Thoughts in a Haystack

Oooh! This is Jerry Coyne at his philosophical best!

He declares:

It's time to admit that those who still claim that religion and science are compatible–ignoring their fundamental and blatantly obvious differences in philosophy, methodology, and success at understanding the universe–are intellectually dishonest.

Why "intellectually dishonest"? Because, according to Coyne:

[Stephen Hawking is] always cited by accommodationists as being quasi-religious, since he said in A Brief History of Time that if physicists were to hit on a "theory of everything" they would have seen into "the mind of God."

"Always"? It's amazing that accommodationists have attracted so much attention if all they do is go around and babble on incessantly about a single sentence in one of Hawking's books. Strangely, even though I would doubtless be considered an "accommodationist" by Coyne because I don't consider science to be a "worldview," an "approach to the world," or an "attitude," I don't ever remember mentioning Hawking's line about God ... and neither does Google.

In any event, stating that science and religion are compatible because one prominent scientist said they were would be the logical fallacy of an appeal to (inappropriate) authority ... unless, of course, you could show that the prominent scientist was also an expert on the philosophy of science and religion. So how does Coyne "demonstrate" that science and religion are incompatible? Why, by citing a few sentences from an interview Hawking recently gave, particularly this one:

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.

According to Coyne:

The last, terse sentence sums up in six words the entire history of science and faith. Hawking, willfully misunderstood by those desperate to harmonize science with faith, recognizes their profound incompatibility.

And that's based on "evidence" consisting of a "terse" sentence from a television interview by a person, with no demonstrated expertise, over twenty years after his book was published? On that grounds we can declare that anyone who disagrees with Coyne's philosophy to be "intellectually dishonest" because they have "willfully misunderstood" Hawking?

Glass. Houses. Stones.
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