A good Unscientific America reviewed

Jason Rosenhouse has a good review of the Mooney/Kirshenbaum Unscientific America.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

It is a nice read, digging into the serious problems of the book.

The science blogosphere has been buzzing about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, the new book by former SciBlings Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. For whatever reason everyone else seems to have received their review copies before I did, and I did not want to weigh in until I had read the book.

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Short review: Mixed, but generally negative. Much of the book is very superficial and I don't think their proposed solutions are practical.

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Some good lines:

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In fact, education researchers have found that defusing the tension over science and religion facilitates learning about evolution. “I submit that anti-religious rehtoric is counter-productive. It actually hampers science education,” a biologist at Davis and Elkins College in West Virgina. In Stover's view, students who feel that evolution is a threat to their beliefs will not “want to learn,” and only reconiliatory discussion can open them up to evolution. (p. 183)

It is painful to read such things. Isn't it just groaningly obvious that the problem here is the attitude that places religious faith in a privileged position relative to science? M and K tell us that people value faith over science, and from this they conclude that Richard Dawkins is the problem? Stover tells us that students don't want to learn until you assure them that you will leave their religious beliefs unchallenged, and his advice is that we should not be criticizing religion?

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Of course, the New Atheists aren't the origin of the cleft between religious and scientific culture in America -- they're more like a reaction to it. (p. 98) (Emphasis in original)

Exactly right. Surely, though, this shows that the idea of a rift between science and religion had no trouble propagating itself long before the New Atheists arrived on the scene. The rift exists becuase there really is a conflict between science and religion generally, and Christianity and evolution specifically. This simple fact is not contradicted by the existence of religious scientists or by the existence of forms of Christianity that have made their peace with evoluition. Saying there is a conflict between A and B does not mean that A and B are mutually exclusive. (In fairness, M and K acknowledge this on pages 101-102.)

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I wonder if M and K would write such things if we were talking about ghosts instead of God. Are scientists helpless to argue against the existence of ghosts? Everything we know about human anatomy suggests that personality and whatnot are the products of physical phenomena in the brain; they die with the body. Countless claims of alleged hauntings have been investigated and perfectly natural explanations have been found. Are we being unreasonable in saying, based on such evidence, that it is unlikely that ghosts exist? If someone claimed that science has cast real doubt on the existence of ghosts, can we count on M and K to rush in and accuse them of making philosophical claims and of overstepping their proper bounds?

How do we use the methodological naturalism of science to say something about the possible existence of supernatural entities? The same way we use it to detect the existence of neutrinos, which also can not be perceived directly with our senses. We look for their effects on the natural world. We may not be able to control supernatural entities, but we can certainly search for their effects on the natural objects we do control (or at least understand). We can search for things in the natural world that can only be plausibly explained by recourse to supernatural entities. That we consistently fail to find them is surely relevant in assessing the likelihood of God's existence.

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