However, and strangely, the vast majority of the objections that creationists have brought up with me specifically have been to physics and geology, not biology.

I would wonder if that has as much to do with going after you with something that is not your specialty and which ultimately may then infringe on evobio.

Russel –

I think that is a mistake. First, there’s no operational definition of “natural” that allows us to identify what should be withheld from critical inspection. If the gods, why not also chupacabras and homeopathy? Maybe homeopathy works by some “supernatural force” that science is unable to suss out. And so, like angels, we should exempt it from critical examination. That’s nonsense, of course. But how do you counter it, once you set the kind of “naturalistic” boundary?

The problem with that, is that it is not generally atheists who are setting up a naturalistic boundary. I sincerely doubt that Greg is trying to argue for naturalistic boundaries, rather I think he is recognizing an extremely common pattern that is of course wrought with the very logical fallacy you are describing. But that it is an inherent logical fallacy doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.

Note I am not saying it makes critiquing ideas that are dependent on that fallacy problematic, just that it makes actual persuasion problematic.

At the same time, I think it does leave a reasonable opening as well. When I was still religious, I believed that if my religious beliefs were correct then they were potentially falsifiable. I picked that up when I was eleven and had the opportunity to meet Carl Sagan after a lecture in Ann Arbor that my dad took me to. Sagan was very kind to me, but also challenging – he simply asked me that if my religious beliefs were true, then what difference would there be between those beliefs and any other aspect of the natural world.

This is a discussion that I had many times over the years, with very positive results. Though I am sure that my own religious beliefs made a difference, when you couch it in those terms it is rather difficult to argue. I have continued to have some positive results with this position and while it is definitely not the last nail in the coffin of a person’s faith (mine took twenty some years to finally lose out), it is a significant milestone on the road to accepting science as a preferable explanation of the universe, than religion.

Biology takes more studying? While the ramifications of physics may be literally infinite and while the basic fact of evolution is a mathematical certainty, the details of how variability occurs, genes translate into traits, and natural selection occurs are highly particular and often unique to one location. It may take more work to extract the lesson of evolution from all of its particulars. So, unless you’ve studied it and seen at least a little of how it manifests itself, it’s easier to dismiss out of sheer ignorance.

For example, it’s easy to see the spots of wild guppies as random decoration rather than the camouflage it is (see last chapter of The Beak of the Finch). Furthermore, it takes study of the species in its native habitat to prove that the spots work as camouflage: funding, grad students, seasons are expended. And you’ve proven one small point about one critter in one place.

Religious arguments can be, and often are, “dismissed” by being avoided, via the naturalistic boundary condition of science. Science does not do religion or superstition, plain and simple.

I think that is a mistake. First, there’s no operational definition of “natural” that allows us to identify what should be withheld from critical inspection. If the gods, why not also chupacabras and homeopathy? Maybe homeopathy works by some “supernatural force” that science is unable to suss out. And so, like angels, we should exempt it from critical examination. That’s nonsense, of course. But how do you counter it, once you set the kind of “naturalistic” boundary?

Second, and what this points out, is that bad reasoning is bad reasoning, no matter the subject to which it is applied.

The notion of “non-overlapping magisteria” strikes me as convenient nonsense. It’s convenient to the religious, who want to protect their faith, and to the “compatibilists,” who want to pretend that the practice of science isn’t a risk to faith. If, teaching a science class, some student were to ask about gods or demons, I would answer honestly that the course is focused on a particular topic, but that students should be abstracting from the kinds of evidence and methods discussed how to evaluate evidence and methods more generally.

However, and strangely, the vast majority of the objections that creationists have brought up with me specifically have been to physics and geology, not biology.

Students or not, you have just (perhaps unwittingly) shifted your terms. For someone who makes a point of distinguishing the implications of the word “from” in phrases like “humans evolved from [xyz]…” I must say that is highly uncharacteristic. Who are you and what have you done with Greg? 😉

But to the point, you went from talking about scientists in the original post to talking about creationists in the blockquote portion of this comment. The overlap between those groups, while certainly not nonexistant, is notably small. Further, the latter has a reason to explicitly deny nearly all of science in order to hold up a much more distinct religious view that, say, someone who just really bought in to the Intelligent Design BS doesn’t have to worry about.

Yes! But, I’d say that there is a more intermediate (less large) level of argument that could be more important.

Religious arguments can be, and often are, “dismissed” by being avoided, via the naturalistic boundary condition of science. Science does not do religion or superstition, plain and simple. And I’m as happy as the next educator/science communicator to stick with that position most of the time.

But lately I’ve noticed that religion is getting away with something that they should not get away with, and that is the scientific falsification of religions hypotheses that in fact can be falsified. There are many many many such hypotheses. Indeed, the rise of scientific (natural) explanations for the diversity and form of life, and for the geological record over religions ones in Western academia is NOT purely a recognition that science does not do religion, but rather, the explicit falsification of religion based hypotheses about why adaptations exist, the age of the earth, the noachian flood, etc.

I agree with what you say here. However, and strangely, the vast majority of the objections that creationists have brought up with me specifically have been to physics and geology, not biology. (I’m talking primarily about students.)