This farrago of conflicting and irresolvable claims about reality stands in stark contrast to science. While science itself has fragmented into different disciplines that use different tools, they all share a core methodology based on doubt, replication, reason, and observation. In other words, while there are different sciences, there is only one form of science, whose conclusions don’t depend on the ethnicity or faith of the scientist who reaches them. Because of this, we need no Outsider Test for Science.
Scientific Truth Is Progressive and Cumulative; Theological “Truth” Isn’t
The progress of science is palpable to everyone, whether you measure it in improvements in the quality or length of our lives (the average life span has doubled since 1800), or simply in our improved understanding of nature. During my own lifetime I’ve seen the elimination of smallpox and the virtual elimination of polio, the discovery of the Big Bang, the uncovering of the structure of DNA and how it produces bodies, the ability to transplant organs, the reconstruction of much of the evolutionary history of life, the advent of personal computers, the first Moon landing and space shuttle, the sending of Mars rovers to explore the planet, in vitro fertilization, cell phones, HPV vaccines, and the identification of the Higgs boson. And that’s just since 1949.
Has theological knowledge advanced since 1949? Clearly not. In fact, I would argue that it hasn’t advanced in the last five thousand years, more than ten times longer than the span of modern science.
Now, when I say theology hasn’t advanced, I’m not saying that it hasn’t changed, for it clearly has. The idea of hell has been abandoned by many, or reconceived as a “separation from God.” The notion of the Immaculate Conception has been adopted. The Catholic Church eliminated (in 1966!) the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of banned books considered injurious to morality, including works by Hume, Sartre, Milton, Locke, and Copernicus. Surely the ability to read these authors without damnation can be seen as an advance—but not an advance in theology. And, of course, whole branches of theology have sprouted, including process theology and liberation theology, as well as wholly new religions, like Scientology and Christian Science.
Nor am I saying that some aspects of church doctrine haven’t come into better sync with reality. The old views of Adam and Eve, of an instantaneous creation, and of a worldwide flood have largely fallen out of favor because science has shown them to be false. Finally, I am not claiming that the morality advanced by some religions hasn’t advanced, for it has: many churches now espouse gay rights and women’s rights, and, on the whole, Western religion has become more enlightened and liberal. Liberation theology is in fact a movement designed to infuse traditional Catholicism with notions of social justice. You’d be hard pressed to find a church that still supports slavery, though many did before the Civil War.
What I am saying is two things. First, religion hasn’t obviously come closer to understanding the divine. From the ancient Hebrew sages through Aquinas to Kierkegaard, we still have no idea whether gods exist; whether there is only one god or many; whether any existing god is deistic, and largely absent, or theistic, interacting with the world; what the nature of any god is (is it apathetic, kindly, or evil?); whether that God is, as process theology claims, affected and changed by the world or unchangeable; how God wants us to live; and whether there is an afterlife, and, if so, what it is like. What has happened is that new theologies and religions have simply appeared alongside the old ones, with some of the old ones going extinct. We still have Judaism, but now we also have Catholicism, Mormonism, and Scientology. Ancient polytheistic Hinduism is still here, side by side with Buddhism and aboriginal religion. Fundamentalists, who see almost the entire Bible as literal truth, coexist with apophatic theologians who claim that nothing can be said about God, and yet write many books on the topic. In this way theology is not progressive but additive, and no consensus has developed about gods and their will. This, of course, contrasts strongly with science, where consensus views have evolved in every field—views that may change with time, but always lead to a deeper understanding of the universe, one that expands our abilities and makes our predictions more accurate. Before 1940, there was no way to decide which primate was our closest relative, to land rockets on the Moon, to understand how the genetic material coded for bodies and behavior, or to determine our position on the planet within a few meters.
I also claim that insofar as theology or religious beliefs do change within a faith, those changes are driven largely by either science or changes in secular culture. It is science, of course, that has put paid to most of the creation myths in Genesis, and archaeology to myths like the Exodus and the captivity of the Jews in Egypt. And it is largely advances in secular philosophy, like increasing empathy for minorities and the dispossessed, that have fueled changing notions of hell, the infusion of social justice into churches, and the acceptance of minorities and women. Religious morality, at least as promulgated by priests, rabbis, imams, and theologians, is usually one step behind secular morality. We are seeing this play out at the moment as increasing numbers of Catholics take issue with church dogma about abortion, contraception, male priests, and homosexuality. We can be fairly confident that eventually the church will make some moral concessions. Like biological species, churches must adapt or die when their environment changes radically.
In candid moments, some theologians like John Polkinghorne grudgingly admit that theology moves more slowly than science:
The nesting relationship of successive scientific theories gives the subject its character of a cumulative advance of knowledge. A very ordinary scientist today possesses, in consequence, much greater overall understanding of the physical world than was ever possible for Sir Isaac [Newton]. . . . The theologian of the twentieth century enjoys no presumptive superiority over the theologians of the fourth or sixteenth centuries. Indeed, those earlier centuries may well have had access to spiritual experiences and insights which have been attenuated, or even lost, in our own time.
But even here theology can turn necessity into virtue. The philosopher and theologian J. P. Moreland sees theology’s stasis as a sign of its ability to grasp truth more readily than does science!
The slow progress in philosophy and theology may indicate not that they are less rational than science—that is, that they have progressed less toward truth—but that they are more rational. Why? Because the slow progress could be an effect of their already having eliminated proportionately more false options in their spheres of study than science has eliminated in its. If this is true, it means that they have already come closer to a full, well-rounded true world view than science has come.
In sum, philosophy and theology may not progress because they may have already arrived rationally at some truth concerning the world. This means that a philosopher or theologian has the right to be sure about this conclusion, not in the sense of terminating inquiry or being closed to new arguments, but in the sense of requiring a good bit of evidence before abandoning the conclusion and not being able to use it to infer other conclusions.
This is a textbook example of how to rationalize uncomfortable truths. But if Moreland is right, let him tell us which of the thousands of religious worldviews is “true” and which have been discarded as false.
The methodological conflicts between science and religion cannot be brokered, for faith has no reliable way to find truth. It is no more compatible for someone to be a scientist in the lab and a believer in church than it is for someone to be a science-based physician who practices homeopathic medicine in her spare time.
Conflicts of Outcome
While most believers accept the methods of science, they also claim additional methods of apprehending truth: faith, revelation, and authority. If those methods were reliable, then the outcomes of religious and scientific investigations would be similar, or at least consonant.
But, of course, they aren’t. Religions make truth claims that have been repea
tedly disproved, claims involving both natural and supernatural phenomena (I’ll say more about the supernatural later). The disproved religious claims involve biology, geology, history, and astronomy, and include these assertions: animals and plants were created in their present form over a short period of time, the Earth is young and was once completely inundated by a great flood, modern humans descend from only two progenitors, Native Americans descend from immigrants from the Middle East, and Caucasians are the results of a breeding experiment by a black scientist. These are all wrong, and it’s science, not faith, that has shown them to be wrong.
Even the historical claims of religion, not counting the various origin myths, are often dubious. There is, for instance, no evidence for the Exodus of Israelites from Egypt, or for the census of the entire Roman Empire around the time of Jesus’s birth as described in the Gospel of Luke. As we’ve seen, there’s no reliable historical account—and there should be one—for the Crucifixion miracles, like earthquakes and resurrected saints, described in the Gospel of Matthew. How did historians of the time miss that? True, some historical facts adduced in the Bible are accurate, for it was written by people living in those times. There is evidence, for instance, for a Roman governor of Judaea named Pontius Pilate, though no extrascriptural evidence that he judged Jesus. But biblical archaeology has, by and large, experienced one failure after another. If you have no problems rejecting biblical incidents like the Exodus or the census of Caesar Augustus, incidents that, like the Resurrection, come solely from scripture, why accept the Resurrection itself?
For if the checkable truths of religion—the “natural truths”—are faulty, why should we give credence to the harder-to-test “divine truths”? Did those claims—the existence of souls, the birth of Jesus from a virgin and his subsequent execution and Resurrection, the presence of an afterlife, the existence of demons, the ascent of Muhammad to heaven on a wingèd horse—just happen to be the ones that God or his scribes got correct, while they erred on many others? If the Bible can’t even get the basic facts of history right, much less those of science, how can we claim divine authority or influence in its authorship? Was it beyond God, speaking either directly or through his emissaries, to tell his creatures that it was advisable to wash their hands after defecating, or that animals and plants weren’t created suddenly but evolved from other forms over a long period of time?
Over the years, I’ve repeatedly challenged people to give me a single verified fact about reality that came from scripture or revelation alone and then was confirmed only later by science or empirical observation. This parallels Christopher Hitchens’s moral challenge, often leveled at religious opponents in debates: “Name me an ethical statement or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.” Like Hitchens, I’ve never had a credible response.
Conflicts of Philosophy
The methodological conflicts between science and religion have ultimately produced a conflict in philosophy: whether or not one sees gods as a realistic possibility. It’s important to realize that this philosophical difference between scientists and believers was not established at the outset as an integral part of science, but arose gradually as a by-product of science’s success.
Science is now deeply wedded to naturalism, the view that all of nature operates according to laws—or rather, “regularities,” for the word “laws” implies a lawgiver—and that a combination of theoretical and empirical study can reveal those laws. (A related phenomenon is materialism, the view that matter and energy are all there is to the universe. I prefer to use “naturalism” because it’s always possible that we’ll find some stuff, like “dark matter,” that is neither matter nor energy as we understand them now.) One of the main criticisms of science by philosophers and theologians is that scientists are committed to naturalism, almost as if we had to swear allegiance to the idea when we got our science degrees. But this criticism is wrong. Naturalism is not something that was always part of science, for at one time science did rely on supernatural explanations. As modern science established itself, there was a period when both natural and supernatural explanations abounded, and only gradually did science slip the bonds of the divine. Creationism is one example—the only credible explanation, before 1859, for the remarkable fit of organisms to their environments. But invoking principles other than naturalism never helped us make progress. It was Darwin’s reliance on the naturalistic idea of natural (as opposed to supernatural) selection that correctly explained biological adaptation and diversity.
An anecdote about the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace provides the classic example of why we adopted naturalism. The backstory involves the astronomical work of Isaac Newton. Genius that he was, Newton nevertheless invoked God as a scientific hypothesis. He thought, for instance, that the orbits of the planets would be unstable without God’s occasional intervention to keep them in place. It was Laplace who later showed that such divine twiddling was unnecessary, and that natural law alone was adequate. The superfluity of religious explanations is described in a story that, though often told, may well be apocryphal. Laplace was said to have given Napoleon Bonaparte a copy of his great five-volume work on the solar system, the Mécanique Céleste. Aware that the books contained no mention of God, Napoleon supposedly taunted him, “Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.” Laplace answered, famously and brusquely, “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-la”—“I have had no need of that hypothesis.” And scientists haven’t needed it since.
Our reliance on naturalism, then, is not an assumption decided in advance, but a result of experience—the experience of men like Darwin and Laplace who found that the only way forward was to posit natural rather than supernatural explanations. Because of this success, and the recurrent failure of supernaturalism to explain anything about the universe, naturalism is now taken for granted as the guiding principle of science. Its use in all scientific studies is called methodological naturalism or—because it’s used to explain observations—methodological empiricism.
Nevertheless, some scientists persist in claiming, wrongly, that naturalism is a set-in-stone rule of science. One of these is my Ph.D. adviser, Richard Lewontin. In a review of Carl Sagan’s wonderful book The Demon-Haunted World, Lewontin tried to explain the methods of science:
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
That quotation has been promulgated with delight by both creationists and theologians, for it seems to show the narrow-mindedness of scientists who refuse to even admit the possibility of the supernatural and immaterial.
But Lewontin was mistaken. We can in principle allow a Divine Foot in the door; it’s just that we’ve never seen the Foot. If, for example, supernatural phenomena like healing through prayer, accurate religious prophecies, and recollection of past lives surfaced with regularity and credibility, we might be forced to abandon our adherence to purely natural explanations. And in fact we’ve sometimes put naturalism aside by taking some of these claims seriously and trying to study them. Examples include ESP and other “paranormal phenomena” that lack any naturalistic explanation.
Sadly, arguments similar to Lewontin’s—that naturalism is an unbreakable rule of science—are echoed by scientific organizations that want to avoid alienating religious people. Liberal believers can be useful allies in fighting creationism, but accommodationists fear that those believers will be driven away by any claim that science can tackle the supernatural. Better to keep
comity and pretend that science by definition can say nothing about the divine. This coddling of religious sentiments was demonstrated by Eugenie Scott, the former director of an otherwise admirable anticreationist organization, the National Center for Science Education:
First, science is a limited way of knowing, in which practitioners attempt to explain the natural world using natural explanations. By definition, science cannot consider supernatural explanations: if there is an omnipotent deity, there is no way that a scientist can exclude or include it in a research design. This is especially clear in experimental research: an omnipotent deity cannot be “controlled” (as one wag commented, “you can’t put God in a test tube, or keep him out of one”). So by definition, if an individual is attempting to explain some aspect of the natural world using science, he or she must act as if there were no supernatural forces operating on it. I think this methodological materialism is well understood by evolutionists.
Note that Scott claims naturalism as part of the definition of science. But that’s incorrect, for nothing in science prohibits us from considering supernatural explanations. Of course, if you define “supernatural” as “that which cannot be investigated by science,” then Scott’s claims become tautologically true. Otherwise, it’s both glib and misleading to say that God is off-limits because he can’t be “controlled” or “put in a test tube.” Every study of spiritual healing or the efficacy of prayer (which, if done properly, includes controls) puts God into a test tube. It’s the same for tests of nondivine supernatural phenomena like ESP, ghosts, and out-of-body experiences. If something is supposed to exist in a way that has tangible effects on the universe, it falls within the ambit of science. And supernatural beings and phenomena can have real-world effects.
Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) Page 13