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

by Coyne, Jerry A.

  Templeton’s time-limited “research grants” are often hybrids between science and religion. There is, for instance, a three-year, $5.1 million “Immortality Project,” devoted to studying the afterlife, its possible manifestation through near-death experiences, its influence on people’s behavior, and its characteristics. Such a mixture requires not only the labor of sociologists, but also the lucubrations of theologians. Templeton awarded $5.3 million for a project called “The Science of Intellectual Humility,” which is heavy on theology and light on science. It gave $1.7 million for the project “Randomness and Divine Providence,” with a combination of physicists, mathematicians, and theologians studying how randomness in nature might be consistent with the existence of a loving god. And $4.4 million went for the study “Big Questions in Free Will,” involving philosophers, neuroscientists, and, of course, theologians.

  One of Templeton’s biggest grants—$10.5 million over five years—was awarded to a group of scientists in my own field: a study titled “Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology” led by Martin Nowak at Harvard University. And while some of that money was directed toward valid scientific questions, like studying the conditions that promote the evolution of cooperation, the project included some distinctly nonscientific components:

  The Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology initiative at Harvard University seeks to generate new kinds of knowledge and understanding in core areas of biology. FQEB encourages researchers to explore such topics as the origins of biological creativity, the deep logics of biological dynamics and biological ontology, and concepts of teleology and ultimate purpose in the context of evolution. Such knowledge is directly relevant to a wide range of philosophical and theological discussions and debates.

  The notions of ultimate purpose and “teleology” (an external force directing evolution) are simply not part of science: this mixing of the scientific with the metaphysical is characteristic of Templeton’s approach. One would think that scientists would be wary of participating in programs that dilute and even distort science in this way, but one would underestimate scientists’ need for research money. And Templeton benefits as well, for the funded scientists are paraded on its Web site like prize horses, evidence of serious purpose and of a fruitful dialogue between science and faith.

  Besides funding science and accommodationism, Templeton also gives money to purely religious projects, such as the television show The American Bible Challenge and the $100,000 Epiphany Prize awarded for “the best wholesome, uplifting and inspiring movies and television programs.” (That prize was once awarded to the gruesome and anti-Semitic movie The Passion of the Christ.) Templeton also gave a $3 million grant to Biola University (formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), an evangelical Christian school in California, to found a Center for Christian Thought. It was the largest foundation grant in the school’s history.

  Given the eagerness of many cash-strapped scientists to join the Templeton stable, the influence of its money on the syncretic program of science and faith should not be underestimated. Whenever you see a public discussion of science and faith, at least in the United States, chances are there’s Templeton money behind it. Even the World Science Festival, run by the physicist Brian Greene and his partner Tracy Day, was partly founded with Templeton money. And so, along with the many lectures and demonstrations of science, there is always a session on “Big Ideas,” often featuring Templeton Prize winners and discussions of science and metaphysics.

  Finally, it’s clear that accommodationism in the last decade has been partly a response to the popularity of New Atheism and its dissemination via the Internet and several best-selling books. Important New Atheist works include The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris; The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins; Breaking the Spell, by Daniel Dennett; God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens; and God: The Failed Hypothesis; How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, by Victor Stenger. All these books appeared within a span of three years, and all were New York Times bestsellers. Although they reprised much of the “old atheism” of people like Robert Ingersoll, Bertrand Russell, and H. L. Mencken, bringing forgotten arguments to a new generation, there was also a new element: an explicit connection with science. More than ever before, atheists with a public profile come from the ranks of scientists and science aficionados. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, Stenger (recently deceased) was a physicist, Harris is a trained neuroscientist, and Dennett is a philosopher of science and the mind. Hitchens, a journalist, is the sole exception, but even he was widely read in science and frequently dealt with evolution and cosmology.

  Nevertheless, these books were more concerned with showing the inimical effects of faith and refuting its claims than with exploring the complex relationship between science and religion. Now that the dust is settled, it’s time to examine in detail why science and religion are incompatible, and to scrutinize the common arguments for their compatibility. And it’s time to address the new “natural theological” arguments for God: the supposed “fine-tuning” of physical laws, the existence of supposedly innate moral sentiments, and other areas where religion equates scientific ignorance with evidence for God. Finally, we need to determine whether there’s any benefit to a dialogue between scientists and believers—the kind of dialogue that the Templeton Foundation promotes with its constant infusions of cash.

  • • •

  The scientific bent of New Atheism, and the issue on which I center this book, is reflected in its view that religious claims are empirical hypotheses. This is not a profound realization. After all, it’s palpably clear that most religions make claims about what is true in our universe—that is, empirical claims. Here are some examples from just one faith, Trinitarian Christianity: There is a God who intercedes in the affairs of humans. God created humans in his image but then two of them sinned, infecting all of their descendants—the entire species of Homo sapiens—with a taint that did not exist before. The deity also fathered a son by a virgin female, a son whose execution and Resurrection gave us the opportunity to expiate our inherited sins. Further, there is an afterlife in which those who were virtuous in their earthly lives will dwell in paradise, while miscreants suffer eternity in hell. Only those who accept Jesus as savior will enjoy the delights of heaven (“I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me”). Finally, Jesus will return someday, ushering in the final reckoning of the End Times. And prayer can work: God listens to our supplications and sometimes grants them.

  These aren’t just the claims of fundamentalists. As we’ll see in the next chapter, far more than half of all Americans take them literally. Catholicism, with its strict moral code, goes further. Acts like unconfessed masturbation, homosexual sex, adultery, and so on are explicitly classified as grave sins, punishable by an eternity in hell. Granted, not every Catholic agrees with this, but every theist—and most believers are theists—believes that God interacts with the world in some way.

  And, of course, such claims aren’t unique to Christianity. Islam has its own God, heaven, and hell, Judaism its Messiah, whose return, hastened by acts of goodness and piety, is anticipated within the next few centuries. Christian Science sees diseases not as organic ailments, but as a result of improper thinking—a belief shared by many Pentecostal Christian sects. Some Buddhist sects, and many Hindus, believe in reincarnation, and Buddhism adds karma, a doctrine of cosmic retribution for good and bad actions. Scientology (whose “theology” seems bizarre simply because we were around when it was invented) uses an e-meter, a device that measures electrical current across the skin, in “auditing” sessions designed to clear the body of malevolent spirits (“thetans”) that supposedly afflict many of us. An important claim of Scientology is that psychiatry and its medications are scams that have no beneficial effect. The cargo cults of Melanesia, like the famous cult of “John Frum,” assume that by building replicas of airp
lanes and airports and worshipping Frum (whose origin is unknown, but apparently stands for American GIs who brought goods to the islands in World War II), they can acquire more of the goods their relatives got seventy years ago. Needless to say, the swag never arrives.

  I could go on, but the point is clear: religions make explicit claims about reality—about what exists and happens in the universe. These claims involve the existence of gods, the number of such gods (polytheism or monotheism), their character and behavior (usually loving and beneficent, but, in the case of Hindu and ancient Greek gods, sometimes mischievous or malevolent), how they interact with the world, whether or not there are souls or life after death, and, above all, how the deities wish us to behave—their moral code.

  These are empirical claims, and although some may be hard to test, they must, like all claims about reality, be defended with a combination of evidence and reason. If we find no credible evidence, no good reasons to believe, then those claims should be disregarded, just as most of us ignore claims about ESP, astrology, and alien abduction. After all, beliefs important enough to affect you for eternity surely deserve the closest scrutiny. Christopher Hitchens was fond of saying that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” His inevitable corollary was that “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” The philosopher L. R. Hamelin describes what happens when we apply science to the existence of God, stipulating five criteria for the “God theory”:

  First, we hypothesize that God is real, with real properties. Second, we create a theory about what a real God and His properties means. A God doesn’t just sit there; what does He do? Third, we make this theory testable: we must be able to determine whether it is true or false. Fourth, we must test the theory by observation or experiment. Finally, we ensure the theory is parsimonious: that is, if we took out God, the theory wouldn’t explain as much. Once we have followed all these steps, we have a scientific theory that includes God, which we can test against what we actually observe.

  But constructing this kind of theory of God puts believers on the horns of a dilemma. Centuries of scientific investigation show that the best scientific theories, testable by observation, include nothing like a personal God. We find only a universe of blind, mechanical laws, including natural selection, with no foresight or ultimate purpose.

  Alternatively, a believer could reject one or more of the criteria for a God theory, but doing that has profound implications. If she admits that God is not real, she’s already an atheist. If she says God doesn’t do anything, who cares? If her theory cannot be tested at all, then there’s no way of telling if it’s true or false. If her theory can be tested only by private revelation, not by observations available to everyone, she unjustifiably claims private knowledge. And if her theory is observationally identical to a theory that does not include God, then she’s again an atheist, for a God who makes no difference is no God at all.

  The only remaining question is whether some people would find this analysis useful, and I know many people who, applying this analysis, have abandoned their religion.

  Some may find this excessively philosophical, saying that their belief in God rests not on logic but on emotions. But all it does is formalize the criteria we use for accepting anything as “real.”

  Throughout this book we’ll encounter not only the kinds of empirical claims made by the faithful, but also the ways that different religions make different and contradictory claims—claims that have often led to religious schisms. Like the branching tree of biological life itself, religions have splintered and proliferated in ways that have created new sects that can be placed in a genealogy of faith. Just as there are millions of species, so there are thousands of faiths. The diversity of their conflicting claims suggests that we should be skeptical about the tenets of every faith. But we’ll also examine the ways that believers, knowing the fragility of such claims, try to insulate themselves from having their empirical claims tested—or even discussed. The ways of rejecting the call for evidence include denying that faith needs evidence, arguing that religion is really an exercise in metaphor, a series of parables that aren’t meant to be historically accurate. Alternatively, some argue that religion makes no existence claims at all. That last category includes adherents to apophatic theology, which says that one can say nothing about the nature of God (although his existence never seems to be in question, and the books that say nothing about him are many), as well as those who assert that God isn’t a humanlike spirit, but a nebulous “ground of being” that defies concrete description. Finally, while many believers admit that religion does make existence claims, they argue that those claims involve “ways of knowing” that bypass reason and evidence. Those ways involve private revelation, church authority, and, especially, faith—the acceptance of things for which there is no strong evidence.

  It does not seem misguided to me, or an insult to believers, to regard God and much religious dogma as hypotheses. As we’ll see in the next chapter, religions regularly make statements about what exists in the cosmos, and believers’ acceptance of those statements—as well as their rejection of empirical claims made by other religions—ultimately depends on what they consider to be evidence. Is it disrespectful to take the claims of believers seriously and examine them rationally and scientifically, especially when so much of modern society, including law, politics, and morality, rests on those claims?

  If there is a common theme in the writings of those who see religion and science as incompatible, it is the idea that in science faith is a vice, while in religion it’s a virtue. It is this incompatibility that upsets believers when skeptics use reason to scrutinize the tenets of their faith—whether those tenets involve the Resurrection, the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, or the reward of a coterie of virgins in paradise for religious martyrdom. The rational scrutiny of religious faith involves asking believers only two questions:

  How do you know that?

  What makes you so sure that the claims of your faith are right and the claims of other faiths are wrong?

  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.

  CHAPTER 2

  What’s 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. Ever
y 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.