Alex’s Heresies – embracing a physical reality

I was watching a  public Michael Ruse lecture in Australia hosted by Fora TV. It made me think about how Ruse, Francis Collins, and the late Stephen Jay Gould along with many scientists and liberal religious leaders see science and religion as working in separate non-conflicting fields of human knowledge and understanding.

Typically they characterise Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens as fundamental atheists, who are equivalent to religious fundamentalists. Both are seen as fringe groups outside the mainstream and majority thought. So the question that came to mind is how much of a religious fundamentalist do you need to be to see conflict between science and religion and what sort of populations hold conflicting views?

The Pew Forum regularly produce statistics on US religious beliefs – the home country of Michael Ruse and Francis Collins. According for Pew:

63% of the sample population believe that their scriptures are literally the word of God (33%) or non-literally the word of God (30%) in 2007/2008. Roughly 80% of the US population of 307 million (July 2009 estimate) are more than 14 years old. So we have around 81 million people believing that their respective sacred texts are literally the word of God. Sacred texts invariably contain miracles as God’s interruptions of the natural order. For Christians that includes Jesus’ virgin birth, healings and physical resurrection as part of those miracle traditions. It seems that these beliefs in the literal historicity of these miracle stories is in direct conflict with a scientific understanding of the world. So does Ruse classify these 81 million religious people as fundamentalists? Even the other 73 million religious people who see the texts as the non-literal word of God are likely to subscribe the some of the more important miracle traditions, again in conflict with science.

The Religious Tolerance website has polls results on beliefs of the resurrection of Jesus story. It seems that 60-90% of Christian clergy and laity believe in the actuality of Jesus’ resurrection over a 1997 to 2000 period. Again, an extraordinary number of US population who believe prima facie something that is contrary to our scientific view of our world.

Do Ruse and Collins see these people, millions I might say, as religious fundamentalists? And, if so, are they equivalent in numbers to the four outspoken atheists often named?

Alex McCullie