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One report put it this way:
Musk has repeatedly warned that AI will soon become just as smart as humans and said that when it does we should all be scared because humanity’s very existence is at stake.
In addition, Musk has joined "thousands of individuals and almost 200 organizations who have publicly committed not to develop, manufacture or use killer robots". To add some detail:
“We the undersigned agree that the decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine,” reads the [2017] pledge [...] organized by the Boston nonprofit Future of Life, an organization that researches the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence along with other existential issues related to advancing technology.
So how can we have a better – deeper – science and religion conversation, where religion provides insights into the ethical principles that should be applied now in medicine, healthcare, in the professions to upgrade the care of the public, to give immediate examples, but more so in the future?
In a third dip into ‘Science and Religion’: Moving away from the shallow end, a report on research by the Theos think-tank, a British Christian organisation that works at the intersection of politics, religion and society, we examine what some of the more than 100 scientists, philosophers and communicators in the field had to say on the subject.
The report writers explore how we can go beyond moral polarisation in "conversations" over ethics. They start with a some recent history:
In a way that was obvious to many people, the New Atheism spasm of the 2000s was ethical rather than scientific in origin. This was partially obscured by the fact that most of its leading proponents were scientists, but the arguments, the language, and the context (Islamic terrorism, Religious Right, decay of secularism) were all highly morally (and politically) charged. That whole affair was a textbook study of life at the shallow end and was recognised as such by those of our interviewees (including atheistic and scientific ones) who mentioned it.
They quote from the expert interviewees:
“To some extent, particularly I found this with people like Richard Dawkins, they purposely misrepresent it because it makes the religious side of things look more simplistic, more basic.” (#99)
“One very simplistic and problematic way of understanding it is the way it’s assumed by the New Atheists where they seem to see religion simply as an inferior rival to science.” (#93)
“The fact that a body can fall 32 feet per second is not something I derive a morality from... and the problem with the New Atheists is that they thought science was a value.” (#54)
The report sees a clear moral basis to the rhetorical stance of antagonists of religion:
Talk of religion poisoning everything, of religion as child abuse, or religion as being like the smallpox virus only harder to eradicate were broadsides against religion but ones that were grounded in its allegedly harmful effects or immoral practices. As the popular New Atheist slogan of the time put it, “science flies you to the moon, religion flies you into buildings”. Religion might be wrong but, above all, it was bad.
Such views were rather rarer among the general population today than they were 15 years ago. In 2006, a ComRes poll, commissioned by Theos found that 42% (!) of adults people agreed that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” (It was not, to put it mildly, what we had hoped to hear from the great British people...). Today, that figure is 20%.
As a rule, however, even the most anti-religious interviewees recognised that there was more to the science and religion debate than moral polarisation, whether that was good scientists vs bad believers, or morally-neutral science vs morally-laden (or morally-toxic) religion.
The deep end of this ‘ethics’ part of the debate in fact had several conversations going on in it, each complex and challenging in its own way. Some were related to the epistemological dimension of the wider debate, such as the way in which science, for all its rigorous method, depended on ethical commitments or on an ethical framework that it cannot itself supply.
It is clear some scientists do not appreciate adherents of religion assuming a role in "scientific" endeavours. Scientists ask how religion provides moral insight when a creator is the source of suffering in both the natural and human spheres. The report offers this thought:“Scientists... clearly have moral commitments to truthfulness, to honesty, they usually value hard work... they hate negligence and deceitfulness. So quite a number of moral things there which clearly are not justifiable in terms of science, but scientists have to proceed with them.” (#6)
There were answers – or at least responses – to this point. Some interviewees claimed that the argument omitted consideration of the good and beauty that results from the process (a consideration that Darwin himself drew into his reflections on this question). As one scientist said:
“I think that the only possible approach to the problem of evil is, oddly enough you can find implicit in Darwin, that suffering is part of the price of evolution but that overall in the life of any organism the good outweighs the bad, otherwise organisms would [feel] depression. He actually does use the word 'depression' in this context.” (#46)
Some pointed out that it ignored any consideration of eternity and redemption which are central to (many) religious views. Others said that the severity of the challenge presented by evolutionary suffering depended on the implicit image of God with which it was being compared.
“Unless God is an all-controlling engineer who simply makes things, it’s bound to have a degree of freedom and unpredictability about it which I believe is at the core of creation, so in that sense, if it’s messy and seems to keep changing its course, this is not incompatible with anything other than an engineering God who made the cosmos with fiat.” (#75)
Interviewees remarked that the whole discussion was predicated on a highly contestable sense of what was ‘wasted’. And some pointed out that pain was simply a reflexive mechanism without which life could not be sustained (the so-called ‘only way’ defence).
“[The] idea of wastefulness...[this is due to] the part of us that worships utility and efficiency, but there’s nothing that suggests that the cosmos works like this at all... God is able to create something which looks to the human mind wasteful, but it isn’t wasteful because it issues in what was needed, whatever means are that are needed for it those means have to be done. The whole idea that evolution is wasteful is a mistake.” (#75)
Whether these constituted adequate responses was far from clear, however, and there were several religious interviewees who were prepared to admit that the problem of suffering, amplified by our scientific understanding of deep history, did present (certain forms of) religious belief with an insuperable problem.
“The creator of the world is one who doesn’t care about the fact that 99 plus percent of all species are extinct now. Or they are suffering. Or that death is an integral physical part of life. It is very, very difficult to square that with a loving, omnipotent god.” (#88)
Whichever way one comes down here, however, the relevant point for our argument is that this critically important part of the science and religion debate is shot through with ethical considerations.
Beyond these specific parts to the ethical dimension within the science and religion debate, there was one additional, generic but very important one. In essence, it is not possible to separate science from technology, and technology from progress. Questions of whether and what we are progressing to, why, how fast, and by what means, are all irreducibly ethical, and that meant that science itself could not help be tied up with wider moral debate, whose connection with religion was obvious to all.
This could be seen at various levels. At the level of individual scientists’ behaviour, if science depended on honesty and integrity, that meant it was also vulnerable to dishonesty and fraud. The practice of science could be good or bad. Science got nowhere by ignoring ethical considerations.
At the level of programmatic research, the topic and method of research was similarly embedded in ethical considerations. Nobody claimed that scientific research was in itself necessarily morally good.
“Science can be as immoral as the rest of us. The Nazis used scientists. And we know that they experimented on not only Jews, but they experimented on mentally and physically handicapped people... One reason why, apparently, African Americans at the moment will be dubious about the vaccine is that they were experimented upon by white scientists, way back in [the previous] century.” (#73)
And then, at the level of application, it was clear that the way in which science shaped technology and technology shaped progress was rife with moral challenges. As one philosopher put it:
“I think science is absolutely shot through with moral stuff. I mean AI is a great example, and I worry about it. The idea that progress in AI is being made in this moral vacuum... [or] by predominantly male people who quite often – you look at people like Elon Musk frankly, and you’ve got to wonder whether they’re approaching all of this stuff with an appropriate sense of the moral implications of what they might be doing.” (#64)
It is important to be clear here. Just because everyone we spoke to recognised that there was an irreducible moral dimension to science – its practice, its programmes, its application – did not mean that everyone (or even a majority) thought that this meant religion should be involved in the ensuing discussions. [...] Some were very clear that it did not.
“I don’t really see religion as playing any distinctive role in that issue, except insofar as you might think that the religion is the thing that grounds the ethics. So, it seems like fundamentally an ethical issue and then you might bolt on the religion as a way of giving you your ethics, which obviously I think would be a mistake.” (#13)
A more favourable view was obvious in others' comments:
“I think there is a real tension but I think it’s an area, having said that, where having religious people and scientists together discussing it can be very interesting and possibly fruitful.” (#47)
The point was simply that there was an irreducibly moral dimension to this debate, and that, as one atheist philosopher put it:
“The religious communities often have a developed ethical vocabulary that helps people to think about ethical issues, for example, the just war tradition.” (#5)
The report's remark concluding this section on the meeting of minds between those involved with religion and science is this:
Religion being indissolubly connected with ethical reasoning meant that, like it or not, ethics was a key part of the science and religion debate.
This aspect of the necessary conversation came through also in what the expert interviewees had to say about the political dimension of the work of scientists. One interviewee, in referring to the criticism of scientists as wanting to "play God", found that there is some logic to the underlying sentiments
The phrase ‘playing God’, when used, was not used approvingly. Nevertheless, as the same respondent went on to explain that "there is at least some logic to the underlying sentiment".
“Now while I disagree with their argument as they state it, I nonetheless have a lot of sympathy with what I think is the emotion underlying it. And that is that we will be doing something extremely complicated with unforeseen consequences. And it might be wiser if we were to be at the very, very least be very cautious here.” (#46)
Others concurred. Science could make astonishing discoveries. Technology could achieve astonishing changes. But scientists, they claimed, could sometimes be dangerously enthusiastic or naïve about their achievements.
“Particularly to do with ethics I think that scientists often lose sight of the ethical implications of their work, and they often want to just plough through ethical boundaries. This is particularly with biosciences and biotechnology, and they just see them as being an unnecessary obstacle to what they see as progress." (#13)
This was not to claim that scientists could not contribute to these ethical debates. They could. However, they were not necessarily best placed to make decisions here. Quite a number of respondents were insistent on this point.
“Scientists have no particular authority about what aims we ought to have and how we should weigh them and scientists have no particular weight on that matter.” (#55)
“I think unfortunately science and religion both are engaged in practices of control that are probably doing a disservice to it and certain control over women, for example.” (#71)
“Science is based on measurement. And measurement takes no notice of secondary qualities... never mind value or meaning.” (#12)
So, if scientists are not in the best position to assess the value or meaning of their work, other parties can speak for the common good, with society as a whole offering its views in applying a wide-angle lens to scientific projects. Just as players in the monetary economy are regulated, at least minimally, because they can wreak havoc with the whole of society as we saw in the financial crisis of 2008 or in imposing outrageous income inequality through corporate irresponsibility, so the scientific community should continue to be supervised by ethics committees.
Science and religion are linked in many ways, but the moral and ethical sphere is central to the effort to work together for the benefit of society as a whole. The "joy of the science and religion conversation" is in the meeting of minds, allowing even conflicting views to produce light that guides and protects.
💢 Read the first and second parts of this series:
Religion and science: a meeting of minds
Science and religion: use a wide-angle lens
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