Contra Coyne: THat Science and Religion are compatible

<[Coyne] often hears a particular objection to his contention that only science generates knowledge: A person claims that “I know my wife loves me” by faith, not by the deliverances of science. Understandably, he replies that this is not analogous to religious faith, but is a conclusion based on “scientific method: observation of behavior.” There is important truth to this. We have a word for a dangerously irrational person who believes you love him or her in the absence of any confirmatory experience: “stalker.” But when it comes to love, things aren’t quite so simple as rationally evaluating the behavioral data. As anyone who’s played “she loves me, she loves me not” knows — and as Soren Kierkegaard points out in “Works of Love” — no amount of evidence is fully adequate to confirm love. It is always fakeable. There is always ambiguity. Yet love requires complete commitment in the face of incomplete evidence. Norman Maclean muses in “A River Runs Through it” that “we may love completely without complete understanding.” Indeed, we not only may but we must: Those who refuse to yield to some element of faith will never experience love at all. For faith is actually an initial condition for knowing the love of another and for creating the conditions in which love flourishes. Ironically — and often painfully — it is also necessary for the kind of investment that allows discovering love to be false. Even with respect to science, Darwin’s advocate T.H. Huxley commented, “Those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact."

Of course, there is a danger in pathological faith that is so averse to this pain that it is unreceptive to challenge by facts or to interaction with others having contrary views. In love, we might call this obsession. In religion, we call it fanaticism. In science, we recognize entrenched paradigms or falsification-resistant core beliefs. The wonderful thing about science is that it entails a more straightforward (though still somewhat murky) procedure for rejecting false answers. But it achieves this, in part, by asking smaller questions. Present to varying degrees in all domains, faith itself is not a pathology. It is a means to both apprehend and experience reality, in commerce with other means. And that’s a fact.> Jeff Schloss, T. B. Walker chair of biology at Westmont, takes on Jerry Coyne’s assertion that science and religion are incompatible. cf. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/science-and-theology/2015/08/03/77136504-19ca-11e5-bd7f-4611a60dd8e5_story.html