Personal Gods, Deism, & ther Limits of Skepticism

In order to continue our discussion of the legitimate philosophical, scientific, and religious aspects of the science and religion quagmire we need a frame of reference to guide us. What I present here is an elaboration on a classification scheme proposed by Michael Shermer. (5) Shermer suggests that there are three worldviews, or "models," that people can adopt when thinking about science and religion. According to the same worlds model there is only one reality and science and religion are two different ways of looking at it. Eventually both will converge on the same final answers, within the limited capabilities of human beings to actually pursue such fundamental questions. The conflicting worlds model asserts that there is only one reality (as the same world scenario also acknowledges) but that science and religion collide head on when it comes to the shape that reality takes. Either one or the other is correct, but not both (or possibly neither, as Immanuel Kant might have argued). In the separate worlds model science and religion are not only different kinds of human activities, but they pursue entirely separate goals. Asking about the similarities and differences between science and religion is the philosophical equivalent of comparing apples and oranges. "These are two such different things," Shermer told Sharon Begley in Newsweek's cover story "Science Finds God," "it would be like using baseball stats to prove a point in football."

Using Shermer's model as a starting point for thinking about S&R, I realized that something is missing. One cannot reasonably talk about the conflict between science and religion unless one also specifies what is meant by religion or God (usually there is less controversy on what is meant by science, though some philosophers and social scientists would surely disagree). So what makes Shermer's picture incomplete is the very important fact that different people have different Gods. I am not referring to the relatively minor variations of the idea of God among the major monotheistic religions, but to the fact that God can be one of many radically different things, and that unless we specify which God we are talking about, we will not make any further progress.

My tentative solution to the problem is therefore presented in FIGURE 1. Here the panoply of positions concerning the S&R debate is arranged along two axes: on the abscissa we have the level of contrast between science and religion, which goes from none (same worlds model) to moderate (separate worlds) to high (conflicting worlds).