The findings of science are morally neutral; it is how they are used that is sometimes a problem. While one might be tempted to make a similar argument about religion, I’ll claim that there are important differences between science and faith that make religion itself complicit in its misuse.
When I read indictments of science for its harmful results, I think of the following: “Toolmaking has given us shovels, hammers, chisels, and knives. But sometimes those tools are used to kill people, so we must remember that, although a valuable enterprise, toolmaking has also brought us misery.” But, like those of science, the misuses of toolmaking are far outweighed by its benefits. Blaming a field of endeavor, rather than misguided people, for its misuse is like blaming architecture for giving Nazis the means to build gas chambers. And when you pin overpopulation and pollution on “science,” is it really the institution and methodology that are to blame, or is it greedy, shortsighted people? Are Darwin and Mendel to blame for eugenics, or is it the corruption of those enterprises by racists and xenophobes? In the end, the solution is not to stop science, or even blame science, but to correct the mind-set that results in bending it toward nefarious or socially harmful ends. Clearly, so long as science is practiced by humans it will never be free from misuse by bad people. And it will always have some bad effects.
But then what about religion? If we can exculpate science for the ills it causes, can’t you exculpate religion on the same grounds? Can’t you say that the evils of religion—things like the Inquisition or the terror bombings of radical Muslims—come not from dogma or scripture but from their misapplication by flawed human beings? My answer is that here science differs from religion in an important way: unlike science, faith itself can corrupt decent people, leading directly to bad behavior.
Most religions, and certainly the Abrahamic ones, have three features that are foreign to science. The most important is religion’s linkage to moral codes that define and enforce proper behavior, behavior supposedly reflecting God’s will. The second is the widespread belief in eternal reward and punishment: the notion that after death not just your fate but everyone else’s depends on adherence to conduct mandated by your religion. And the third is the notion of absolute truth: that the nature of your god, and what it wants, is unchanging. While some believers see their ability to fathom God’s nature as limited, and don’t accept the notion of a heaven or a hell, the certainty of religious dogma is far more absolute and far less provisional than the pronouncements of science.
This combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic. It is what leads many believers not only to accept unenlightened views, like the disenfranchisement of women and gays, opposition to birth control, and intrusions into people’s private sex lives, but also to force those views on others, including their own children and society at large, and sometimes even to kill those who disagree. It is this toxic mixture, which we’ll discuss in the next chapter, that the physicist Steven Weinberg indicted when he said, “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.” He did not mean, of course, that religion turns all good people bad, but merely some of them, depending on their religion and their ardor. Without religion, for instance, it’s hard to imagine the eternal enmity between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, often people from identical national and ethnic backgrounds who nevertheless slaughter each other over the question of who were Muhammad’s proper heirs. The eternal persecution of the Jews is a purely religious matter, turning on their presumed status as killers of Christ.
But the same things cannot be said of science, for the discipline contains nothing prescriptive (save “find the truth” and “don’t cheat”), nor any intimation of eternal rewards. Physicists do not kill each other when they differ about the value of string theory or who first came up with the idea of evolution.
Actually, Weinberg wasn’t quite correct. For good people to do evil doesn’t require only religion, or even any religion, but simply one of its key elements: belief without evidence—in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but in any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent. This was precisely the case in the totalitarian regimes of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, whose excesses are often (and wrongly) blamed on atheism. And it is in such societies, where free inquiry is suppressed, that we find bad science becoming an institution.
Perhaps the most famous example of pernicious, ideology-based science is the “Lysenko affair,” in which a bogus form of genetics held sway in the Soviet Union between 1935 and the mid-1960s. “Lysenkoism” was a cult of personality centered on both Stalin and his handpicked “expert” in agriculture, the mediocre agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Catching Stalin’s ear with exorbitant and bogus claims that he could produce more crops by treating seeds with extreme cold and moisture, Lysenko became in effect the dictator of Soviet agriculture and genetics. His methods rested on the unscientific and unsubstantiated claim that environmental treatments could affect the heredity of plants, a claim that conflicts with everything we know about genetics. Western genetics and plant breeding were abandoned as decadent, and, with Lysenko’s approval, famous geneticists were either executed or sent to the gulag. Other scientists, hoping to avoid punishment, simply faked their data to conform to Lysenko’s ideas.
Lysenkoism failed miserably. It didn’t improve crop yield, and the purge of geneticists set Soviet biology back by decades. Is it then a black mark on science? Hardly, for it marked the abandonment of real science for something like creationism: empirical statements based on wish-thinking and supported by fealty to a religious-like god (Stalin) and his anointed son (Lysenko). It was the faith in these methods, and the suppression of the normal criticism and dissent of science, that caused the debacle. As Richard Feynman said in his report on the failed O-rings that doomed the space shuttle Challenger, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
But Weinberg was on the money when he (and the philosopher Karl Popper) argued that the problems imputed to “science” are really the problems afflicting all of humanity: venality, irrationality, and immorality:
Of course science has made its own contribution to the world’s sorrows, but generally by giving us the means of killing each other, not the motives. Where the authority of science has been used to justify horrors, it really has been in terms of perversions of science, like Nazi racism and “eugenics.” As Karl Popper has said, “On the other hand, it is only too obvious that it is irrationalism and not rationalism that has the responsibility for all national hostility and aggression, both before and after the Crusades, but I do not know of any war waged for a ‘scientific’ aim, and inspired by scientists.”
Science Is Fallible and Its Results Are Unreliable
This is another tu quoque argument from beleaguered believers. If religion can be wrong, the argument runs, then so can science. If we have our doubts about religious truths, well, scientific truths are also shaky. After all, hasn’t scientific “knowledge” been overturned time after time? The author Jeffrey Small expresses this sentiment in an article called “The Common Ground Between Science and Religion”:
We must also be careful not to overstate the infallibility of the scientific method. Scientific knowledge has inherent limitations. Science is not truth; it’s an approximation of truth. . . . Another limitation with the scientific method is that all scientific theories rely on human conception, interpretation and evaluation. The history of science shows that the process of one scientific theory supplanting another is a bumpy one.
This argument is not unique to religionists and accommodationists: it’s a staple of postmodernists and assorted pseudoscientists, including advocates of creationism, alternative medicine, global-warming denialism, and the supposed dangers of vaccination. In Texas, for instance, the “science is wro
ng” trope appears in the biology curriculum of a publicly funded “charter school”:
Many other historical blunders of science could be mentioned. What we need to keep in mind is that scientists are human beings. The assumption that they are completely objective, error-free, impartial, “cold machines” dressed in white coats is, of course, absurd. Like everyone else, scientists are influenced by prejudice and preconceived ideas. You should also remember that just because most people believe a particular thing does not necessarily make it true.
The “particular thing” under discussion is, of course, evolution.
The response is simple. Of course science can be wrong, and has been many times before—but that’s what’s right about it. Naturally scientists are only human, and sometimes reluctant to part with their pet theories, but they also make mistakes. That, in combination with the limited understanding we have at any one time, guarantees that many scientific “truths” will fall by the wayside. Some scientific results are flat wrong, as in the cases of faster-than-light neutrinos, cold fusion, bacteria with arsenic in their DNA, and the notion of static continents, while others have simply replaced useful paradigms, like Newtonian mechanics, with more inclusive ones, like quantum mechanics. And beyond simple error, there’s been fraud. The most famous case is Piltdown Man, a hoax involving a humanlike skull. Supposedly found in a gravel pit in East Sussex, the skull was shown to scientists in 1912 by the amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson, stunning them with its combination of a modern skull and apelike teeth. Many saw it as a transitional form between primitive and modern humans: proof that we evolved. It took four decades for that skull to be revealed as a forgery, a mélange of a medieval human skull, the jaw of an orangutan, and teeth from a chimpanzee. (The identity of the forgers remains a mystery, but suspects include the writer Arthur Conan Doyle and the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.) Piltdown Man is still a staple of creationist literature, regularly trotted out to show that evolutionary biology and its practitioners can’t be trusted.
But notice that all of these hoaxes and false results were exposed by scientists themselves. It was suspicious anthropologists and paleontologists who uncovered the Piltdown forgery, so there was no collusion (as implied by creationists) to buttress the “lie” of evolution with a phony fossil. And, of course, we now have a panoply of genuine fossils attesting to human evolution. The “arsenic” DNA, faster-than-light neutrinos, and cold fusion were all quickly debunked by other scientists trying to replicate the results.
And that’s the point. Science has a huge advantage over “other ways of knowing”: built-in methods of self-correction. These include not only the familiar attitude of doubt, but also an arsenal of empirical weapons to test and replicate the results of others. After all, renown accrues to scientists who show up their peers (we’re just as ambitious as anyone else), and one way to do that is to disprove a result that has gained a lot of attention. Certainly some scientists are reluctant to part with theories that have made them famous, and paradigms do get entrenched in some fields (the idea that continents don’t move is one example), for scientists are, with good reason, conservative. But ambition and the desire to know will ultimately lead to good science driving out the bad.
Although scientific research may change some of our conclusions over the years, many of those conclusions will remain intact. It’s unlikely, for instance, that we’ll find that continental drift is wrong, for we can actually see and measure the movement of continents using satellites and lasers. Few scientists doubt that, several centuries from now, DNA will remain the genetic material in multicellular species, that the speed of light in a vacuum will remain within 1 percent of its reported value, and that a molecule of methane will have one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. These things can be regarded, in the vernacular, as “proven.” In fact, we’ve seen that the very people who argue that science is fallible and its results are untrustworthy put their trust in science every day. Why would they do that?
But none of this criticism of science makes religion even a tiny bit more credible. While science has been wrong, it’s been right enough to improve our understanding of the universe in a way that’s immeasurably advanced the well-being of our own species and our understanding of nature. Even a simple scientific advance can save millions of lives. The Green Revolution is well known, but a more recent innovation is the development of “golden rice,” a genetically engineered crop that incorporates a precursor to vitamin A, an essential nutrient, into the rice genome. The product is nutritious, perfectly safe, distributed without charge to subsistence farmers, and, best of all, could save the lives of nearly three million children who die annually of vitamin deficiency. Sadly, misguided people who are suspicious of all genetically modified organisms—GMOs—have prevented widespread distribution of the product.
In contrast, religion has never been right in its claims about the universe—at least not in a way that all rational people can accept. There is no reliable method to show that the Trinity exists, that God is loving and all-powerful, that we’ll meet our dead relatives in the afterlife, or that Brahma created the universe from a golden egg. Lacking a way to show its tenets are wrong, religion cannot show them to be right, even provisionally.
Although this chapter may have had the flavor of an academic debate, what with the emphasis on charge and countercharge, argument and answer, the stakes are far higher than simple intellectual victory. For mixing science with faith, or assuming that they are coequal ways of finding truth, harms not just intellectual discourse but also people’s lives. The next chapter describes the damage of such accommodationism.
CHAPTER 5
Why Does It Matter?
A surgeon once called upon a poor cripple and kindly offered to render him any assistance in his power. The surgeon began to discourse very learnedly upon the nature and origin of disease; of the curative properties of certain medicines; of the advantages of exercise, air and light, and of the various ways in which health and strength could be restored. These remarks ware so full of good sense, and discovered so much profound thought and accurate knowledge, that the cripple, becoming thoroughly alarmed, cried out, “Do not, I pray you, take away my crutches. They are my only support, and without them I should be miserable indeed!” “I am not going,” said the surgeon, “to take away your crutches. I am going to cure you, and then you will throw the crutches away yourself.”
—Robert Green Ingersoll
Even if you agree that science and religion are incompatible, what’s the harm in that? After all, most religions aren’t opposed to science in general, and many religious scientists happily ignore God while they do their day job, even if they abandon that attitude when they go to church on Sunday.
The harm, as I’ve said repeatedly, comes not from the existence of religion itself, but from its reliance on and glorification of faith—belief, or, if you will, “trust” or “confidence”—without supporting evidence. And faith, as employed in religion (and in most other areas), is a danger to both science and society. The danger to science is in how faith warps the public understanding of science: by arguing, for instance, that science is based just as strongly on faith as is religion; by claiming that revelation or the guidance of ancient books is just as reliable a guide to truth about our universe as are the tools of science; by thinking that an adequate explanation can be based on what is personally appealing rather than on what stands the test of empirical study.
Religious scientists undermine their own profession by diluting the rigor of science with claims about the supernatural—claims that are, broadly construed, scientific. Despite Stephen Jay Gould’s declaration that “proper” religion stays away from making assertions about the natural world (we’ve learned that, for theistic religions, there is no clear distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural” world), religion regularly becomes improper, making clear claims about reality. Both scientists and theologians
have shown that Gould was wrong in asserting that Abrahamic religions are, in Ian Hutchinson’s words, “empty of any claims to historical or scientific fact, doctrinal authority, and supernatural experience.”
Historical facts are, of course, scientific facts, but the new natural theology also makes scientific claims. Perhaps the most damaging are the “god of the gaps” arguments: caulking the holes in our understanding of nature with divine explanations. Not only are such explanations easily destroyed by the advances of science (and this has happened repeatedly), but they also give people the false impression that some questions about the universe are simply refractory to scientific explanation, for the explanation lies outside of science.
When Francis Collins argues that because altruism and innate moral feelings cannot be explained by science, and therefore must have been given to us by God, he’s making a claim about both nature and science: morality will always elude naturalistic explanations. When theologians argue that both consciousness and the ability of our senses to detect truth will never be explained by science, they are not only misleading the public, but acting as “science stoppers,” implicitly suggesting that scientists should simply give up studying these phenomena. When religious biologists say that the evolution of humans, or of a humanlike species, was inevitable, they are making a claim that sounds scientific, but really rests on scriptural notions of humans as God’s special species. When theistic evolutionists state that God acts by moving electrons around in an undetectable way, or by creating the odd mutation to produce a desired species, they are making claims that have no scientific basis but are superfluities tacked on to science to fulfill emotional needs. And when we hear that the laws of physics, and the so-called fine-tuning of the universe’s physical constants, have no explanation save God, I know that nearly all physicists disagree.
Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) Page 29