why the accommodationists still don’t get it…

Michael Ruse once again shows us why accommodationists don't understand science and how it works, and don't want to understand it.

Illustration by Miguel Covarrubias

Few public spats seem to be more amiable than that of Jerry Coyne vs. Michael Ruse mostly because Coyne makes extensive use of the scientific method and natural facts to drive his arguments while Ruse has little to no command of them and acknowledges about as much. And this makes his latest post complaining about Coyne’s tin ear for philosophy, which is a condition of which I’ve been frequently accused also, hypocritical as he’s shown time and time again that he cares far more about being nice than about the facts.

Just as a typical accommodationist is expected to do, he sticks to vague platitudes in his critiques pays a tidbit of lip service to the mantra of compatibility between science and religion, and goes on to blather about every little material thing in which Coyne likes to indulge, presumably to distract from this lackluster argument…

Although I have little time for most religion, qua philosophy I still argue that science does not have all of the answers and it is at least legitimate for believers to try to offer their answers. I don’t think the answers are necessarily beyond criticism, but at the same time I don’t think that because they are not scientific answers this thereby makes them wrong or pernicious.

Repeat slowly after me. Science does not have all the answers and does not pretend to have them, otherwise there would be no point in any scientific profession since all the answers have been found. To quote the Irish comedian Dara O’Briain, if science knew everything it would’ve stopped. But science has a terrific way to get a factual, reproducible answer to a particular question. Like the GPS in your car, it doesn’t physically take you to the fancy new restaurant where you made reservations, but shows you how to get there turn by turn, and if you aren’t sure of what it’s telling you, you can check in with the satellites to track your actual position and maps of the area to confirm the route.

By contrast, religion is like the backseat driver just as new to the city as you are, giving you directions based on his personal opinions and preconceptions of how others got to a destination, along with threats that you’ll get lost and wander into a really rough neighborhood if you don’t listen. Why take that left on Elm? Because your backseat driver told you to after remembering that he read about some driver’s left turn on Elm to get somewhere and you should do that too if you don’t want to get carjacked or robbed.

Folks, this approach does not work because you’ll end up navigating a maze of streets and arrive where you’d like to go either by sheer luck or because one of you finally looks at a map, the tool designed especially for the purpose of getting you where you want to be. Likewise, this approach doesn’t work in anything else. You need to connect ideas, thoughts, and advice to something that is factual, something science is meant to do. It may not get you where you want to go by the easiest path, it may make mistakes along the way, it may end up that the place you want to go either doesn’t exist yet or won’t exist at all.

It’s not perfect. But it’ll get you much farther than wild guesses and wishful thinking. So when someone like Ruse says that non-scientific answers aren’t necessarily wrong by virtue of being non-scientific, he spectacularly misses the point. The problem with non- scientific answers is that they’re not grounded in facts we could falsify or situations we can replicate. They’re a guess or a parroting of someone’s guess. Were you to ask a stranger how to get to the Taipei 101 building in Taiwan and he proceed to give you a set of directions, this doesn’t mean that he’s necessarily wrong. But how do you know that he gave you the right directions? Wouldn’t you want to ask some questions to verify them?