There's Only One Way Of 'Knowing': Why We Need Science In One Simple Diagram

Following on from this post on Pharyngula on the limits of what we can see and hear, I thought I’d take a different tack. The diagram shows on the vertical axis the electromagnetic spectrum and the vertical length of the tiny yellow bar is how much of it we can see (not a lot is the answer).  The horizontal axis is the life of the universe from big bang to heat death. Average species life span is apparently about one million years – the yellow bar is thicker than this so you can actually see it. So unaided, humans will most likely exist for a blink of an eye in the life of the universe and even then we will be blind to most of what is going on around us.

To the left and right of that little yellow blob are the vastnesses of time.  Religion fills these with gardens and talking snakes on one side and burning pits and bliss-palaces on the other. Science fills these with the wonders of those first strange moments of time after the big bang, with galaxies, stars, planets forming, with evolution, great ice ages, strange creatures on one side and the giant lonely tapestry of the death of a universe on the other.

Above and below, science fills in with gamma rays, with planets orbiting stars in distant galaxies, black holes, nebulae, quantum mechanics… Religion gives us crystal spheres, turtles and angels…

So science already extends that yellow blob vertically all the way across the spectrum. If we’re lucky, it may find some way to help us beat the odds on a million year extinction and looking further ahead, make sure we’re off this planet before two hundred million years goes by and it becomes uninhabitable due to an aging sun.

So which would you put your trust in?

No sir, we Irish are not that sort of Catholic

This post, worth reading as well, in WEIT reminded me to check out the latest Iona Institute survey. Like the 2010 Bishops Conference survey, they have no real good news if you're a Catholic leader.

I've plotted up the first table in the survey as well as total adults in Ireland by age group (blue), collated from the 2006 census figures. In red is the number of adults identifying as Catholic and in green is the number of those Catholics that attended mass in the past week.

It clearly shows that the the younger you are in Ireland, the less likely you are to call yourself a Catholic and very much more so the less likely you are to attend mass regularly. Given how fundamental mass is to the Catholic religion, I think this is a good barometer of how committed someone identifying as Catholic is to their religion. It points towards a big decline in religious Catholics even if people still consider themselves cultural Catholics.

If the trends shown extrapolate into the new generations then we might expect a ongoing but not precipitous fall in religious affiliation but I think the key thing is actually the mass going percentage - that really suggests that even if Ireland remains on paper significantly Catholic for the time being, the reality is that they are mostly cultural or plastic Catholics.

This fits with the results of the 2010 survey which found that only half of Irish Catholics believed in Hell and only three-quarters believed in Heaven, while 10% didn't believe in God. It's also reflected in the perception of their church amongst Catholics in the Iona survey:

Again the 55's and older appear to prop up the figures. So how much of the population is that cohort as a percentage? 


Looking at the CSO website in the 2006 census, they account for 20% of the total population (or 26% of everyone over 14 years old) while the 15-54 age group is 59% of the total population (or 74% of everyone over 14 years old). 


Of course, as it's actually 77% of the over 54's that are Catholic, that means the older religious group corresponds to 20% of the total adult population of Ireland.

Religion does not like Science

Jerry Coyne and Russell Blackford tackle a Huffpo article by Michael Ruse on religion and science's compatibility. It's not very a very convincing article especially with comments like this,

"But is there not the uncomfortable worry that religion -- theology -- is always going to play second fiddle, having to give way in the face of science? ... It may be true that this is a one-way process, but in no way does this imply that theology is inferior."

Yup, it does kind of imply that actually.

Religion seems to have at least four stances with regard to science.

Science as heresy. See christianity's history in Europe with astronomy as a prime example. Arguably creationists fall in this category too, though I'm more thinking of when a religion has the temporal power to kill or imprison those it decides to define as heretics.

Science to be denied. Creationists are the prime example. Their strange twistings of science, but only of those parts that are problematical, are a wonder to behold. I look forward to somebody showing that something like gravity is incompatible with the bible and seeing how they deny that...

Science to be impugned. As religion surrenders its explaining power to science, it attempts to belittle science. The attitude is that science may be able to explain questions like how we came about, the laws of physics, how to fly, how to make effective medicine etc, but that they still hold authority over important questions like the kind of sex God wants to see in bedrooms around the world (He's a bit of a prude apparently). More seriously though, they try to claim morality and ethics as their own, disenfranchising anybody coming from a non-believing scientific background as having anything worthwhile to say about these subjects.

Science to be pwned. This is the attitude of those who realise the truth of science and so have to demonstrate that their religion already knew all of science before science existed. Thus we have Hindu Science and Islamic Science, amongst others no doubt. It is bizarre to read how the Rig Veda has amongst other things the correct value for the speed of light, while a new one to me, the Koran had geology sorted out long before Lyell et al did.

The Government's position on key religious questions

Atheist Ireland received a reply to some key questions it put to Fine Gael (part of our governing coalition) during the election campaign earlier this year. It can be found here but in summary, Fine Gael's position is:

• Reform of education – it will make publicly-funded schools with a secular ethos available.
• Constitutional Review – will “consider the continued relevance of religious references in the Constitution”, whatever that means.
• Blasphemy – It should not be a criminal offence.
• Religious ethos of hospitals – no interest in addressing.
• Equality Law – agree that religious bodies should be treated no different to other bodies
• Tax – no intention to make churches pay their fair share of tax.

We'll see how they perform.

That Census Question on Religion

Following on from my last post, the question is why does it matter how many devout Catholics we have in Ireland? Atheist Ireland tackled this question in the run-up to the 2011 census, making the point that,

the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin says that it “does not make use of baptismal registers for calculating the Catholic population of the Archdiocese of Dublin. It relies solely on the data from the Central Statistics Office, obtained through the census, by which citizens themselves choose to record, or not, their religious affiliation.”

These numbers feed into decisions on funding for schools for example and if they can be used by the Catholic church to defend their control of most of our schools, they will be, even if the church knows they do not represent the number of genuinely devout Catholics (if we use regular mass attendence as a criteria).

If the census asked a less leading question than "What is your religion?", such as "How religious are you?", then we might get a better picture. Unfortunately Atheist Ireland was unable to get the question changed for the 2011 census. I think the census results will be published in July and it'll be interesting reading. However it is unlikely to be an accurate reading, as far as religion is concerned.