"Is Truth Compatible With Fiction?"

That is the rhetorical question posed by some perfectly sensible atheists, when asked whether science is compatible with religion. They are confident that falsehoods always melt away in the light of facts, and that religion is on its last legs.

Unfortunately, they are far too optimistic. Depressingly, they sound like many 18th-century atheists, confident in Enlightenment, who were sure that religion was on its last legs, about to disappear very shortly, to melt quickly away in the glorious sunshine of Reason and Knowledge and Science. How could it not vanish, that aggravating nonsense? And yet, here we are, in the 21st century... What about before the 18th century? Before the 18th century, in Western "civilization," all the way back to the 5th century, when the Christian crackdown became complete, atheists were forced to keep their atheism to themselves. Before the 18th century, we can only guess which brave individuals might have been trying to send an atheist message between the lines of their writings. We can be sure that Hobbes was. As far as I know, the existence of any further atheists is controversial. Spinoza, Descartes, Machiavelli, Boethius -- their religious views are hotly debated.

Surprise surprise, many believers hang on to their beliefs quite tenaciously. If they do not reject science on religious grounds, they rarely miss an opportunity to insist that religion and science never conflict, and to chuckle condescendingly at people who think they do. The thing is that believers keep inventing new fictions when the older ones wear out, rather than embracing facts. Some whoppers currently popular among Christian theologians, people who actually hold Doctorates and are allowed to teach at otherwise-reputable universities:

* Before 19th-century American fundamentalism, it had never occurred to anyone to take the stories in the Bible literally.

* Galileo and the Inquisition just had a friendly chat, not a conflict; and/or: The issue between Galileo and the Inquisition had nothing whatsoever to do with science (because the Inquisitors were the most learned men of their day, and as science-friendly as could be, harrummph harrumph), but only with a personal quarrel between Galileo and the Pope.

* The Inquisition never killed anyone! (Yes, they actually say such things. All the Inquisition did was torture people and then hand them over to secular authorities who had no choice but to burn them alive.)

* Augustine and Aquinas were friends of science, nay -- there were scientists.

* (Etc. Fill in your own favorite examples of hair-raising, jaw dropping denials of plain reality which believers bring forth, rather than just say: okay, religion was mistaken, and science is a big improvement over it.)

The Malleus Maleficarum And The Malaysian 777

So on the one hand I finally found a copy in the original Latin of the Malleus Maleficarum, a 2 volume set edited by Christopher S Mackay, Copyright 2006, paperback edition with corrections Copyright 2011. Iss a Ding. See link below. Translations into English are a dime a dozen, but I think this may actually be the first edition in the original Latin since 1669. So I'm reading Mackay's introduction to this splendid edition, about how people were tried and tortured and burned in the Middle Ages for being heretics, and how witches, a sub-set of the set of heretics, were thought to have been ensnared by demons who lived in the air above the Earth who guided them in the ways of evil -- which was defined as everything which was not considered pious Christianity -- and had sex with them, and how women were thought to be particularly susceptible to being seduced by demons and becoming witches and how "heresy" is Greek for "choice" (Yikes!) and a person might well be condemned as a heretic for choosing to interpret a Bible verse in ways unpleasing to his friendly local Inquisitor, and how a sect, another term from the Greek, before Christianity was simply a philosophical school and nobody got killed for belonging to them, but in 1480's when the Malleus Maleficarum was published, about a century into what is now called the "witchcraft delusion," which would continue for another 2 centuries, during which tens or hundreds of thousands of people would be tortured, condemned and burnt as witches, most of them women -- in the 1480's the leader of a sect was generally considered to be Satan himself. Less than 60 years after the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, Copernicus would published his book demonstrating that the Earth was not the center of the universe, his book which his friends persuaded him not to publish until near the end of his life, because they were afraid that he would be accused of working with Satan, and tortured and burned to death. And then about 85 years after that came the little unpleasantness between Galileo and the Inquisition, which apologetics are strenuously attempting to make it seem as if it has been misunderstood and overblown, and in between was Giordano Bruno...

And on the other hand I run into someone talking about how science supposedly "blinds" us to "deeper wisdoms" to found in place like, Oh, yes, the Bible.

And then on the 3rd hand I see headlines about how people are closing in on the crash site of that Malaysian 777 which recently vanished. How are they closing in? By praying about it? Yeah, that must be it. Science would be no help to the people searching. It would only blind them, surely. How can modern man be so arrogant as to think that he knows better than God how to search for traces of the victims of a catastrophe?

And why o why won't people see that the very idea of this supposed conflict between religion and science doesn't go back any earlier than the time when people in Christendom were first allowed to make the ridiculous assertion that the conflict existed, without risking imprisonment, torture and death by fire? What IS it with these people?!

Sometimes It's Hard To See The Forest For The Trees

A striking example of this occurred recently during debates I've had with apologists who point out that Charles Darwin's books were never put onto the Index, and claim that this is one of many things which proves that the Catholic Church is the greatest supporter of science of all time. The obvious, forest-for-the-trees answer to that is that THERE WAS SUCH A THING AS THE INDEX, from the 16th century to the 20th. Here's a webpage listing every author who was ever on the Index. That webpage is a little misleading: it claims to be the Index in 1949. Actually, many authors were put on the Index and then later taken off. I happen to have a copy of the official Index as it stood in 1854. Charles Darwin was never on the Index, but in 1854, when Charles turned 45 years old, his father, the eminent, world-famous biologist Erasmus Darwin, was on the Index. (Yes, Charles' very own Dad. No one can speak for Charles now, but is it really very far-fetched to imagine that Charles might have gotten just a little bit annoyed if someone tried to tell him that an organization which had banned his father's books was the greatest promoter of science of all time?) So were Bruno (opera omnia, of course: the complete works), Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and, oh yes, also... Wait for it... Francis Bacon! ("We're the greatest supporters of science of all time! Don't read Francis Bacon, generally credited with the formulation of the scientific method, often called the 'father of modern science,' or you'll go to Hell!") And of course also Pascal and Diderot and Voltaire and Luther and Hume (opera omnia) and Bentham and Locke and Heine, and so many other illustrious writers that it is no exaggeration to say that it was a bit of an insult to an illustrious modern European writer if he or she were not put onto the Index. It is a Who's Who of the intellectual community of Europe. (Why not Charles Darwin? Why not Goethe or Feuerbach or Schopenhauer or Marx or Nietzsche? Didn't each of them deserve that distinction as much as Zola [opera omnia.]? Maybe because the people composing the Index rightly suspected that such authors would only be overjoyed and encouraged by being Indexed. Maybe because there's not much rhyme or reason here.) Over 400 pages long, the Index in 1854. Several thousand entries.

People who actually promote science don't ban books they dislike. It would never occur to them to do such a thing. They say: this book is terrible. Go ahead, read it for yourself and you'll see what I mean.

Albert Schweitzer And My Kittycat George, And Science And Religion And Art

I gather that Albert Schweitzer claimed that science cannot tell us why we love our children. Some scientists would disagree. Some years ago I wasted a part of my life arguing with a particularly unpleasant theologian, who at one point claimed that science's explanations were robbing life of its wonder. I said I disagreed, and used the example of the big beautiful lazy silly wonderful loving cat I had at the time, George, who would often sit in my lap and purr while I sat at my computer and engaged in these Internet fooferahs. I said that the fact that I had learned that George's DNA was very similar to mine had increased my sense of wonder and awe about life, and about how amazing George and other living things were, not decreased it at all. My point is that I think that people, possibly including Schweitzer, who are afraid of losing something precious and beautiful if science makes them lose their religion, are simply underestimating science.

(I say "possibly including Schweitzer" because it's not clear whether or not he actually believed in God. I'm coming more and more to the position that if a person lived in the 20th century or later in Europe or the Americas, and therefore had the option of announcing that he or she didn't believe in God, and it's not clear whether or not he or she did, as in the case of Schweitzer, and the case of Einstein -- then it's not particularly important what he or she believed in regard to God. Because if it had been terribly important, and essential to understanding other things he or she had said, he or she would have made his or her position clear. If, that is, it had been possible to do so. Quite often such a thing is not possible, simply because a person is a true agnostic who leans neither one way nor another, has no clear position on God's existence, and simply doesn't know what to think about it.)

These fooferahs rage, with atheists such as myself on one side insisting that there is an inherent conflict between science and religion, and on the other side believers, who either are scientists or claim not to be completely ignorant of science, insisting that that there is no such inherent conflict. You know, if they just said "science and art" instead of "science and religion," and made all the claims for art which currently they make for religion, I'd completely, enthusiastically agree with them. Religion and art have one very big thing in common, of course: in both pursuits it's essential to constantly make things up. In both pursuits make-believe is an irreplaceable part of the process. Grasp that, and suddenly it makes perfect sense why one is so much more likely to encounter religious believers among great artists than among great scientists.

The huge and essential difference between art and theology, of course, is that artists have the common decency to admit that they're making things up, and theologians don't.

But just change one word, say "art" instead of "religion," and I'm on board, 100%: Yes, people with no feeling for art are dead inside. Yes, art makes life worthwhile. Art gives life meaning. It offers essential comfort. It offers joy. Yes, there is no inherent conflict whatsoever between science and art, in fact, there's a lot that they can do for each other. All of the things which these yutzes keep claiming for religion, if they'd make those claims for art instead, boom, suddenly I'd have no problem with them anymore.

One word, guys. That's all I'm asking for.

Human Exceptionalism Is An Outmoded Religious Concept

It's not unusual these days to hear someone say in the same breath both that humans are distinct from the rest of the "animal kingdom," and that we must keep in mind that we are part of the continuum of life on Earth, two statements which directly contradict each other. The fact that it's not unusual, that even respected academics can still say such things without immediately being shouted down or risking their tenure, demonstrates that we are in a period of transition from religion to science. As recently as Charles Darwin's lifetime, the assertion that humans are no more or less than animals, although it was no longer particularly eyebrow-raising within biology departments, could still encounter great resistance in general in even the most progressive universities, because even then most of them were still dominated by religion. Very few universities founded more than two centuries ago were founded as other than religious institutions, and very many since have been founded as religious institutions, whose very purposes for being are based on holy texts which are thousands of years old, not on insights gained more recently which conflict with what those texts say. And, of course, universities which have been explicitly, declaredly secular cannot be expected to have been entirely immune from religious mindsets and agendas which permeate our very existence. And the notion that humans are distinct from the rest of nature is a religious notion, not shared by all religions by any means, but a central tenet of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which teach that God put man in charge of everything and that man has a soul which is lacking in other species.

This human exceptionalism is deeply ingrained in people's minds. But biology says something completely different. It has shown us that we are not different from other animals. We're all carbon-based and we all grow and function on the basis of DNA, and humans share the majority of their DNA coding with, for example, cats. We're the same.

It's also only religiously-based thinking which causes anyone to find such plain facts insulting and/or to reject them. The religious concept of humanity being "higher" than all other life forms causes a remarkably one-sided assessment of human accomplishments when making comparisons between species. Yes, there are a long list of wonderful things which are unique on Earth to our species, the information technology by means of which you and I are now communicating being just one example. But there are also a long list of horrible things which only we humans have accomplished. No other species has produced smog or acid rain. (Not yet, anyway. We mustn't forget that all species are continually evolving, not just us.) And besides thoroughly tangible things like computers and pollution, there are assumptions made about things we don't know, such as what other species are thinking. (It's iffy enough when we claim to know something about the internal lives of other members of our own species.) Even among biologists who are atheists the assumption than no non-human species think at all, based on nothing at all but the vestiges of religious human exceptionalism, is still amazingly widespread. How do we know that dogs don't think in ways very similar to us? How do we know, for example, that they have no religious beliefs? The only rational answer is that we don't know, that such assumptions rest on primitive human mental habits and upon no firm evidence. And that we should stop making such assumptions and approach such subjects with more open minds.

Habits of thinking develop not just in individuals but also in groups, and this habit of regarding humans to be exceptional and apart from the rest of life -- again, I must emphasize, NOT shared by all humans, although it has been dominant in Western and Islamic civilizations -- this mental habit has been engrained and reinforced for thousands of years, and so perhaps it's not at all to be expected that it will vanish quickly. But we can start by recognizing where it came from, and that it has not come from science.

I don't think that there should be anything at all insulting or otherwise disappointing in seeing ourselves as animals like other animals. If adapting this attitude is a negative thing for you, perhaps you don't know non-human species as well as you could and don't love them nearly as much as you could.

A Fresh Look At Science And Religion (Actually There's Nothing Fresh About It)

Huffington Post has reprinted something written by 14-year-old Nimai Agarwal for the "God" issue of the magazine KidSpirit:

Thinking about these topics has not only strengthened my faith in God, but has also helped me find connections between science and religion, whose seeming opposition [...]

I'm trying to visualize the editors of Huffington Post's Religion section at work. It can't be easy to be them:

"Yes, that "seeming" opposition is so Gosh-darn persistent and omnipresent. What or whom can we blame it on this time? Uhh... Umm... Okay, I got nothin. Oh, wait! I know! We'll publish an essay by a 14-year-old Hindu kid who's into science, and when the usual pains in our euphemisms come around with their usual snark we can accuse them of both picking on kids and being prejudiced against Hindus! 2 for 1! It's brilliant!"

It's really not. This horse has been dead for a long, long time. It's not going to get any fresher by posting something written by a 14-year-old who had been homeschooled until a year previously, for whom things like grade-school Astrophysics 101 and the scientific view of gravity are still new: " Gravity fascinates me very much -- the fact that planets are revolving around each other and that all objects in this world attract each other? Pretty mind-blowing stuff" and who hasn't yet lost his faith.

Ya gotta feel sorry for those editors sometimes. And for that kid too, caught between the rock of his religious home-school background and the hard place of editors for religious publications, obviously anxious to make him a poster boy, on the other. "Being born into a religious family has many advantages, but I've never been challenged to think about the existence of God. I have always taken it for granted." Oh, kid. Those weren't advantages.

Deleted From Huffington Post's Readers' Comments, Reconstructed From Memory

Frank Schaffer writes:

Where is God when a child is shot in Newtown or hung in Auschwitz or killed in an American drone air strike or for that matter dies of cancer? I don't know. There is no answer.

There's a very clear answer, Frank, believers just don't want to hear it: He's all in your heads. People made him up to try to explain things and to help them cope. God is obviously still a great coping mechanism for many people, but science has been explaining things better for a long time now, and coming up with all sorts of ways to solve problems, undreamt of in earlier eras when religion still represented the intellectual cutting edge (thousands of years farther back in the past in my opinion than in yours), problems which therefore don't have to be coped with by means of flights of fancy and escapes from reality. For example: we haven't completely eradicated cancer yet the way we've eradicated many other diseases, but we're getting closer, and in the meantime we're getting better and better at treating it, and we haven't eradicated those other diseases nor made that progress with cancer by praying or interpreting Scripture, we've done it with science. Science, with which religion is still constantly interfering. (Pushing the HP Religion party line that neither fundamentalism nor literalism nor a conflict between religion and science goes back further than the 19th century is a blatant interference with the study of history, as blind and counterproductive as insisting that the world is 6000 years old.)

By the way, HP mods? Deleting perfectly reasonable comments phrased in a civilized manner just because they express points of view at odds with your own does not make HP look modern and enlightened and progressive and tolerant. HP Religion constantly pushes an image of itself as modern, enlightened, progressive, tolerant believers -- plus a couple of token docile atheists -- and it's constantly deleting perfectly reasonable comments. I can see the comments posted by my friends which have been removed. Of course, if which comments are removed is not decided by the moderators' judgement at all but is just a matter of how many flags a comment receives, that would be even worse. That would mean, in effect, that what we have here are not moderated comments at all, but flame wars.

Trust Me, There Are Trees in Forests

The Huffington Post is at it again, attacking "the idea that there is a conflict between religion and science." Alan Lurie, in his usual passive-aggressive way, admits the idea that such a conflict exists "is often presented by well-intended, educated individuals;" nevertheless, "the idea that religion has historically been opposed to science is simply an erroneous and unsupported construct that was created in the late 19th century, primarily as an anti-Catholic polemic. And it is an idea that all (yes, all) knowledgeable historians categorically reject."

I'll just bet that Lurie has a foolproof method for determining just exactly who is and who is not a "knowledgeable historian."

It's so absurd. Lurie is in effect categorically denying that there are any trees in forests, and claiming that all competent specialists in such matters agree with him. I think it's time to take a survey of tenured professors in History departments at leading universities and ask what they think of this. I think many of them might be quite surprised that people publishing in such a prominent outlet of the Huffington Post are asserting that "the idea" of a conflict between science and religion is "an erroneous and unsupported construct." As opposed to a fact of life known to just about everyone who's half-educated or better. How to go about proving that there are trees in forests? One obvious response to Lurie didn't occur to me for a while: the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. For many people -- for instance, me -- the very existence of the Index is a refutation of Lurie's thesis, as if a refutation were necessary. Forbidding people to read certain texts is the opposite of the freedom of thought which is an essential part of the conditions necessary in order for science to thrive. (But who even needs to be told such things? Well, Lurie needs to have such things pointed out to him, apparently, as do many of his colleague at Huffington Post Religion. Many, or most, or actually all of them. Can you imagine such a state of affairs?) In case some people actually need a little more, let me just provide the names of some people who have been on the Index: Maimonides. Johannes Scotus Eriugena. Copernicus. Bruno. Kepler. Francis Bacon. Galileo. Descartes. Hume. Kant. Erasmus Darwin. Comte.

Of course, I'm not actually addressing Lurie or his colleagues. I've pretty much given up on them on this point. In order to have arrived at such a position, they have had to be thoroughly immune to reason or plain fact concerning this point. I don't know how to debate such belief. All I can do is denounce it to third parties who might have been in danger of taking these guys seriously. Lurie writes:

"Over most of its existence, in fact, the Catholic Church was the center of open scientific investigation, supporting mathematicians, physicists, botanists and astronomers."

That's one way of putting it. Another way, of course, would be: between late antiquity and the Reformation, all Western European institutions of learning were controlled by the Catholic Church, and anyone who wanted to be a mathematician, physicist, botanist or astronomer had to do it on the Church's terms. Not that Protestants and Protestant institutions of learning have been consistently more pro-science: they've been sometimes more pro-science, sometimes less than Catholics, and they've always presented much less of a unity in this regard, as in others, than the Catholics. And of course the assertion that stating that religion and science are in conflict reflects anti-Catholic bigotry is another red herring: there are anti-Catholic bigots, and they may chime in against the picture of the Catholic Church in harmony with science, but that doesn't mean you have to be a bigot in order to point out that the picture is inaccurate.

And speaking of inaccurate pictues: Lurie writes: "the popular image of Galileo brought to trial in chains to face a sadistic Inquisition, where he uttered his defiant statement 'but it moves,' before being thrown into the papal dungeon, is a dramatic 19th century fabrication" This is not the first time I've read this business about chains and a dungeon in an article in Huffington Post Religion. Only problem is, I don't know who's asserting that Galileo was put in chains and thrown into a dungeon. I thought most everybody knew that Galileo was politely threatened with torture (which Lurie doesn't mention), recanted some of his scientific theories (which Lurie doesn't mention), spent the rest of his life under house arrest, during which time he wrote his magnum opus, which reversed the recantations (which Lurie doesn't mention) and was smuggled into Holland after his death, where, unlike in Italy at the time, it could be published (which Lurie doesn't mention).

This article is a perfect example of why you need to know your sources, know how reliable they are, and not simply trust someone because they're published in the Huffington Post, or TIME magazine -- or anywhere at all -- or because they're on PBS talking to Bill Moyers, and why ideally you'll familiarize yourself with the primary documants in the original languages, as well as knowing something about the people who edited those documents -- if you don't bypass the editions and go straight to the manuscripts.

Or, of course, if that's too much bother, you could simply trust me, hehe.

When Are "Angry Atheists" Actually Angry, And Why?

In this Wrong Monkey blog post, I took Max Tegmark to task for this Huffington post article in which he insists that there is no inherent conflict between science and religion. A week after that article, Tegmark followed up with this brief piece in which he professes to be amazed by all the negative responses to the first piece by "angry atheists," whom he proceeds to condescendingly lecture, and blame for religious fundamentalism.

Several stages of this process so far have been very familiar to any regular reader of Huffington Post's Religion section: a scientist with some credentials appears on the Huffington Post, says that there is no reason why science and religion should be in conflict, gets a strong negative response, calls his critics "angry atheists," and proceeds to blame allegedly angry atheists for religious fundamentalism.

A bizarre accusation of atheists, you say? Well of course it is. A bizarre description of the history and present relationship of science and religion? You don't have to tell me. But that's the sort of hooey they're selling these days on HP Religion. It's also what the Templeton Foundation is selling. If you examine the bios of the contributors to the Religion section and note the number of recipients of grants from Templeton, you must surely agree that to call the relationship between HP Religion and Templeton "cozy" would be a great understatement, and that to call it "cordial" would be a bigger understatement still.

What makes Tegmark's case stand out as particularly strange is the combination of his professed amazement at the negative response he gets when he posts the standard Templeton nonsense, and the fact that from 2006 to 2009, he awarded grants on behalf of Templeton. He's not merely one of the usual suspects -- he funded many of the usual suspects.

I suppose that it's somehow possible that Teagmark was completely insulated, until a week ago, from the public response the sort of "moderate and enlightened religious" propaganda which he pushes, and which is funded by neocons like Templeton, tends to get. It reminds me more than a little of Renault being "shocked, shocked!" to discover that gambling was going on at Rick's, but I suppose that it's possible that Tegmark's intellectual cocoon was that solid until last week. And I suppose that it's possible that many of the responses he's gotten are angry. I have to guess, Tegmark doesn't quote a one of them. I would guess that the typical atheist response he's gotten is similar to the typical reader's comment on these two pieces on HP. I wouldn't call them "angry" as much as "very, very unimpressed." Tegmark complains about "ad hominem" attacks. Well jeepers, Professor, I don't know what to say to that except that if you're going to discuss science and religion in public, you really ought to be wearing your big boy pants and shrug it off if some responses get personal.

But can we believe Tegmark when he says he's shocked by the response to his nonsense? Or is he worse than clueless: pretending to be clueless and deliberately stirring shit? Arianna must love the huge volume of clicks he's generating.

But if he really is sincere, and if "angry" really is a better description of the response he's getting than "unimpressed," still I think that he and purveyors of similar simplistic malarkey should ask themselves: is it more precise to call these people "angry atheists," or atheists who are angry when they're around, atheists who are angry at them? And perhaps with perfectly good cause?

Conflict?! Ha! What Conflict! (Shut Up! I Said There's No Conflict!)

Once again, the Huffington Post has dug up a prominent scientist to laughingly poo-poo the notion of a conflict between science and religion. Max Tegmark, in this case, an astrophysicist at MIT. Dixit Tegmark:

"So is there a conflict between science and religion? The religious organizations representing most Americans clearly don't think so. Interestingly, the science organizations representing most American scientists don't think so either"

Kudos, Professor Tegmark, a lot of people agree with you. However, the soundness of a proposition is not a matter of popular vote. If you had always settled questions about physics by popular vote, your career as a legitimate physicist never would've gotten very far. (Although who knows how far you might have gone as a Christian clergyman and apologist.) If you'd asked the same question 500 years ago, the agreement would have been unanimous or nearly so. At least publicly. But then, you might have gotten killed just for posing such a question publicly, depending on how you phrased it and how clear it was that you were not going to accept any answer except "No, there is no conflict." The fact that such questions could be fatal could conceivably have meant that people's private opinions about them were much different than their public statements. We may never know how great such differences between public and private were. And never mind 500 years ago, 321 years ago Puritans killed some witches in Salem. And I think it was about 263 years ago that Hume was denied a chair in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh because of his positions on religion. (And Hume never publicly admitted to being an atheist.) And the Spanish Inquisition wasn't shut down until 177 years ago. And never mind all of that -- go to Texas or Mississippi or Pakistan today and talk to some scientists there -- off the record, for their sake -- and ask them what they think of the relationship between religion and science right now.

I have a feeling that Tegmark either doesn't want to hear any of that, or that he would laugh in an infuriating way and tell me that I have a twisted and inaccurate conception of history, somehow. But wait a minute, is Tegmark's assertion about organizations representing most Americans and most scientists even correct to begin with? It's not impressively presented. He continues:

"For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science states that science and religion 'live together quite comfortably, including in the minds of many scientists.'"

Presumably some person affiliated with the Association said that. Which person? Where, when? What reason have we to believe that this statement reflects some sort of popular vote conducted within the Association, or its leadership, or sumpin? If Tegmark knows, he doesn't seem to care. And that's the only example he gives of scientists seeing a conflict-free relationship between religion and science. And as far as the the religious organizations representing "most Americans" are concerned, he provides more unsourced quotes. For a physicist? Not so much with the details!

But he continues, and this is why his article is in the Huffington Post, because this is the Huffington Post party line:

"This shows that the main divide in the U.S. origins debate isn't between science and religion, but between a small fundamentalist minority and mainstream religious communities who embrace science."

All is well! Pay no attention to those fanatical atheists trying to tell you that science and religion are in conflict! (How can you tell which ones are fanatical? They're the ones saying that there is such a conflict!) There is no typhus in Moscow! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

For a conflict which doesn't exist, and which furthermore only a small fringe group of wild-eyed fanatics believe exist, some people spend an extraordinary amount of time and energy insisting that it doesn't exist. For a handful of people at the Huffington Post, and some of their favorite contributors, and the Templeton Foundation, for example, it seems to be their full-time job.

PS, February 19: ThinkCreeps, an HP reader, informs me that Tegmark ran a grants program for Templeton for several years. So strictly speaking it was perhaps not that Tegmark reminded me of Templeton so much as that Templeton has closely resembled Tegmark for a while. Thanks for the tip, ThinkCreeps!

Selling the Lie About the Harmony Between Religion and Science

Karl Giberson is completely full of shit -- but chances are you knew that already, if you're familiar with his work.

He writes: "I have on my desk a delightful little book titled Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion.Myth is employed here in the popular sense and the title essay explains that the harsh treatment of Galileo by the Inquisition -- torture, imprisonment -- has no basis in fact. It is a made-up story -- a myth."

I never heard stories about Galileo being tortured and thrown into a dungeon until I heard apologists refuting them. Of course, the apologists' refutation is misleading, as is their assertion of what the story used to be. Galileo was threatened with torture, and he was imprisoned -- in two of his houses, which certainly were much more comfortable than dungeons, much as today's minimum-security prisons for Wall Street criminals and other perpetrators of Ponzi schemes are more comfortable than maximum-security prisons, but he was still confined. And he was only not tortured because he signed documents saying that he didn't believe what he did believe about science. That's definitely a serious conflict between science and religion.

I have an interesting little book on my desk: Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History from Myth.

That sort of thing is obviously not for everybody.

"To take root in deeply religious America," prattles Giberson, "evolution needs to be a better myth."

No. Replacing bullshit with better bullshit only benefits purveyors of bullshit. Like Giberson and the author of that little book on his desk. And most of the other people who write about religion for HP. Giberson is pushing their tired myth about the harmony and scinece, not, as, they claim, for the sake of science, but for the sake of religion and their phony-baloney jobs.

The Conflict Between Science and Christianity

There has been some very silly talk lately about how the conflict between Christianity and science is very recent, and how the very idea that they conflicted in earlier times is just a recent notion, based in ignorance of history.

Well, it may be that it has only been recently, since the mid-19th century or so, since one has been able to say such completely obvious things as that Christianity has hampered the progress of science without endangering one's academic career, if one had one. (It seems one can't always say such things on HP today, hence this post.)

Freedom of inquiry is an essential part of science. Pre-Christian Graeco-Roman antiquity may not have been perfect, but it was very free in some ways. Philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers and others were free to speculate about the nature of the universe, and atheism, although not widespread, was certainly not life-threatening. Changing one's religion was an everyday occurrence, not the occasion for the batting of an eye.

Then the Christians took over, and for about 1,200 years, from around AD 400 to 1600, from when Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire until the time that people finally began to fight back successfully against the madness, there was a complete, brutal clampdown on intellectual activity in the West. There was one one last gasp of paganism around AD 400, represented by writers such as Ammianus, Claudian, Symmachus and Ausonius, the last three of whom were all friends with one another. Later in the 5th century Hypatia, a philosopher in Alexandria, was ripped to shreds by a Christian mob acting under the orders of the local bishop. The recent movie Agorastars Rachel Weisz as Hypatia and speculates that she may have been speculating about heliocentrism at the time of her murder, and so that heliocentrism died with her, not to be rivived by Copernicus for over a thousand years, in a book his friends wouldn't let him publish while he was still alive for the fear that he would be killed for it. We don't know for sure what Hypatia was doing, other than that it was not Christian. Her works were destroyed with many other non-Christian philosophical and scientific works all over the Empire as Christianity tightened its hold over everything. Plato's Academy, the world's first university and by far the most prominent center of learning in the pre-Christian Classical world, lasted until the mid-6th century before the authorities shut it down.

It makes me very angry when apologists claim the scientific work of, for instance, Galileo as the work of the Church, when people after Galileo were killed for witchcraft and atheism and heresy, when Galileo himself knew that he had to have his later work smuggled to Holland to be published after his death. If you dispute that freedom of inquiry is essential on order for science to flourish, there's very little for us to discuss. If you think I'm exaggerating about the oppressive conditions under Christianty, name one European atheist or pagan in the millenium between Hypatia and Hobbes, except, possibly, Boethius. It's true that not everyone in medieval Europe was a Christian. There were also Jews, who were allowed to live as second-class citizens suffering occasional massacres and deportation, and some Muslims whose very existence struck deep horror into the heart of every good Christian.

Yes, some science was done in medieval Europe. It was done in spite of Christianity, not because of it.