Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (47 page)

Reconciliation, story of, 58–59

Rees, Martin, 194–195, 196n, 198

Regularity, 67, 102–104, 112, 117, 120, 271–272, 274, 276, 282–283, 285, 302n

Reid, Thomas, 156, 178, 237, 241, 242n, 270, 293, 312, 345–346

Relativity theory, xii, 53, 78n, 91, 120, 122, 143–144, 145, 176, 286, 296–297, 301, 308

Religious belief, x, xii, 3, 5, 36, 42–45, 48, 54, 62, 65, 123n, 124, 137, 140–141, 143, 144, 145, 148, 150–151, 152n, 164, 168n, 169, 181, 182, 186

rationality of.
See
reformed epistemology

Religious pluralism, 61

Rimini, A., 115n

Ruse, Michael, 133–134, 142–143

Russell, Bertrand,
xi
, 10n, 25, 26n, 36–37, 249, 266

Russell, Robert, 97, 111n, 114n

Russell paradoxes, 289

Resurrection, 61, 118, 153, 157–158, 161, 262

Royden, H.L., 209

Sanders, E.P., 159

Saunders, Nicholas, 100, 104–105, 118n

Schrödinger equation, 92–93, 114–115

Schrödinger, Erin, 123

Science and naturalism.
See
naturalism, relation to science

Scientific anti-realism, 92n

Scientific realism, 92n

Scientific Scripture scholarship.
See

Historical Biblical Criticism

sensus divinitatus
, 60, 148n, 181, 263–264, 312

Scott, Eugenie, 169–170

Segal, Aaron, 345n

Set(s), 133, 171–172, 209–210, 250–251, 286–287, 288–290, 290–291

Shapiro, James, 258

Sheehan, Thomas, 157

Shepard, Alan, 132

Simplicity, 27, 83n, 88, 257, 268, 278n, 285, 297–299

Simon, Herbert, 134–136, 164, 173

Simonian science, 164, 168, 173–174, 174–175, 177–178, 181, 182, 184, 186, 186–189

Simpson, George Gaylord, 12–13, 308

Skepticism, 158, 315, 344

naturalist commitment to, 315, 344

Skeptical theism, 101–102

Slone, D. Jason, 138n

Smith, Quentin, 49

Sober, Elliot, 11, 12n, 19n, 134n, 200, 202, 220–221, 239n, 240n

Sociobiology.
See
evolutionary psychology

Spandrel, 131, 132, 137, 138, 142, 227, 255, 287

Special divine action, xii–xiii, 20, 63, 68, 72, 74–75, 78n, 82–83, 86, 90, 91–92, 94, 96, 97–98, 100–101, 110–112, 113, 120–121, 122, 125, 130, 158, 265

divine consistency objection to, 104, 106.
See also
miracles

problem of interference/intervention, 70, 72–73, 74, 97–102, 158

problem of regularity, 102–104

Spinoza, Baruch, 155

Stark, Rodney, 137, 138, 142, 274n

Strauss, David, 156

Street, Sharon, 28n

Stroud, Barry, 315, 316

Stump, Eleonore, 44, 45n, 287n

Suffering, x, 56–59.
See also
problem of evil

Supervenience, 88, 96, 116, 320n, 323–325, 338

Swinburne, Richard, 42, 44, 45n, 89n, 156n, 179n, 197, 208, 262, 297n

Sympathy, 156, 178, 270, 312

Taylor, Richard, 310n

Testability, 300

Theodicy, 59

Traditional biblical commentary, 152, 154, 156

Three-body problem, 84

Theoretical virtues, 297

Tillich, Paul, 104

Tipler, Frank, 194

Tracy, Thomas, 97, 111n, 114n, 118n

Tremlin, Todd, 138n

Troeltsch, Ernst, 158, 174

Unger, Peter, 3, 122

Ullman, Shimon, 243n

Van Fraassen, Bas, 92n, 95, 171, 209n, 277n, 332n

Van Horn, Luke, 110n

Van Inwagen, Peter, 44, 45n, 58n, 59n, 67n, 88n, 119n, 266n, 318n

Varghese, Roy, 124n

Vestrup, Eric, 205

Von Weizsäker, C.F., 266

Wang, Hao, 289–290

Warrant, 42, 44, 47, 48, 120, 141n, 150, 153, 166, 177, 182, 185, 188–189, 242, 244, 249–250

intrinsic, 188–189

Warrant defeaters, 166–167, 340n

Weatherford, Roy, 332n

Weber, T., 115n

Weinberg, Stephen, 297

Wells, G.A., 157

Westminster Confession, 4

Whewell, William, 245, 275, 276, 277n

White, Andrew Dixon, 6

White, Roger, 197, 214n, 332n

Whitehead, Alfred North, 272, 274, 283

Wigner, Eugene, 284–285

Wildman, Wesley, 97n, 99, 104, 111n, 112

Wiles, Maurice, 101n

Wilkins, John, 266

Wilson, David Sloan, 134n, 138, 142–143, 145–148, 150–152, 164, 171, 181

Wilson, E.O., 131, 134, 138, 277

Wish-fulfillment, 148–150

Witham, L., 74

Worldview, ix, x, 3, 122, 307, 309

scientific, x, 3, 122, 307, 309

Worrall, John, 122–124

Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 44, 45n, 46n, 153n

Wright, N.T., 179

Young earth creationism, 10, 144n

Zhang, W.J., 329n

Zweir, Paul, 333n

1.
Philosophy
(1939), p. 131. Quoted in
The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Science
, ed. Peter Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 1.

1.
See, e.g., Unger’s
All the Power in the World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) and chapters 1 and 5 of
Beyond Inanity
, forthcoming.

2.
Aquinas,
Summa Theologiae
Ia q. 93 a. 4;
Summa Theologiae
Ia q.93 a.6.

3.
How, exactly (or even approximately) shall we understand
conflict
? Conflict comes in more than one form. There is straightforward inconsistency, there is inconsistency in the presence of obvious truths, there is probabilistic incompatibility, and more. I address these questions in chapters 5 and 6.

4.
It is commonly claimed that the Copernican revolution signified a demotion for humanity by virtue of earth’s being removed from the center of the universe; that is just one way among others, so goes the claim, in which earth’s privileged place in the universe was compromised by the advance of science. This seems to be a mistake; in the earlier Aristotelian scheme of things, being at the center of the universe was definitely not an honor. It was the heavier, grosser elements that sank to the center; in Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, the lowest circle of hell is at the very center of the universe; and according to Pico della Mirandola, Earth-dwellers inhabit “the excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world.” See Dennis R. Danielson, “The Great Copernican Cliché,”
American Journal of Physics
69 (10) October 2001, pp. 1029ff.

5.
White,
History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
(New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1898). Quoted in Michael Murray’s “Science and Religion in Constructive Engagement” in
Analytic Theology
, ed. Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 234.

6.
John Brooke,
Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 8–9. See also the account of the Galileo affair in Jerome Langford,
Galileo, Science and the Church
(South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998).

7.
“If any simple explanation existed, it would rather be in terms of the customary ruthlessness of societal authority in suppressing minority opinion, and in Galileo’s case with Aristotelianism rather than Christianity in authority” (Stillman Drake,
Galileo
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), v.

8.
Thomas H. Huxley, letter to Darwin, November 23, 1859.

9.
Why not suppose that life has originated in more than one place, so that we needn’t all be cousins? This suggestion is occasionally made, but the usual idea is that life originated just once—if only because of the astounding difficulty in seeing how it could have originated (by exclusively natural processes) at all.

10.
Creationists often suggest that when God Created the world 6,000–10,000 years ago, he created it in a “mature state,” complete with crumbling mountains, fossils, and light apparently travelling from stars millions of light years distant. Here they can appeal to an unlikely ally: in
The Analysis of Mind
(London: Routledge, 1921), p. 159, Bertrand Russell wrote that we can’t disprove the proposition that the universe popped into being just five minutes ago, again, complete with apparent memories and other apparent traces of a much longer past.

11.
Those Christians who think the world is much younger than current scientific estimates will indeed find a conflict here; they can see it as a superficial conflict as outlined in chapter 6. Concerning Augustine, see
The Literal Meaning of Genesis
, translated and annotated by John Hammond Taylor, S. J., 2 vols. (New York: Newman Press, 1982), vol. 1, chapter 1.

12.
Hodge,
What is Darwinism
(New York: Charles Scribner, 1871).

13.
Mayr,
Towards a new Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 98.

14.
Sober, “Evolution Without Metaphysics?” in J. Kvanvig (ed.),
Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion
, vol. 3.

15.
Gould,
Ever Since Darwin
(New York: Norton, 1977), p. 267.

16.
Gould, “In Praise of Charles Darwin,” in
Darwin’s Legacy
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 6–7.

17.
Simpson,
The Meaning of Evolution
(New Haven: Yale University Press, rev. ed., 1967), pp. 344–45.

18.
Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
(New York and London: Norton, 1986).

19.
Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
, p. 5.

20.
See Alex Pruss, “How not to Reconcile Evolution and Creation,” available on the web at
Philpapers
(
http://philpapers.org
), 2009.

21.
Huxley as cited in Brooke,
Science and Religion
, p. 36. Clearly this suggestion raises difficult questions about determinism, the chanciness (if any) involved in quantum mechanics, the existence of counterfactuals of chance (that is, propositions specifying what would have happened, if a given chance process had occurred), and so on; some of these questions will be addressed in chapter 3.

22.
Locke,
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
IV, x, 10.

23.
Although in his later book
The God Delusion
(New York: Bantam, 2006) he offers some sophomoric arguments for the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that there is such a person as God; see reviews by Thomas Nagel (“The Fear of Religion,”
The New Republic
, October, 2006), H. Allen Orr (“A Mission to Convert,”
New York Review of Books
, January, 2007), and myself (“The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad Absurdum,”
Books and Culture
, March/April, 2007).

24.
Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
, p. 81.

25.
Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
, pp. 78–9.