Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (18 page)

Other syncretists argue that it's
impossible
for science to contradict religion because science, devoted to understanding how God's creation works,
must
comport with religious belief. As Pope John Paul II put it in 1996, “
truth cannot contradict truth
.” The theologian Stephen J. Pope from Boston College explained further: “
God is the source of both reason and revelation
, and truth from one source cannot contradict truth from the other. Disagreements in science and religion are capable of reconciliation because these sources are two valid but distinct modes of apprehending what is true.”

But such claims look silly when the two areas provide “answers” that are irreconcilable—the “conflict of outcomes” described in the last chapter. Perhaps the best example of this forced harmony is “scientific creationism,” a movement that began in America in the 1960s and died out about twenty years later. After American courts rejected the teaching of biblical creationism in public school science classes on constitutional grounds (creationism was seen as a form of religion, violating our legal separation between church
and state), creationists regrouped under the rubric of “scientific creationism,” claiming that the findings of science were perfectly reconcilable with the Bible. They could then argue that teaching biblical ideas wasn't religious at all, but simply science.

That too failed, for the reconciliation is spurious. To harmonize the fossil record with the story of Noah's flood, for instance, scientific creationism proposed the ludicrous theory of “hydrodynamic sorting,” arguing that a sudden worldwide flood would in fact yield precisely the fossil record we see. Marine invertebrates, living on the seafloor, would naturally be the first to be covered with sediment when the waters began to rise and roil. They would therefore show up at the bottom of the geological record, the part that scientists consider the oldest. The fishes would follow, settling atop the invertebrates, and then, in order, we'd see amphibians (who live close to water), reptiles, and then mammals, who, being smarter and more agile, would be able to flee the rising waters. And humans, the smartest and most resourceful of all creatures, could climb quite high before they were inundated, accounting for our appearance as fossils in the topmost geological layer.

As a young assistant professor, I taught a course called “Evolution vs. Scientific Creationism”—perhaps the most fun I've ever had as a teacher. On Mondays I'd lecture as an evolutionary biologist, and on Wednesdays as a creationist, refuting what I had said on Monday. (I was already quite familiar with the claims of creationists, and could easily talk like one.) The students, of course, became deeply confused. But on Fridays we'd have a discussion and sort out the competing claims. And it was when we came to the “hydrodynamic sorting” hypothesis that the students realized that biblical “truth” simply couldn't be harmonized with scientific truth. Why weren't some unlucky humans, perhaps confined to beds or wheelchairs, buried in sediments alongside fossil amphibians? Why didn't some seagoing mammals, like whales, sleep with the fossil fishes, instead of appearing later alongside the mammals? And why did the flying pterodactyls get inundated so much earlier than modern birds, when both could fly to the mountaintops? Such is the debacle that results from claiming that “truth cannot contradict truth.” Eventually, scientific creationism went the way of its literalist ancestor, branded by the courts as simply fundamentalism tricked out as science.

But this strategy is still alive. As we'll see in the next chapter, “natural theology,” the idea that some facts of science support the existence of God—and in fact can't be explained
except
by God—is alive and well among even liberal theologians.

Muslim accommodationists, who, like most Muslims, take the Quran literally, have their own form of scientific creationism, asserting that the book is not only scientifically accurate on all issues, but actually anticipated every finding of modern science. The results are both pathetic and amusing. The Turkish physician Halûk Nurbaki, for instance, collected fifty verses from the Quran, striving mightily to show that they predicted the discovery of gravity, the atomic nucleus, the Big Bang, and quantum mechanics. He translated one such verse as “
The fire you kindle arises from green trees
.” Nurbaki sees this as a divine indication of the oxygen produced by plants and consumed by fire, adding, “It was impossible 14 centuries ago for unbelievers to understand the stupendous biological secret this verse contains, for the inside story of combustion was not known.” All this shows is how far some people can twist scripture to make their faith comport with science. (The one exception for Muslims is human evolution: while many have no problem with evolution itself, they nearly all agree with the Quran that our species is unique, created instantly by Allah from a lump of mud. And nearly all Muslim science classes exempt humans from the evolutionary process.)

Because accommodationism is largely a Western enterprise, it's harder to find works in English that reconcile Eastern faiths with science. But one strain of Hindutva, the growing Hindu nationalist movement, apparently does for the Vedas what Nurbaki does for the Quran, forcing science into the Procrustean bed of scripture. As the Indian historian and philosopher Meera Nanda notes, this current of thought “
simply grabs whatever theory
of physics or biology may be popular with Western scientists at any given time, and claims that Hindu ideas are ‘like that,' or ‘mean the same' and ‘therefore' are perfectly modern and rational.”

What about Buddhists? That “faith,” of course, comprises many sects, some more philosophical than religious, but the most famous statement on Buddhist accommodationism comes from Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama. Fascinated by science from his youth, Gyatso wrote an entire book trying to harmonize science and Buddhism,
The Universe in a Single Atom
. It
contains a statement often quoted to show the primacy of fact over faith in Buddhist teaching: “
If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate
certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.” Yet Gyatso nevertheless accepts at least two supernatural claims, reincarnation and the “law of karma,” and criticizes the theory of evolution along creationist lines, arguing that mutations aren't random and that the notion of “survival of the fittest” is a tautology (it isn't). Buddhism is considered one of the “nonliteralist” faiths, but, like all faiths, its literalism about some beliefs makes it incompatible with science.

The NOMA Gambit

The most famous attempt to reconcile science and religion, at least in recent years, was made by the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. In his 1999 book
Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life,
Gould argued that the compatibility of science and religion rests on understanding that their aims are completely separate. Science, he said, is the endeavor to find out about the natural world, while religion deals solely with issues of meaning, purpose, and morals. The two disciplines thus constitute “non-overlapping magisteria,” for which Gould coined the acronym NOMA. To Gould, this disjunction creates a kind of harmony: dealing with the human condition, he argued, requires both physical and metaphysical inquiry. The NOMA argument has been co-opted by many scientific organizations eager to show that they don't step on religion's toes.

Gould wasn't the first to float this idea: both theologians and philosophers previously made similar claims. The mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, for instance, anticipated Gould in 1925:

Remember the widely different aspects
of events which are dealt with in science and in religion respectively. Science is concerned with the general conditions which are observed to regulate physical phenomena; whereas religion is wholly wrapped up in the contemplation of moral and aesthetic values. On the one side there is the law of gravitation, and on the other the contemplation of the beauty of holiness. What one side sees, the other misses; and vice versa.

Gould's contribution was not only to formalize this argument in an entire book, but also to promote it as a principle of sound intellectual behavior. Its popularity—for the idea is neither new nor profound—undoubtedly reflects Gould's compelling prose, the “let's all get along” tone of the book, and the fact that an argument “
that grants dignity and distinction
to
each
subject” was being made by a famous and popular scientist who was also an outspoken atheist.

Unfortunately, Gould's attempt fails on two counts: it requires the homeopathic dilution of religion into a humanistic philosophy devoid of supernatural claims, and it gives to religion sole authority over moral and philosophical issues that have nevertheless had a long secular history. Because NOMA is perhaps the most common argument for the compatibility of science and faith, it bears some examination.

Gould began his argument by observing that both science and religion have sometimes transgressed their proper boundaries, with religion in effect making scientifically testable statements about nature, and scientists inferring ethical or social principles from nature. The most obvious example of the former is American creationism; of the latter are early attempts to justify racism and capitalism by appealing to the theory of evolution. Using examples drawn from the work of Darwin, Galileo, Cardinal Newman, and other scientists and theologians, Gould showed that these territorial violations have occurred throughout history. NOMA, he argued, will prevent them from recurring if we simply stick to the following principles:

Science tries to document
the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.

Gould thus granted these magisteria “equal importance,” calling for thoughtful dialogue between religion and science—not to unite them, but to encourage greater harmony and mutual understanding.

The problem is that while NOMA appeals as a utopian vision, Gould saw it as more than just a pleasing platitude, for he urged that we must realize
his vision by
structuring
science and religion in a way that would allow their peaceful coexistence. He thus saw NOMA as “
the potential harmony
through difference of science and religion, both properly conceived and limited.”

The word “properly” is the red flag here. Imagining “proper” science is easy—the vast majority of scientists are happy to pursue their calling as an entirely naturalistic enterprise. But what is “proper” religion? It was, to Gould, religion that does not overlap with science.

And that's the rub, for real religion is frequently and stubbornly
improper
. As we've seen, many people's religions, by making factual claims about the world, bring them into Gould's territory of science. As always, evolution is the most prominent example. It's not only fundamentalists who subscribe to unscientific creationist narratives, but also many mainstream Protestants and Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orthodox Jews, Native Americans, Scientologists, Muslims, and Hindus. But ideas about the origin of humans and other species aren't the only religious violations of NOMA. Christian Scientists entertain a spiritual theory of disease, and some Hindus believe that disability is a sign of past spiritual transgression. Most Abrahamic religions accept the existence of souls that distinguish humans from other species. It's simply undeniable that religions worldwide often stray into scientific territory, sometimes with tragic results. How many have died, even in the last few decades, because an infection is regarded as simply spiritual malaise?

To deal with this difficulty, Gould apparently construed “religion” as the pronouncements of liberal Western theologians, many of them agnostics in all but name. But of course there is far more to religion than the opinions of scholars. Religion encompasses beliefs that help people make sense of personal reality, even when those beliefs overlap with science. By casting himself as the arbiter of “proper” religion, Gould simply redefined terms to satisfy his utopian vision. Thus NOMA underwent a second metamorphosis from an achievable utopia to
an actual description of reality
. That is, to Gould the distressing clashes between faith and science
by definition
did not involve “real” religion. This turned NOMA into an exercise in tautology, allowing him to simply dismiss religions that make claims about reality:

Religion just can't be equated
with Genesis literalism, the miracle of the liquefying blood of Saint Januarius . . . or the Bible codes of kabbalah and modern media hype. If these colleagues wish to fight superstition, irrationalism, philistinism, ignorance, dogma, and a host of other insults to the human intellect (often politically converted into dangerous tools of murder and oppression as well), then God bless them—but don't call this enemy “religion.”

But what else can we call it? Many religious people would be affronted to learn that NOMA requires them to abandon essential parts of their faith. Nevertheless, that was apparently Gould's prescription. He denied to religion, for instance, a reliance on miracles, arguing that the first commandment for NOMA is “
Thou shalt not mix the magisteria
by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science.” But of course this rejects the central claim of Christianity—the Resurrection—as well as the Catholic and literalist beliefs in a historical Adam and Eve.