So the final piece of the puzzle here, let's turn to the public, is the religious public in moral conflict with science? Now, there's a number of moral conflicts that could be going on between religion and science, and I will argue that you see more and more of these as the 20th century progresses and to the contemporary day. The first type of moral conflict is the most broad. Do you look to science to set a direction for society, or do you look to religion? So in the U.S. and the U.K., in the 1950's for example, there were scientists who wanted to look to human evolution to tell society what direction we should go. Some of the elite scientists at the time were not content with making fact claims about nature, were trying to have science answer, questions that had typically been associated with religion. So, Robert Edwards who is the co-inventor of In-Vitro fertilization, would later say about this time that many scientists saw a more limited role for science, almost a fact gathering exercise providing neither morals nor standards. My answer he said, is that moral laws must be based on what man knows about himself, and that knowledge inevitably comes from science. Or similar claim with Jacob Bronowski in 1962, that I am therefore not the least ashamed to be told by someone else that my values, because they're ground in science are relative, because theirs are given by God. My values, he said, come from an objective and definitive source as any God, namely the nature of the human being. So, these elite scientists were argued that science can be used to set ethics or morality for society. Some of the theologians of the time recognize that they're being challenged on these grounds by these mostly biologists. So, an example of the Methodist theologian Paul Ramsey was primary opposed to this moral system, and he called it essentially the surrogate theology the cult of messianic positivism, this guy can always really turn a phrase. But reacting against scientists like Edwards and Bronowski, he thought the scientists goal was not to be an exact science, but to provide the meaning of life. He says, taken as a whole, the proposals of the revolutionary biologist, the anatomy of the thought-forms, the ultimate context for acting on these proposals provides a propitious place for learning the meaning of "playing God"- in contrast to being men on earth. The scientists have a distinctive attitude towards the world, a program for utterly transforming it, an unshakable, a fanatical confidence in a world view, a faith no less a program for the reconstruction of mankind. These expressions is rather exactly described a religious cult if there ever was one- a cult of men-gods, however otherwise humble. So, Ramsey was not saying that scientists are wrong about their facts. He accepted what they said about facts about the natural world. What he has said was he was opposed, this theologian, was opposed to these scientists at the time who were trying to create what he saw as essentially an alternative religion of science. So that's one type of moral conflict that we can imagine. A second type of moral conflict is based on a long standing argument from religious people that science unintentionally teaches a moral message. So again, if you go back to the 1870's after Darwin's Descent of Man, his theory, people claim that his theory was, no matter what Darwin intended, teaching people sexual immorality, because it described animal and human sexuality in the same way. To this day the intelligent design advocates are less concerned by fact claims about human evolution as the concern that the materialism that is the underlying basis of evolutionary theory causes moral problems in young people. Once young people learn materialism, all these sort of bad things follow. Critics have long held that if you define humans, for example like Richard Dawkins does, as sort of a biological DNA replicating machine, people will learn this about humans and look at each other ever so slightly differently. They will think of a human as more like a machine or an object, and then ever so slightly treat them differently. So again, this is the typical religiously based critique of science, which is that even though Dawkins would say that it's true, that this is what a human is like, there is a side effect of that. Which is your teaching that particular moral message about humans, which leads to these moral problems in this view. The third type of possible moral conflict is a bit more clear, which is scientists taking stances on controversial moral issues. So, scientists are probably seen as being in favor of embryonic stem cell research creating Chimeric embryos, producing genetically modified human embryos, like the Francis Crick Institute in London is currently doing. Now, this could conflict with the morality of particular religious groups, so to take the obvious example here, there are some Christian groups that are opposed to the destruction of human embryos, and I think that a lot of scientists would be perceived at least as being advocates of destroying human embryos. So, this is all that's possible. But again what is actually happening? There are some studies that suggest for the religious public, the relationship between religion and science is moral, and not about knowledge of the physical world. So, let me give you some examples. First of all, in a survey analysis of three different types of faith in science, I find that all the religious groups in the US are equally likely as the non-religious people to believe that science can solve problems about the physical world like pollution. So, they all believe in sort of the power of scientific knowledge. But I find that religious people have much less faith in scientists ability to set meaning and purpose for humanity. So again, the non-religious are more likely to look to science to set sort of a purpose for humanity and the religious are not. That's one moral conflict. Other analysis show that even if conservative Protestants are equally likely to believe in scientists ability to determine fact claims about the world, they're less likely to want scientists to be involved in public debates. Well, they don't want scientists to be influence in the public affairs at all, and even about things like global warming which really don't have any religious overtones. Why is that? I think it's clear that particularly conserve Protestant's in the US see themselves in a long term competition in the public sphere over moral issues, and they think that essentially scientists should keep to their fact claims, and out of the public sphere. Third is, historians have long showed us debates about Darwin for ordinary people are only partly about competing fact claims about human origins is actually more about what conservative protestants see is the moral implications of Darwinism and its pernicious effect on behavior. So, let me sum up what I've talked about for these last segments of this lecture. First of all, social scientists look at general society at the public. Social science suggests that it's highly unlikely that religious members of the public are in systemic knowledge conflict with science. Secondly, there is propositional knowledge conflict between primarily conservative Protestants over a few scientific fact claims. Mostly having to do with human origins. This does have public ramifications. So for example, in the United States, there are still controversies over teaching Darwin in the government funded schools. However, it's important for people to know that this one conflict does not mean that conservative Protestants or religious people in general are opposed to other scientific claims, or to science you know writ large. And third, and finally, there is strong evidence that there is conflict between religious people and science over various forms of morality or ethics.
