In the end, the incompatibility between the methods of science and religion ultimately yields a genuine philosophical incompatibility. Working scientists are constantly steeped in doubt and criticality, leading to an ingrained skepticism about truth claims—not a bad thing, really. If you combine that attitude with the proven value of naturalism over the history of science, and mix in the repeated failure to find evidence for the supernatural, then you arrive at the following philosophy: because there is no evidence for supernatural entities or powers, although there could have been such evidence, one is justified in thinking that those entities and powers do not exist. This attitude is called philosophical naturalism.
The philosopher Barbara Forrest defends the connection between methodological and philosophical naturalism:
Taken together, the (1) proven success of methodological naturalism combined with (2) the massive body of knowledge gained by it, (3) the lack of a comparable method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of any conclusive evidence for the existence of the supernatural, yield philosophical naturalism as the most methodologically and epistemologically defensible world view.
This is where philosophical naturalism wins—it is a substantive world view built on the cumulative results of methodological naturalism, and there is nothing comparable to the latter in terms of providing epistemic support for a world view. If knowledge is only as good as the method by which it is obtained, and a world view is only as good as its epistemological underpinning, then from both a methodological and an epistemological standpoint, philosophical naturalism is more justifiable than any other world view that one might conjoin with methodological naturalism.
Although Forrest wrongly implies that science can’t examine the supernatural, her overall argument makes sense. If you spend your life looking in vain for the Loch Ness Monster, stalking the lake with a camera, sounding it with sonar, and sending submersibles into its depths, and yet still find nothing, what is the more sensible view: to conclude provisionally that the monster simply isn’t there, or to throw up your hands and say, “It might be there; I’m not sure”? Most people would give the first response—unless they’re talking about God.
Some scientists succeed at being methodological naturalists on the job and supernaturalists at other times, but it’s hard to reconcile an ingrained skepticism toward the claims of your colleagues with complete credulity toward the claims of fellow believers. The skepticism usually leaks through, explaining both why many scientists become atheists and why many believers instinctively distrust or even disparage science. The hemorrhage of scientific doubt into the body of faith is also, I think, why older scientists are less religious than younger ones (they’ve been critical for longer), and why more-accomplished scientists are also less religious (their criticality, and willingness to question authority, is what brought them renown).
It’s important to realize that philosophical naturalism is, like atheism, a provisional view. It’s not the kind of worldview that says, “I know there is no god,” but the kind that says, “Until I see some evidence, I won’t accept the existence of gods.” Even so, philosophical naturalism is anathema to accommodationists, who, even though they may be atheists themselves, avoid flaunting their beliefs. And even scientists who embrace that philosophy tend to keep quiet about it, for, at least in America, we’re surrounded by believers, some of whom fund our research and others who help us fight creationism and pseudoscience. It’s not clear whether professing atheism would endanger those alliances, but in America, where an atheist is a skunk in the woodpile, it seems better to play it safe.
The most objectionable thing an American scientist can say about belief is this: “Science and religion are incompatible, and you must choose between them.” After all, many people embrace both, and we know that when forced to choose, many would keep their faith. On such grounds accommodationists argue that forcing that choice is both unseemly and damaging to science. But if you are trying to be consistent in how you get reliable knowledge about our universe, and if you already reject unevidenced claims like those of ESP and homeopathy, or claims of religions other than yours, then in the end you must choose—and choose science. That doesn’t mean that you must accept an unchanging set of scientific facts, but simply that you choose reason and evidence over superstition and wish-thinking.
CHAPTER 3
Why Accommodationism Fails
There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: “Let us be friends.” It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: “Let us agree not to step on each other’s feet.”
—Robert Green Ingersoll
“Cognitive dissonance” is a well-known phenomenon in which you experience psychological discomfort from holding two conflicting beliefs or attitudes, or from behaving in a way that is inconsistent with your beliefs. Such a dilemma causes mental discomfort, compelling you to find a way to reduce that distress. A common solution is to convince yourself that there’s not really a conflict. People who think of themselves as honest may cheat a bit on their taxes, but then rationalize it, preserving their self-image, by saying, “It’s not so bad, because everyone does it, and anyway, the government wastes a lot of money.”
Accommodationism—claiming that science and religion are not in conflict—is the solution to another form of cognitive dissonance, the one that appears when you live in a culture that reveres science but you still cling to pseudoscientific and religious myths. Many people want to be seen as pro-science, but they also need the comfort of their faith. And so they cobble together a variety of solutions that let them have both.
The most visible accommodationists are religious people, especially theologians, who are liberal, friendly to science, but see that scientific inquiry poses some threat to their beliefs. The dissonance is especially strong in religious scientists, whose practice at work directly conflicts with their faith’s “ways of knowing.” Surprisingly, though, many of the most prominent accommodationists are atheists or agnostics. Some of these, whom I call “faitheists,” see religion as a falsehood, but one that’s good for society (the philosopher Daniel Dennett has called this attitude “belief in belief”).
There are also political reasons for accommodationism. As I’ve noted, American science educators and science organizations coddle faith to gain religious allies in our fight against creationism, to reassure a religious government (the main supporter of research) that science isn’t equivalent to atheism, and to avoid a reputation as rabble-rousers or, worse, God-haters. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the claim that publicly professed atheism harms the acceptance of evolution. Here’s one example from Roger Stanyard, founder and former spokesperson of the British Centre for Science Education (BCSE). When I wrote an open letter to American scientific organizations, criticizing their claims that professing nonbelief is inimical to the public acceptance of evolution, Stanyard commented on my Web site:
We have a political battle, to keep the creationists out of state-funded schools. It requires our very limited resources to be tightly focused on what is a single issue matter.
Moreover, it will fail if it involves a general attack on religion because:
1. You’ll lose a pile of allies.
2. The message immediately becomes confused and will be ignored.
3. It will immediately lead to a huge over stretching of resources.
If you want creationism out of schools, it’s not an intellectual battle. It’s politics and you have to play politics to win. That includes forming alliances with whom you might find distasteful and keeping your distance from many you might agree with.
The Varieties of Accommodationism
The brands of accommodationism fall into just a few categorie
s, and I’ll describe them in increasing order of intellectual rigor.
Logical Compatibility
This argument is used but rarely, for its claim is merely that there is no logical reason why religion and science are incompatible. It could be true, for instance, that deities exist who have never interfered with the workings of the universe. But pure deism is a rare brand of faith. Alternatively, there could be religions that alter their doctrines every time one becomes incompatible with a new finding of science, or with reason itself. Such beliefs, though compatible with science, are almost nonexistent as well. Ultraliberal forms of Christianity, like those that accept a personal God but deny miracles such as the Resurrection, may accept science but nevertheless still defy reason by making unsubstantiated claims.
Mental Compatibility
This is the most common—though hardly the most convincing—argument for accommodationism. It runs like this: “Many scientists are religious, and many religious people embrace science, so the two must be compatible.” It is what Stephen Jay Gould had in mind when he said, “Unless at least half of my colleagues are inconsiderate dunces there can be—on the most raw and direct empirical grounds—no conflict between science and religion.”
People making this claim often point to famous religious scientists of the past, like Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and J. J. Thomson. But of course in the early days of science everyone was religious, so this hardly counts as evidence of compatibility. Because publicly professed belief was ubiquitous, religion could be touted as compatible with all human endeavors.
What we must consider more seriously are the modern scientists who publicly avow their faith, for scientists have little to lose by professing atheism. Such “scientists of faith” include Francis Collins, a geneticist and an evangelical Christian, the Anglican paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, and the Catholic cell biologist Kenneth Miller. Even Indian scientists, before they launch spacecraft, visit Hindu temples to ask their deities for blessings. In America, religious scientists aren’t rare: a survey by the sociologist Elaine Ecklund showed that 23 percent of U.S. scientists believe in God with varying degrees of confidence, even though that’s only one-fourth the proportion of believers among Americans as a whole.
Does this class of modern believers, then, demonstrate that science is compatible with religion? Well, that would be a very odd kind of compatibility, for it simply construes “compatibility” as the ability of two divergent worldviews to be simultaneously held in one person’s mind. That says nothing about whether those views, or the methodologies they employ, are “accordant, consistent, congruous, or agreeable.” This form of accommodationism confuses coexistence with compatibility.
And if religion and science are compatible in this way, so are marriage and adultery. After all, many married people are unrepentant adulterers. Astrology and science also become compatible, because many science-friendly people still consult their horoscopes. Indeed, because some scientists—often chemists or engineers—believe that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, and that God created all species simultaneously, we might even say that science and creationism are compatible! We all know people who hold incompatible views, whether or not that causes them distress.
Syncretism
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, syncretism is the “attempted union or reconciliation of diverse or opposite tenets or practices, esp. in philosophy or religion.” When discussing science and religion, syncretists claim that they are two sides of a single practice: finding truth. They’re claimed to be harmonious in diverse ways, including seeing the cosmos and its laws as a religion (“pantheism”), holding that science and religion cannot conflict because they’re both God-given ways of approaching truth, and claiming that the truths of science are already embodied in ancient scripture.
Syncretism, then, makes science and religion compatible by redefining one so that it includes the other. We may argue, for instance, that “God” is simply the name we give to the order and harmony of the universe, the laws of physics and chemistry, the beauty of nature, and so forth. This is the naturalistic pantheism of Spinoza, whose most famous recent advocate was Albert Einstein, often—and wrongly—described as accepting a personal God. One of Einstein’s quotes is often used to show this:
The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.
But this is clearly a paean not to the Abrahamic God, but to the mysteries of the universe. Although Einstein isn’t the final authority on the harmony between science and faith, as he grew older his spirituality became increasingly synonymous with the laws of nature, and at odds with the religions of his American countrymen. In his biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson recounts how Herbert Goldstein, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi in New York, sent Einstein a telegram asking directly, “Do you believe in God?” Einstein answered, “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” In other words, Einstein was at best a pantheist. The reason why accommodationists are so obsessed with Einstein’s view of religion is that he’s often viewed as the smartest man in history, so his approbation of religion would give faith a special imprimatur.
The big problem with pantheism, in which science does not marry religion so much as digest it, is that it leaves out God completely—or at least a monotheistic God who has an interest in the universe. Such a god is unacceptable to most religious people. As we’ve learned, more than 65 percent of Americans believe in a personal God who interacts with the world, as well as in the divinity of Jesus, heaven, and miracles. In his popular book Finding Darwin’s God, Kenneth Miller attacked pantheism because it “dilutes religion to the point of meaninglessness.” He added, “Such ‘Gods’ aren’t God at all—they are just clever and disingenuous restatements of empirical science contrived to wrap an appearance of religion around them, and they have neither religious nor scientific significance.” Most believers would probably agree.
Another syncretic argument is to equate “spirituality” with religion, disregarding the diverse forms of spirituality, many having nothing to do with the supernatural. Interviewed by National Geographic at his study site in Egypt, Owen Gingerich, a renowned paleontologist who has done seminal work on the evolution of whales, synonymized religion and spirituality:
Gingerich is still baffled by the conflict that many people feel between religion and science. On my last night in Wadi Hitan, we walked a little distance from camp under a dome of brilliant stars. “I guess I’ve never been particularly devout,” he said. “But I consider my work to be very spiritual. Just imagining those whales swimming around here, how they lived and died, how the world has changed—all this puts you in touch with something much bigger than yourself, your community, or your everyday existence.” He spread his arms, taking in the dark horizon and the desert with its sandstone wind sculptures and its countless silent whales. “There’s room here for all the religion you could possibly want.”
Gingerich’s “spirituality,” which he clearly sees as religious, nevertheless approaches the kind of emotion described by Albert Einstein. And there are few scientists who haven’t felt that way about either their work or the amazing discoveries constantly falling into the hopper of science. Further, despite the stereotype of scientists as cold automatons, immune to beauty and devoid of wonder, we’re people first. We love the arts (I’d maintain that scientists appreciate t
he arts more than humanities scholars appreciate science); we have the same emotions as everyone else (as well as a special kind: the wonder we feel when discovering something that no one ever knew before); and sometimes we feel individually insignificant but connected to the larger universe we study.
If emotion, awe, wonder, and yearning are considered “spirituality,” then call me spiritual, for I often feel the same “frisson in the breast” described by Richard Dawkins, a die-hard atheist, as his own form of spirituality. But emotionality isn’t the same as religious belief in the divine or the supernatural, and it’s not helpful for scientists like Gingerich to conflate them.
Yet the effort goes on. Elaine Ecklund, whose work on sociology is funded by the Templeton Foundation, has devoted much of her career to showing that scientists are more religious than everyone thinks. When she and her collaborator Elizabeth Long surveyed spirituality among scientists, they concluded, “Our results show unexpectedly that the majority of scientists at top research universities consider themselves ‘spiritual.’” In reality, Ecklund and Long’s “majority” was only 26 percent of all scientists—barely a quarter! The authors go on to admit, “Our results show that scientists hold religion and spirituality as being qualitatively different kinds of constructs,” adding that “in contrast to their views on spirituality, what scientists in this group specifically dislike about religion is the sense of faith that they think often leads religious people to believe without evidence.” The difference between a “religious” and a “spiritual” scientist couldn’t be clearer, but Ecklund still uses this kind of data to argue for harmony between science and religion.
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