So, Jerry Coyne has a new article out titled “Seeing and Believing,” on the incompatibility of science and religion. It drew criticism from an American Scene blogger which inspired further criticism from another American scene blogger which, together, inspired criticism from Ross Douthat. Ken Miller, one of Coyne’s original targets, also posted a rebuttal at the Edge page devoted to the piece.

Everyone is accusing Coyne of assuming that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge, but I have more difficulty picking out the thread of his argument. The fact that early on he agrees with Miller that pantheism is too diluted to be real religion, and the fact that later he argues empirical content is a big part of lots of religions, suggests he rather believes that when you strip away all the testable stuff from religion, you done have much left. The first American Scene blogger–Jim Mazini–sort-of recognizes this point, but then loses it by pointing out “hey, the Catholic Church thinks evolution is cool.” Perhaps religion can do without a literal reading of Genesis, but that’s different than doing without a single testable empirical claim. To this day, the Catholic Church feels the need to celebrate each canonization of a saint with rather ridiculous miracle claims that would never be accepted if they were as serious about the saint-validation process as they claim to be.

Still, I’m a bit puzzled by this paragraph:

Many religious beliefs can be scientifically tested, at least in principle. Faith-based healing is particularly suited to these tests. Yet time after time it has failed them. After seeing the objects cast off by visitors to Lourdes, Anatole France is said to have remarked, “All those canes, braces and crutches, and not a single glass eye, wooden leg, or toupee!” If God can cure cancer, why is He impotent before missing eyes and limbs? Recent scientific studies of intercessory prayer–when the sick do not know whether they are being prayed for–have not shown the slightest evidence that it works. Nor do we have scientifically rigorous demonstrations of miracles, despite the Vatican’s requirement that two miracles be proven for canonizing every saint. Holy relics, such as the Shroud of Turin, have turned out to be clever fakes. There is no corroborated evidence that anyone has spoken from beyond the grave. And what about the ancient “foundational” miracles, such as those supposedly performed by Christ, Buddha, and Mohammed? We were not there when they happened, so we cannot test them. But at least we can apply the same standards to these as we do to other Biblical or Koranic claims.

What’s the last sentence mean? The critics take him to be saying that since history ain’t science, it can’t be true. What Coyne should have said in place of that sentence–what I would have said–is that when every supposed miracle worker you can actually investigate turns out to be fraudulent or deluded, you can infer they all are–at least the ones that aren’t figments of other people’s imaginations.

Miller also continues to defend the “but some scientists are religious” argument–which Gould memorably presented as a dilemma between accepting religious scientists’ self-assessments or thinking they are “enormously stupid.” This is a false dilemma: you can think someone is wrong about something without thinking they are enormously stupid. Scientists do this all the time when they present evidence against other scientists’ theories. The question of enormous stupidity is a separate one, though some of the relevant evidence (the insistence of Miller &co. on clinging to awful arguments) points in an unfortunate direction.

Final comment: complains about alternative hypotheses relevant to pro-God arguments. I really think Coyne made a mistake in trying to present credible alternatives to the God hypothesis. When the argument is just “here’s a gap, must be God,” an alternative hypothesis can have absolutely nothing going for it and still be just as good as God, because the religious apologists hasn’t yet said anything worthwhile in God’s favor. Atheists should stop giving the impression that they concede anything else by bothering with real scientific ideas like the multiverse hypothesis and the theory of everything, and just start saying, “any random hypothesis pulled out of nowhere would be as good as God.”