Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (3 page)

These concerns affect all scientists, but evolutionary biologists have an extra worry. Many of our allies in the battle against creationism are liberal religious believers who themselves proclaim that evolution doesn't violate their faith. In court cases brought against public schools that teach creationism, there is no witness more convincing than a believer who will testify that evolution is consonant with his own religion
and
that creationism is not science. Were scientists to say what many of us feel—that religious belief is truly at odds with science—we would alienate these allies and, as many warn us, impede the acceptance of evolution by a public already dubious about Darwin. But there's no hard evidence for either this view or the claim that scientists endanger their livelihood by criticizing faith.

Nevertheless, steeped in a religious culture, many scientific associations prefer to play it safe, proclaiming that science can coexist happily with religion. One example is the American Association for the Advancement of Science's
Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion
program, devoted to “[facilitating] communication between scientific and religious communities.”
The “communication” promoted by this largest of America's scientific organizations is always positive; there are no dialogues pointing out any conflicts between science and faith. Likewise, the World Science Festival, a yearly multimedia expo in New York City, always includes a panel or lecture
on the compatibility of science and religion. Francis Collins, once head of the Human Genome Project and now director of the National Institutes of Health—and a born-again evangelical Christian—founded BioLogos, an organization devoted to helping antievolution evangelicals retain their faith in Jesus while accepting evolution at the same time. Unfortunately, its success has been limited. It's no coincidence that all three of these programs were funded by grants from
the John Templeton Foundation
, a wealthy organization founded by a mutual-fund billionaire whose dream was to show that science could give evidence for God. As we'll learn shortly, the Templeton Foundation and its huge financial resources are the impetus for many programs promoting accommodationism.

Like BioLogos,
the Clergy Letter Project
aims to convince believers that evolution does not violate their faith. In this case, religious leaders and theologians have written letters and manifestos affirming that evolution is not heretical.
The National Center for Science Education, the nation's most important organization for fighting the spread of creationism, has a “Science and Religion” program with aims identical to those of the Clergy Letter Project. But all of this activity raises a question: if science comports so easily with evolution, why do we need incessant public proclamations of harmony?

Yet the proclamations keep coming. Here are two. The first is from the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

The sponsors of many of these
state and local proposals [to limit or eliminate the teaching of evolution in public schools] seem to believe that evolution and religion conflict. This is unfortunate. They need not be incompatible. Science and religion ask fundamentally different questions about the world. Many religious leaders have affirmed that they see no conflict between evolution and religion. We and the overwhelming majority of scientists share this view.

Note that this statement, although issued by a group of scientists, is essentially about theology, implying that “true” religions need not conflict with science.
But because many Americans believe otherwise
—including
the 42 percent of the populace that accepts young-Earth creationism—this is in effect telling nearly half the American public that they misunderstand their faith. Groups of scientists clearly have no business declaring what is and is not a “proper” religion.

Here's a declaration from the National Center for Science Education:

The science of evolution does not make claims
about God's existence or non-existence, any more than do other scientific theories such as gravitation, atomic structure, or plate tectonics. Just like gravity, the theory of evolution is compatible with theism, atheism, and agnosticism. Can someone accept evolution as the most compelling explanation for biological diversity, and also accept the idea that God works through evolution? Many religious people do.

But many—perhaps most—religious people
don't
. After all, nearly half of Americans agree with the statement that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last ten thousand years or so.”
Because nearly 20 percent of Americans
are either agnostics or atheists, or say their religion is “nothing in particular,” it's a good bet that most religious Americans reject the notion of evolution even in a form guided by God.

The irony in the above statements is that a substantial fraction of
scientists,
and a large majority of accomplished ones, are atheists. Although they have rejected God themselves, presumably because supernatural beings conflict with their evidence-based worldview, many do see religious belief as a social good, but one they don't need themselves. In moments of candor, some scientists admit that these accommodationist statements are really motivated by the personal and political issues I mentioned above.

Similar statements issue from the other side of the aisle. The
Catechism of the Catholic Church,
for instance, states that it's impossible for faith to conflict with fact because both human reason and human faith are vouchsafed by God:

Though faith is above reason
, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and
infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God.

Note the privileging of faith above reason, a bizarre statement that exemplifies the very conflict the church denies. If the two systems must align, what reason would there be to put one above the other?
Further, as we'll see
, the Catholic Church is by and large friendly to evolution, yet many American Catholics are young-Earth creationists, explicitly rejecting the church's view. What else is that but a discrepancy between faith and reason?

The priority of faith over reason isn't just Catholic policy: it's the view of many adhering to other religions. A statistic that would frighten any scientist came from a poll of Americans taken in 2006 by
Time
magazine and the Roper Center.
When asked what they would do
if science showed that one of their religious beliefs was wrong, nearly two-thirds of the respondents—64 percent—said that they'd reject the findings of science in favor of their faith. Only 23 percent would consider changing their belief. Because the pollsters didn't specify exactly
which
religious belief would conflict with science, this suggests that the potential conflict between science and religion is not limited to evolution, but could in principle involve any scientific finding that conflicts with faith. (A prominent one, which we'll discuss later, is the series of recent scientific discoveries disproving the claim that Adam and Eve were the two ancestors of all humanity.)
A related poll
also underscored the secondary role of scientific evidence for believers: among Americans who rejected the fact of evolution, the main reasons involved religious belief, not lack of evidence.

These figures alone cast doubt on statements from religious and scientific organizations that science and religion are compatible. If nearly two-thirds of Americans will accept a scientific fact only if it's not in clear conflict with their faith, then their worldview is not fully open to the advances of science.

Indeed, polls of Americans belonging to various religions, or no religion, show that the
perception
of a conflict between science and faith is widespread.
A 2009 Pew poll
showed, for instance, that 55 percent of the U.S. public answered “yes” to the question “Are science and religion often in conflict?” (Tellingly, only 36 percent thought that science was at odds with
their own
religious belief.) And, as expected, the perception of general conflict was markedly higher among people who weren't affiliated with a church.

One reason why some churches are eager to embrace science is because they're losing adherents, particularly young ones who feel that Christianity isn't friendly to science. A study by the Barna Group, a market research firm that studies religious issues, found that this is one of six reasons why young folk are abandoning Christianity:

Reason #3
—Churches come across as antagonistic to science.
One of the reasons young adults feel disconnected from church or from faith is the tension they feel between Christianity and science. The most common of the perceptions in this arena is “Christians are too confident they know all the answers” (35%). Three out of ten young adults with a Christian background feel that “churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in” (29%). Another one-quarter embrace the perception that “Christianity is anti-science” (25%). And nearly the same proportion (23%) said they have “been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate.” Furthermore, the research shows that many science-minded young Christians are struggling to find ways of staying faithful to their beliefs and to their professional calling in science-related industries.

If the incompatibility of science and religion is an illusion, it's one that's powerful enough to make these young Christians vote with their feet. They may not abandon religion, but they certainly break ties with their church.

While some liberal churches deal with the conflict by simply accepting the science and modifying their theology where required, more conservative ones put up a fight.
One of the more remarkable demonstrations
of this resistance occurred in September 2013, when a group of parents, with the help of a conservative legal institute, filed suit against the Kansas State
Board of Education. Their goal was to overturn
the entire set of state science standards from kindergarten through twelfth grade,
arguing that those standards gave students a “materialistic atheistic” worldview that was inimical to their religion. Just as this book went to press, the lawsuit was dismissed.

Finally, if religion and science get along so well, why are so many scientists
nonbelievers? The difference in religiosity between the American public and American scientists is profound, persistent, and well documented. Further, the more accomplished the scientist, the greater the likelihood that he or she is a nonbeliever.
Surveying American scientists
as a whole, Pew Research showed that 33 percent admitted belief in God, while 41 percent were atheists (the rest either didn't answer, didn't know, or believed in a “universal spirit or higher power”). In contrast, belief in God among the general public ran at 83 percent and atheism at only 4 percent. In other words, scientists are ten times more likely to be atheists than are other Americans. This disparity has persisted for over eighty years of polling.

When one moves to scientists
working at a group of “elite” research universities, the difference is even more dramatic, with just over 62 percent being either atheist or agnostic, and only 23 percent believing in God—a degree of nonbelief more than fifteenfold higher than among the general public.

Sitting at the top tier
of American science are the members of the National Academy of Sciences, an honorary organization that elects only the most accomplished researchers in the United States. And here nonbelief is the rule: 93 percent of the members are atheists or agnostics, with only 7 percent believing in a personal god. This is almost the exact opposite of the data for “average” Americans.

Why do so many scientists reject religion compared with the general public? Any answer must also explain the observation that the better the scientist, the greater the likelihood of atheism. Three explanations come to mind. One has nothing to do with science per se: scientists are simply more educated than the average American, and religiosity simply declines with education.

While that is indeed the case, we can rule it out as the only explanation from a 2006 survey of religious belief of university professors in different fields. As with scientists, American university professors were more
atheistic or agnostic than the general populace (23 percent versus 7 percent nonbelievers, respectively). But when professors from different areas were polled, it became clear that scientists were the
least
religious. While only 6 percent of “health” professors were atheists or agnostics, this figure was 29 percent for humanities, 33 percent for computer science and engineering, 39 percent for social sciences, and a whopping 52 percent for physical and biological scientists together. When disciplines were divided more finely, biologists and psychologists tied as the least religious: 61 percent of each group were agnostics or atheists.
So, among academics
with roughly equal amounts of higher education, scientists still reject God more often. The tentative conclusion is that the atheism of scientists doesn't simply reflect their higher education, but is somehow inherent in their discipline.

That leaves two explanations for the atheism of scientists, both connected with science itself. Either nonbelievers are drawn to become scientists, or doing science promotes the rejection of religion. (Both, of course, can be true.) Accommodationists prefer the first explanation because the latter implies that science itself produces atheism—a view that liberal believers abhor. Yet there are two lines of evidence that practicing science does erode belief.
The first is that elite scientists
were raised in religious homes nearly as often as nonscientists, yet the former still wind up being far less religious. But this may mean only that religious homes can produce nonbelievers, who then are preferentially drawn to science.