need to prove that there is no supernatural. You don't need to experiment on the supernatural.

All you need to do is look, if the thing behaves supernatural, then there is nothing I can do in terms in terms of science, of science. All the science is concerned with is the natural the natural world. You you can also be, of course, if you if you wish, a philosophical naturalist. The philosophical nature such as myself and incidentally, Eugenie Scott is somebody who says, yes, but I actually go a little beyond that and I take the science informed position that in fact it is the rational is the most rational view of of of a metaphysical view that one can hold.

But it is a metaphysical view and it's not necessary for science. So Ken, Ken Miller can go on and do science, even though he is a Catholic and he's doing nothing wrong, is a perfectly valid scientist. He's doing perfectly valid research. We don't want to get to the point where we're sort of implicitly mandating to scientists being atheists, because that is, first of all, but self-defeating. And second, I'm purely pragmatic grounds. And second of all, just unnecessary.

It's not justified on philosophical grounds.

One last point and then we're going to have to wrap this up and move on to the next. When people talk about science, I've noticed that they might mean two different things by they might mean the scientific method, the process of scientific inquiry, or they might mean the body of facts, of knowledge that that process has resulted in.

So even if the facts aren't contradictory, you could argue that the assumption that the scientific method is the best way to reach truth about the world isn't compatible with the assumption that you don't need the scientific method or really any empirical evidence at all.

So, yes, a good way to put what you just said is something that was written by Richard Feynman, you know, Nobel Prize physicist for his work on quantum mechanics. And I believe we can find the quote around. And he had a very good view of what the real conflict between science and actually is. Is this the one from the meaning of it all?

That's right. OK, so I do have it here. He says, I do believe that there is a conflict between science and religion. The spirit or attitude towards the facts is different in religion from what it is in science, the uncertainty that is necessary in order to appreciate nature is not easily correlated with the feeling of certainty and faith. That's right.

And I think that Feynman said it much better than any of these people who are now going around crying accommodation is ever had.

And on that note, we're going to wrap up this part of the podcast and move on to the rationally speaking, PEX.

Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I take a couple of our favorite books or movies or websites or whatever tickles our fancy. Let's start as usual, as usual, with Julia Spik.

Thanks, Massimo. And my pick is a book. It's called Conversations on Consciousness What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will and What It Means to Be Human. It's by Susan Blackmore. Basically, the book is a series of interviews, about 20 interviews that she conducts with some of the top names in consciousness research. And that includes philosophers as well as neuroscientists David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Stuart Komaroff, all of the people that you've heard of around here.

And and Susan Blackmore herself isn't an expert, but she asks a lot of good questions and she asks the same questions again to see that you can compare the answers that are given by all the different respondents. And she touches on a lot of the really sort of fundamental, really tricky questions about consciousness.

And then your views are interesting because it makes it clear how tough it is to talk about the subject or at least how tough it seems to be for even the experts. So, for instance, she touches on the idea of the zombie, the philosophical zombie. This is a common thought experiment to David Chalmers. Yeah, yeah. David Thomas, thanks.

So she says, does it even make sense to imagine a a being whose brain works exactly like ours, but it's an automaton. There would be no sort of sensation of consciousness experienced by anyone. It would just just you know, you'd have the physical workings of the brain going on, but no consciousness. And some respondents say, yes, that makes sense. And you know that that's a way to separate out what happens physically in the brain from what we mean by consciousness and qualia.

And some other respondents say, no, that doesn't make any sense. It's an incoherent thought experiment. If you have the capacity is occurring, then you have consciousness. You can't just separate that.

That's what is actually in fact, our our listeners can find a commentary on David Chalmers that was published on Russian speaking the blog a few months ago, because I happened to go to the City University in New York Graduate Center where Chalmers was giving a talk. It was not about zombies in that particular case, but but his fame was mostly for these side experiments you're talking about. And I actually count myself among those to think that the thought experiment is, in fact, incoherent, that I don't think the charmeuse is actually made any point at all.

But but that could be a whole separate show on just consciousness and what is called the hard problem of consciousness, which is what Chalmers was trying, I think, rather unsuccessfully to to address.

Yeah. And one one takeaway that I thought was kind of comforting from one of the interviews was that what we you mentioned, the hard problem, which is how how could an understanding of the physical processes of the brain ever really make us feel like we understand what produces these sensations, these qualia they're often called?

I know you hate that word, Masimo. Yeah, but you feel like this, though. One of the respondents and I can't remember who it was, said, you know, this isn't a unique problem. We've had plenty of problems in the history of science where the physical explanation that we got didn't make us feel satisfied, like when people want to know what light is and they were told these waves of electromagnetic, it didn't feel like they're like, no, but that doesn't explain what why I see this this light.

I have the sensation of light and it sort of the explanation and the the sensation sort of finally collapse into the same thing as people just got more comfortable with the explanation. Yeah, I think you're right.

And there's also another point that is relevant to this whole discussion of consciousness and qualia, which is the quali is the term that philosophers used for for first person, first person experience things like colours and sounds and things of that sort.

And I think that to some extent, that goes back to the to the very basic question of what do we mean by an explanation. Right. Because, you know, for instance, let's take the case of cholera. I mean, we understand very well the physiology of cholera and the physics of cholera. I mean, we know how human beings in other animals perceive color, but if by explanation one means well. But all of that knowledge about physiology and physics and so on and so forth doesn't recreate the first person subjective experience of of seeing a colour.

You know, the colour red.

Well, of course it doesn't. That's not what an explanation is. An explanation is not a first person experience. The first person. First person experience is an experience which is not the same thing as an explanation. It's a good point. Should we move to the second? Yeah. What's your pick, Massimo?

Well, since we were talking about earlier about accommodation, ism and Purisma, as far as as far as philosophy of science, I suppose is concerned. And one of the people we mentioned was Eugenie Scott, the director of the National Center for Science Education. Then my pick for this week is in fact the website of the National Center for Science Education, which is NCOIC dot com. It's a great resource for any anybody interested in evolution, in particular on the evolution creation, intelligent design debate.

But it's also expanding, so, for instance, I'm just looking at at the current incarnation of the page and it turns out that there are several articles about global warming. Now, why are there articles about global warming on a site that is usually devoted to evolution? Because it turns out that global warming deniers are beginning to use the same language and the same so-called logic that evolution deniers are using as well.

For instance, they use there is a House concurrent resolution, 10 or nine, says the website. Under consideration, the South Dakota legislature, the bottles language from anti evolution legislation because it encourages teachers to present, quote, a balanced and objective view of global warming and related issues. Exactly the same kind of language that creationists use when they want introduced legislation that sort of balance balances the views on evolution. There are a lot of actually there are parallels, in fact, among several sort of denying movements.

And one can been denying evolution. One can be denying global warming. One can be denying the efficacy of vaccines. All of these have fundamentally same thing in common. They have a willful rejection of the best findings of science at the core for ideological reasons of one one kind of another. There could be religious or not, and they all tend to use the same kind of strategy in the same kind of sort of language. And so somebody should do a study, a sociological study about this sort of thing.

But in general, I think the National Center for Science Education is a great resource. People should go there and visit the site for the information, the wealth of information that they provide and also to support them. Because we have to remember that the National Center for Science Education, which has a staff of three people, is for all effective purposes, the only organization nationwide that that fight the good fight against creationism. And against that, you have to balance the existence of multimillion dollar per year budget operations, such as the Discovery Institute, the Institute for Creation Research, and so on and so forth.

It is a very uneven battle. The creationists, a lot of money and a lot of resources available. And the other side tends to rely on outlets like the National Center for Science Education, and they definitely need all our help. Right.

In fact, it was a professional PR firm that came up with the slogan Teach the controversy and sort of helped craft the whole media strategy of the creationists. Then later we dubbed the intelligent design movement. That is that it's it seems, being being copied by by other movements as well.

So exactly.

Yeah, I think we can wrap it up at this point now so that I guess that concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.