Science & Religion @ Hampshire

Hampshire College's Science and Religion has sponsored some great lectures in the past academic year. I just learned that videos are available for two of the lectures at Google Video. Way to go, Hampshire!

Here's what you can see:

Natural and Supernatural: Historical Perspectives on Miracles and the Order of Nature
Lawrence Principe
April 12, 2007

"In the popular press and daily conversation we often hear events casually described as miracles. This abusive use of the term, however, leads us to forget that the word has a precise and highly-restricted theological meaning that was developed over centuries of scholarly investigation, particularly in the Latin Middle Ages. This lecture illustrates how precise discussions of miracles opened up crucial questions about the way the world works and the way in which human beings are able to study and understand it using the method we now call science. Indeed, several current science/religion issues are illuminated or resolved by a careful consideration of the miracles."

Lawrence Principe is Professor of chemistry & History of Science, Medicine &
Technology at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle And his Alchemical Quest.

Evolution and Religion: Two sideshows and the main event
David Sloan Wilson
March 8, 2007

"Evolution and Religion are perennially in the news, but not for the right reasons. On the one hand we have debates about creationism and intelligent design. On the other hand, we have attacks on religion by evolutionists such as Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell and Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. Both of these are sideshows compared to the main event: The serious study of religion as a natural phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective. I will review the nascent field of evolutionary religious studies and what it means for the more general study of cultural evolution, evolutionary psychology, and the quality of everyday life."


David Sloan Wilson is distinguished professor of biology with a joint appointment in anthropology at Binghamton University. He is also founder and director of EvoS, a campus-wide program that uses evolutionary theory as a common language for studying all human-related subjects in addition to the natural world. His books include Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (with Elliott Sober), Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (co-edited with Jonathan Gotschall), and his first book for a general audience: Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives. More about Wilson from Cogscilibrarian.

See Wilson here:

"The Crusade Against Religion"

Been meaning to post about the November 2006 article in Wired magazine called The Crusade Against Religion, but time kept slipping away. Plus, I didn't much agree with the article, and now that I've heard a counter argument to the "new atheism", I'm more comfortable with it.

The "New Atheists" would ask us (scientists, mostly, I think, but also the population at large) "Where do you stand on God?"

"The New Atheists ... condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil. ... Three writers have sounded this call to arms. They are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett." Gary Wolf, author of the Wired article, interviewed all three of them about the new atheism and wrote this thought-provoking article.

Wolf concludes: "The irony of the New Atheism -- this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism -- is too much for me."

Religion: Spandrel or Adaptation?

Have you been following the debate over religion & science? Whether you have or not, if you're interested, you should definitely check out Darwin's God, an article in Sunday's New York Times magazine. Robin Marantz Henig summarizes the debate on both sides in clear prose that is not (imho) inflammatory.

The main question is: "are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?"

In this corner, we have ... Byproduct Theorists, who argue that religion is a "spandrel", which Henig describes thusly:

"Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed 'spandrel' to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align." (see the wikipedia definition of spandrel.)

The spandrel could be a result of one or more of these three cognitive tools: agent detection, causal reasoning, and/or theory of mind.

Spandrelists (great name) do not necessarily agree that religion or belief in God "offered an adaptive advantage to our ancestors."

Adaptionists, in the other corner, think that "even if a trait offers no survival advantage today, it might have had one long ago."

David Sloan Wilson, evolutionary biologist at SUNY Binghamton, "staked out the adaptationist view. 'Through countless generations of variation and selection, [organisms] acquire properties that enable them to survive and reproduce in their environments. My purpose is to see if human groups in general, and religious groups in particular, qualify as organismic in this sense' " in his 2002 book Darwin's cathedral : evolution, religion, and the nature of society.

(side note: How does this relate to me? I'm going to see him speak this afternoon at Hampshire College.)

Henig's article is important reading if you are interested in this topic!