Making Sense with Sam Harris - #10 — Faith vs. Fact

Episode Date: May 19, 2015

Sam Harris interviews biologist Jerry Coyne about his new book, "Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible." If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'll be speaking with Jerry Coyne. Jerry is a biologist at the University of Chicago, and he's written over a hundred scientific papers and several books, the most recent of which is Faith vs. Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, and I highly recommend that you pick it up. Jerry is one of the more

frequent and articulate commentators on the clash between scientific and religious ways of thinking, and he's been a colleague and comrade and friend in this area for several years. I should probably apologize for the audio here. We did this interview remotely, and the recording of Jerry's voice especially leaves something to be desired, but you can hear the clarity of his thinking nonetheless. So without further ado, I bring you Jerry Coyne. Hey, Jerry, how you doing? Fine, yourself? I'm good, I'm good. Well, thank you for taking the time to do this.

You are the first proper interview on my podcast, which makes me happy. Okay, well, I'm honored. Nice. Well, I was trying to remember where we met. Was that in Mexico at the Ciudad de las Ideas conference? Yeah, that's the first time I met you. It might have been the first time I met Dan.

It was certainly the first time I met Hitch, and the last time as well. That was a good conference. It was a surprisingly well-organized one. Yeah. Unfortunately, I had to miss the big debate with you guys. That was supposed to be nice, but I had to get back to catch my flight. If you missed the debate, you missed Nassim Taleb's performance where he gave voice to one of the most bizarre eruptions of anti-science gibberish I can ever recall hearing. That's on YouTube for any interested person. Yeah, I didn't realize that was on YouTube.

I'll have to go back and look at it. It was amazing. He insinuated himself into this debate that was already too crowded with like three or four people on each side. And he insisted that he had something of compelling interest to all of humanity to say and then he got up there and just laid down a word salad of a sort that well i guess you're used to word salads in these kinds of debates

i also remember from that conference the it was the first time i witnessed just how different a human organism christopher hitchitchens was than myself. I don't know if you recall, but it was like a three-hour drive to Mexico City from where the conference was because the traffic was so brutal at every hour of the night. Yes. And he had to go to D.C. the next day. So he was flying in the morning. He had like a 6 a.m. flight from Mexico City. And he had an event that night in D.C.,

and I met him at the bar at midnight where he was having a scotch and a club sandwich, and he was not planning to sleep. He was just going to get in the car, get on the plane, go to D.C., and perform again that night. He had amazing stamina, that guy, especially given the way he used his body. I'm glad he gets to meet him once before he dies. Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to get into the topic of your new book, but just a couple of questions about how you got in a position to write it. First, how did you get into science, and what is your current focus in biology? Well, getting into science, people have asked me that, and that's not clear.

If I were to name something, I suppose I'd say it was my parents, because my dad was an animal lover. So from the very first, I can remember he was always dragging us to zoos and things. And then when I was a kid, they bought me all kinds of science books, you know, the Golden Book of Geology, the Golden Book of Dinosaurs, that whole series. And I didn't really choose science as, I guess, a profession until I went to college and I took an introductory biology course that was taught by an evolutionary biologist, a guy named Jack Brooks at William & Mary. He was extremely charismatic. And that's all it takes, basically, to, you know, for the tipping point. From that point on, I was hooked on evolution and studied it throughout college and then went to graduate school.

So that's how I became a scientist. My area of research has been pretty much through my career with a few digressions, the origin of species. That is how one lineage can branch into two or more lineages. one lineage can branch into two or more lineages. What are the genetic changes that accompany the origin of species that make these different lineages reproductively separated from one another? And are there any generalities or regularities in this process that we can study? And which genes are involved in that process? So I was basically taking up the question that Darwin started with his book,

The Origin of Species, which he, of course, neglected to answer. He didn't say anything about the origin of species. He talked about how a single species would evolve. And that question lay pretty much fallow until about the 1930s and 40s, and then became fallow again. And I was interested in it, so I started working on it when I went to graduate school. And you're working in drosophila or what what are you what animals yeah and fruit flies uh if you want to study the genetics of how species form genetics um defined in a hard way then that means doing crosses not just sequencing dna which we couldn't do anyway when i started it so if you want to for

example find out where and how many genes distinguish two closely related species for a character like the sperm motility or behavioral isolation, mating discrimination, or any of their traits, like how they look different or anything, there's no way around that, even in these days of DNA sequencing, except to cross them. And fortunately, in fruit flies, many closely related species can be crossed under lab conditions. And they have a generation time of about 10 days to two weeks. So you can go through 30 generations of genetic manipulations in a year, which makes them ideal for this kind of study.

Of course, you can't do that with any other organism except maybe, you know, flatworms or something. But at least for studying flies, I've gotten a deal out of that system. Yeah. And so now you also spend a lot of time policing the boundary of science and non-science. And you've been a very vocal critic of religious dogmatism and, you know, a real ally of mine on that front. And you have a blog, Why Evolution is True, that you do most of that writing on. And now you have a couple of books. The first, Why Evolution is True, where you go into the details of answering that question. And your new one, Faith Versus Fact, Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, deals with the

collision between science and religion very directly and very usefully. It's a book I highly recommend people read. What percentage of your time now are you allocating toward doing primary science, and what percent is this more public communication of science slash defense of science against unreason? Well, I'm sort of at the tail end of my scientific career. I turned 65 and I'm actually going to retire within a year. So the amount of new research I'm doing is zero, but I'm cleaning up what I have done, which means writing the final papers that I got on my last grants and everything. So right now I'm, and I've been halftime for about a year and a half. So right now I'm segwaying from science into, you know,

more public kind of journalism, writing, et cetera. So right now, you know, I'd spent, I probably spent about 80% of my time doing the latter and 20% of it doing straight science. Cause that's just consists of writing up the research that I haven't finished writing up yet. Right. Well, the thing you focus on in the new book is this phenomenon that we've come to call accommodationism. Can you explain what that is? And did you coin this word? Where did this word come from? Did you coin this word? Where did this word come from? Coin is a good verb for that.

I think I did, but I'm not sure. It's one of those words that I use a lot, and I think people got from me, but I'm not sure I'm the originator of it. So since I don't know that, I'm not going to claim credit for that neologism. But it is a good one, and people have picked it up. In terms of what it means, it's a view that is held by both believers, agnostics, and atheists themselves sometimes, that there is no inherent conflict or any kind of conflict between science and religion. There are various ways that you can couch that compatibility thing, but that's basically the view, that there is no conflict between the

two areas. And was the first clear and clearly wrongheaded expression of this Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisteria? Where do we get this notion of fundamental compatibility? Yeah, actually, he's the guy that made it famous, but I think I have actually the book here. I can find the first expression of it in 1925 by Alfred North Whitehead. I just have a quote from him here that says that, remember the widely different aspects of events which were dealt with in science and religion respectively. Science is concerned with the general conditions which are observed to regulate physical phenomena, whereas religion is wholly wrapped up in the contemplation of moral and aesthetic values

on the one side there's the law of gravitation and on the other the contemplation of the beauty of holiness what one side sees the other misses and vice versa so that's why it hit in 1925 and just been cooled by 74 years saying basically the same thing that it's the separate magisteria view gould of course made the view famous because he was a famous scientist. The public lapped up his works, and he wrote a whole book on this, what he calls the NOMA, or non-overlapping magisteria hypothesis. Plus, everybody loved the idea, you know, why can't we all get along? That's a very popular idea.

You can't be wrong if you say something like that. And, you know, it was a famous book. But, you know, you see this kind of view of non-overlapping magisteria scattered throughout the discussion of science and religion, you know, throughout the 20th century. Just to be clear about what non-overlapping magisteria are, the idea is that there are these two domains of expertise that are separate, and one is the purview of religion, the other is the purview of science, and they don't overlap. So in principle, there can be no conflict between science and religion. That's correct, because it's like a Venn diagram with two circles that don't intersect,

so there's no overlap. I mean, I think Gould was badly wrong about that, but that was his thesis. One sphere, just to be clear, is the domain of investigating what's real in the universe, and the other domain, Gould said, was the bailiwick of meaning, morals, and values, which is the religious circle. I just can never understand why this idea has a half-life of more than like 90 seconds among smart people. Because clearly, clearly every religion is making claims about certain invisible things and certain ultimate fates really existing for people and souls and various corners of the cosmos. There are invisible spirits. There are souls.

There are gods. There's a hell you can go to or successfully avoid. These are all claims about the way the universe is and how someone like Gould could think they don't trespass on the terrain of science. I can't even begin to see how this confusion is arising in someone like him. I think this book is a bit disingenuous. I knew Steve. He was on my thesis committee, and he was a diehard atheist, if there ever was one. I don't know if this book was like a psychological burp in him or that it was a gambit to gain

popularity with the public. I just find it hard to believe knowing Steve. I mean, he's passed on now that he would really believe this. But, you know, when faced with the kind of argument you made, which I agree with 100%, that almost all religions, there may be a few outliers, make statements about what is real in the universe, Google would claim that that's not real religion. So, for example, creationism, which is a staple of Christianity in the United States and is accepted by about 43% of all Americans,

young earth creationism, is a tenet of Protestantism, of many Protestants. And that's a claim about the real world. I mean, Genesis talks about basically how old the earth is, if you calculate it back. It talks about everything being formed at once. It makes statements about Noah's flood. But all of these things are not only scientific statements, but they're scientifically checkable. So, you know, what Gould did when faced with that is he said, well, that's not real science.

I mean, sorry, that's not real religion. That's, I don't even remember what he calls it. I talk about it in my book. But he finessed the problem by just defining away as not religious those statements that religion makes about reality. And so, of course, you know, tautologically, he was correct. But it doesn't make sense. And theologians have glommed on to this evasive maneuver he made. Now, you know, in some circles, it's still popular to deny that religion does not make statements about reality. There was an article by Tanya Luhrmann in last Sunday's New York Times referring to another paper by a, I think a Belgian philosopher, who claims that religious statements of fact

aren't the same as the kind of fact that we think of when we say there's a table here, or, you know, the earth is 10,000 years old. They're what he calls statements of religious credence. They don't have the same factual or epistemic content as factual statements. So there's a whole lot of so-called sophisticated religious people who take a different tack from Gould and claim that religion is not about factual statements at all. And, you know, I would take issue with that, and I assume you would, too. So, you know, they, too, would sign on with Noah. But most theologians have rejected Steve's statement because—just on the religious side, because they recognize that their own faith

makes claims about reality. To take Christianity as the example, if you think that Jesus really existed, you're making a claim about a historical person. And if you think that he really survived his death and in some sense persists and can hear your prayers, and that he may be coming back to earth to raise the dead in turn. You're making claims about biology. You're making claims about the human survival of death. You're making claims about telepathic powers of a now invisible carpenter. You're making very likely claims about human flight without the aid of technology. It's very frustrating. And this is, as you, I think, suggested, also related to the idea that many people have that religious beliefs don't actually lead to any significant human behavior in this

world because religious beliefs are, in principle, vacuous and they're only about solidarity and community and finding this nebulous meaning in life, they don't actually lead to concrete behaviors that we need to worry about. So jihadism is not the result of what any specific Muslims believe. It's politics, it's economics, and so religious belief is not worth worrying about. It's an attitude that many of our fellow atheists hold, It's an attitude that many of our fellow atheists hold, and therefore they see no reason to oppose people's religious certainties, even when they're seeming to encroach in the public sphere and in the kinds of public policies, whether it's opposition to gay marriage or embryonic stem cell research or whatever it is in the context of the United States. And I find it incredibly frustrating to interact with this kind of denialism, which is the other side of what you're calling accommodationism.

Yeah, it's interesting. There's actually two claims there. The first one is that religion does not make any meaningful statements about reality and the second claim which can be separate from that is that religious beliefs don't lead to behavior i mean those things aren't necessarily connected with one another but it'd be an interesting exercise to see if those people who claim that religious beliefs don't have epistemic content are the same people who deny that, you know, for example, belief in the Quran leads to suicide bombing. I think somebody like Karen Armstrong would instantiate both of those views. She has this apophatic view of religion that you

can't say anything about God. And of course, she goes around and claims that everything bad that religious people do is not based on religion themselves. Yeah. Well, Scott Atran, the anthropologist, has linked those two ideas very explicitly in the way he talks about Islam, that these beliefs, religious beliefs, are in principle vacuous. They have no propositional content about the world that could motivate anybody to do anything differently, and therefore nobody does anything differently on their basis, i.e. nobody blows himself up for that reason. Yeah, I was going to say, I think we had something like a bit of this conversation when you were here in Chicago last, and I would like to ask those people, okay, what would it take to convince you

that they really were motivated by religion? I mean, they're like theologians in a way that there's nothing you can tell them to disabuse them or no evidence whatsoever that would convince them that they're being motivated by religion because they can always think of a way that it's something else. So I like to ask them to write down a list of, okay, what would it take you to show that?

I mean, I saw your interchange with Tron, I guess it was in 2006. I read that yesterday, and I was simply astounded that he could say the things he did about it. And then you showed a video of a Muslim preacher reciting from the Quran, and you said it was very moving. And I looked at that, and it was. The words were beautiful. The musicality was great. And he was talking about hellfire and how you know and people were weeping you know it's hard to believe that any kind of emotional reaction like that

could not be caused by belief in the propositions that the preacher is actually laying out at the time it wasn't the music that was making them cry it was the fact that they were part of this great movement of belief so i think to anybody who's not blinkered by some kind of accommodationist desires it's palpably obvious that so much behavior is motivated by religious belief i mean look at creationists if they don't really believe in the tenets of genesis why are they trying to force them to be taught to everybody in schools why are they opposing evolution if it's just some kind of metaphor that they see in Genesis? I don't think that's the case. I think they really do believe that the words of Genesis are true, and that's borne out by polls that show that a substantial proportion of Americans take the Bible as literal

truth. Yeah, and you made in that conversation in Chicago the very useful observation, which I have now reiterated many times, which is this is a double standard that people like Atran and Armstrong and everyone else has not copped to because they never ask that we justify or that we doubt the political or economic rationales put forward for human behavior. So for instance, when someone like a member of the KKK says, I'm doing all this stuff because I hate black people, you know, I'm really a racist and this is my core political ideology. Nobody doubts that racist hatred of black people is really motivating this person. We would never try to look for an underlying motive there that negates the claim that he is in fact really racist. But when we have someone expressing their religious opinions or their religious expectations, the idea that they're going to get into paradise behaving a certain way, or the idea that homosexuality is anathema to God, the accommodationists insist upon finding some layer below that,

which is the true reason why a person is behaving as he is. Yeah, this is a good example of confirmation bias. I mean, theologians behave the same way. You know, they'll accept evidence that substantiates their religious beliefs, but anything that goes against it, they, you know, they reject or work it into their, you know, worldview somehow. These accommodationists, in terms that goes against it, they reject or work it into their worldview somehow. These accommodationists in terms of politics and religion are exactly the same way. And I can't help but believe that this is just one more symptom of the unwarranted respect that people have for religion and faith. They just cannot bring themselves to claim that religion could

make anybody do anything bad. I mean, if people like us can admit that religion can sometimes make people do good, I don't see why they can't admit the same thing on their side. Yeah. And let's put a finer point on that, because I freely admit that religion can cause people to do extraordinary things which are good and many of which could be unthinkable, but for that specific person's religious beliefs. It's certainly possible that there are people who would only go to Africa to aid in a famine because of what they believe about Jesus and about the importance of spreading his word, and that those same people couldn't find a truly rational,

and that those same people couldn't find a truly rational secular motive to behave that way. It's not to say that rational secular motives don't exist, but for any one person, it's quite possible that he's not going to get out of bed in the morning and do good, but for believing certain irrational things about God or about his fate after death. That's totally possible, and there seems no reason to deny that. Yeah, that's another example of the double standard. I mean, if we can admit that religion is such a psychological motivator, that it will drive missionaries to places that are, well, God-forsaken in both respects, and sacrifice basically their well-being and their lives to do this kind of stuff, why do they deny that it could

also motivate people to do things that we consider bad, but they consider good for their religion? I don't really understand the whole thing, except that the people that usually do that show this overweening respect for faith. Yeah. Now, so what do you make of someone like Francis Collins? Because obviously one argument that we hear for the compatibility between science and religion is essentially an existence proof in the person of someone like Francis Collins, is here you have a scientist who is a working scientist who is in fact, in Collins's case, an evangelical Christian. So there it is, proof that science and religion are compatible. And he says that they're not only compatible,

but mutually supportive. What do you make of the riddle of his mind? Well, there's two claims there. The first one is compatibility. The second is spatial support. I would take the second one first and say that that's... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, Thank you. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.