Today we had another SSA meeting, and this time we asked Dr. Shorey to speak. Dr. Shorey is probably my favorite professor I have had thus far at Mines. He teaches one of the core classes, Earth and Environmental systems, and so most students have had him at one point or another. Apparently they had another professor do it one year, and there was enough of a public outcry that Shorey returned. His class is extremely easy-- not because of the subject matter, but because of the way he teaches. He has pre-written objectives, from which all the test questions will be pulled, so you know what you need to take notes on and what you need to study. And he has a podcast of every subject he covers in the class, in case you have to miss for some reason. But mostly, he's awesome because he is very, very enthusiastic.
When we started talking about this group, someone mentioned that they had been talking to him about being a faculty advisor, and I was a little surprised-- in one of his podcasts (specifically the one on evolution) he states that he is a christian. Apparently that is out of date; he was very keen to help us get started, and he has connections and all kinds of useful things to offer.
Today he spoke about religion. He began by declaring himself an agnostic secular humanist, which he then defined: agnostic because he doesn't know about afterlife or the supernatural, secular because if he doesn't know, he's not going to make decisions based upon those things, and humanist because to him, the most important thing is the survival and well-being of the human race. I rather like that definition, as well as that label. He then spoke about what he called the elephant in the room-- religion. Apparently the word comes from two cells, "re," meaning back, and "ligio," meaning tied to. So religion, based on this, is something that ties us back. To what? Dr. Shorey stated that he believes it ties us back to each other, to a belief that we are all connected and important in some way.
He spoke then about myths-- he is fond of the hindu myth regarding the face of glory, and fond of myths in general, and in that, I agree. He says that he certainly does not believe them to be true, but that there is worth in them anyway. Then he talked about the anthropic principle a bit, and I think he was a little too soft on the idea of the strong anthropic principle. (The weak anthropic principle states that of course the universe is "fine-tuned" for life; if it wasn't, we wouldn't be here to wonder about it. The strong anthropic principle involves the idea that we are necessary for the universe to exist or continue existing, which I find rather silly.)
Then he talked about whether science and religion were compatible, and here is where I disagree with him. He didn't come out and say it, but he appeared to support the idea of Non-Overlapping Magisteria, or NOMA. What NOMA states is that science answers one kind of quesiton, and religion another, and they therefore can coexist as long as they don't try to deal with the other's subject matter. I disagree. For one, religion seems to step into science's domain, if you want to think of them as separate, all the time. Fundamentalists especially want to step in and say that science is wrong, but really, all of them do it. They believe prayer can heal, and they believe miracles can break the laws of physics, and they want to define where life begins for their own morality's sake. And yet when science tries to step into their domain-- that's intolerance!
It goes deeper than that-- what IS the domain of religion, exactly? It used to be that it spoke on everything from the causes of the weather to dietary restrictions. Now we know better-- that's science's domain now. Religion can talk about an afterlife... sure. Science cannot yet say whether there is any point to that. I think the presence of a soul-- a non-physical, animating thing which makes us who we are-- is absolutely a scientific question, and that it doesn't look terribly good for the supernatural claims at this point. Does religion dictate morality? HELL no. As they say, it takes religion to make a good man do evil things. Should science dictate morality? It's got a much better angle on it, as far as I am concerned.
But at the core, the problem is that the very basis of all science and the basis of all religion are at odds, as far as I can tell. Religion asks that you believe, without proof-- the more you believe, the "better" you are. Science asks that you put every hypothesis to the test. The less you believe, without evidence, the better a scientist you are. And the religious reliance on faith, on believing in spite of evidence, is, I think, harmful to the human race. It teaches people NOT to hold their ideas up to examination. It teaches people that "I don't know" means "god did it," rather than "let's find out."
In any case, I very strongly disagree with the idea of NOMA. Other than that, though, today's meeting went very well, and Dr. Shorey filmed his talk, so hopefully I'll be able to share it soon. For the moment, I need to head to bed, it's been a long day and I've a long weekend ahead of me.
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