Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516)
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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 p
erson, 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.
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: