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

by Coyne, Jerry A.

  Both claims are wrong.

  The orderliness of nature—the so-called set of natural laws—is not an assumption but an observation. It is logically possible that the speed of light in a vacuum could vary from place to place, and while we’d have to adjust our theories to account for that, or dispense with certain theories altogether, it wouldn’t be a disaster. Other “natural laws,” like the relative masses of neutrons and protons, probably can’t be violated, at least in our corner of the universe, because the existence of our bodies depends on those regularities. As I’ve noted, both the evolution of organisms and the maintenance of our bodies depend on regularities in the biochemical processes that keep all organisms up and running. The laws of nature, then, are regularities (assumptions, if you will) based on experience, the same kind of experience that makes us confident that we’ll see another sunrise. After all, Aristotle had “faith” in the religious sense that heavier objects would fall faster than light ones, but it was experiments—sadly, not involving Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa—which showed that, absent air resistance, all objects actually fall at the same rate.

  Accommodationists further accuse scientists of having “faith in reason.” Yet reason is not an a priori assumption, but a tool that’s been shown to work. We don’t have faith in reason; we use reason, and we use it because it produces results and progressive understanding. Honed by experience to include tools like double-blind studies and multiple, independent reviews of manuscripts submitted for publication, scientific reason has produced antibiotics, computers, and our ability to reconstruct the tree of life by sequencing DNA from different species. Indeed, even discussing whether we should use reason involves using reason! Reason is simply the way we justify our beliefs, and if you’re not using it, whether you’re justifying religious or scientific beliefs, you deserve no one’s attention.

  Another trope in the argument that science is like religion is that we also have a god: the truth revealed by the methods of science. Isn’t science, as some maintain, based on a “faith” that it’s good to pursue the truth? Hardly. The notion that knowledge is better than ignorance is not a quasi-religious faith, but a preference: we prefer to know the truth because accepting what’s false doesn’t give us useful answers about the universe. You can’t cure disease if, like Christian Scientists, you think it’s caused by faulty thinking. The accusation that science is based on faith in the value of knowledge is curious, for it’s not applied to other areas. We don’t argue, for instance, that plumbing and auto mechanics are like religion because they rest on an unjustified faith that it’s better to have your pipes and cars in working order.

  Religion Gave Rise to Science

  Even if you can’t show harmony between science and religion, you can always argue that science was a product of religion: that, long ago in Europe, modern science arose from religious beliefs and institutions. Given that science as practiced now is completely free from gods, this is a strange argument, but it’s a way to give religion, even if incompatible with modern science, some credit for that science. And given the preponderance of Western theists who make this argument, it’s no surprise that it’s Christianity rather than Judaism or Islam that gets the credit.

  This argument takes several forms. The most common is that science came from natural theology, which itself arose from the Christian desire to understand God’s creation. The most detailed version of this argument comes from the sociologist Rodney Stark:

  The rise of science was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God. In order to love and honor God, it was necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork. Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these principles.

  Almost as common is the claim, made here by Paul Davies, that the concept of physical law itself came from Christianity:

  The very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.

  As we’ll see, these claims are disputed, but even if they’re wrong, theists can always fall back on the argument that the ethics undergirding modern science come from Christian morality. As Ian Hutchinson argues, “The ethical and moral acceptability of scientific practices is strongly dictated by religious beliefs and commitments.”

  To address the Christianity-produced-science argument, we should realize that science arose in other places before Christian Europe, most notably ancient Greece, the Islamic Middle East, and ancient China. But because modern science is essentially a European invention whose spirit and motivations derived from ancient Greece and Rome, various explanations are given for why it fizzled out elsewhere. Islamic science, for instance, is often said to have disappeared after the twelfth century because free inquiry was declared inimical to Quranic doctrine. But explaining such large-scale social change is often slippery, susceptible to multiple and conflicting interpretations. Some Christian apologists, like the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, argue that faith in the “order of nature” and “general principles” (i.e., physical laws) was inherent in medieval Christianity:

  My explanation [for why science developed in Europe and not other areas] is that faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

  But one can argue even more cogently that the idea that the universe could be understood through reason was a legacy of ancient Greece.

  Another strategy is to argue, as does Ian Hutchinson, that many famous scientists were religious, and their work was motivated by their faith:

  Any list of the giants of physical science would include Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Pascal, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, all of whom, despite denominational and doctrinal differences among them, and opposition that some experienced from church authorities, were deeply committed to Jesus Christ.

  This is related to the claim that science and religion are compatible because many scientists are still religious.

  What can we make of these claims? It would be petulant to argue that religion, or Christianity in particular, made no contribution to science, or has always impeded science. Some scientists, like Newton and the nineteenth-century British natural theologians, apparently were motivated by their faith, and produced valuable work as a result. Some medieval theologians argued that God gave us reason to help us to understand the world. Monasteries were often the only repositories of scientific knowledge from earlier thinkers. And churches helped create and support European universities in the Middle Ages, some of which encouraged prescientific inquiry.

  Overall, however, the assertion that “religion birthed science” doesn’t hold water. But first we must admit that even if this thesis were true, it gives no credence to the tenets of faith, or to the value of religion in finding truth. Even institutions founded on falsity can sometimes mature by casting aside their childish things. Alchemy was the predecessor of chemistry—Robert Boyle, who made immense contributions to chemistry, also dabbled extensively in alchemy—but we’ve long since abandoned the notion of turning lead into gold. Boyle’s accomplishments in chemistry don’t burnish the image of alchemy.

  And if Christianity was required for science to emerge, why was there such a burst of science in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as China and Islamic countries? Many ancient Greeks and Romans embraced rationalism and scientific inquiry as a way to understand the world. Think of the accompl
ishments of people like Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Democritus, Archimedes, Pliny the Elder, Theophrastus, Galen, and Euclid. As the historian Richard Carrier has argued, if any faith should get credit for science, it would be paganism. And there’s little evidence that Greek and Roman science was anything other than a secular endeavor motivated by pure curiosity.

  The historians Richard Carrier, Toby Huff, Charles Freeman, and Andrew Bernstein have noted that although Christianity took hold in Europe about 500 CE, science didn’t come into its own until much later. In their view (which is, of course, contested), the authoritarianism of the church suppressed the kind of freethinking that really did produce modern European science. Heresies like Arianism (the notion of God not as a trinity but a single being) and Manichaeism (the belief that God is benevolent but not omnipotent) were brutally suppressed. Indeed, the notion of “heresy” itself is explicitly antiscientific. If science required Christianity for its genesis, why that thousand-year delay? Why, if Christianity promoted scientific innovation during the Middle Ages, did Europe show no economic growth for a millennium? Reviewing Rodney Stark’s defense of Christianity as critical for the birth of science, Andrew Bernstein argued that the hiatus of science during the Dark Ages reflected the diversion of brainpower from empirical issues to apologetics:

  In the Middle Ages, the great minds capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony—decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and plague, dying in droves in their twenties—the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies. Again, these fundamental philosophical points bear heavily against Stark’s argument, yet he simply ignores them.

  The notion that Christianity was pivotal in producing science also fails to explain why science didn’t arise in the Eastern Empire, which was Christian, prosperous, and endowed with rich libraries holding the scientific works of ancient Greeks and Romans.

  In the end, we don’t know why modern science arose for keeps in Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, while arising and then vanishing in China and Islamic countries. Besides Christianity, there were other differences between the West and other areas that could have promoted European science, including the advent of the printing press, the greater mobility of Europeans, a critical mass of population that could promote intellectual interaction, and the questioning of authority (including the religious kind)—in other words, everything that brought about the Enlightenment. The rise of modern science in Europe is a complex affair that, as a one-off historical event, defies conclusive explanation. Christianity may be one factor, but we can’t rerun the tape of history to see if science would have arisen later in a Europe that lacked religion.

  But we can at least show that, in some respects, Christianity impeded free inquiry. Many theologians from Aquinas on advocated the killing of heretics, hardly an endorsement of freethinking. Martin Luther was famous for his attacks on reason. Besides persecuting Galileo and Giordano Bruno for their heresies, some of which involved science, and burning Bruno alive, the Catholic Church famously condemned the University of Paris in 1277 for teaching 219 philosophical, theological, and scientific “errors.” And what are we to make of the church’s infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which for four centuries protected its flock from theologically incorrect thinking? That apparently included science, for the list included works by Kepler, Francis Bacon, Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather, who had his own theory of evolution), Copernicus, and Galileo. Why would an institution that promoted science make it a sin to read books by scientists? And why would an institution in favor of free inquiry ban philosophy books by Pascal, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Hume?

  Finally, what about those famous scientists who were religious? We shouldn’t be too quick to give scientific credit to their Christianity. Newton, for instance, was an Arian who rejected the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and the notion of an immortal soul. But the argument that the existence of Christian scientists proves that Christianity caused science is wholly unconvincing, for it’s based simply on correlation. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, nearly everyone was a Christian, or at least professed to be, simply because it was a universal belief that prominent people defied at peril of execution. If Christianity gave rise to science between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, then you could give religion credit for everything that humans devised in that period.

  And we can firmly reject any contribution of religion to modern science. As we know, scientists are on average far less religious than are laypeople, and the most accomplished scientists are nearly all atheists. This means that virtually no modern scientific research can be motivated by religion, and I’m aware of no scientific advances made by those who claimed religious inspiration. Most of the major scientific achievements of our time—advances in evolution, relativity, particle physics, cosmology, chemistry, and modern molecular biology—were made by nonbelievers. (While intelligent design creationism does have religious roots, it is those very roots that have discredited it as valid science, for there’s simply no evidence for the claimed intervention of a teleological designer in evolution.)

  James D. Watson once told me that while searching for the structure of DNA, he and Francis Crick were strongly motivated by naturalism: they wanted to show that the “secret of life”—the replicating molecule that is the recipe for all organisms—was pure chemistry, with no divine intervention required. If we’re going to give religion credit for the birth of science, then by the same lights we must give nonbelief credit for most of the scientific advances of the last century, which were driven by ruthless adherence to naturalism. Every bit of truth clawed from nature over the last four centuries has involved completely ignoring God, for even religious scientists park their faith at the laboratory door.

  As for religion’s positive contribution to the morality of science, the case is weak. You’d be hard pressed to show that the ethics imbuing modern science—treating laboratory animals humanely, not falsifying data, giving people due credit for their contributions—come from religious beliefs rather than secular reason. And religious morality has clearly impeded modern science, by producing bans on much stem cell research, promoting the AIDS epidemic through Catholic claims that condoms don’t prevent the disease (as well as encouraging population growth by discouraging contraception), and hindering vaccination through religiously based opposition by Muslims and Hindus.

  Religion has undoubtedly contributed to the work of some scientists, and may even have played some role in the rise of the discipline, at least through sponsoring universities that nurtured early scientists. But balancing religion’s beneficial versus repressive role in science is a task for historians, who, after much bickering, have failed to reach a consensus.

  Science Does Bad Things

  Defenders of religion often try to balance the undeniable benefits of science by arguing that it has also been responsible for many of the world’s woes. The biologist Kenneth Miller’s argument is typical:

  Science is a revolutionary activity. It alters our view of nature, and often puts forward profoundly unsettling truths that threaten the status quo. As a result, time and time again, those who feel threatened by the scientific enterprise have tried to restrict, reject, or block the work of science. Sometimes, they have good reason to fear the fruits of science, unrestrained. To be sure, it was religious fervor that led Giordano Bruno to be burned at the stake for his scientific “heresies” in 1600. But we should also remember more recently that it was science, not religion, that gave us eugenics, the atomic bomb, and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.

  A similar note is sounded by the novelist Jeffrey Small, an Episcopalian:

  Critics of religion enjoy pointing out how many wars and how much suffering has been caused in the name of religion. But only science has given us the tools to kill each other in ways never before imagined. Biologists
have produced viral and bacterial weapons; chemists have developed gunpowder and ever more destructive explosives; physicists have given us the power to destroy our very existence with nuclear weapons. Scientific advances in mechanical and chemical engineering have made our businesses more productive than at any time in history, bringing us comfort and prosperity. These same advances have also polluted our environment to the point of endangering our planet.

  Statements like these have one aim: to show that while religion may have done bad things, science has too. They are tu quoque arguments: “See, you’re as bad as we are!” As the journalist Nick Cohen noted about accusations that atheism is like religion, “It’s not a charge I’d throw around if I were seeking to defend faith. When people say of dozens of political and cultural movements from monetarism to Marxism that their followers treat their cause ‘like a religion,’ they never mean it as a compliment. They mean that dumb obedience to higher authority and an obstinate attachment to dogma mark its adherents.”

  Notice that these indictments are aimed not at scientists, but at “science”—as if the discipline itself, rather than its practitioners, is responsible for this malfeasance. But science is simply a way of investigating the world, a set of tools to discover what’s out there. The compelling force that produced nuclear weapons, gunpowder, and eugenics was not science but people: the scientists who decide to use discoveries in a certain way, the technologists who convert those discoveries into things like weapons, and the people who make decisions to use technology for purposes that may be harmful or immoral. Although physicists produced the work on nuclear fission that made possible the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, the executive order that started work on the bomb in America was signed by Franklin Roosevelt, and the Manhattan Project was directed not by a scientist, but by a soldier, Major General Leslie Groves. Roosevelt’s decision was in fact partly a response to a letter he received from Albert Einstein urging the United States to stockpile uranium because Einstein feared (rightly) that Germany was trying to develop an atomic bomb. The decision to drop the bomb on Japan was made by President Harry Truman. In other words, between the science itself and its devastating effects was a chain of people making tactical and ethical decisions.