Faith Versus Fact (Kindle highlights)

Although this book deals with the conflict between religion and science, I see this as only one battle in a wider war—a war between rationality and superstition. Religion is but a single brand of superstition (others include beliefs in astrology, paranormal phenomena, homeopathy, and spiritual healing), but it is the most widespread and harmful form of superstition. And science is but one form of rationality (philosophy and mathematics are others), but it is a highly developed form, and the only one capable of describing and understanding reality. (loc. 92-95)
I’d claim that adopting a more broadly scientific viewpoint not only helps us make better decisions, both for ourselves and for society as a whole, but also brings alive the many wonders of science barred to those who see it as something distant and forbidding (it’s not). (loc. 259-61)
I will have achieved my aim if, by the end of this book, you demand that people produce good reasons for what they believe—not only in religion, but in any area in which evidence can be brought to bear. I’ll have achieved my aim when people devote as much effort to choosing a system of belief as they do to choosing their doctor. (loc. 274-76)
Science and religion—unlike, say, business and religion—are competitors at discovering truths about nature. And science is the only field that has the ability to disprove the truth claims of religion, and has done so repeatedly (the creation stories of Genesis and other faiths, the Noachian flood, and the fictitious Exodus of the Jews from Egypt come to mind). Religion, on the other hand, has no ability to overturn the truths found by science. (p. 1)
Harmonizing religion and science makes you seem like an open-minded and reasonable person, while asserting their incompatibility makes enemies and brands you as “militant.” The reason is clear: religion occupies a privileged place in our society. Attacking it is off-limits, although going after other supernatural or paranormal beliefs like ESP, homeopathy, or political worldviews is not. Accommodationism is not meant to defend science, which can stand on its own, but to show that in some way religion can still make credible claims about the world. (p. 6)
The difference in religiosity between the American public and American scientists is profound, persistent, and well documented. Further, the more accomplished the scientist, the greater the likelihood that he or she is a nonbeliever. (p. 12)
Religious scientists are in some ways like the many smokers who don’t get lung cancer. Just as those cancer-free individuals don’t invalidate the statistical relationship between smoking and the disease, so the existence of religious scientists doesn’t refute an antagonistic relationship between science and faith. (p. 14)
Any “knowledge” incapable of being revised with advances in data and human thinking does not deserve the name of knowledge. (p. 28)
What is “known” may sometimes change, so science isn’t really a fixed body of knowledge. What remains is what I really see as “science,” which is simply a method for understanding how the universe (matter, our bodies and behavior, the cosmos, and so on) actually works. Science is a set of tools, refined over hundreds of years, for getting answers about nature. (p. 28)
The doubt and criticality of science are there precisely for the reason Feynman emphasized: to prevent us from believing what we’d like to be true. (p. 29)
Clearly most of those who accept God are theists, not deists. (p. 47)
As I often say, some believers are literalists about nearly everything, but nearly every believer is a literalist about something. (p. 54)
When a scientific claim is disproved, it goes into the dustbin of good ideas that simply didn’t pan out. When a religious claim is disproved, it often turns into a metaphor that imparts a made-up “lesson.” (p. 54)
I often hear theologians argue that their predecessors like Aquinas and Augustine were not literalists, and that literalism began only in the nineteenth or twentieth century. But that’s a distortion of history, one designed to save churches from the embarrassment of having taken seriously stories now seen as palpably fictitious. (p. 57)
The question to ask believers is this: “Does it really matter whether what you believe about God is true—or don’t you care?” If it does matter, then you must justify your beliefs; if it doesn’t, then you must justify belief itself. (p. 63)
My claim is this: science and religion are incompatible because they have different methods for getting knowledge about reality, have different ways of assessing the reliability of that knowledge, and, in the end, arrive at conflicting conclusions about the universe. (p. 64)
Where religion diverges from science is how its adherents behave when the evidence doesn’t support their beliefs. (p. 72)
If the Bible was intended as pure allegory, that fact somehow escaped the notice of churches and theologians for centuries. (p. 76)
The big problem for believers, of course, is to find a consistent method for distinguishing fact from metaphor. If Adam and Eve are metaphors, could the Resurrection be a metaphor as well—perhaps for spiritual rebirth? And how are we supposed to interpret God’s commands in the Old Testament that a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath should be put to death, as should practicing homosexuals, adulterers, and those who curse their parents? Because these are no longer seen as valid moral prescriptions, are they really metaphors for something else, or did God simply change his mind? (p. 77)
The way liberal believers winnow fact from metaphor is in fact to use science: whatever science has falsified becomes metaphor, and what has not yet been falsified can retain its status as fact. But this makes religious dogma subservient to science. The accommodationist strategy of accepting both science and conventional faith, then, leaves you with a double standard: rational on the origin of blood clotting, irrational on the Resurrection; rational on dinosaurs, irrational on virgin births. Scientists, archaeologists, and historians can tell us which parts of scripture are false, but who can affirm what is true? There are no good criteria. (p. 77)
The obvious question is this: why are believers in mainstream religions, like Islam and Christianity, less critical of their own faiths than of others? (p. 83)
Their persistence has given them an aura of credibility, somehow making their claims seem less contrived. (p. 83)
Religion has hijacked the evolved tendency of humans to accept authority when they’re young, something that would have enhanced the survival of our ancestors (learning is a good way to avoid the dangers of experience). (p. 83)
To a very large extent, which religion you accept and which you reject are accidents of birth. (p. 83)
The only rational solution is to apply the same degree of skepticism toward the claims of your own faith as you do toward the ones you reject. (p. 85)
We can in principle allow a Divine Foot in the door; it’s just that we’ve never seen the Foot. (p. 93)
If something is supposed to exist in a way that has tangible effects on the universe, it falls within the ambit of science. And supernatural beings and phenomena can have real-world effects. (p. 94)
There is no harmony between religion and science . When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: “Let us be friends.” It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: “Let us agree not to step on each other’s feet.” —Robert Green Ingersoll (p. 97)
In the end, NOMA is simply an unsatisfying quarrel about labels that, unless you profess a watery deism, cannot reconcile science and religion. (p. 112)
This shows what we already know: belief may arise by indoctrination or authority, but is often maintained by social utility. (p. 120)
This is the usual double standard in using evidence—accept it if it supports your preconceptions, reject it if it doesn’t—that distinguishes science from religion. (p. 132)
The biggest problem with theistic evolution, as with all attempts to twist theology to fit new facts, is that it’s simply a metaphysical add-on to a physical theory, a supplement demanded not by evidence but by the emotional needs of the faithful. (p. 149)
To the layperson, our consciousness seems scientifically inexplicable because it’s hard to imagine how the sense of “I-ness”—and our subjective sensations of beauty, pleasure, or pain—could be produced by a mass of neurons in our head. (p. 158)
Only the last—the so-called hard problem of consciousness—seems baffling, for it’s difficult to imagine how a brain that can be studied objectively produces feelings that are subjective. (p. 158)
The most recalcitrant problem of science isn’t the origin of life, or the origin of the laws of physics, but the evolution and mechanics of our brains and the minds they produce. This is the result of a peculiar recursion: we’re forced to use an organ that evolved for other reasons to study how that organ makes us feel. (p. 158)
The anthropologist Pascal Boyer, for instance, proposes that religion began with the inborn and adaptive tendency of our ancestors to attribute puzzling events to conscious agents. If you hear a rustle in the bushes, you’re more likely to survive (or get food) if you believe it came from another animal than from a gust of wind. (p. 182)
I see science as a method, not a profession. Science construed in this broad way embraces all acts, including those of plumbers and electricians, that involve making and testing hypotheses. (p. 187)
The reason believers argue for “other ways of knowing” is simply to show that science has no monopoly on finding truth, and therefore that religion might muscle in alongside archaeology and history. But as we’ve seen, insofar as archaeology, economics, sociology, and history produce knowledge, they do so by using the methods of science broadly construed: verifiable, tested, and generally agreed-upon results of empirical study. (p. 195)
In the first sense of the term, then, most of my colleagues and I are indeed guilty of scientism. But in that sense scientism is a virtue—the virtue of holding convictions with a tenacity proportional to the evidence supporting them. (p. 198)
In the end, as Daniel Dennett argues, scientism “ is a completely undefined term . It just means science that you don’t like.” (p. 201)
In medieval and Renaissance Europe, nearly everyone was a Christian, or at least professed to be, simply because it was a universal belief that prominent people defied at peril of execution. If Christianity gave rise to science between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, then you could give religion credit for everything that humans devised in that period. (p. 216)
Although such infections can usually be cured easily with a dose of penicillin, Ryan didn’t have that option, and died. What killed him was not religious faith, but faith in alternative medicine. (p. 236)
In 1992, the U.S. Congress funded an Office of Alternative Medicine, which seven years later became the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), still associated with the prestigious National Institutes of Health. In the two decades ending in 2012, the government sank $2 billion into NCCAM. Despite that huge expenditure, the center has never produced one bit of evidence for the value of “alternative medicine”—and that includes acupuncture, reiki, and various forms of spiritual healing. (p. 238)
Is there any institution other than religion that could see terminal suffering as beneficial? (p. 244)