Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (34 page)

In the end, it may smack of circularity to use empirical results to justify the use of the empirical toolkit we call “science,” but I'll pay attention to the circularity argument when someone comes up with a better way to understand nature. Science's results alone justify its usefulness, for it is, hands down, the single best way we've devised to understand the universe. And by the way, if you're going to use the circularity argument against science, you can just as easily apply it to religion. Just as you can't use the Bible as the authority on the divine truth of the Bible, so you can't use philosophy—or any “truth-seeking” method of religion—to show that revelation is a reliable route to the truth.

As for the claim that science is a kind of “faith” because it rests on untestable assumptions, depends on authority, and so on, this involves either a deliberate or an unconscious conflation of what “faith” means in religion versus what it means in everyday life. Here are two examples of each usage:

“I have faith that because I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior, I will join my late wife in heaven.”

“I have faith that when I martyr myself for Allah, I'll receive seventy-two virgins in paradise.”

“I have faith that the day will break tomorrow.”

“I have faith that taking this penicillin will cure my urinary tract infection.”

Notice the difference. The first two statements exemplify the religious form of “faith,” the one Walter Kaufmann defined as “intense, usually
confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.” There is no evidence beyond revelation, authority, and sacred books to support the first two statements. They show confidence that isn't supported by evidence, and most of the world's believers would reject them.

In contrast, the second two statements rely on empirical evidence—strong evidence. In these cases the word “faith” doesn't mean “belief without much evidence,” but “confidence based on evidence” or “an assumption based on performance.” You have “faith” that the Sun will rise tomorrow because it always has, and there's no evidence that the Earth has stopped rotating or the Sun has burned out. You have faith in your doctor because presumably she has treated you successfully in the past and has a good reputation. After all, would you go to a doctor who was constantly being sued for malpractice, or had repeatedly failed to help you? If you had “faith” in your doctor in the religious sense, you'd assume she could do no wrong, no matter what wonky things she'd do or prescribe. If she prescribed toad's blood for your psoriasis, you'd take it gladly. But the kind of faith we
really
have in our doctor is a provisional and evidence-based one—the same kind of “faith” we have in scientific results. After a vigorous but unhelpful regime of toad's blood, you'd find another doctor.

The conflation of faith as “unevidenced belief” with its vernacular use as “confidence based on experience” is simply a word trick used to buttress religion. In fact, you'll almost never hear a scientist using that vernacular in a professional role, saying things like “I have faith in evolution” or “I have faith in electrons.” Not only is such language alien to us, but we also know full well how those words can be misappropriated by the faithful.

What about the respect that the public and other scientists have for scientific authorities? Isn't that like religious faith? Not really. When Richard Dawkins talks about evolution and Carolyn Porco about space exploration, scientists in other disciplines accept what they have to say, and the public eagerly consumes their popular books. But that too is based on experience—perhaps not direct experience in the case of the public, but on our understanding that Dawkins's expertise in evolution and Porco's in planetary science have been continuously vetted and accepted by hypercritical scientists.

We know too that the self-correcting nature of science and its tradition
of affording more respect to accomplishment than to authority (a common saying is “You're only as good as your last paper”) ensure that an incompetent or ham-handed scientist won't gain respect—at least for long. Very few laypeople understand Einstein's theories of relativity, but they know that those theories passed muster with qualified scientists. It was for this reason that Einstein was revered
by the public
as a great physicist. When Daniel Sarewitz claimed that “belief in the Higgs [boson] is an act of faith, not of rationality,” and compared it to Hindu belief in a sea of milk, he was simply wrong. There is solid evidence for the existence of the Higgs, evidence confirmed by two independent teams using a giant particle accelerator and rigorous statistical analysis. But there isn't, and never will be, any evidence for a Hindu sea of milk.

In contrast, how reasonable is it to believe that the pope really is infallible when he speaks ex cathedra, or that his views about God are closer to the truth than those of any ordinary priest? A rabbi may gain repute for great kindness or wisdom, but not because he's demonstrated a knowledge of the divine that is more accurate than that of other rabbis. What he may know more about is what other rabbis have
said
. As my friend Dan Barker (a Pentecostal preacher who became an atheist) once quipped, “Theology is a subject without an object. Theologians don't study God—they study what other theologians have said.” The claims of a priest, a rabbi, an imam, or a theologian about God have no more veracity than anyone else's. Despite millennia of theological lucubrations, we know nothing more about the divine than we did a thousand years ago. Yes, there are religious authorities, but they aren't equivalent to scientific authorities. Religious authorities are those who know the most about
other
religious authorities. In contrast, scientific authorities are those who are best able to understand nature or produce credible theories about it.

As we've seen, scientists give no special credence or authority to books either, except insofar as they present novel theory, analysis, or data. In contrast, many creeds require believers and ministers to swear adherence to unchanging doctrines like the Nicene Creed, and many Christian colleges have “statements of faith” that must be affirmed yearly by faculty and staff. This distinction, and the fallacy of claiming that science is a religion, was emphasized by Richard Dawkins in an article in the
Humanist:

There is a very, very important difference
between feeling strongly, even passionately, about something because we have thought about and examined the evidence for it on the one hand, and feeling strongly about something because it has been internally revealed to us, or internally revealed to somebody else in history and subsequently hallowed by tradition. There's all the difference in the world between a belief that one is prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic and a belief that is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority, or revelation.

Scientists, then, don't have faith—in the religious sense—in authorities, books, or unevidenced propositions. Do we have faith in
anything
? Two other objects of scientific faith are said to be physical laws and reason. Doing science, it is said, requires faith not only in the “orderliness of nature” and an “unexplained set of physical laws,” but also in the value of reason in determining truth.

Both claims are wrong.

The orderliness of nature—the so-called set of natural laws—is not an assumption but an
observation
. It is logically possible that the speed of light in a vacuum could vary from place to place, and while we'd have to adjust our theories to account for that, or dispense with certain theories altogether, it wouldn't be a disaster. Other “natural laws,” like the relative masses of neutrons and protons, probably
can't
be violated, at least in our corner of the universe, because the existence of our bodies depends on those regularities. As I've noted, both the evolution of organisms and the maintenance of our bodies depend on regularities in the biochemical processes that keep all organisms up and running. The laws of nature, then, are regularities (assumptions, if you will) based on experience, the same kind of experience that makes us confident that we'll see another sunrise. After all, Aristotle had “faith” in the religious sense that heavier objects would fall faster than light ones, but it was experiments—sadly, not involving Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa—which showed that, absent air resistance, all objects actually fall at the same rate.

Accommodationists further accuse scientists of having “faith in reason.” Yet reason is not an a priori assumption, but a tool that's been shown to work. We don't have faith in reason; we
use
reason, and we use it because
it produces results and progressive understanding. Honed by experience to include tools like double-blind studies and multiple, independent reviews of manuscripts submitted for publication,
scientific
reason has produced antibiotics, computers, and our ability to reconstruct the tree of life by sequencing DNA from different species. Indeed, even
discussing
whether we should use reason involves using reason! Reason is simply the way we justify our beliefs, and if you're not using it, whether you're justifying religious or scientific beliefs, you deserve no one's attention.

Another trope in the argument that science is like religion is that we also have a god: the truth revealed by the methods of science.
Isn't science, as some maintain
, based on a “faith” that it's good to pursue the truth? Hardly. The notion that knowledge is better than ignorance is not a quasi-religious faith, but a
preference:
we prefer to know the truth because accepting what's false doesn't give us useful answers about the universe. You can't cure disease if, like Christian Scientists, you think it's caused by faulty thinking. The accusation that science is based on faith in the value of knowledge is curious, for it's not applied to other areas. We don't argue, for instance, that plumbing and auto mechanics are like religion because they rest on an unjustified faith that it's better to have your pipes and cars in working order.

Religion Gave Rise to Science

Even if you can't show harmony between science and religion, you can always argue that science was a
product
of religion: that, long ago in Europe, modern science arose from religious beliefs and institutions. Given that science as practiced now is completely free from gods, this is a strange argument, but it's a way to give religion, even if incompatible with modern science, some credit for that science. And given the preponderance of Western theists who make this argument, it's no surprise that it's Christianity rather than Judaism or Islam that gets the credit.

This argument takes several forms. The most common is that science came from natural theology, which itself arose from the Christian desire to understand God's creation. The most detailed version of this argument comes from the sociologist Rodney Stark:

The rise of science
was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God. In order to love and honor God, it was necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork. Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these principles.

Almost as common is the claim, made here by Paul Davies, that the concept of physical law itself came from Christianity:

The very notion of physical law
is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.

As we'll see, these claims are disputed, but even if they're wrong, theists can always fall back on the argument that the
ethics
undergirding modern science come from Christian morality. As Ian Hutchinson argues, “
The ethical and moral acceptability
of scientific practices is strongly dictated by religious beliefs and commitments.”

To address the Christianity-produced-science argument, we should realize that science arose in other places before Christian Europe, most notably ancient Greece, the Islamic Middle East, and ancient China. But because
modern
science is essentially a European invention whose spirit and motivations derived from ancient Greece and Rome, various explanations are given for why it fizzled out elsewhere. Islamic science, for instance, is often said to have disappeared after the twelfth century because free inquiry was declared inimical to Quranic doctrine. But explaining such large-scale social change is often slippery, susceptible to multiple and conflicting interpretations. Some Christian apologists, like the mathematician Alfred North
Whitehead, argue that faith in the “order of nature” and “general principles” (i.e., physical laws) was inherent in medieval Christianity:

My explanation
[for why science developed in Europe and not other areas] is that faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

But one can argue even more cogently that the idea that the universe could be understood through reason was a legacy of ancient Greece.

Another strategy is to argue, as does Ian Hutchinson, that many famous scientists were religious, and their work was motivated by their faith:

Any list of the giants of physical science
would include Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Pascal, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, all of whom, despite denominational and doctrinal differences among them, and opposition that some experienced from church authorities, were deeply committed to Jesus Christ.