All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Social sciences and economics get more leeway than say...physics or chemistry. Then you have a few in the middle like biology or math.
The second part is key here. Whatever connection 'plenty of scientists' see between faith and science, it has no place at a scientific conference. That aside, calling someone a bigot or some other label in order to distract from the actual topic at hand is hardly productive. Like he says at the end:
> If that is what causes someone to be called a militant atheist, then no scientist should be ashamed of the label.
I'm assuming that you mean that non-science has no place at a science conference. Scientists who see a connection between faith and science will see that as science, which is why it's as important to them as a type of protein folding or particle decay might be to someone else.
Only if such a connection is documentable, predictable, hypothesizable, and reproduceable. Calling anything else "science" is diluting the word.
(apologies to string theorists: https://xkcd.com/171/ )
They probably should. Religious belief betrays at least a partial rejection of what science even is. If you can apply one set of rules to determine, say, the efficacy of some new drug undergoing testing, but another set of rules to how you believe the universe works, then you don't really understand either.
Can you go into more detail about what this means?
Which is to say, either you think that scientific reasoning isn't always a good way to understand our world, or you don't think understanding how our world works is really so important. All else being equal, good scientists will possess neither of these qualities.
In other words, "history" might not be science depending on your definition, but anthropology certainly is.
Any statement you make about reality, or a model for reality, should have a consequence in anticipated experiences. If it doesn't, you haven't gained any knowledge.
Testable predictions aren't even applicable in some domains. (e.g., fundamental moral principles.) Science can tell you whether certain actions fulfill a given set of moral principles, but it only answers "is" questions, and not fundamental "ought" questions. (It can sometimes answer derivative "ought" questions once you use some other means to select the answers to fundamental "ought" questions.)
> Which is to say, either you think that scientific reasoning isn't always a good way to understand our world, or you don't think understanding how our world works is really so important.
Or, you think that there are things worth considering besides the mechanics of how our world works. Certainly, some take the view that this is the only class of thing worth considering but this view is, itself, a quasi-religious and not-scientific view (and, as it is not a view about how the world works, somewhat self-inconsistent to hold in any case.)
You are correct that "ought" questions are not scientific in nature, but that's because they are not statements about the natural world. Moral principles will be rooted in your biology and your culture, and if your culture includes religion that will be reflected in your beliefs, but that certainly doesn't validate your religion. Of course, how your religion came to have those values in the first place is in the domain of science (anthropology).
Once politics or agendas get involved, then science takes a back seat to convincing others that you are right.
The controversy-value of a statement has no bearing on its truth-value, and to think so is deeply unscientific. Belief in the supernatural is unscientific by definition: once something crosses into the natural realm it comes under the dominion of science. In the meantime, God will not pop into existence if enough people believe in him. Even if I am so persuasive that I can convince every living physicist that I'm immune to the laws of gravity, when I jump off a tall enough bridge I will still plummet to my death. If the fate of our species should we continue on the path we're on, is the collapse of our civilization and binding to this one planet until our eventual extinction, then that is what will happen regardless of whatever clever arguments against climate change you can conjure up. The combined willpower of every living human being could not so much as change the spin of a single electron. The universe is indifferent, and it is hard to overstate just how dangerous it is to ignore this basic fact.
Moreover, taking a strong standpoint is absolutely justified based on the strength of the evidence. To do otherwise implies that the evidence is not so strong. And again, controversy-value has no bearing on this, either.
No, it doesn't. (I would argue that that statement betrays a misunderstanding of what science -- or religious belief -- is.)
There's no fundamental conflict between science and religious belief, even in principle. There can be a conflict between science and particular religious beliefs, and a conflict between a quasi-religious scientism and other religious belief, but that's a different thing.
What if self-described militant atheists like Krauss took their atheism seriously and considered fundamental values, whether they come from a sincere belief in a deity or not, to be essentially the same, since they basically are if there's in fact no God? They would have to look closer at values and see if there was perhaps a social or personal utility to having certain types of values. Study them, and figure out what makes certain values work well and which ones implode. Create some kind of explanatory model of values. If you will, come up with a "scientific" way of analyzing values. One might even put some effort into examining value systems for consistency, figure out if they have side-effects or study what types of outcomes they optimize for, and make a good one for the outcome you desire. Just don't tell Krauss that this is what philosophy does, because he thinks philosophy is dumb and a waste of time.