But the religion [Gould] is making room for is empty of any claims to historical or scientific fact, doctrinal authority, and supernatural experience. Such a religion, whatever be its attractions to the liberal scientistic mind, could never be Christianity, or for that matter, Judaism or Islam.
The theologian John Haught agrees:
[A] closer look at Gould’s writings about science and religion will show that he could reconcile them only by understanding religion in a way that most religious people themselves cannot countenance. Contrary to the nearly universal religious sense that religion puts us in touch with the true depths of the real, Gould denied by implication that religion can ever give us anything like reliable knowledge of what is. That is the job of science alone. . . . Still, Gould could not espouse the idea that religion in any sense gives us truth.
In the end, NOMA is simply an unsatisfying quarrel about labels that, unless you profess a watery deism, cannot reconcile science and religion. As Isaiah realized when prophesying harmony among the beasts, it takes a miracle to reconcile the irreconcilable: “And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”
Science Versus the Supernatural
Implicit in the NOMA gambit is the claim that science deals only with questions involving natural phenomena, while questions about the supernatural fall in the bailiwick of religion. You’ll often see this claim made by scientific organizations trying to avoid alienating believers. Here’s such a claim from a very prestigious group of scientists, the National Academies:
Because they are not a part of nature, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. In this sense, science and religion are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different ways. Attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist.
The National Science Teachers Association made a similar proclamation:
Science is a method of testing natural explanations for natural objects and events. Phenomena that can be observed or measured are amenable to scientific investigation. Science also is based on the observation that the universe operates according to regularities that can be discovered and understood through scientific investigations. Explanations that are not consistent with empirical evidence or that cannot be tested empirically are not a part of science. As a result, explanations of natural phenomena that are not derived from evidence but from myths, personal beliefs, religious values, philosophical axioms, and superstitions are not scientific. Furthermore, because science is limited to explaining natural phenomena through testing based on the use of empirical evidence, it cannot provide religious or ultimate explanations.
Many liberal churches have issued similar statements. By reassuring people that science has nothing to say about their faith, such words are supposed to turn creationists into supporters of evolution. Sadly, there’s no evidence that this has worked.
The main problem, however, is that these statements are flatly wrong. Science in fact has a lot to say about the supernatural. It can and has tested it, and so far has found no evidence for it.
But let’s back up, for such a statement demands that we clarify what we mean by “supernatural.” One way is to simply claim that the supernatural is “the realm of phenomena that can’t be studied by scientific methods.” This is the sense used by the philosopher of science Robert Pennock when arguing that “[if] we could apply natural knowledge to understand supernatural powers, then, by definition, they would not be supernatural.” Such a definition makes the statements by the National Academies and the National Science Teachers Association true, but only as tautologies.
As we’ve already seen, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “supernatural” as “belonging to a realm or system that transcends nature, as that of divine, magical, or ghostly beings; attributed to or thought to reveal some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature; occult, paranormal.” In other words, the supernatural includes those phenomena that violate the known laws of nature. What’s important to realize is that this definition does not make the supernatural off-limits to science. Indeed, over its history science has repeatedly investigated supernatural claims and, in principle, could find strong evidence for them. But that evidence hasn’t appeared.
Note too that the supernatural includes not only divine phenomena (which I’d characterize as things caused by beings having mind but no substance), but also the paranormal: phenomena like alchemy, homeopathy, ESP, telekinesis, ghosts, astrology, Buddhist karma, and so on. All of these involve breaking the known laws of nature. Because we surely don’t know all the laws of nature, one must consider that something that appears “supernatural” to science may lose that status with further study. As I describe below, there are certain observations that would convince me of the truth of some religions, but that truth might ultimately be due to misunderstanding—a giant magic trick played by space aliens, for instance. After all, in science all conclusions about the universe are provisional. But it would be a mistake for scientists to completely rule out a priori any truly supernatural phenomena, religious or otherwise.
Nearly all religions make empirical claims about how God interacts with the world, although some of them are hard or impossible to test. Contra Gould, this means that most religions overstep their NOMA boundaries. I’ve already mentioned some religious claims about reality, but let’s look at how science might test whether phenomena are supernatural acts of a god, as well as the existence of a god itself. The philosophers Yonatan Fishman and Maarten Boudry gave seven such tests, describing which outcomes would give evidence for a god or other supernatural and paranormal phenomena. (There’s no real difference between “supernatural” and “paranormal” phenomena: both involve violating the known laws of nature, though the former term usually refers to divine intervention and the latter to “nonreligious” phenomena like ESP and clairvoyance.)
1. Intercessory prayer can heal the sick or re-grow amputated limbs.
2. Only Catholic intercessory prayers are effective.
3. Anyone who speaks the Prophet Mohammed’s name in vain is immediately struck down by lightning, and those who pray to Allah five times a day are free from disease and misfortune.
4. Gross inconsistencies found in the fossil record and independent dating techniques suggest that the earth is less than 10,000 years old—thereby confirming the biblical account and casting doubt upon Darwinian evolution and contemporary scientific accounts of geology and cosmology.
5. Specific information or prophecies claimed to be acquired during near-death experiences or via divine revelation are later confirmed—assuming that conventional means of obtaining this information have been effectively ruled out.
6. Scientific demonstration of extra-sensory perception or other paranormal phenomena (e.g., psychics routinely win the lottery).
7. Mental faculties persist despite destruction of the physical brain, thus supporting the existence of a soul that can survive bodily death.
Now, we already have anecdotal evidence against nearly all of these claims, and more systematic evidence against ESP and the efficacy of prayer. The most relevant studies for our purposes are those of prayer.
It’s surprising how often Americans pray, and how much confidence they have that it works. Eighty-eight percent of Americans pray to God, 76 percent say prayer is an important part of their daily lives, and 83 percent believe that there is a God who answers prayers. And those prayers aren’t just meditative exercises. More than 50 percent of Christians, Jews, and Muslims pray for their health and safety, good relationships with others, and help with mental or physical illnesses.
Chapter 5 describes the dreadful outcomes of using prayer instead of medicine for healing, but many Americans use prayer as a supplement to doctors. Over 35 percent of Americans pray for their health in a given year, and 24 percent ask others to do so. Clearly these people believe that prayers, both their own and others’, can work.<
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If you believe prayer works, and isn’t just a way of having a chat with God, then that belief can be tested. In fact, such a test was first conducted in 1872 by the geneticist and statistician Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s half cousin. Galton figured that among all British males who lived at least thirty years, those who were prayed for most often would be the regents (“God save the King”). If that were so, you’d expect that kings would, on average, live longer than other males, including the aristocracy, clergy, artists, tradesmen, and doctors themselves. (Kings also have the advantage of better food and medical care.) Contrary to Galton’s hypothesis, though, ninety-seven sovereigns examined had the shortest longevity of all the classes tested: sixty-four years as opposed to averages between sixty-seven and seventy years. But while Galton fobbed off petitionary prayer as a remnant of ancient superstition, he hedged by suggesting that it still might be useful for communing with any gods, relieving stress, and bringing strength. He apparently believed in belief.
One can, of course, dismiss this study as a lighthearted investigation of a passing idea (Galton was prone to such spur-of-the-moment statistical tests), but there are more modern and scientifically controlled studies of the effects of intercessory prayer on healing. Three of the best involved the effect of prayer on recovery after hospitalization for heart problems, after cardiac catheterization or angioplasty, and the effect of “distant healing” of patients after breast-reconstruction surgery. All three had proper controls: that is, some patients weren’t prayed for, and none knew whether they were prayed for. The results were uniformly negative: there were no positive effects of prayer on healing. A somewhat smaller study of healing after breast surgery also showed no effect of prayer, and a combination of prayer and other distant-healing methods had no effect on the medical and psychological condition of patients carrying HIV.
Theists’ typical response to these failures is to say either “God won’t let himself be tested” or “That’s not what prayer is about: it’s simply a way to converse with God.” But you can bet that had these studies shown a large positive effect, the religious would be noisily flaunting this as evidence for God. The confirmation bias shown by accepting positive results but explaining away negative ones is an important difference between science and religion.
There’s no substantive difference between the paranormal and the supernatural, and demonstrations of paranormal phenomena have also failed in medicine—including nonreligious methods of “cure” such as therapeutic touch, inhaling flower scents, and using magnets—as well as in other areas like ESP, telekinesis, and past-life regression. One can envision many other tests of religious claims. Does rain dancing help Native Americans relieve drought? Can God affect evolution by raising the probability of an adaptive mutation when conditions change?
So what would convince a skeptic like me of a miracle—a phenomenon that violated the laws of nature? Several of Fishman and Boudry’s examples from the list above would suffice. And because humans, unlike salamanders, don’t have the ability to regenerate lost limbs, if a religious healer could repeatedly regrow missing limbs by saying prayers over the afflicted, and this was documented with reliable evidence and testimony by multiple doctors, I would consider that a miracle, and perhaps evidence for God. But it hasn’t escaped people’s notice that “miracle” healings are always of the kind, like the disappearance of tumors, that can happen naturally, even without prayer. The Vatican itself, which requires a miracle to beatify someone, and two miracles to make that person a saint, is none too scrupulous about the medical evidence needed to elevate someone to the pantheon. The “miracle” that clinched the beatification of Mother Teresa, for instance, was the supposed disappearance of ovarian cancer in Monica Besra, an Indian woman who reported she was cured after looking at a picture of the nun. It turns out, though, that her tumor wasn’t cancerous but tubercular, and, more important, she’d received conventional medical treatment in a hospital, with her doctor (who wasn’t interviewed by the Vatican) taking credit for the cure.
More convincing forms of healing are simply never seen. Anatole France brought this up in his book Le Jardin d’Épicure:
When I was at Lourdes in August, I visited the grotto where innumerable crutches had been put on display as a sign of miraculous healing. My companion pointed out these trophies of illness and whispered in my ear:
“One single wooden leg would have been much more convincing.”
Indeed. The question “Why won’t God heal amputees?” is almost a cliché of atheism, but isn’t it reasonable to ask why wooden legs and glass eyes aren’t on exhibit at Lourdes? France had a response:
That seems sensible, but, philosophically speaking, the wooden leg has no more value than a crutch. If an observer with true scientific spirit witnessed the regrowing of a man’s severed leg after immersion in a sacred pool or the like, he would not say “Voilà—a miracle!” Rather, he would say, “A single observation like this would lead us to believe only that circumstances we don’t fully understand could regrow the leg tissues of a human—just like they regrow the claws of lobsters or the tails of lizards, but much faster.”
Here France rejects the supernatural in favor of natural laws that we haven’t yet discovered. Such healings, for example, could be the work of altruistic space aliens with advanced abilities to regrow tissue. But it doesn’t matter. If we consider the regeneration of limbs or eyes not as absolute evidence for God, but—as a scientist would—provisional evidence, then it points us toward the divine. And if these miracles occur repeatedly, are documented carefully, and occur only under religious circumstances, then the evidence for a supernatural power grows stronger.
In his book The Varieties of Scientific Experience—deliberately named to mimic William James’s classic study of religion—Carl Sagan describes how ancient scripture could have given us scientific evidence for God. It could, for instance, have presented information not known to humans when the sacred texts were written. These include statements like, “Thou shalt not travel faster than light” or “Two strands entwined is the secret of life.” God could also have made his presence known by engraving the Ten Commandments in large letters on the Moon. Unless defined tautologically, then, the supernatural is either in principle or in practice within the realm of science. And when we consider all the failures to find it—the lack of accurate predictions in scripture, the failure of science to confirm testable religious claims, the failure of a god to make its presence unimpeachably known—we find a big hole: the absence of evidence when the evidence should be there. Our rational response should be to tentatively reject the existence of any supernatural beings or powers.
Evidence for the supernatural, of course, is not evidence for a god or, especially, for the tenets of a particular religion. That requires other information. But some nonbelievers reject the possibility of any evidence for gods, claiming that the concept of a god itself is so nebulous, so incoherent, that there could never be evidence to support one. I disagree, and I think most scientists could think of some observations that would convince them of the existence of God. Even Darwin himself had some ideas, which he mentioned in a letter to the American botanist Asa Gray in 1861:
Your question what would convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, & I was convinced, from others seeing him, that I was not mad, I shd. believe in design.—If I could be convinced thoroughily [sic] that life & mind was in an unknown way a function of other imponderable forces, I shd. be convinced.—If man was made of brass or iron & no way connected with any other organism which had ever lived, I shd. perhaps be convinced. But this is childish writing.
Well, perhaps not so childish, for it tells us that Darwin, like a good scientist, was open to evidence for “Design,” by which he surely meant “God.”
I too could be convinced of the Christian God. The following (and admittedly contorted) scenario would give me tentative evidence for Christiani
ty. Suppose that a bright light appeared in the heavens, and, supported by wingèd angels, a being clad in a white robe and sandals descended onto my campus from the sky, accompanied by a pack of apostles bearing the names given in the Bible. Loud heavenly music, with the blaring of trumpets, is heard everywhere. The robed being, who identifies himself as Jesus, repairs to the nearby university hospital and instantly heals many severely afflicted people, including amputees. After a while Jesus and his minions, supported by angels, ascend back into the sky with another chorus of music. The heavens swiftly darken, there are flashes of lightning and peals of thunder, and in an instant the skies clear.
If this were all witnessed by others and documented by video, and if the healings were unexplainable but supported by testimony from multiple doctors, and if all the apparitions and events conformed to Christian theology—then I’d have to start thinking seriously about the truth of Christianity. Perhaps such eyewitness evidence isn’t even necessary. If, as Sagan suggested, the New Testament contained unequivocal information about DNA, evolution, quantum mechanics, or other scientific phenomena that couldn’t have been known to its authors, it would be hard not to accept some divine inspiration.
Perhaps other scientists would call me credulous. My scenario about a visiting Jesus could, they say, be a gigantic con game played by aliens with the technology to pull off such a stunt. (Curiously, those who make such arguments never extend them to their logical conclusion, that all life on Earth could be merely a Matrix-like computer simulation run by aliens.) After all, the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s “third law” was “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But I think you can substitute “God” for “magic.” And this is why my acceptance of God would be provisional, subject to revocation if a naturalistic explanation arose later. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but we can never say that such evidence is impossible.
Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) Page 16