I heard someone talking about a study of religious belief and career choices that I need to look up, for what was said to me was that fundamentalist Christians are way underrepresented in the natural sciences.

To be more specific, to the best of my knowledge the modern intelligent design movement has so far not come up with one single new idea. Lately I’ve been reading a whole lot of the history of the controversies surrounding the theory of evolution, and in 19th century writers I have found every single claim now argued by modern ID proponents. There is not one new idea. (And yes, I’ve read Dembski and Behe and Meyer and Johnson and Wells and their colleagues.) Hence, I see no support for Monton’s argument there.

Finally, I commend the decline of Islamic science in the couple of centuries prior to the Western Renaissance to Monton’s attention. While there’s some dispute, there seems to be a fair consensus that changing religious views were a non-trivial contributor to that decline.

(That last paragraph was a free association to the security word “turban” for this post.)

Nice skewering, BTW.

Wes writes:

This is not even an existence proof; it’s a whimsical fantasy. Even if one were to instantiate it with a real example …

Real example…real example. Oh, Jonathan Wells praying and being told by Father Moon to get a degree to destroy Darwinism (I’m sure he really meant ‘exlore the powerful scientific theory of intelligent design’). There you go. I’m sure he was involved in some sort of discovery, however tiny, while doing his thesis. There you go, cause and effect.

I do appreciate the mild tone of your reply, one which I hardly deserve. However, the arguments at issue are important, and deserve being clearly laid out. Thus, I’m not inclined to pussyfoot around.

If you want to play “Now I’ve Got You, You S-O-B” with Ken Miller, I’m sure that’s a game that provides some amusement.

But you have apparently chosen to provide intellectual cover for an illegitimate political scam using nitpicky disagreements over the exact wording of claims. Perhaps Ken Miller was not justified in using exactly the words he wrote, but the following from your response:

But anyway, I’m happy to report that Elsberry and I are in agreement about the truth value of Miller’s claim. It’s false, and that’s all I was trying to argue.

says to me that my allusion to straining at gnats and swallowing camels was spot-on. Ken Miller is far closer to the truth in this matter than you are.

The weak claim is most probably true, though I’ll leave it to the historians to come up with a nice example.

I’d submit that your own example of Newton and the over-a-hundred-year wait for Laplace fits the bill admirably.

But the irony of following that with this bit is extreme:

The strong claim is surely false: I can imagine a situation where some scientist comes up with a great scientific insight, but she only comes up with that insight as a result of the peculiar religious training she’s had — had she not had that religious training, she wouldn’t have come up with the insight. Perhaps she frames the insight in supernatural terms, but other scientists see that the supernatural aspect is inessential, and embrace the non-supernatural aspect, thus leading to a major scientific advance.

This is not even an existence proof; it’s a whimsical fantasy. Even if one were to instantiate it with a real example (as you hold out for when it isn’t your conjecture on the line), it relegates the role of religious experience to making the synapses trigger in odd ways. Further, human minds are known to be adept at post-hoc rationalization, and one cannot guarantee that testimony of where a particular idea came from delivers the actual ontology of the idea.

The response about a moderate claim concerning the value of supernatural hypotheses confuses and conflates hypothesis and motivation.

Consider this counterfactual claim: had Newton not considered supernatural hypotheses, he would have been a better scientist. Is that true or false (or neither)? It’s really not obvious to me what the answer is. I can see someone arguing that the claim is true, since (as we atheists agree) supernatural hypotheses are false, and hence considering them automatically delays scientific progress. But I can see someone arguing that the claim is false, since Newton was in part motivated to investigate the world because of his theistic beliefs, and if it were the case that Newton wasn’t willing to consider the hypothesis that God actively acted in the world, then he wouldn’t have been as motivated to do his scientific investigations in the first place.

Your own original argument depended upon being able to separate those two concepts, but here you are relying upon not being able to separate them.

Finally, I have to note an omission on your part. I finished up my critique saying that it wasn’t enough to claim minimal or no harm to the practice of science by reverting to the 17th century version thereof, but rather one needed to justify a benefit to modern science of doing so. And that you do not address at all.

Not because science is atheistic, but because science does not admit models which are not empirically testable. And that’s not because scientists like the philosophy, but because it works.

http://bradleymonton.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/various-thoughts-inspired-by-elsberrys-critique/