Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (6 page)

I've argued that there is plenty of evidence, some involving people's perception, that the purported harmony between science and religion is not what it's cracked up to be. In the next chapter, I'll go beyond perception and give my own explanation for why these areas are irredeemably incompatible.

I admit I'm surprised
whenever I encounter a religious scientist. How can a bench-hazed Ph.D., who might in an afternoon deftly purée a colleague's PowerPoint presentation on the nematode genome into so much fish chow, then go home, read in a two-thousand-year-old chronicle, riddled with internal contradictions, of a meta-Nobel discovery like “Resurrection from the Dead,” and say, gee, that sounds convincing? Doesn't the good doctor wonder what the control group looked like?

—Natalie Angier

I
learned about the nature of science the hard way. After an undergraduate education in biology at a small southern college, I was determined to get a Ph.D. in evolutionary genetics at the best laboratory in that field. At the time, that was the laboratory of Richard Lewontin at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, for Lewontin was widely seen as the world's best evolutionary geneticist. But soon after I arrived and began working on evolution in fruit flies, I thought I'd made a terrible mistake.

Shy and reserved, I felt as if I'd been hurled into a pit of unrelenting negativity. In research seminars, the audience seemed determined to dismantle the credibility of the speaker. Sometimes they wouldn't even wait until the question period after the talk, but would rudely shout out critical questions and comments during the talk itself. When I thought I had a good idea and tentatively described it to my fellow graduate students, it was picked apart like a flounder on a plate. And when we all discussed science around the big rectangular table in our commons room, the atmosphere was heated and
contentious. Every piece of work, published or otherwise, was scrutinized for problems—problems that were almost always found. This made me worry that whatever science I managed to produce could never make the grade. I even thought about leaving graduate school. Eventually, fearful of being criticized, I simply kept my mouth shut and listened. That went on for two years.

But in the end, that listening was my education in science, for I learned that the pervasive doubt and criticality weren't intended as personal attacks, but were actually the essential ingredients in science, used as a form of quality control to uncover the researcher's misconceptions and mistakes. Like Michelangelo's sculpturing, which he saw as eliminating marble to reveal the statue within, the critical scrutiny of scientific ideas and experiments is designed, by eliminating error, to find the core of truth in an idea. Once I'd learned this, and developed a skin thick enough to engage in the inevitable to-and-fro, I began to enjoy science. For if you can tolerate the criticality and doubt—and they're not for everyone—the process of science yields a joy that no other job confers: the chance to be the first person to find out something new about the universe.

Until I started pondering the relationship of science and religion for this book, I never really thought about what “science” was, although I'd been doing it for over three decades. Most scientists never get formal instruction in “the scientific method,” except perhaps for the rote (and incorrect) recitation of “make hypothesis/test it/accept it” sequence you see in textbooks. Literally and figuratively, I learned science on the fly, simply by watching how my peers did it. But learning it and defining it are different matters. In fact, it was not until I wrote this book that I realized that my own notion of science is simply that of a method: a process (to my mind, the
only
process) that has proved useful in helping us understand what is real in the universe. While I had never pondered this issue, my training as a scientist had led me to unconsciously internalize its methods.

So what is “science”? Before I lay out my own definition, let's see how the word is construed by other people. To many it represents simply the
activities
of professional scientists: the person on television in the lab coat who,
peddling the latest antiwrinkle cream, touts it with the words “Science says . . .” To others, it's the
knowledge
produced by scientists: the facts taught in classes on chemistry, biology, physics, geology, and so on. Those facts segue into
technology,
or the practical applications of scientific knowledge—the development of antibiotics, computers, lasers, and so on.

But scientific knowledge is often transitory: some (but not all) of what we find is eventually made obsolete, or even falsified, by new findings. That is not a weakness but a strength, for our best understanding of phenomena will alter with changes in our way of thinking, our tools for looking at nature, and what we find in nature itself. Any “knowledge” incapable of being revised with advances in data and human thinking does not deserve the name of knowledge. In my lifetime, the continents were thought to be static, but now we know they move—at the same rate our fingernails grow. The universe was also thought by many to be static, having eternally been in its present form, until 1929, when Edwin Hubble showed that it was expanding, and later, in 1964, when scientists discovered the background radiation that was the sign of a Big Bang. And even in 1949, the year I was born, and less than three years before Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, many people still thought that the genetic material was a protein.

What is “known” may sometimes change, so science isn't really a fixed body of knowledge. What remains is what I really see as “science,” which is simply
a method for understanding how the universe (matter, our bodies and behavior, the cosmos, and so on) actually works.
Science is a set of tools, refined over hundreds of years, for getting answers about nature. It is the set of methods we cite when we're asked “How do you
know
that?” after making claims such as “Birds evolved from dinosaurs” or “The genetic material is not a protein, but a nucleic acid.”

My view of science as a toolkit is what Michael Shermer meant when he defined science as a collection of methods that produce “
a testable body of knowledge
open to rejection or confirmation.”
That's as good a definition of science as any, but the best
rationale
for using those methods came from the renowned and colorful physicist Richard Feynman:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself
—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.

Like everyone, scientists can suffer from
confirmation bias,
our tendency to pay attention to data that confirm our a priori
beliefs and wishes, and to ignore data we don't like. But, like all rational people, we must admit the truth of what Voltaire noted in 1763: “
The interest I have in believing
in something is not a proof that the something exists.” The doubt and criticality of science are there precisely for the reason Feynman emphasized: to prevent us from believing what we'd like to be true. The part of Feynman's quote about fooling yourself is important, because his view of science is precisely the opposite of how religion finds truth. (Feynman was an atheist, and I can't help but suspect that he was thinking of religion when he wrote that.) As we'll see, religion is heavily laden with the kind of confirmation bias that makes people see their own faiths as true and all others as false. In other words, religion is replete with features to
help
people fool themselves.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. When I characterize science as a way to find truth, what I mean is “truth about the universe”—the kind of truth that is defined by the
Oxford English Dictionary
as “Conformity with fact; agreement with reality; accuracy, correctness, verity (of statement or thought).” And if you look up “fact,” you'll find that it's defined as “something that has really occurred or is actually the case; something certainly known to be of this character; hence, a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony, as opposed to what is merely inferred, or to a conjecture or fiction; a datum of experience, as distinguished from the conclusions that may be based upon it.”

In other words, truth is simply what
is:
what exists in reality and can be verified by rational and independent observers. It is true that DNA is a double helix, that the continents move, and that the Earth revolves around the Sun. It is not true, at least in the dictionary sense, that somebody had a revelation from God. The scientific claims can be corroborated by anyone with the right tools, while a revelation, though perhaps reflecting someone's real
perception,
says nothing about reality, for unless that revelation has empirical content, it cannot be corroborated.
In this book I will avoid the murky waters of epistemology by simply using the words “truth” and “fact” interchangeably. These notions blend into the concept of “knowledge,” defined as “the apprehension of fact or truth with the mind; clear and certain perception of fact or truth; the state or condition of knowing fact or truth.”

As I noted above, widespread agreement by scientists about what is true does not guarantee that that truth will never change. Scientific truth is never absolute, but provisional: there is no bell that rings when you're doing science to let you know that you've finally reached the absolute and unchangeable truth and need go no further. Absolute and unalterable truth is for mathematics and logic, not empirically based science. As the philosopher Walter Kaufmann explained, “
What distinguishes knowledge
is not certainty but evidence.”

And that evidence can change. It's easy to find cases of accepted scientific “truths” that were later shown to be false. I've mentioned a few above, and there are many more. Early cases in the history of science are geocentrism (the Earth as the center of the cosmos) and the Greek concept of the “four humors”: that both personality and disease resulted from the balance of four bodily fluids (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood). A famous modern case is the demonstration of “N rays,” a form of radiation described in 1903, observed by many people, and then found to be bogus, a result of confirmation bias. Atoms were once considered indivisible particles of matter. There's even one case of a Nobel Prize awarded for a bogus discovery, that of the
Spiroptera carcinoma,
a parasitic nematode worm that supposedly caused cancer. Its discovery earned Johannes Fibiger the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1926. Soon thereafter, researchers showed that this result was wrong: the worm was simply an irritant that, like many other factors, induced tumors in already damaged cells. But Fibiger's prize stands, for his discovery seemed true at the time.

The overturning of some scientific truths has often served as ammunition for religious critics who indict the field for its inconstancy. Science can be
wrong
!
But that mischaracterizes
any
attempt to understand truth, both religious and scientific. Scientific tools and ways of thinking change: how can our understanding of nature not change as well? And, of course, the criticism of inconstancy can be turned right back on religion. There is simply no way that
any
faith can prove beyond question that its claims are true while those of other faiths are false.

It is a common saying among scientists that we can prove theories wrong (it would be relatively easy to show, for instance, that the formula for water isn't H
2
O), but that we can never prove them
right,
for new observations could
always come along that would overturn received knowledge. The theory of evolution, for instance, is regarded by all rational scientists as true, as it's supported by mountains of evidence from many different fields. Yet there are observations that could, if they surfaced, conceivably disprove that theory. These include, for instance, finding fossils embedded in strata from the “wrong” time, like discovering mammalian fossils in four-hundred-million-year-old sediments, or observing adaptations in one species that are useful only for another species, such as a pouch on a wallaby that can hold only baby koalas. Needless to say, such evidence hasn't appeared. Evolution, then, is a fact in the scientific sense, something Steve Gould defined as an observation “
confirmed to such a degree
that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” Indeed, the only real “proofs” beyond revision are those found in mathematics and logic.

But some people take this too far
, claiming that scientific truths not only are provisional, but change
most of the time
. Science, the argument goes, isn't really
that
good at apprehending truth, and we should be wary of it. Such claims of inconstancy usually involve medical studies—like the value of a daily aspirin in preventing heart disease, or the advisability of annual mammograms—whose conclusions go back and forth when different populations are sampled. What's important to remember is that most scientific findings become truths when they're replicated many times, either directly by other dubious scientists or when repeated as a foundation for further work.

In reality, we can consider many scientific truths to be about as absolute as truths can be, ones that are very unlikely to change. I would bet my life savings that the DNA in my cells forms a double helix, that a normal water molecule has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, that the speed of light in a vacuum is unchanging (and close to 186,000 miles per second), and that the closest living relatives of humans are the two species of chimpanzees. After all, you bet your life on science every time you take medicines like antibiotics, insulin, and anticholesterol drugs. If we consider “proof” in the vernacular to mean “evidence so strong that you'd bet your house on it,” then, yes, science is sometimes in the business of proof.

So what are the components of the toolkit of science? Like many of us, I was taught in high school that there is indeed a “scientific method,” one consisting of “hypothesis, test, and confirmation.” You made a hypothesis
(for instance, that DNA is the genetic material) and then tested it with laboratory experiments (the classic one, done in 1944, involved inserting the DNA of a disease-causing bacteria into a benign one and seeing if the transformed bacteria could both cause disease and pass this pathogenicity on to its descendants). If your predictions worked, you had supported your hypothesis. With strong and repeated support, the hypothesis was finally considered “true.”