Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (15 page)

But none of these are good reasons for deeming your religion true and others false. Granted, some people argue that
all
religions are true, claiming that at bottom we all worship the same God. But that's simply not the case. The foundational claims of different religions are not only disparate, but conflicting. Many Christians think that the only route to salvation is accepting Jesus as one's savior. If you're a Muslim, that doctrine will send you straight to hell.
The Quran also claims
that Jesus was slain but not crucified, with an impostor dying on the cross.
Jews, of course, don't see Jesus as the Messiah at all.

Unlike monotheistic faiths, Hinduism has many gods. Jehovah's Witnesses think that precisely 144,000 of them will make it to heaven, while the others who are saved will inhabit a paradise on Earth. In contrast, Laestadianism, a conservative branch of Lutheranism, considers itself the only true faith: only its roughly sixty thousand adherents are eligible for salvation, with the billions of others on Earth doomed to eternal torment. Catholics believe in
transubstantiation:
that the wine and wafer consumed during the Eucharist actually become the physical substance of Jesus's body and blood. In contrast, some Eastern Orthodox and Protestant sects hold to
consubstantiation,
the notion that the wine and wafer coexist as regular food and drink along with Jesus's blood and body. How could one possibly distinguish between these claims? We'll never know who gets saved, and chemical or DNA tests will show that bread and wine remain bread and wine during
all
Eucharists. What basis, then, for these beliefs? (Remember that the Eucharist involves not a metaphorical and spiritual transformation, but an actual
physical
transformation.)

Even more bizarrely, Black Muslims believe that whites are a race of devils, created less than seven thousand years ago from selective breeding by a mad black scientist named Yakub. And, of course, there is Xenu and his hydrogen bombs. Add to these all the conflicting doctrines and equally conflicting moral codes that differ in how one should treat women, gays, sex before or outside of marriage, criminals, animals, and so on. They can't
all
be right.

How many different religions are there
? The number is uncountable. While there are about a dozen “major” religions, they're fractured into
different branches with different beliefs and practices. In fact, the Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary estimates that there are forty-four thousand sects of Christianity alone!

The different claims among these faiths have consequences, for they've produced endless misery over the course of history. Sunni and Shiite Muslims, who regularly kill each other, originally diverged only in whom they saw as the proper person to head the faith: those related to Muhammad or those who, regardless of ancestry, were most qualified. “Heretical” Christian sects like the Donatists and Cathars were ruthlessly extirpated over differences in doctrine.
And even today
, 16 percent of the world's 198 countries penalize blasphemy, while 20 prohibit apostasy (abandoning one's faith).
All of the latter are nations that are largely Muslim.

Clearly, religions aren't incompatible only with science: they're incompatible with one another. And this incompatibility wasn't inevitable: if the particulars of belief and dogma were somehow bestowed on humans by a god, there's no obvious reason why there should be more than one brand of faith. These schisms and conflicts are further evidence that religion is not only a human construct, but is about more than sociality or community.
Beliefs matter.

But suppose that there is a “correct” religion—one whose conception of God, and the practices and moral codes God decrees, is accurate. How do you discover it? Given that most religious people acquire their faith through accidents of birth, and those faiths are conflicting, it's very likely that the tenets of a randomly specified religion are wrong. How can you tell if
yours
is right? As we've seen, this question should be of the greatest importance to believers, for its answer involves the all-important issues of morality and, if you believe in an afterlife, where you'll spend eternity.

The only rational solution is to apply the same degree of skepticism toward the claims of your own faith as you do toward the ones you reject. This rational and quasi-scientific approach is promoted by the ex-preacher John Lotfus, who lays it out briefly:

It is highly likely
that any given religious faith is false and quite possible that they could all be false. At best there can only be one religious faith that is true. At worst, they could all be false. . . .

So I propose that: . . . The only way to rationally test one's culturally
adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider with the same level of reasonable skepticism believers already use to examine the other religious faiths they reject. This expresses the
Outsider Test for Faith
(OTF).

Given that beliefs matter, the wisdom of this approach is unquestionable. But if it's used honestly, its outcome is inevitable. If you're a Christian, for instance, you probably reject the beliefs of Islam because you see them not only as misguided, but also as lacking in evidence. If that's the case, then you must abandon your own faith on the same grounds. In the end, the inconsistencies between faiths, combined with the reasonable doubt that believers apply to other faiths, means that
no
faiths are privileged, none should be trusted, and all should be discarded. This is what the philosopher Philip Kitcher calls the core challenge of secularism toward religion: the “
argument from symmetry
.”

This farrago of conflicting and irresolvable claims about reality stands in stark contrast to science. While science itself has fragmented into different disciplines that use different tools, they all share a core methodology based on doubt, replication, reason, and observation. In other words, while there are different sciences, there is only one
form
of science, whose conclusions don't depend on the ethnicity or faith of the scientist who reaches them. Because of this, we need no Outsider Test for Science.

Scientific Truth Is Progressive and Cumulative; Theological “Truth” Isn't

The progress of science
is palpable to everyone, whether you measure it in improvements in the quality or length of our lives (the average life span has doubled since 1800), or simply in our improved understanding of nature.
During my own lifetime I've seen the elimination of smallpox and the virtual elimination of polio, the discovery of the Big Bang, the uncovering of the structure of DNA and how it produces bodies, the ability to transplant organs, the reconstruction of much of the evolutionary history of life, the advent of personal computers, the first Moon landing and space shuttle, the sending of Mars rovers to explore the planet, in vitro
fertilization, cell
phones, HPV vaccines, and the identification of the Higgs boson. And that's just since 1949.

Has theological knowledge advanced since 1949? Clearly not. In fact, I would argue that it hasn't advanced in the last five thousand years, more than ten times longer than the span of modern science.

Now, when I say theology hasn't advanced, I'm not saying that it hasn't
changed,
for it clearly has. The idea of hell has been abandoned by many, or reconceived as a “separation from God.” The notion of the Immaculate Conception has been adopted. The Catholic Church eliminated (in 1966!) the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum,
the list of banned books considered injurious to morality, including works by Hume, Sartre, Milton, Locke, and Copernicus. Surely the ability to read these authors without damnation can be seen as an advance—but not an advance in theology. And, of course, whole branches of theology have sprouted, including process theology and liberation theology, as well as wholly new religions, like Scientology and Christian Science.

Nor am I saying that some aspects of church doctrine haven't come into better sync with reality. The old views of Adam and Eve, of an instantaneous creation, and of a worldwide flood have largely fallen out of favor because science has shown them to be false. Finally, I am not claiming that the
morality
advanced by some religions hasn't advanced, for it has: many churches now espouse gay rights and women's rights, and, on the whole, Western religion has become more enlightened and liberal. Liberation theology is in fact a movement designed to infuse traditional Catholicism with notions of social justice. You'd be hard pressed to find a church that still supports slavery, though many did before the Civil War.

What I am saying is two things. First, religion hasn't obviously come closer to understanding the divine. From the ancient Hebrew sages through Aquinas to Kierkegaard, we still have no idea whether gods exist; whether there is only one god or many; whether any existing god is deistic, and largely absent, or theistic, interacting with the world; what the nature of any god is (is it apathetic, kindly, or evil?); whether that God is, as process theology claims, affected and changed by the world or unchangeable; how God wants us to live; and whether there is an afterlife, and, if so, what it is like. What has happened is that new theologies and religions have simply
appeared alongside the old ones, with some of the old ones going extinct. We still have Judaism, but now we also have Catholicism, Mormonism, and Scientology. Ancient polytheistic Hinduism is still here, side by side with Buddhism and aboriginal religion. Fundamentalists, who see almost the entire Bible as literal truth, coexist with apophatic theologians who claim that nothing can be said about God, and yet write many books on the topic. In this way theology is not progressive but additive, and no consensus has developed about gods and their will. This, of course, contrasts strongly with science, where consensus views have evolved in every field—views that may change with time, but always lead to a deeper understanding of the universe, one that expands our abilities and makes our predictions more accurate. Before 1940, there was no way to decide which primate was our closest relative, to land rockets on the Moon, to understand how the genetic material coded for bodies and behavior, or to determine our position on the planet within a few meters.

I also claim that insofar as theology or religious beliefs
do
change within a faith, those changes are driven largely by either science or changes in secular culture. It is science, of course, that has put paid to most of the creation myths in Genesis, and archaeology to myths like the Exodus and the captivity of the Jews in Egypt. And it is largely advances in secular philosophy, like increasing empathy for minorities and the dispossessed, that have fueled changing notions of hell, the infusion of social justice into churches, and the acceptance of minorities and women. Religious morality, at least as promulgated by priests, rabbis, imams, and theologians, is usually one step behind secular morality. We are seeing this play out at the moment as increasing numbers of Catholics take issue with church dogma about abortion, contraception, male priests, and homosexuality. We can be fairly confident that eventually the church will make some moral concessions. Like biological species, churches must adapt or die when their environment changes radically.

In candid moments, some theologians like John Polkinghorne grudgingly admit that theology moves more slowly than science:

The nesting relationship of successive scientific theories
gives the subject its character of a cumulative advance of knowledge. A very ordinary
scientist today possesses, in consequence, much greater overall understanding of the physical world than was ever possible for Sir Isaac [Newton]. . . . The theologian of the twentieth century enjoys no presumptive superiority over the theologians of the fourth or sixteenth centuries. Indeed, those earlier centuries may well have had access to spiritual experiences and insights which have been attenuated, or even lost, in our own time.

But even here theology can turn necessity into virtue. The philosopher and theologian J. P. Moreland sees theology's stasis as a sign of its ability to grasp truth
more readily
than does science!

The slow progress in philosophy and theology
may indicate not that they are less rational than science—that is, that they have progressed less toward truth—but that they are more rational. Why? Because the slow progress could be an effect of their already having eliminated proportionately more false options in their spheres of study than science has eliminated in its. If this is true, it means that they have already come closer to a full, well-rounded true world view than science has come.

In sum, philosophy and theology may not progress because they may have already arrived rationally at some truth concerning the world. This means that a philosopher or theologian has the right to be sure about this conclusion, not in the sense of terminating inquiry or being closed to new arguments, but in the sense of requiring a good bit of evidence before abandoning the conclusion and not being able to use it to infer other conclusions.

This is a textbook example of how to rationalize uncomfortable truths. But if Moreland is right, let him tell us which of the thousands of religious worldviews is “true” and which have been discarded as false.

The methodological conflicts between science and religion cannot be brokered, for faith has no reliable way to find truth. It is no more compatible for someone to be a scientist in the lab and a believer in church than it is for someone to be a science-based physician who practices homeopathic medicine in her spare time.

While most believers accept the methods of science, they also claim additional methods of apprehending truth: faith, revelation, and authority. If those methods were reliable, then the outcomes of religious and scientific investigations would be similar, or at least consonant.