Mr. Daily Show,
In general, I love you guys and think you are insightful regarding many of today’s issues.
However, the Marilynne Robinson interview revealed both her ignorance and, sadly, yours. (I don’t want to blame Jon Stewart only, as I suspect there are other culprits!)
Ms. Robinson imagines a conflict between science and religion and then imagines that imaginary conflict shouldn’t exist.
I could write seven essays on the problems with the ideas expressed in this interview, but uh… I’ve got stuff to do. And so do you. So here’s seven sentences:
1.) Science never relies on faith (where “faith” is the belief in a fact despite the absence of evidence that can be generated in repeatable controlled experiments).
2.) When science proposes something like, “Dark Matter (not anti-matter, buddy) makes up most of the universe, but we don’t know what it is and we can’t detect it,” it’s not stating that as a fact or a belief.
3.) Rather, science relies on proposing possible explanations for phenomena, then proposing tests to prove or disprove those phenomena, while never claiming proof of things that can not be proven (like the existence or non-existence of God).
4.) Religion relies on mythological and untestable explanations for phenomena, and is increasingly met with scientific facts that eliminate what is mythological and shrink what is untestable.
5.) Science is ambivalent to religion because science is ambivalent to anything that isn’t an observable, measurable, repeatable natural fact.
6.) Religion must struggle with science because it constantly expands our knowledge into crevices of thought that displace long-held and comforting beliefs – like the observation of evolution displaces creationism, and continued study of abnormal psychology ousts evil spirits, or an understanding of cognitive processes casts doubts on the soul.
7.) Ultimately, religion must learn to evolve if it’s going to survive; it must adapt itself into a cultural spine for helping guide those who are lost and advise those who are facing ethical dilemmas (which it always claims are its goals), but it must abandon the threats, the myths and the nonsense.
Yeah, the semi-colon was a bit of cheating.
Love,
Chuck