Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (2 page)

This brings us to the common claim that critics of religion accept a “straw man” fallacy, seeing all believers as fundamentalists or scriptural literalists, and that we neglect the “strong and sophisticated” versions of faith held by liberal theologians. A true discussion of faith/science compatibility, this argument runs, demands that we deal only with these sophisticated forms of belief. For if we construe “religion” as simply “the beliefs of the average believer,” then arguing that those beliefs are incompatible with science is just as nonsensical as construing “science” as the rudimentary and often incorrect understanding of science held by the average citizen.

But this parallel is wrong in several ways. First, while many laypeople hold erroneous views of science, they neither
practice
science nor are considered part of the scientific community. In contrast, the average believer not only practices religion but may also belong to a religious community that may try to spread its beliefs to the wider society. Further, while theologians may know more about the
history
of religion—or the work of other theologians—than do regular believers, they have no special expertise in discerning the nature of God, what he wants, or how he interacts with the world. In understanding the claims of their faith, “regular” religious believers are far closer to theologians than are science-friendly laypeople to the physicists and biologists they admire. Throughout this book I'll consider the claims both of garden-variety believers and of theologians, for while the problem of faith versus science is most serious for the regular believer, it is the theologians who use academic arguments to convince believers that their faith is compatible with science.

I emphasize that my claim that science and religion are incompatible does not mean that most religious people reject science. Even evolution, the science most scorned by believers, is accepted by many Jews, Buddhists, Christians, and liberal Muslims. And, of course, most believers have no problem with the idea of supernovas, photosynthesis, or gravity. The conflict plays out in only a few specific areas of science, but also in the validation of faith in general. My argument for incompatibility deals not with people's
perceptions,
but with the contradictory ways that science and religion support their claims about reality.

I begin by showing evidence that the conflict between religion and science is substantial and widespread. This evidence includes the incessant production of books and official statements by both scientists and theologians assuring us that there really is compatibility, but using different and sometimes contradictory arguments. The sheer number and diversity of these assurances suggest that there's a problem that hasn't been resolved. Further evidence for conflict includes the high proportion of scientists in both the United States and the United Kingdom who are atheists, a proportion of nonbelievers roughly ten times higher than that in the general public. Also, in America and other countries, there are laws that privilege faith by giving it precedence over science, as in the medical treatment of one's children. Finally, the existence of pervasive creationism, as well as widespread belief in religious and spiritual healing, shows an obvious conflict between science and religion—or between science and faith.

The second chapter lays out the terms of engagement: the ways I construe science and religion, and what I mean by “incompatibility.” I'll argue that the incompatibility operates at three levels: methodology, outcomes, and philosophy—what “truths” are uncovered by science versus faith.

Chapter 3 takes on accommodationism, analyzing a sample of the arguments used by both religious people and scientific organizations to argue for a harmony between science and faith. The two most common arguments are the existence of religious scientists, and Stephen Jay Gould's prominent idea of “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA), in which science encompasses the domain of facts about the universe while religion occupies the orthogonal realm of meaning, morals, and values. In the end, all accommodationist strategies fail because they don't resolve the huge disparity between discerning “truths” using reason versus faith. I'll describe three examples of the problems that arise when scientific advances flatly contradict religious dogma: theistic (God-guided) evolution, claims about the existence of Adam and Eve, and Mormon beliefs about the origin of Native Americans.

The fourth chapter, “Faith Strikes Back,” tackles not only the ways that religion is said to
contribute
to science, but also the way the faithful
denigrate
science as a way of defending their own turf. The arguments are diverse, and include claims that science actually supports the idea of God by supplying answers to questions supposedly beyond the ken of science. I call these endeavors the “new natural theology”—a modern version of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arguments that purported to show the hand of God in nature. The updated arguments deal with the purported “fine-tuning” of the universe—the claimed improbability that the laws of physics would permit the appearance of life—as well as with the claimed inevitability of human evolution, and the details of human morality that, it's argued, resist scientific but not religious explanations. I also take up the notion of “other ways of knowing”: the contention that science isn't the only way of ferreting out nature's truths. I'll argue that in fact science is the
only
way to find such truths—if you construe “science” broadly. Finally, I deal with believers'
tu quoque
accusations that science is either derived from religion or afflicted with the same problems as religion. These accusations are also diverse: science is actually a product of Christianity; science involves untestable assumptions, and is therefore based on faith; science is fallible; science promotes “scientism,” the view that nonscientific questions are uninteresting; and—the ultimate redoubt of believers—the assertion that while religion has sometimes been harmful, so has science, which has given us things like eugenics and nuclear weapons.

Why should we care whether science and religion are compatible? The last chapter answers this question, showing why reliance on faith, when reason and evidence are available, has created immense harms, including many deaths. The clearest examples involve religiously based healing, which, protected by American law, has killed many, including children who have no choice in their treatment. Likewise, opposition to stem cell research and vaccination, as well as denial of global warming, is sometimes based on religious grounds. I argue that in a world where people must support their opinions with evidence and reason rather than faith, we would experience less conflict over issues like assisted suicide, gay rights, birth control, and sexual morality. Finally, I discuss whether it's
ever
useful to have faith. Are there times when it's all right to hold strong beliefs that are supported by little or no evidence? Even if we can't prove the claims of faith, isn't religion useful as a form of social glue and a wellspring of public morality? Is it possible for science and religion to have a constructive dialogue about these things?

I am aware that criticizing religion is a touchy endeavor (a classic dinner-table no-no), invoking strong reactions even from those who aren't believers but see faith as a societal good. Beyond summarizing what this book is, then, I should also explain what it is not.

Although I deal largely with religion, my purpose is not to show that religion has, on balance, been a malign influence on society. While I do believe this, and in the last chapter emphasize some of the problems of faith, it would be foolish to deny that religion has motivated many acts of goodness and charity. It has also been a solace for the inevitable sorrows of human life, and an impetus for helping others. In the end, it's impossible to perform the “good versus bad” calculus of religion by integrating over history.

My main thesis is narrower and, I think, more defensible: understanding reality, in the sense of being able to use what we know to predict what we don't, is best achieved using the tools of science, and is never achieved using the methods of faith. That is attested by the acknowledged success of science in telling us about everything from the smallest bits of matter to the origin of the universe itself—compared with the abject failure of religion to tell us anything about gods, including whether they exist. While scientific investigations converge on solutions, religious investigations diverge, producing innumerable sects with conflicting and irresolvable claims. Using the predictions of science, we can now land space probes not only on distant planets, but also on distant comets. We can produce “designer drugs” to target a specific individual's cancer, decide which flu vaccines are most likely to be effective in the coming season, and figure out how to finally wipe scourges like smallpox and polio from our planet. Religion, in contrast, can't even tell us if there's an afterlife, much less anything about its nature.

The true harm of accommodationism is the weakening of our organs of reason by promoting useless methods of finding truth, especially that of faith. As Sam Harris notes:

The point is not that we atheists can prove
religion to be the cause of more harm than good (though I think this can be argued, and the balance seems to me to be swinging further toward harm each day). The point is that religion remains the only mode of discourse that encourages grown men and women to pretend to know things they manifestly do not (and cannot) know. If ever there were an attitude at odds with science, this is it. And the faithful are encouraged to keep shouldering this unwieldy burden of falsehood and self-deception by everyone they meet—by their coreligionists, of course, and by people of differing faith, and now, with startling frequency, by scientists who claim to have
no
faith.

In arguing that science is the only way we can really learn things about our universe, I am not calling for a society completely dominated by science, which most people see as a robotic world lacking emotion, empty of art and literature, and devoid of the human need to feel part of something larger than oneself—a need that draws many to religion. Such a world would indeed be sterile and joyless. Rather, I'd claim that adopting a more broadly scientific viewpoint not only helps us make better decisions, both for ourselves and for society as a whole, but also brings alive the many wonders of science barred to those who see it as something distant and forbidding (it's not). What could be more entrancing than understanding at last where we (and all other species) came from, a subject that I've studied all my life? Most important, there would be no devaluating of the emotional needs of humans. I live my life according to the principles I recommend in this book, but if you met me at a party you'd never guess I was a scientist. I am at least as emotional, and enamored of the arts, as the next person, am easily brought to tears by a good movie or book, and do my best to help the less fortunate. All I lack is faith. One can meet all the emotional requisites of a human—except for the assurance that you'll find a life after death—without the superstitions of religion.

Nevertheless, I won't discuss how to replace religion when—as I believe will inevitably happen—it largely disappears from our world. Solutions inevitably depend on the emotional needs of individual personalities, and those interested in such solutions should consult Philip Kitcher's excellent book
Life After Faith
: The Case for Secular Humanism.

Finally, I don't discuss the historical, evolutionary, and psychological origins of religion. There are dozens of hypotheses for how religious belief got started and why it persists. Some invoke direct evolutionary adaptations, others by-products of evolved features like our tendency to attribute events to conscious agents, and still others the usefulness of faith as a societal glue or a way to control others. Definitive answers aren't obvious, and in fact may never be forthcoming. To explore the many secular theories of religion, one should begin with
Pascal Boyer's
Religion Explained
and Daniel Dennett's
Breaking the Spell
.

I will have achieved my aim if, by the end of this book, you demand that people produce good reasons for what they believe—not only in religion, but in any area in which evidence can be brought to bear. I'll have achieved my aim when people devote as much effort to choosing a system of belief as they do to choosing their doctor. I'll have achieved my aim if the public stops awarding special authority about the universe and the human condition to preachers, imams, and clerics simply because they are religious figures. And above all, I'll have achieved my aim if, when you hear someone described as a “person of faith,” you see it as criticism rather than praise.

For we often talked of my daughter
, who died of the fever at fall.

And I thought 'twere the will of the Lord, but Miss Annie she said it was drains.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

T
here are no heated discussions about reconciling sport and religion, literature and religion, or business and religion; the important issue in today's world is the harmony between
science
and religion. But why, of all human endeavors that we could compare with religion, are we so concerned with its harmony with science?

The answer, to me at least, seems obvious. Science and religion—unlike, say, business and religion—are competitors at discovering truths about nature. And science is the only field that has the ability to disprove the truth claims of religion, and has done so repeatedly (the creation stories of Genesis and other faiths, the Noachian flood, and the fictitious Exodus of the Jews from Egypt come to mind). Religion, on the other hand, has no ability to overturn the truths found by science. It is this competition, and the ability of science to erode the hegemony of faith—but not vice versa—that has produced the copious discussion of how the two areas relate to each other, and how to find harmony between them.

One can in fact argue that science and religion have been at odds ever since science began to exist as a formal discipline in sixteenth-century Europe. Scientific advances, of course, began well before that—in ancient Greece, China, India, and the Middle East—but could conflict with religion in a public way only when religion assumed both the power and the
dogma to control society. That had to wait until the rise of Christianity and Islam, and then until science produced results that called their claims into question.

And so in the last five hundred years there have been conflicts between science and faith—not continuous conflict, but occasional and famous moments of public hostility. The two most notable ones are Galileo's squabble with the church and his sentence to lifetime house arrest in 1632 over his claim of a Sun-centered solar system, and the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” involving a titanic clash between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan over whether a Tennessee high-school teacher could tell his students that humans had evolved (the jury ruled no). Although both of these incidents have been recast by accommodationist theologians and historians as not involving genuine conflict between science and religion—it's always construed as “politics,” “power,” or “personal animosity”—the religious roots of these disputes are clear. But even setting these episodes aside, there are many times when churches decried or even slowed scientific advances, episodes recounted in the two books I'll describe shortly. (Of course, churches sometimes
promoted
scientific advances as well: during the advent of smallpox vaccination, churches were on both sides of the issue, with some arguing that it was a social good, others that it was short-circuiting God's power over life and death.)

But these episodes of conflict didn't give rise to public discussion about the relationship of science and religion. That had to wait until the nineteenth century, and was probably ignited by Charles Darwin's 1859 publication of
On the Origin of Species
. The greatest scripture-killer ever penned, the book demolished (not deliberately) an entire series of biblical claims by demonstrating that purely naturalistic processes—evolution and natural selection—could explain patterns in nature previously explainable only by invoking a Great Designer.

And so the modern discussion that science and religion are at odds, with science having the stronger weapons, began with two books published in the late nineteenth century. Historians of science see them as having launched the “conflict thesis”: the idea that religion and science are not only at war, but have been
perpetually
at war, with religious authorities opposing or suppressing science at every turn, and science struggling to free itself from the grip of faith. After recounting what they saw as historical clashes
between the church and scientists, the authors of both books declared science the victor.

The pugnacity of these works, unusual for their time, was fully expressed in the first:
History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science
(1875) by the American polymath John William Draper:

Then has it in truth come to this
, that Roman Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being absolutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice—it cannot have both.

As the quote implies, Draper saw Catholicism, rather than religion as a whole, as the main enemy of science. This was because of that religion's predominance, the elaborate nature of its dogma, and its attempt to enforce that dogma by civil power. Further, in the late eighteenth century, anti-Catholicism was a dominant strain among the American gentry.

A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,
published in 1896, was longer, more scholarly, and more complex in both origin and intent. Its author, Andrew Dickson White, was another polymath—a historian, a diplomat, and an educator. He was also the first president of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. When White and his benefactor, Ezra Cornell, organized the university in 1865, the state bill describing its mission required that the board of trustees not be dominated by members of any one religious sect, and that “
persons of every religious denomination
, or of no religious denomination, shall be equally eligible to all offices and appointments.” Such secularism was almost unique for that era.

White, a believer, argued that this plurality was actually intended to promote Christianity: “
So far from wishing to injure Christianity
, we [he and Cornell, who was a Quaker] both hoped to promote it; but we saw in the sectarian character of American colleges and universities, as a whole, a reason for the poverty of the advanced instruction then given in so many of them.” This was an explicit attempt to set up an American university on the European model, fostering free inquiry by eliminating religious dogma.

This plan backfired. The secular intent of White and Cornell angered many believers, who accused White of pushing Darwinism and atheism
and promoting a curriculum too heavy on science. And they even allowed atheists
on the faculty! (Some observers felt that
every
professor should be a pastor.) White's attempt to try “sweet reasonableness” failed, and ultimately he came to view his struggle for university secularism—which he won—as one battle in a wider war between science and theology:

Then it was that there was borne
in upon me a sense of the real difficulty—the antagonism between the theological and scientific view of the universe and of education in relation to it.

This led to thirty years of research culminating in his two-volume work, which was thorough (going far beyond the researches of his predecessor Draper), divisive, and a bestseller. It remains in print today. Despite its catalog of religious opposition to linguistic research, biblical scholarship, medical issues like vaccination and anesthesia, improvements in public health, evolution, and even lightning rods, White insisted that his aim was not to show conflict between science and religion, but only between science and “dogmatic theology.” In the end, he hoped—in vain—that his book would actually strengthen religion by calling out its unwarranted incursions into social and natural sciences. In this way it foreshadowed Stephen Jay Gould's accommodationist arguments for the “non-overlapping magisteria” of science and religion, a thesis we'll encounter later.

What White's and Draper's books
did
accomplish was to provide a nucleus for discussing the conflict between science and faith, which in turn raised the ire of theologians and historians of science, who proceeded to argue that the “conflict thesis” was simply wrong. Some historians of science claimed that White's and Draper's scholarship was poor (yes, they did make some errors and omit some countervailing observations, but not nearly enough to invalidate the books' theses), and also that a true reading of the relationship between religion and science showed that they often were in harmony. The rejections of Darwin's and Galileo's theories were, said these historians, exceptions in a genial history of church-science relations, and at any rate those skirmishes were motivated not by religion but by politics or personal quarrels. Indeed, many scientific advances were said to be
promoted
by religious belief, and science itself was touted as a product of the Christianity that permeated medieval Europe.

The truth lies between Draper and White on one hand and their critics on the other. While it's undeniable that religion was important in opposing some scientific advances like the theory of evolution and the use of anesthesia, others, like smallpox vaccination, were both opposed and promoted on biblical grounds. On the other hand, it's a self-serving distortion to say that religion was not an important issue in the persecutions of Galileo and John Scopes. Nevertheless, because not all religions are opposed to science, and much science is accepted by believers, the view that science and faith are perpetually locked in battle is untrue. If that's how one sees the “conflict thesis,” then that hypothesis is wrong.

But my view is not that religion and science have always been implacable enemies, with the former always hindering the latter. Instead, I see them as making overlapping claims, each arguing that it can identify truths about the universe. As I'll show in the next chapter, the incompatibility rests on differences in the methodology and philosophy used in determining those truths, and in the outcomes of their searches. In their eagerness to debunk the claims of Draper and White, their critics missed the underlying theme of both books: the failure of religion to find truth about
anything
—be it gods themselves or more worldly matters like the causes of disease.

So what is the evidence that not all is well on the science-and-religion front? For one thing, if the two areas have been found compatible, discussion about their harmony should have ended long ago. But in fact it's growing.

Let's start with a few telling statistics. WorldCat, founded in 1971, is the world's largest compilation of published items, cataloging more than two billion of them in more than seventy thousand libraries worldwide. If you trawl that catalog for books published in English on “science and religion,” you'll find a steady increase over the last forty years, from 514 in the decade ending in 1983, to 2,574 in the decade ending in 2013. This doesn't simply reflect the total number of books published, as we can see by normalizing this number by the total number of published books whose subject was “religion.” If you do that, the proportion of books on religion that also deal with science has jumped from about 1.1 percent in the former decade to 2.3 percent in the latter. While the number of books on religion nearly doubled between the two decades, the number of books on science and religion increased fourfold.
And while not all of the “science and religion” books
deal
with their relationship, these data support the impression that interest in the topic is growing.

Along with the growth of publications comes a growth in academic courses and programs dealing with science and religion. As Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham noted in 1997, “
By one report, U.S. higher education
now boasts 1,000 courses for credit on science and faith, whereas a student in the sixties would have long dug in hardscrabble to find even one.” Think tanks and academic institutes entirely devoted to science and religion have sprouted; these include the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge University (founded 2006), the Ian Ramsey Center for Science and Religion at Oxford University (founded 1985), and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California, founded in 1982 and now boasting of “
building bridges between science and theology
for 30 years.”
New academic journals dealing with science and religion have also burgeoned (like
Science, Religion and Culture,
founded in 2014), and, as we'll see below, established scientific organizations have begun to incorporate programs dealing with religion, as well as to issue statements assuring the public that their activities don't conflict with faith.

To a scientist, the clearest sign of disharmony
is
the existence of such programs and statements—for their goal is to try to convince the public that although science and religion might
appear
to be in conflict, they're really not. Why do scientists try to do this? One reason is simply what I call the “nice guy syndrome”: a lot more people will like you if you say good things about religion than if you are critical of it. Asserting that your science doesn't step on religion's toes is one way to stay in the good graces of the American public, and everyone else's.

Further, there are those who simply don't like
conflict—the “people of good will,” as the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called them. For this group, accommodationism seems a reasonable way to avoid conflict, like prohibiting talk about religion and politics at the dinner table. Harmonizing religion and science makes you seem like an open-minded and reasonable person, while asserting their incompatibility makes enemies and brands you as “militant.” The reason is clear: religion occupies a privileged place in our society. Attacking it is off-limits, although going after other supernatural or paranormal beliefs like ESP, homeopathy, or political worldviews is
not. Accommodationism is not meant to defend science, which can stand on its own, but to show that in some way religion can still make credible claims about the world.

But the real reasons why scientists promote accommodationism are more self-serving. To a large extent, American scientists depend for their support on the American public, which is largely religious, and on the U.S. Congress, which is equally religious. (It's a given that it's nearly impossible for an open atheist to be elected to Congress, and at election time candidates vie with one another to parade their religious belief.) Most researchers are supported by federal grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, whose budgets are set annually by Congress. To a working scientist, such grants are a lifeline, for research is expensive, and if you don't do it you could lose tenure, promotions, or raises. Any claim that science is somehow in conflict with religion might lead to cuts in the science budget, or so scientists believe, thus endangering their professional welfare.