ac·commo·dation·ist

ac•com•mo•da•tion•ist n.
One that compromises with or adapts to the viewpoint of the opposition.

In the case of religious accommodationism this means someone who adapts his viewpoint to religious people. In my experience it means this is someone who will open a back-door for religion while believing something else. Accommodationists are people who are atheists, but while they don’t believe in god(s) themselves, maintain that somehow some version of religion is working just fine with science and reason. In the opposite, moderates are people who believe in some vague weird concept of God that isn’t anywhere near the concrete beliefs that most religionists hold, or at least they think their version is moderate and compatible with reality. Many studied theologians seem to take such a stance and don’t realize it’s miles away from what your normal religious person would believe. In the very least, it will veil the many irrational things the theologian himself believes!

Most importantly, though, unlike moderates and (most) theologians, religious accommodationists do not believe in God. They just want to make peace with religious people and have the moderates on their side when fighting for the acceptance and education in science, or for peace and prosperity. Accommodationists often seem to claim a moderate God is possible and hope that nobody asks any further, so that the major religions slip through the net of acceptance. The NCSE, as great as their work is, seems quite big on this. In that respect, they’re like the above-mentioned theologians.

The question is, would we want accommodationists on our side? – That is, should we turn into the kind of people accommodationists want us to be [that is: accommodationists as well]? Should we avoid the link between our scepticism concerning God and science for the sake of getting the moderates and accommodationists on our side?

My answer is no, and I have two main reasons.

1. Taking an accommodationist stance is a price I am not willing to pay

The first one is that many of us are not willing to pay the price. The price for taking an accommodationist stance is denying what is reasonable and lying to ourselves and/or others about our stance. It is simply not true that God and reason, the tool of science, are compatible (see below). Accommodationists are among the most forceful defenders of the God-of-the-gaps argument. That is the idea that because not every little branch of science does have hard evidence against an involvement of God, moderates may have a point. That’s not how reason works!

Professor Kenneth Miller, a moderate Roman Catholic and an excellent refuter of creationist arguments, for example, holds the view that God can be found interfering through random quantum events, as described in his book “Finding Darwin’s God”. Accommodationists hold the view that Miller might have a point. They, just as Miller, completely ignore that scientific thinking involves more than just “is there evidence or is there no evidence [yet]?”. It’s also about probabilities, hypothesis, likelihoods and being rational and sceptical about ideas. In Miller’s case we really can’t say whether God isn’t a quantum-twiddler. But there is absolutely no reason to think he is, either. Rather the opposite: a God that calculates how to twiddle which of countless quanta to make a certain event (that someone prayed for) happen must have a mathematical capacity beyond human understanding. Not to mention hearing of the prayer in the first place. Such a God must be infinitely complex and there’s no reason to believe that something so infinitely complex just sprang into existence, unless something even more infinitely complex made it (which then again had to be made by something even more infinitely complex… and so on). It’s much more reasonable and scientific to assume that the current notion that the universe started off simply and that over a very long time complexity increased, is the likely option. That also takes into account that our current knowledge and the history of scientific progress tell us that it is imaginable that our world is explainable as a product of natural processes. The problem becomes much worse when you start trying to find arguments for one god instead of several, for the Christian god instead of the Muslim one, the Aztek gods over the Mayan or Egyptian ones… there’s absolutely no reasonable argument to pinpoint a particular God as the creator of the world. However, most people do believe in one or several very particular, very distinct Gods.

So, if you have some kind of rational, scientific thinking, or even, if you just think that by your personal conviction God isn’t likely to exist for any other reasons, taking an accommodationist stance is a pitiful lie. “No, I can’t manage to believe in that, but you can keep on going. I wouldn’t take your little fantasy away.” How condescending. If you, like me, find it illogical and unreasonable to believe in God, then it’s a huge lie to say “I don’t believe in God, but you may have a point thinking someone guided evolution or talks to you when you pray (or whatever belief you may hold)”. No, I really don’t think so. I won’t respectlessly lie to you to tell you that I think you have a point.

Most of all, nowhere in properly done science will you find God as a possible explanation for unsolved problems, precisely because there’s no reason to postulate such a being when looking at the evidence and at what makes reasonable explanation. There are by far more logical hypotheses, and reasons to take the “I don’t know, but I want to find out” stance over “God did it”. Regarding something as impossible as God as a suitable alternative just doesn’t cut it for a sceptic, rationalist or lover of reason and science.

Denying reason, scientific thinking and scepticism or lying about what is reasonable, scientific and sceptical just isn’t a price we’re willing to pay.

2. Accommodationism is not helping the cause

The accommodationist stance has been popular for a longer time than atheism. Especially the outspoken kind of atheism is so new that some will title it “New Atheism” (a term not everyone is happy with). Yet, it seems acceptance of evolution, a central subject to biological science that is vehemently opposed by fundamentalists, has jumped since 2004, according to Gallup polls. This must not necessarily be attributed to the “New Atheism” (correlation is not causation), but it certainly cannot be attributed to accommodationism that has been popular for much longer.

The best argument, however, has been brought up again just recently, and is of course the reason for this post: Jerry Coyne put it very clearly when replying to the BioLogos Foundation’s accommodationist stance. BioLogos asked scientists to be more moderate about what they claim as scientific truth, because nothing in science is certain, and this view should be displayed. However, what is an “uncertainty” in science can easily be an absolute conviction in politics, and certainly IS an absolute certainty in religion. What I am trying to say is that science has a habit of being very cautious about everything and put great value on even the slightest doubt. But that a scientific cautiousness doesn’t translate into a public uncertainness. So if you mix public and scientific communication the wrong way, you convey is a false picture of how uncertain or certain things are. Add to that a bit of snip-snip by journalists and it gets quite a bit worse – journalist just love straightforward answers and scientists are so unwilling to give those. So journalists often tend to just cut things in shape as they see fit.

The way of communication, however, is important, also because other public disciplines like politics and religion will not display this same cautiousness. Many public figures will just postulate “x is true” or “y isn’t true” where a scientist among his colleagues will say “x is almost certain to be true, but one could imagine that…”… and a journalist will cut it down to “x is almost certain to be true” – while the Murdoch newspaper will read it and turn it into “scientists not certain that x is true!”. It’s not about being dishonest about what you mean, but it’s about avoiding misunderstandings because a scientific use of language isn’t the same as the public use of it. What is a “theory” in common language is a “hypothesis” in science – while a “theory” in science is actually an explanatory model.

The point, however, is that when the BioLogos foundation is suggesting this uncertainty-stance it’s likely meant as an accommodationist strategy. It’s demanding yet another gap, though fabricated, for people to say “ha, see, there is still room for my personal, irrational conviction” (well, people won’t literally say that, but you get the drift). Certainly, one would wish everyone would be as cautious as scientists in making absolute statements, but that’s simply not how our society works. That’s why such overdone uncertainty will be misunderstood. The acceptance of science will not strive, if scientists willingly and continuously speak a different language than the general public. However, that is what BioLogos demands.

Jerry Coyne shoots down the BioLogos argumentation in an elegant, common way – he replaces science with religion:

For this reason, it is important, here and elsewhere, for the faithful to emphasize that uncertainty is central to religion, and advocacy is disruptive of it. When a religious person becomes an advocate, he loses for himself the power to use faith to discern reality.

You know this isn’t going to happen, even though the uncertainties in religion are enormous – it’s based on believing everything by faith alone and nothing by evidence – rather the opposite (see my “Shroud of Turin” entry before this!). Yet, the same thing is asked of scientists as if their public representation was uncoupled from other people’s and organization’s public presentations.

Whom are people going to believe? The convinced pseudocientist who claims with absolute certainty that “vaccines cause autism” or the scientist who cautiously says “so far, no links between vaccines and autism have been found, though of course we can’t completely rule out that in the fringe cases x and y, recent vaccination was a common connector”. There’s a chance your opposite has fallen asleep before you even finish that sentence. The point is that such a statement not going to arrive in the public sphere as it arrives among other scientists. Nobody will think “Oh, okay, so the connection between vaccines and autism are extremely unlikely, we should try to find a better way to approach the subject of autism”. What is going to arrive is “Scientists don’t think there’s a link, but there very probably could be!!!”. As I said, it would be great if thinking scientifically (never rule out the last doubt!) would be a common way of thinking, but it really, really isn’t!

The point is that this uncertain kuddlemuddle cannot work in favour for science and will, if anything, promote insecurity and as a consequence, distrust in the scientific method – which is the best method to discern reality that we have. There are certainly subjects that warrant keeping a dubious stance, but that is not what BioLogos is aiming for. Concerning those scientific subjects that are publically on the line at the moment (evolution, vaccines, God’s place, history, the Shroud of Turin, AIDS) conveying a false level of uncertainty is not pro-science – it’s anti-science.

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The help of accommodationists would be welcome, but only if they had a functional approach that didn’t involve pretending things that don’t go with our conscience. We’d absolutely like the extra weight on the pro-science and anti-pseudoscience side, but we can’t have this extra force, if it pulling us in the wrong direction.