Science’s response is to conclude that the people who say they have experienced most of these are liars.

Science’s response is to suggest that these people’s interpretation of their experiences are mistaken. Or at least I can’t speak for all of science, but that’s what I would say. The people concerned might find it just as irritating as being told that they’re liars, but saying that billions of people are wrong about something is different from saying they’re all lying.

I agree it’s true and important that scripture is not data. The Bible is not an encyclopaedia or a copy of the Lancet. The primary relationship between text and believer is not, and should not be, of evidence and analyst. It would be a peculiar and dysfunctional religion where that was the case.

And I agree that treating religious texts ’scientifically’ is an anomaly, historically; not least because science is itself an anomaly. That is, scientific culture as we understand it today is still fairly new. Nonetheless, I think that for most of the past two thousand years, most Christians have believed it to be be ‘true’ that Christ died and came back to life three days later. That is, that it actually happened, and if you had been there you would have seen it. I can’t see that that claim is somehow different from the kind of things that science normally concerns itself with.

No doubt it varied somewhat from person to person, from place to place and from sect to sect which Bible stories were believed in that way, from people who believed the whole kit and kaboodle was ‘true’, from the Garden of Eden at one end to the beast with seven heads and ten horns at the other, to people who only believed the New Testament, to those who believed the bare minimum—that Christ was the son of God who died and rose again. I suspect that there have been a lot of people (including thoughtful, educated, sophisticated, intelligent people) who believed that the whole lot was ‘true’, and that the proportion of the Bible believed in that way and the proportion of people who believed it that way has shrunk under the direct impact of increasing scientific knowledge (and historical, archaeological, textual knowledge). I’m not going to make any strong claims that way because I accept it’s not a subject I know well enough.

But surely religion has to make some kind of specific truth claim, or what’s the point? I’m happy to make any amount of allowances for figurative language, symbolism, storytelling and whatever, but buried in the middle of it there must be some kind of proposition which is true or false in the same way it’s true or false that Tirana is the capital of Estonia, or what has all the fuss been about? Why the thousands of years of believers fighting wars and torturing each other over disputed points of doctrine?

One, I don’t believe in God as metaphor. That wasn’t the intent of my post. What I referred to was the metaphorical language of religious texts, which is language that science is not equipped to examine. Scientific thought and argument is a rhetoric that thrives on literalism. Religious thought and argument is couched, and always has been, in mystery, poetry, transformation of experience into words.

Two, I don’t accept that “300 years ago nearly all Christians believed in the literal truth of the Bible”, which is a kind of nonsense that is easy to spout but hard to sustain because the literal interpretation of that written document depends upon, well, literacy, which is something that began to spread the middle industrial age. What people believed in 300+ years ago were stories, not a book that sat still and offered itself up for scientific scrutiny. Stories are told to explain things that appear difficult or complex. People who are accustomed to stories and storytelling don’t regard tales as scientific data, but as guideposts towards understanding. I suspect that the current obsession with “scripture” as data — an obsession shared, apparently, by believers and sceptics alike — is in fact an anomaly, a blip on the face of the history of faith. Scripture is, above all, literature, art, an interpretation of reality, and not reality itself, and I suspect that most religious people, like most artists, understand this. That many don’t, and that those many are the most vocal of us, is a shame, but it’s not the standard by which I judge religion.

Where you and I differ, of course, is that I regard it as an interpretation of reality; you regard it as fiction. That’s fair enough. The distinction is as it should be; art and literature are supposed to be interpreted differently. It’s this reason, among others, that makes it difficult for science to test, just as science finds it difficult to test (on the one hand) love, or (on the other) psychic experiences, or the existence of parallel worlds, or encounters with ghosts. The medium that expresses all of these is language, and symbolic or metaphorical language at that. Science’s response is to conclude that the people who say they have experienced most of these are liars. I’m not so sure.

Lots of religions do make claims about Godly interventions in the actual physical world, though, whether it’s faith healing or the power of prayer or weeping statues.

And many believers do believe in the literal truth of varying amounts of scripture; Genesis has fallen out of fashion since the evidence against started mounting up, but things like the Resurrection and the feeding of the five thousand are still part of mainstream doctrine, I think? Anyone who says those actually happened is making a claim that is in principle testable. In practice we can’t prove whether or not they happened, but one can weigh up the evidence and consider how plausible it is.

BTW, I think the more irritable atheists (among whom I would only sometimes count myself) might find the ‘God as metaphor’ approach even more frustrating than the literal versions. Because, you know, 300 years ago nearly all Christians believed in the literal truth of the Bible and were what we would now call Young Earth Creationists. In the face of the evidence theologians retreated from the testable claims, leaving more or less of their beliefs intact. For people like me, the idea that you can shrink your claims about religion right down to the point where you can call it metaphor or literature, and still call yourself a believer, and not go that little step further, is difficult to comprehend.

But the world would be boring if we were all the same ;)

I think you have a point about the rejection of the “god hypothesis”, if neutrally considered by scientists, but I’m not convinced by it. The one difficulty I have with it is that religion doesn’t present the idea of a god or gods as a hypothesis. Rather, most religions discuss the idea of the world-beyond using figurative, not literal, language, which to me renders the available data scientifically questionable. It would be like trying to “prove” the “hypothesis” of the sword in the stone or of Beowulf and Grendel based upon the literature received about them.

Because I’m a theist and a student of literature, this doesn’t bother me; I happen to believe that there’s a reason for figurative language, and that its function is to describe what lies beyond the concrete, factual universe, whether that beyond is imagination (and who’s to say that isn’t “real”?) or the supernatural (which may not be). I don’t know whether I’m saying that the “beyond” is unmeasurable. I don’t think we have yet got the tools to measure what isn’t physically observable, though we are growing closer, with quantum physics and the cognitive studies. And I don’t know that “god hypotheses” is in fact scientifically testable, as the languages that describe the physical world are factual, concrete, measurable, while those that describe the world of the “gods” are hyperbolic, figurative, and metaphorical.

I think you’re right about this. The problem seems to be that we’re usually a lot more willing to be ambiguous in our language when the ambiguity supports our own position.

PZ doesn’t actually say that the conclusion is scientific, he only says “we” draw it from a scientific worldview, not clarifying whether “we” means “scientists drawing a scientific conclusion” or “scientists drawing a reasonable, but non-scientific, conclusion”.

I’m sure his defense would be that he never claimed it could be scientifically proved, only that it was the obvious conclusion, given the worldview science has provided. But the quote above doesn’t quite give that impression, and I think you’re right that this kind of thing undermines the reputation of science.

Thanks for the post.