An hour with Dr. Eugenie Scott

from woodruff auditorium in the kansas union k pr presents an hour with dr eugenie scott i'm kay macintyre dr scott is the executive director of the national center for science education and a vocal critic of teaching creationism an intelligent design in schools this lecture was the third inmate difficult dialogues uncommon series on ballads faith and reason co sponsored by the hall center for the humanities and the biodiversity institute at the university of kansas and now here is that through reaching thigh questions of faith and science seemed to be unusually contentious these days in american society now as you heard my day job is monitoring and keeping track of what goes on in the creationism and evolution controversy and obviously this is one place where the action or intersection or are actually isn't as it were over some forms of religious faith and sciences and during and indeed the people who object

to evolution predominantly in the united states are members of conservative christian denominations but there also is some opposition to evolution in other middle eastern monotheism so like christianity judaism and islam but we're not here to talk about the creation and evolution controversy this evening we're here to talk about science and religion but i think perhaps part of the reason why we have this problem with the creation and evolution is because people don't really know what size is good for and what its limitations are and people don't really understand a religion and what its strengths and limitations as well i think one of the messages that are have tonight is that we should indeed render unto science what needs to be rendered into science which is explaining the natural world and quite frankly it wouldn't hurt us to maybe do a little rendering into religion china for what religion is better but when you talk about science and

religion i suggest we have to step back out before we can talk about science and religion which are ways that we look at the idea the universe is human and the natural world in which we exist shift i suggest we think for just a moment about the what the philosophers of science called epistemology is see when you go to university when big words like that ok i'm ways of knowing and they're basically are three major ways of knowing going to philosophers of science there's authority and we all do you is authoritarian ways of knowing sometimes emphasis actually not necessarily all that happening you you can sort of imagine the adaptive most of authoritarian ways of knowing especially for children and this is very likely goes back very deep anti my i suspect when when the pleistocene mom said don't use the saber tooth it was generally speaking quite adaptive for sunny to pay

attention to this and not to tease the saber tooth you are much more likely to pass on your genes if you follow what your parents tell your parents are of course the first authority with many other authorities and our own them in our lives i come from california and one of the young a popular bumper sticker is that you see a lot in the east bay where lived a berkeley etc this question authority i met my native instinct whenever i see that bumper stickers do i wish i had a magic marker because i would i would edit that question authority but stop at stop signs sir and so far it is certainly one very important type of way of knowing and we all use it i it's not always the best thing for are some decisions that we have to make but its not uncommon that when it comes to particle physics for example i

acquiesce to the authority of steve weinberg but i'll explain a little bit later around why that's not quite the same kind of authority his donkeys d is the saber tooth a subdivision of the authority way of knowing his revelation to revelation prefers to knowledge that is acquired by supernatural sources in american christianity for example on deals with revelation through the bible islam deals with revelation is very concerned with revelations to the program the hindu believe that the veterans are under finally revealed so many many religions not most around the world do have some concept of of authority generated through revelation you believe in the bible you believe in the qur'an because it as an authoritative source of knowledge they're also exists in the ways of knowing the notion that you can understand things throughout

a personal state of being or or particular insight you might develop something that comes from within back when i was a college student back in the sixties there were a number of people who experimented with states of metal being told that there were brought about by substances of various kinds i'm sure that college students today are fast well beyond that but that sort of from a drug induced term ways of a people and people would wake up and they think that they had great insights into the world in a number of musicians still believe that that is where most of their best stuff so we don't have this is as a recognized way of knowing many people meditate and believe that they come to a knowledge that way and so so this is another category now the trouble with these kinds of her small areas of insight is that they tend not to be very

persuasive to other people if i am a young mom or indian down in the idea of rain forest of the amazon and i believe that the yard and heckled the spirits have entered me and there are telling me why a someone in my tribe has said you're probably not going to be very persuaded by that that that i have this insight based on this this spiritual on infusion a similarly the christian tradition many people had a born again experience they believed that they they will describe it as having been filled with the spirit and this is a very real experience to people who have undergone this to people who have not undergone this kind of a an experience it doesn't make sense it's not as rita so individual states may be extremely important to an individual but not they don't transfer very well they often are very culturally specific and obviously and that particular individuals experience may

not be relevant to somebody else's the third way of knowing indeed that ways of knowing chart that i have here though is if you're listening to this on the radio you're not missing a whole lot this very boring guy there is science and sciences at a different way of knowing than the other two the scientific way of knowing deep hands on an incurable evidence that a period it depends on observations of depends on an experiential acquisition of knowledge and also as i will discuss it also has to do with the testing and hester making influenza so it's really a very different kind of way of knowing then i'm ways of the way of knowing throughout authority personal or internal state or research mission you heard it and victors introduction of me that i described science is a limited way knowing him and i do believe that this

is important for people to understand that there are people who do describe sciences this hedge monica epistemology year to which every other way of knowing this meal and i don't believe this i think science is an extraordinarily important way of knowing to me it is the most important way of knowing but it is a limited way of knowing and let me tell you what i mean by that i believe that science is limited in two ways it's limited to explaining just the natural world first of all science is not going to tell you about the relationship of you to god or gods or ancestor spirits are the heck about science is not going to tell you anything about anything other than the material universe about the universe of matter and energy and their interactions which we are very familiar with baby the universe of this some wooden podium that i'm sitting at an anti air that we're reading in soho the second way that science is a limit is

science is limited is that it's limited to explaining through natural causes now why do we limit science to explain financial cause well because of testing which i'll talk about in more detail our testing involves holding constant certain variables i which you'll understood when you took seventh grade science cause that's part of everybody's seventh grade science it we control variables what you hold them customers are they were talking about here yes there is an omnipotent force in the universe if there are supernatural forces in the universe or outside of universal forces that interacts with the universe in some fashion you cannot hold their effects constant and one one way to put it you can't go out and test it you can control for the actions of supernatural powers by definition whether they exist or not you can use them as part of a scientific explanation

so science is limited by the nature of science to using only natural cause but you know something it works really well it it has a way of knowing that has given us over the last several hundred years a phenomenal understanding of this material world in which we live and for that alone it is hugely valuable another reason why we respect her sustenance for cause is that if we allow ourselves to say boy this is a really tough problem i'm really having problems understanding this particular natural our forests are natural situation the origin of life as a crisis and we don't yet have an agreement among scientists about an unnatural origin of that first replicating structure the first replicating so it's a really tough problem let's just give up and say god did it well as soon as we give up looking for natural cause i guarantee you we won't find them if there are natural causes out there we have to

keep looking for them or we will never find them so another reason why we limit science to natural causes that it keeps us honest it keeps us looking now sometimes it takes a long time to explain things sometimes we have to just set a problem aside until we develop maybe instrumentation or a more sophisticated theoretical structure to examine a problem sometimes we just have to say we don't know yet and they get is very important so science is limited to explaining just the natural world using natural processes that there are scientists you had and the esteemed richard dawkins speaking to you earlier program within the same series wonderful speaker i'm sure you all enjoyed hearing him greatly his friend mike richardson has said and the gracious loved going on this that the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there

is at bottom no design no purpose no evildoer no good nothing but blind people listen difference with which by the way we completely out but where richard invited to part company on this is that he believes that this conclusion is compelled by science i believe it is compatible with science but it is not compelled by science and i'll explain a little bit later on why i feel that way what this confuses is the idea of a restriction of explanation and science to natural cause what we call methodological naturalism and something called philosophical naturalism which is the point of view the ridges it's expressing the spirit that there is no supernatural there is no god there are no ancestor spirits market for nothing other than the world the universe of matter and energy we're most familiar with and obviously this is a very old idea but in my opinion although science is

compatible with that is it's not compelled us let's talk a little bit about the nature of science i mentioned testing was very important science and unfortunately the idea of testing is not one that the american public really associates with science unfortunately the national research council of the national science foundation a couple of years publishes a r m study called science and engineering indicators and others lots of information in here about science and science education and technology and the rest but they also ask a bunch of questions of american citizens about their understanding of both science as a way of knowing as well as their understanding of specific thaksin concept of science we dont do really well in these the surface but i want to talk about dirty understanding of science as a way of knowing one of the questions that they ask is to our request to be out the adult american to describe

science in your own words and what they can to find in these surveys is where science has to do with amassing a lot of facts and science has to do with collecting lots and lots of observations they don't look at science as testing explanations of testing theories and they don't look at science in in the fashion that scientists look and then in case recall was a tough way to ask people questions they also ask the respondents of this questionnaire that sets and telephone survey they ask them to choose between two hypothetical scenarios and i don't expect you to read this causes very fine print i don't use a favor of blowing it up here are two research strategies you want to test a blood pressure medicine one test would be to give the drug to a thousand people and measure how many of them have decreased actually that's one way to a second way to give the drug to five hundred people with high blood pressure and don't give

the drug to another five hundred people with high blood pressure and then see at the end of a period of time how many have lowered the pitch casey hears to research scenarios which one is more scientific ok boys and girls how many of you think number one is more scientific oh you guys how many of you think number two that's better and you're better than about forty to forty three percent of american citizens to answer that question because most of them didn't know the basic idea of how to set up a scientific text while clearly when you set up a scientific test what you are doing is you are controlling for certain variables in the blood pressure example here they had they controlled for high blood pressure they both a test group as well as the control group both of them had high blood pressure so we know that that's the one you want a test is does the medicine work and that's really what you're trying to figure out they had outlets would have had to control for a number of other things as

well and a blood pressure differs by sex so maybe they have all males girl i mean you want you could cook has pretty well i i couldn't have females get the drug and nelson had hit the drug and i guarantee you the drug would show the difference at the end of the period that wouldn't be a fair test would because man tend to have a higher blood pressure and famously or stacking the deck when you're doing ma properly conduct a test like this is you're really stacking the deck against your explanation you're trying to set up as many things as possible that might possibly explain what you're trying to test so that the only thing that can explain that in this case the lower blood pressure is this strike that's the idea behind a test now yes but you're also in white isn't she use the word in this case the emerging experiment why doesn't she talk about experiments cause that's what i just described yes indeed but i tend not to

use the word experiment because when people hear the word experiment and this is what they think they think about people in laboratories in white coats and you're pouring things from one beaker to another and yet there's this kind of inflexible idea about experiments that that i that i hate that seems to be ingrained in people's minds oh i very rarely use the word experiment just like a very rarely used the word use that word theory but that's another reason i am what we're talking about here is my way of testing an explanation and you know you can do it outside of the laboratory aren't there a lot of field tests where you are in fact testing explanations but you're doing it through observational kind of research design you can control for variables observational eu country control for them statistically you can use computer models you can you can control different variables even if you're sitting in a blind on the coast watching birds or something now the idea of testing

explanations using computer modeling as just kind of a fun idea and i have a i have an example here that i would just like to play with you with i mean if you go to the web and you google holiday lectures hughes foundation you will find some wonderful online resources if your teacher this is a particularly wonderful place to go and there's a really great lecture by a biologist from the university of wisconsin madison named sean carroll and it and one of it in this great lecture on the us' holiday lectures that that's posted there he has this really great example of natural selection on at our species of mouse these are other rock talk of mice that live in the southwestern united states some of you may have may be familiar with the peppered moth example of natural selection where like march against our

backgrounds tend to be a fall prey to predators more than monster mash the background so forth well that's kind of what happens with these little little mouse ears and i'm a play you a short little love video here to show little videos just for fun and be the size that we don't have to watch a talking head for the whole hour so let's hope that this doesn't work so when the darkness finds itself like color it's natural fighters are all of course if we change the backdrop of darkness planes and well the light colored mouth look at a graph of get a little bit better on the second part that that so that's the basic idea ok it and the second little clip that i'll show you which is not very long ago and better graphics like you say he talks about how you can model the change in the frequency of light and dark mice in this natural situation now he was very interested

in given a particular advantage a particular selection coefficient of the light or dark colored to in this population of mice how long would take before all the mice were one color or how affected how many generations could you get ninety five percent to one hundred percent okay so what they're doing is testing ideas about natural selection using a combination of research design they're observing the mutation frequency of this particular and leonard are challenging coat color gene the population there observing the arm a mortality rate of the dark like mobs against the dark background etc that the crips is and then there making predictions using computer modeling and the selection coefficients to predict how many generations it would take now be usable parts thousand generations if your deep reading

know two to four times a year you can have changed pretty quickly and those also manage our on other principles so let's go back to the bar let's talk about testing a little bit more about these securities are folks from your home territory this is a group of british thousand years they claim to have a mystical ability to be able to find water with four sticks and this gentleman here has a huge is holding a fork stake here and this lady has one here and this lady has one here and so you can sit on them if you ask these people how do you how do you know if there's water there most of them would probably prefer to some sort of internal state of being way of knowing they would say will because i feel the energy from the from the water flowing through the ground and up into my fork sticking into my hands and so i know there's water there's a there's a lot of the sort of mystical personal experience personal state of being kind of the best analogy and thought they might give you an explanation are based on authority well uncle fred armisen authority he

finds water with a forked stick therefore i believe in dancing and some of them might even give you a scientific or at least in empirical explanation that thousand dozen works because it works we can find water with four sticks i was rather amused to find this picture on the well but if you look at the english countryside there it would be kind of hard to not find water or given the fact that there are these petals all over the place but so the first thing you might want to ask this doesn't thousand really find water i mean you would certainly look at a picture like this where you have the dancers in his puddles of water all over the place you would not be convinced that it was the forked stick that was allowing them to find what you can open your eyes and find what i was living i was teaching a number of years ago at the university of colorado and there was the disappearance of a young woman around under and nobody from the body they suspected foul

play the boyfriend was a suspect in and nobody but there was nobody and a psychic detective called up to one of the local police departments and said the body will be found near water and of course we all fell down laughing because you know in that part of colorado you you kind of can't nice water mean there are there is going to be water every quarter mile and near water gives a lot of wiggle room so you know the first thing you'd want as getting back to the dancers here is do they really find water using four sticks you may not be able to test the mystical source of the ability but the first anyone ask is that is there there there so audience how would you test whether dancers actually find water how to set up a control to test of this what might be something you'd want to control for anybody wanted

make an artificial reservoirs says one member of the audience come out but wouldn't they just are pointless dixon say oh goody water what would you have to do with this reservoir you'd have to conceal it from the thousands wouldn't you they can't know where it is okay so that's the first big idea here we've got to have a test for the dancers don't know i'm like this photograph for her there's water all over the place you have to have a situation where the dow zooms don't already know where the water is this seems really simple and in fact the australian skeptics organization composed of some really fun people i got together with the australian association of dancers to do a controlled a test of whether these individuals often were very sincere they all firmly believe that they could find water with four sticks so the way they did this to see these alarms of white scattered around on the ground here they talk bottles they must really their cars beer bottles and they are filled some of them

with water and filled some of them with sand and put each of these bottles in a day paper bag so that you couldn't see what see what the bottle was and then they scatter them around this field and they set the doses to work what else might you want to do in order to make this a fair test one suggestion was to maybe have other people finding water who worked downstairs that's a very interesting idea i am to that might be that that you really think about it if the people who i did not believe in doesn't also found the bottles with water on what would that tell you you know usually get you to eliminate chance wouldn't you because you have how many bags and i think they had twenty bags out there only a certain number of which have water in them you wouldn't want to have fifty percent of the bags with water because then you have a fifty percent chance so guessing right so there's a lot of things that you got up enough you thought about

besides spring the sign you if that's unfair of me i know that but you can probably think of a way to set up a fair test for dousing and this is what the australian skeptics didn't they got a dozen association to agree this is a fair test and the dancers all went out and they are those little stakes and you know something they found water exactly as predicted by chance which certainly would lead one to conclude that maybe there isn't a mystical force allowing people to find water and with four steps by the way if you are a teacher this is a really good classroom exercise have your students figure out a way of testing dousing and you know make them work with blinding blending means that the person who put the bags out with the various bubbles and i'd rather the various either sand or water is away he he'd he's not watching the yeah does actually doesn't inadvertently signaled them right and the person who is the marking down with a clipboard that does or number for us as bottle

number twenty two airbag number twenty two is out is a water bottle that he doesn't know whether that's what about so we can inadvertently cue so you don't get it you can work and double blind you can work on a lot of things the basic idea control and it's it's engaging because students really believe this stuff they really you know especially in a place like kansas we got a lot of water which i'm going anyway so try that ok so we trust explanations by making direct observations but we also test explanations by making influences in fences or something that is and can really miss understood by the general public and a lot of people think that facts are much more important than in france is actually the other way or an inferential explanations explain facts are which we don't really have a whole lot of time to go into consider that all of the really important scientific explanations are inferences you may not think necessarily that helios centers and is an inference but it is the explanation or theory if you will that the

planets go around the sun isn't inference nobody has sat out in space and watch the planets go around the sun for year or in the case of pluto eighty years on it is an inference you make that inference of helios centers and based upon calculations and observations an empirical evidence that it is an inferential explanation and all the really important explanations are of that same kind of let's see how good you are at making inferences here is a scenario we have a highway department store it we have a well a cop i right and we have a tire jack i want to look very carefully at the tabloid here and i want you to try to figure out which came first was the cow pie appear before the highway strike out wasn't there after the highway straight the tire tracks is that in the den dome after the youngest striking true went by out what exactly

is going on here but i am i'm afraid you might not be able to see quite as well so let me just summarize this is a case where the hybrid department took a lot of writing because they apparently didn't even bother noticing that there was this girl flop in the middle of the road may just painted right over fist but ann and i think looking at the evidence here we would all come to that conclusion you got the highway you got the strike excuse me with the cow first came the highway second game because by third came to howard highway department rolled strike and then at iran over it i think all this would say yes that is a very reasonable in france to make but nobody was there to see it happen but i think everybody would feel pretty secure that we have recreated the past even if no one was there to directly observe in the highway department as their jobs and of course we do this all the time and forensics were always making these kinds of conferences of historical events that

happened where nobody was there to see it nobody saw the woman being murdered and you make an inference based upon the physical remains based upon the the evidence the observations and logical inferences that you make from those data and indeed in the case of law we do this all the time the case of sensitive assault in a case of law we send people away for life based on insurance and actually if you talk to our law enforcement personnel they would rather have a very solid inference then add a direct witness because eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable whereas logical inference from good data is very reliable so surely if we can execute people based upon and friends it's not unreasonable for us to reconstruct the history of the fossil history of women prisoners same thing for science has to do with data with testing with holding constant some variables making influences and we're always learning

new stuff when it comes to science i have ever friend in physical anthropology harwell that kurt nolte who was asked to a member of years ago why did you become a scientist he wrote as an adolescent i aspired to lasting fame i craved factual certainty and i first and for a meaningful vision of human life so i became a scientist this is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls nobody becomes a scientist for factual certainty can't we we assume that the facts are going to change we assume that are explanations are going to change and they do and that's the strength of science the strength of sciences that are explanations can grow and change when we get new information when we get new instrumentation only get new ways of looking at things

and this is this is why science is such a powerful way of understanding the natural world now in my day job where i'm dealing with the creation evolution controversy there certainly are an awful lot of of opposing points of view here where the revealed truth of the bible for example as in this cartoon from answers in genesis is considered to be much much more important than science because in science you're always changing your mind well yes we are we proudly change her mind because that's how we learned about me to calm and even in n n n were all ok with this this is nothing that is as upsetting to scientists at all the arm out paleontologists doug doug or once was quoted as saying in an article that was titled fossil findings may force revisions in the history of life he said i hope they're right because like to be more interesting for the next ten or twenty years if they are whether to re re

examine a lot of assumptions so the fact that science changes is not considered by us to be a handicap that at the same time i don't want you to leave i don't want to leave you with the idea that all signs changes all the time because it really doesn't and i think there's been some scientists in the past and even you know even steve gould them i admired very much delayed stephen jay gould were all those columns you know natural history magazine sometimes i think steve gave people the impression that everything in science is up for grabs and everything is changing and know what is innocent and the way i like to look at this is to consider science the content of signs really consists of three concentric circles in the center of this set of concentric circles are the core ideas of science these other ideas that have been tested over and over and over that they're really solid theories of science that we feel very very secure about and we're not really actively testing them anymore things like huey us centers and are here just a time in anybody's opera

singer you know maybe maybe it's the case that the plans don't go around the sun is really asking that question i actually you can't you can't find your centrist said i can give you some references to phd is it in science who believe in just centers some butt one might consider that they're pretty marginal on the rest of the scientific community feels pretty confident about the planets going around the sun not the other way around evolution the inference that living things have a common ancestor the evan bayh and friends of the universe's had a history that is one of the core ideas of science yes there are phd is who i disagree that evolution took place but they are on the fringes like the geo centers around the core ideas of science the next concentric circle out of the frontier ideas of science and this is where the real business is taking place at a university like a u i universities around the country are to this is where this is what your scientists are doing they are working on testing new ideas that some of these ideas will

go into the core the vast majority of them won't i have a friend who's a physicist he says you know i have about ten really great ideas a day and nine and half of moral was low it gets more ideas pretty the most of us expect i didn't know the idea here is that science is a very active kind of area and when we say that science is changing and sciences open we're really talking about the frontier yes yes it's true that even some an idea like gravitation which is pretty basic are or you listen to some us astronomers and physicists are tinkering around the margins of these ideas but basically those are core ideas the real active research of sciences here in the frontier and then finally the third concentric rings the french and a french ideas of science ideas where people really aren't spending very much time ms ahmed they are ideas like intelligent design their ideas like i'm the cycle can he says their ideas like go well like dancing and espn things like that and so there are some explanations about which we're very very confident

and other explanations like a frontier explanations that we're still wrestling with i'm sometimes a friend to a fringe idea will become a frontier idea will become a core idea this is possible or not saying that those ideas out there in the french are never going to enter into the consensus few signs what were saying is that for them to slide toward the middle you get to do the work and again this is where intelligent design fails because they're not doing any actual signs of course we argue a lot in science but we argue about ideas in the frontier we don't really argue but it isn't the core in the case of evolution were arguing about the details of evolution were arguing about the mechanisms of the ocean where arguing about the tree of life who has ancestral to what we don't argue over whether living things that common ancestors cause that's a core idea but we're happy to change our ideas and signs all the time there's this article that came out a couple years ago about india a fungus which was thought to have caused the irish potato famine young about the

irish potato famine terrible terrible disaster in ireland and meeting hundreds and it was thought to be won over it a fungus but further research caused a change in that position genes right i was wrong laughingly said the scientists so and so a plant ecologist with the usda it how this happens all the time yes we do fight tooth and nail to supporter it is but you know in the evidence is against you you say you're right and i'm in that happens all the time now one of the titles of his talk tonight is so it has to do with assumptions and i'd been talking a lot about how science is empirical and sciences testing an inferential and all this kind of good stuff but i would argue that just like religion has assumptions and other ways of knowing have assumption so science also has assumptions but i think they're very minimal assumptions made me tell you what i think there we assume when we're doing science that there is an objective reality outside of the individual i assume

that cross did not make me up five minutes ago and that i am a figment of his imagination i think he assumes that he is not a figment of my imagination i made up ten minutes ago with all of your memories intact we assume that that that's something you do on first year philosophy classmates it's really a waste of time but nonetheless we assume there is an objective reality we assume that there is a real they're there and we're trying to understand it returned no i don't that's an assumption i'm into harvard and goody goody we also assume when we do science that the universe operates according to regularity is that if a two day water consists of hydrogen and oxygen tomorrow it will consist of hydrogen and oxygen we assume that today if this paper clip that i'm holding the massive this paper clip is attracted by the mass of the desk and falls rather than flying around the room and ice up to support and we sometimes the same thing will happen tomorrow the gravitational work the same today as it works to map as it were but

we don't know that's an assumption tomorrow maybe water's gonna be composed of something about something whatever that it doesn't seem like an under reasonable assumption but it is an assumption i would say that most scientists also make a third assumption which is that human beings can understand these regular it is but i also want to be fairly modest about this because i think human beings have done a wonderful job in understanding incredibly complicated things about the natural world using this method we call science of testing an inference and so forth but you know it's possible that there are things that we are simply incapable of understanding that doesn't necessarily mean that they or mystical or that they are supernatural let me give you an example let's say i have goldfish and i have the world's smartest goldfish when i got a gold fish tank

the goldfish swims to the top of the one of the bull because it knows that when the shape that i am to a goldfish outside of all i'm comes to the goal food appears magically in the top of the bowl when my husband comes up to the goldfish bowl he doesn't pay any attention to it whatsoever enough or goldfish this is probably this is the einstein a goldfish ok so let's say that i have the world's smartest goldfish in my kitchen it is also the case that i live here in california and in california well that's a one day approximately three miles below the surface the surface of the earth to continental plates rub together and a massive energy has sent through the crust of the earth and makes the water sly shout of a goldfish bowl now i have the world's most brilliant goldfish but i don't

think he's going to understand plate tectonics k not because this as a gift maybe the goldfish would conclude that this was a domestic or act but the gods of goldfish made the water slash out of the air tank who knows that this is a perfectly natural material cause this is an earthquake sarah function of mariner energy right and we can understand earthquakes because we're lot smarter than goldfish my suggestion when i say that scientists assume that we are capable of understanding the regularity supernatural world i think we have to be i think we have to act on that because otherwise we give up our but i think we also have to to understand that we maybe goldfish that that there may be some things that our neurons just aren't going to be capable of processing any more than a goldfish can process plate tectonics but that said there still were really smart goldfish and there's a lot that we can understand about the natural world and i hope now admitting that there are some things that possibly we may

not be able to explain doesn't give a sworn for taking anything off the table and this of course is the objection that scientists have to be intelligent design creationists are like michael be he who will be speaking here in a few weeks he wrote a book called darwin's black box in which he presented the idea to reducible complexity similarly william denson he wrote a book called the design and friends in which he presented the concept of complex specified information or the design in france which basically is irreversible complexity and gussied up and probability theory on the main reason why the intelligent design argument is from such resistance among philosophers of science is that they confuse what is unexplained with those phenomena being unexplained a bowl if we have not yet explained something that does not mean something is unexplainable if the goldfish hasn't quite figured out plate tectonics maybe someday in the future it'll at least figure out that

darn how water gets put back in the bull out when the waters life is happening that's a terrible analogy never drew analogies and the flies at dusk and i'm very bad where is the major main reason why i am intelligent design has rejected significant the science world in nairobi is darwin's black box he talks about a number of structures that he claims have this quality of being here it is a big complex like the bacteria flagellum the blood clotting maxim mechanism the immune system and so forth and it is clear that there is already a lot of research on these topics and i understand that you've heard of judge jones speak as part of this series a few weeks ago i judge jones was the judge for the kids mothers is dover trial and one of the things that the plaintiffs are expert witnesses i did during the kitzmiller trial was confront dr beachy with a pile of articles and books so lee and the evolution of the immune system and the claim that there is no

evolutionary explanation for the immune system didn't quite stand up in court and more importantly doesn't stand up in the world of science so that science now let's look a little bit at religion the fife religion you know it's a really tough thing to do i'm an anthropologist iss has mentioned the physical anthropologist but one of the things about anthropology is that you do get trained in and cultural anthropology young and linguistics and archaeology as well keep your expectations low and linguistics that sorry i i do appreciate the cultural aspects of humans adaptations well and if we're going to come up with the definition of religion and you're an anthropologist what you want to do is come up with a definition it's gonna work for all human cultures in society as you know most americans think of religion they think of christianity because that's the religion that most americans it here to the more sophisticated americans might recognize the middle eastern lot of the isms of

christianity judaism and islam and though those who've really thought about this might consider world religions including things like chateau and buddhism and and hinduism and so forth and so on but for anthropology even world religions as too narrow you also have to consider a definition that would work for tribal regions and a definition that would work for human cultures in the past as well as those in the present so can we come up with with some general characteristics of all religions and i believe that they are the most inclusive definition of religion is that religion is a set of rules and beliefs that people have about a non material universe and its inhabitants know we live in a material world i live in a world of matter and energy but the vast majority of human beings on this planet believe that there is a non material reality other than the material world in which we live and is not material reality takes many many many different for

buddhists don't have god's but they do have a concept of love reincarnation and coming back from someplace and so forth i'm christianity obviously has haven't us and christians believe in hell and there is this idea of something other than something transcending the transcendent reality other than the material world religion just like science has assumptions and one of the assumptions of religion is of course that there is this non material reality and i firmly believe that you know he now they've they say the world is divided into two kinds of people those that divide everything into two and then everybody else one of the former group i think there's two kinds of people there are those who make the assumption that there is a manager a reality and those are people who are conventionally religious an unconventional image is there are

those people who do not believe that there is anything other than the material universe between that those people are philosophical material is the quote from richard dawkins was a good example and i'm so those new teachers is an anvil in both of those are assumptions because you cannot prove either of those there is no external proof that you can use to prove there is a transcendent reality or that there is no you merely you start with that is an assumption but then you try to build a clear view on that most religions assume and this is most again this is not all but most as religions assume that it is possible proof for people to interact with this non material reality when i thought about the characteristics of religion that was also difficult to do because religions very hugely from the world religions to travel religions to what we know of past religions and so forth but it i came up with a qualified common characteristics a belief and supernatural beings are

powers is quite common in the idea that truth is revealed from sacred source is the bible the core around defenders center and oftentimes in religions mystical or personal states of being are important being filled with the spirit and meditation and buddhism and so forth leon a mom or being having the spirits of the forthcoming to them these are all common characteristics of religion also common in religion is a sense of the sacred and this is a very important apparently it's quite important human feeling because all human seem to see this sort of thing about feelings of awe and wonder and believe in an afterlife is common but not universal by the way not all religions believe in an afterlife and a concern with morals and ethics is also common to religion but again not universal not all human societies based their moral unethical behaviors in a supernatural because in many tribal people are

you your rules for how to behave properly to people and you're our society are handed down by the ancestors are by tradition let's talk about science religion in terms of these characteristics if we look at religion and we consider a characteristic of science where we use logic and empirical evidence well does religion news logical empirical evidence i would say yes in my study of religion i find many religious traditions in which revelation is important but also so is the material world so is the world of experience to find a lot of discussion of this in the history of christianity and catholic tradition as particularly strong in this regard where experience and faith experience and revelation are both equally important and both need to be considered revelation is obviously important religion and mystical states of being is important to what about science will clearly science uses logical an empirical evidence that's kind of the bread and butter of signs that we've been

talking about revelation on the other hand is something that's completely outside france if you're trying to explain something scientifically will not be persuasive if you say i had a dream that isn't going to do what you have to have empirical evidence you have to have a logical explanation similarly mr cullen and personal states of being are also an important science the intervention of supernatural powers is important in many religions the belief in a non material world of course is central to religion and the belief in spiritual beings is also important in the case of science we we cannot test supernatural explanations as i mentioned so the question of whether supernatural powers intervened is not something that can be addressed by science but we have to assume for the for the because of the limitations of science because we have to test whether to assume that god isn't and they're messing around with our our experiments we have decided to set aside got a

side maybe god wanted the blood pressure medicine to work but that's nothing we can test so we have to just said god aside and set up our test of whether the blood pressure medicine works or doesn't work based on just material cause i'm the science also has no opinion a belief in the non period and on material world remember him talking about science as a way of knowing i'm not talking but scientists were people or individuals who may be big lever is that maybe not believers but scientists are are different from science per se science class science if you wish to either go into philosophy of science can avoid age and again science in terms of the leaf in spiritual being science has no opinion on the syllabus simply is outside of science science cannot say there is or is not a non material world science cannot say that spiritual beings do or do not exist a belief in the afterlife as common and religion are concerned with evil ethics and morals is

common in religion a sensible on mystery sacred is common in religion in terms of science in these categories a belief in an app after life sciences no opinion you cannot test scientifically whether people live after death and science science per se but scientists but science per se is not concerned with evil effects or morals scientists want to know why coyotes kill chickens they don't make a value in a science doesn't tell you whether it's good or bad for coyotes to kill chickens that's not what it's all about the moral and ethical our components are something that human being should pay a lot of attention to and scientists should pay a lot of attention to what science itself is eight more when you look at science religion and materialism as i say the real contrast between religion and jerry lewis i'm not between religion and science indeed materialist philosophy does draw so

inspiration from science there's no question about that a book like ursula goodness the sacred depths of nature describes very politically how she looks at how should her knowledge of science helps her to develop a spiritual kind of understanding and unfeeling about the world on the reference center richard dawkins identity and many other people feel that science does give them very strong grounds for holding their philosophical view is but remember also that science has been used by religious people as the foundation for their views as well william paley certainly through natural theology but more recently theologian jack carter author of god after darwin arthur peacock evolution to disguise friends of faith there's a lot of ways that scientists have used scrutiny that theologians and religious people have use science as inspiration for their religious views even conservative christian it's like margaret

town in her book alice to genesis and of course the man who was probably the finest scientific mind of the ages and it was a very outcome very serious and devout christian my concern is that science not be hijacked in pursuit of an ideology whether that ideology is the a stick or atheist science is too important a way of knowing limitations are not to be ignored because it is inappropriately associated with an ideology that one might disagree with indeed render unto science that which it is that which is sciences and do not confuse it with ideological concerns as a friend of mine once wrote this confuses methodological naturalism with philosophical matters matt cardinal wrote many scientists are atheists or domestic still want to believe that the natural world they study is all variants and being only human they try to persuade themselves that science gives them grounds for that big it's an honorable

believes that it isn't a research finding and csc can be found at and csc where data word my colleagues erik mickle wesley elsberry susan staff nick matzke and glen branch and i are there to help you understand the creation and evolution controversy and also issues of science and religion which we think are certainly very closely related to solving this other very large and i thank you so much for inviting me to be part of the difficult things november sixteen two thousand i would have auditorium at the kansas union it was a presentation of the difficult dialogue series on knowledge faith and reason co sponsored by the hall center for the humanities and the biodiversity institute at the university of kansas reporting assistance was provided by k u media services

i'm kate mcintyre kbr presents is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas