Sorry, folks; I published this prematurely (hitting “publish” rather than “save draft”), so all 11 comments have been lost. I apologize, but feel free—if you remember what you said—to repost your comments.

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Martin Nowak is a well-known professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, specializing in theoretical models for the evolution of cooperation. His work has been funded by one of the largest Templeton Foundation grants I know of: 10.5 million dollars!

Nowak’s latest notion is to discard an idea that’s been immensely productive in evolutionary biology, the idea of inclusive fitness—that the “replicability” of a gene has to take into account the effects of the gene’s fitness not only on its carrier, but on related carriers who also carry copies of the gene. (Selection based on this kind of relatedness is called “kin selection”.) Selection for parental care is one example, as is selection on any genetic variants producing behaviors that favor relatives.

I’ve written extensively on my differences with Nowak and his co-authors Coina Tarnita and E. O. Wilson about this issue; I, along with many others, think that inclusive fitness has been a seminal idea in evolutionary biology and has led to a lot of new understanding (just search for “Nowak” on this site if you want to see this discussion).

I see that Nowak is still crusading against kin selection and inclusive fitness (he, Wilson and Tarnita favor “group selection”): Nowak’s answer to the latest Edge question: “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” was “inclusive fitness.”

But I don’t want to talk about inclusive fitness today. I’d rather talk about accommodationism, or rather the failure of trying to accommodate science and religion. Those failures are evident in a new article also published by Nowak, one that appeared in the January 13 edition of Big Questions Online, the “popular science” outlet of the John Templeton Foundation. Templeton, as you know if you’re a regular, is an organization devoted to blurring the boundaries between science and religion, and doing that by co-opting scientists congenial to their message by giving them big grants and lots of money for their writing (I hear that Big Questions Online pays quite a lot for articles).

Nowak’s article, “How might cooperation play a role in evolution?“, perfectly exemplifies the problems with accommodationism. The meat of it is decent, straightforward science: a recounting of what Nowak sees as the major steps in evolution (e.g., the evolution of multicellular organisms, the origin of human language), a discussion of the various ways cooperation might evolve, and a list of the “open questions” in evolution (e.g., how did life begin?). But then Nowak, an observant Catholic (one reason Templeton likes him), drags in God, and the whole article goes down the tubes. God first sticks in His nose in the first paragraph:

Evolution is a powerful and correct scientific approach. Yet our current understanding of evolution is incomplete. We are confronted with many open questions. I will discuss some of them in this article. I will also argue that a purely scientific interpretation of evolution does not constitute an argument against Christian theology, which holds that God is creator and sustainer of the universe. Science and religion are fundamental components in the search for truth. They should work together to solve the challenging problems that mankind is facing.

Well, there you go. What is this doing in a piece on evolution? (The answer, of course, is that the piece was commissioned by Templeton.) The evolutionary questions raised by Nowak have answers, at least in principle, but how does he know that there is a God, much less that said God is creator and sustainer of the universe?

Nowak doesn’t; he’s just assuming it’s true because that’s what his Church teaches. It’s superstitious nonsense. And as far as science and religion being complementary ways to find the truth, that’s also wrong, for religion cannot and has never been able to find truth. If it had, all religions would have produced the same truths. If we want to solve the problems that face mankind, science had best stay as far away from religion as possible, except, perhaps to enlist the faithful in helping us implement empirical solutions. What was Nowak’s church’s solution to AIDS in Africa? Don’t use condoms!

But the end of the article is where Nowak really goes off the rails. Imagine, after reading a fairly solid article about the major steps in evolution and the evolution of cooperation, seeing this:

God and Evolution In Christian theology, God is the creator and sustainer of the universe. According to St. Augustine, God is atemporal and created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing). According to St. Thomas, God is the ultimate cause for everything that exists. God has chosen to unfold his creation in time according to laws of nature. Humans, created in the image of God, have begun to understand some aspects of these laws of nature. Evolution is an organizing principle of the living world. God uses evolution to unfold life on earth. The creative power of God and the laws of evolution are not in conflict with each other. God acts through evolution. God is the ultimate cause for evolution. In this world view, without God there would be no evolution at all. Similarly, God uses gravity to organize the structure of the universe on a large scale. Without God there would be no gravity. Neither gravity nor evolution constitute challenges for Christian faith. A purely scientific interpretation of evolution does not lead to an argument against the existence of God. Scientific atheism is a metaphysical position, which goes beyond a scientific interpretation of the available evidence. God is not only creator, but also sustainer. God’s creative power and love is needed to will every moment into existence. God is atemporal. In my opinion, an atemporal Creator and Sustainer lifts the entire trajectory of the world into existence. For the atemporal God, who is the creator and sustainer of the universe, the evolutionary trajectory is not unpredictable but fully known.

This just deflates me immensely. And the God stuff sticks out like a sore thumb. As a whole, though, I think the piece is about the best demonstration one could have of the incompatibility of science and faith. Here’s a smart guy, a Harvard professor who does hard and respected science, and then he tacks on a bunch of medieval superstition, with no evidentiary basis, at the end of a science piece. And it’s a glaring addition, for none of the stuff in the paragraphs above is supported by the merest scrap of evidence. How does Nowak know that God is using gravity to control the universe, or that God is required for gravity? How could you falsify that? And how does he know that Augustine was right and God is “atemporal”? God could, after all, be temporal. How does Nowak know that God is loving? There’s a lot of evidence against that supposition.

In fact, a lot of what Nowak writes here doesn’t even make sense—and is in complete opposition to what he says about science. His ideas about kin selection (not on display in this piece) might be wrong, but at least you can test them. You can’t test all this palaver about God’s love and atemporality and status as the Giver of Gravitation.

And there you have the great breach between science and religion. In half of his article Nowak relies on evidence and reason, but at the end abandons all that rationality in favor of medieval superstition that happens to make him feel good. It’s a mystery to me how any scientist trained to value reason, logic, and evidence can produce such a bunch of babble about God.

And, by the way, scientific atheism is not a metaphysical position that “goes beyond the evidence”. Scientific atheism is simply the view that there is no evidence—scientific or otherwise—for a God, and therefore no reason to believe in one. If that’s a metaphysical position, then so is our provisional refusal to accept the existence of Santa Claus, Bigfoot, aliens in flying saucers, and the Loch Ness monster.