But does the public hear their disagreement and understand their counterarguments? More likely the layperson, at least in the United States, thinks that, yes, science has indeed reached its explanatory limits, and beyond those limits lies God. That is a distortion of science. As we’ve learned, science does indeed have provisional explanations for morality, altruism, consciousness, the specificity of the laws of physics in our universe, and the fact that many of our beliefs are true. Those explanations may be wrong, but how can we know without even more science? Unfortunately, “god of the gaps” arguments discourage further research by claiming that science can never produce such explanations.
As a scientist, I am distressed by this constant elbowing of religion into questions of reality, and even more so when it leads to unsubstantiated claims about evolution. As we’ve seen, religion has no warrant and no method for decreeing what is and what is not beyond science. Certainly science has some hard problems, and just as certainly some of those problems will never be solved (why is the speed of light in a vacuum constant?), simply because the final answer will be “That’s just the way it is.” We may reach the limits of explanation for several reasons: because the evidence eludes us (many ancient species, for example, simply weren’t fossilized) or because our brains aren’t configured to puzzle out the answers. But consider how many questions religion once told us could never be answered—and were taken as evidence for God—and yet ultimately were solved by science. Evolution, infectious disease, mental illness, lightning, the stable orbits of planets: the list is long. Religious people often call for scientists to be “humble,” ignoring the beam in their own eyes, which see things like morality as forever inexplicable by science. How much more arrogant, and ignorant of history, to argue that our failures of understanding are somehow evidence for a god! And how much more egotistical to believe that that god is the god of your own religion! If the “other ways of knowing” of your faith provide concrete answers, then tell us not only what those answers are, but how they would convince either nonbelievers or members of other faiths. And let those “other ways of knowing” make predictions in the same way that science does.
The damage to science I’ve emphasized so far involves the public perception of science. The practice of science itself isn’t seriously harmed by accommodationism, but there is one exception. And that is when the direction of science is warped by organizations like the John Templeton Foundation, which can actually steer research down certain avenues congenial to its aims: the harmony among science, faith, and spirituality. Not all of Templeton’s funding goes to that kind of research, but one can argue that because of its priorities there is more work on “spiritual” topics like near-death experiences than we’d have if scientists themselves (as they do in many government agencies) decide which research gets funded. The “core funding areas” of the Templeton Foundation in the life sciences include these:
The Foundation supports projects investigating the evolution and fundamental nature of life, human life, and mind, especially as they relate to issues of meaning and purpose. Projects are welcome from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including the biological sciences, neuroscience, archeology, and paleontology.
“Meaning and purpose” are human constructs, products of intelligent minds, and “purpose” implies forethought of such minds, either human or divine. These are teleological ideas that are not part of science, except in work on human behavior. Here we see the subtle bending of scientific research toward unanswerable religious questions.
We see similar distortion in Templeton’s funding of the human sciences:
The Foundation supports projects that apply the tools of anthropology, sociology, political science, and psychology to the various moral and spiritual concepts identified by Sir John Templeton. These include altruism, creativity, free will, generosity, gratitude, intellect, love, prayer, and purpose.
Clearly these areas are motivated by curiosity not about nature but about the numinous.
Child Abuse: Faith as Substitute for Medicine
But far worse things happen when faith, seen as a valid route to empirical truth, is accompanied by other aspects of religion: the notions that you possess absolute truth about divine aspects of the universe, that adherents to other faiths are simply wrong, and that God has given you a code of behavior enforced by a system of eternal rewards and punishments. That can lead to missionizing: attempts to enforce one’s unsubstantiated beliefs on others. And while more liberal religions avoid such missionizing (have you ever had a pair of Unitarians knock on your door?), they often act as enablers of more extreme, antiscience creeds. If religious faith is generally harmful, as I think it is, then any religion whose beliefs rest on faith or that extol faith contributes to that harm.
Nowhere is this missionizing, and its support by religion in general, more toxic than in those sects that reject medical care in favor of prayer and faith healing, and enforce this belief on their children. Denied the benefits of modern scientific medicine, those children often endure prolonged and horrible deaths. Their stories are appalling testimony not only to the incompatibility of science and faith, but to the fact that this incompatibility is embraced not just by biblical literalists, but by members of more sophisticated and less marginalized faiths. And all of us, even nonbelievers, have contributed to these deaths, at least in the United States, by passing laws allowing children to be denied medical care on religious grounds. Underlying it all is the privileging of faith—giving a pass to religious beliefs that contradict science.
Christian Science (the official name is the Church of Christ, Scientist) is not just an oxymoron, but also a mainstream faith, with over a thousand churches in the United States and perhaps several hundred thousand members worldwide (the numbers are kept secret). Its members are not Bible-thumping fundamentalists, but often educated and affluent members of the community. Because Christian Scientists believe that disease and injury are illusions caused by faulty thinking, many of them reject modern medicine, relying instead on Christian Science “practitioners” who are given a mere two weeks of training—none of it in genuine medical care. The church also runs sanatoriums and nursing homes where patients are given prayer instead of medicine. Curiously, Christian Scientists are allowed to go to dentists and optometrists—apparently bad teeth and eyes are exceptions to the view of bodily infirmities as illusions—and can have broken bones set. Many of them also supplement Christian Science “healing” with modern medicine, though that’s against church rules. But when they treat their children’s maladies with prayer alone, the results are heartbreaking, for the children are either too young to understand or have been indoctrinated into the dogma of faith healing. One of the most horrible cases involved a young girl, Ashley Elizabeth King.
Ashley was the only child of Catherine and John King, prosperous middle-class Christian Scientists in Phoenix (John was a real estate developer). In 1987, at the age of twelve, Ashley developed a lump on her leg. Her parents sought no medical aid, and the lump continued to grow. When it became too large and painful to allow her to go to school, they withdrew her, and although Ashley was supposed to receive in-home instruction by teachers, her parents refused it.
Ashley’s lump—a tumor—kept growing, and the Kings continued to ignore it. In May 1988, a detective, alerted by neighbors who hadn’t seen the child for months, managed to enter the Kings’ home, and saw that the problem was serious. Although Ashley tried to cover the tumor with a pillow, the detective immediately realized that she was in fact dying. A court order put her in custody of child protective services, which sent her to Phoenix Children’s Hospital. But by the time she got real medical attention, it was far too late. Her tumor was an osteogenic sarcoma—bone cancer—and had metastasized to her lungs. Her heart was dangerously enlarged from trying to pump blood to the growing tumor, and since she couldn’t move because of the pain, her genitals and buttocks were covered with bedsores. Her tumor had grown to
thirteen inches across, larger than a basketball, and the stench from her rotting flesh permeated the hospital floor. The doctors recommended amputating the leg—not to save her life, for her condition was terminal—but to ease her pain and give her a bit more time. One doctor said that Ashley was experiencing “one of the worst kinds of pain known to mankind.”
The Kings refused amputation, and on May 12 moved their daughter to a Christian Science sanatorium where there was no medical care, not even pain medication. Instead, there were seventy-one calls to Christian Science practitioners for Ashley’s “treatment”: prayer alone. When she cried out in agony, she was told that she was disturbing the other patients. Ashley died on June 5, 1988, a martyr to her parents’ delusions. At the subsequent trial of her parents, a prosecutor described her tumor at death as “about the size of two watermelons.” The doctors believed that had she been diagnosed early, there was a 50 to 60 percent chance she could have been saved.
Arizona is one of the few states that don’t give parents immunity from prosecution for child abuse if they withhold medical care on religious grounds. (If you withhold it on nonreligious grounds, you’re culpable everywhere.) The Kings were tried for that abuse after a charge of negligent homicide was dropped. They pleaded no contest, were convicted of one count of reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor, and were given a slap on the wrist—three years’ unsupervised probation and 100 to 150 hours of community service.
As in many such cases, the parents showed a curious lack of affect and remorse for what they had done. In a press conference after Ashley’s death, her mother compared her daughter’s fear of being hospitalized to Anne Frank’s anguish about her deportation to Auschwitz. Catherine King added, “I know I was a good mother, and no judge or jury in the country can convince me otherwise.” In contrast, the county attorney who filed charges against the Kings said, “Any person who calls himself a Christian wouldn’t let a dog die like this.” But it was precisely because the Kings were members of a Christian sect, one with beliefs about healing, that Ashley died in misery. Had the Kings been atheists, there was a good chance she would have lived.
I’ve read about dozens of these cases, and their common elements are two: no serious punishment of the parents, and those parents’ lack of regret. Both, I think, are due to faith. Most states have no legal grounds to prosecute parents like Ashley’s; in those where they can be put on trial, juries are reluctant to convict and judges reluctant to punish. But that occurs only when the abuse has a religious excuse. I attribute the lack of affect in the parents to religion as well: the belief that the pain, suffering, and death of their children are far less important than not violating the tenets of their faith. Their conviction that they did what God or their church demands immunizes such parents against normal feelings of guilt and shame.
While there are reams of similar stories about the deaths of children after Christian Science “treatment,” many other, more marginal sects also reject medical care in favor of prayer. This dogma invariably rests on passages in the Bible such as James 5:13–15:
Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms. Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.
Medical advances have been incalculably large since those words were written, but our children continue to suffer and die on the basis of ancient texts—and from the peer pressure exerted by coreligionists. The many sects that rely on prayer treatment often shun or expel members caught going to doctors.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, numbering nearly eight million worldwide, routinely refuse blood transfusion, citing biblical passages like Genesis 9:4 (“But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat”) and Leviticus 17:10 (“I will even set my face against that soul who eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people”). Many adults and children have died from a metaphorical interpretation of “eating blood,” although transfusing some components of blood, like the protein hemoglobin, is now permitted. The children who have died, brainwashed by their parents into refusing blood, are celebrated by Jehovah’s Witnesses as martyrs: a copy of the church’s magazine Awake! from May 1994 shows pictures of twenty-five of these children with the chilling caption “Youths who put God first.”
These completely avoidable deaths continue to mount. In 1998, Seth Asser and Rita Swan tried to measure the toll in a paper published in the medical journal Pediatrics. Their aim was to determine how many children had died from religiously based medical neglect in the twenty years after 1975, and how many could have been saved. To that total they added mortalities of fetuses and infants during and shortly after birth when doctors and midwives were barred on religious grounds. Of course, determining after the fact whether medical intervention would have saved lives is a judgment call, but in many cases, including childhood diabetes, ruptured appendixes, and breech births, medical intervention is nearly always successful.
The results were both startling and depressing. Of 172 children who died over those two decades after being denied medical care on religious grounds, 140—81 percent of the total—had conditions that would have been curable with a probability of greater than 90 percent. Another 18 (10 percent) had a probability of cure greater than 50 percent but less than 90 percent. Only 3 (victims of a car accident, a severe heart defect, and anencephaly) would not have benefited from medical attention. Asser and Swan’s list of examples is heartbreaking; here are but three:
For example, a 2-year-old child aspirated a bite of banana. Her parents frantically called other members of her religious circle for prayer during nearly an hour in which some signs of life were still present.
One teenager asked teachers for help getting medical care for fainting spells, which she had been refused at home. She ran away from home, but law enforcement returned her to the custody of her father. She died 3 days later from a ruptured appendix.
One father had a medical degree and had completed a year of residency before joining a church opposed to medical care. After 4 days of fever, his 5-month-old son began having apneic episodes. The father told the coroner that with each spell he “rebuked the spirit of death” and the infant “perked right back up and started breathing.” The infant died the next day from bacterial meningitis.
Both mothers and fetuses have died after refusing to have doctors or midwives present at childbirth. Is there anything other than faith—or complete ignorance of medicine—that could have caused the following gruesome scene?
In one case, a 23-year-old woman presented to an emergency room after 56 hours of active labor with the infant’s head at the vaginal opening for 16 hours. The dead fetus was delivered via emergency cesarean, and was in an advanced state of decomposition. The mother died within hours after delivery from sepsis because of the retained uterine contents. The medical examiner noted that the corpse of the infant was so foul smelling that it was inconceivable anyone attending the delivery could not have noticed.
The believers in these cases were not just Christian Scientists (16 percent of the total deaths), but represented twenty-three Christian denominations from thirty-four states.
Such deaths are unconscionable because they involve children who have no say—or no mature say—in their own medical care, but are at the mercy of their parents’ beliefs. Because injuring a child by withholding medical care for nonreligious reasons constitutes legal child abuse, it’s hard to make the case that it’s not equally abusive when medical care is rejected on religious grounds. In such light, Jesus’s statement in Matthew (19:14)—“Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven”—has a horrible double meaning.
It’s not just the parents who are at fault. Religious exemptions are written into law by the
federal and state governments—that is, those who represent all Americans. In fact, thirty-eight of the fifty states have religious exemptions for child abuse and neglect in their civil codes, fifteen states have such exemptions for misdemeanors, seventeen for felony crimes against children, and five (Idaho, Iowa, Ohio, West Virginia, and Arkansas) have exemptions for manslaughter, murder, or capital murder. Altogether, forty-three of the fifty states confer some type of civil or criminal immunity on parents who injure their children by withholding medical care on religious grounds.
Surprisingly, these exemptions were required by the U.S. government in 1974 as a condition for states to receive federal aid for child protection. Before that, only eleven states had such exemptions; afterward there were forty-four. (That requirement was rescinded in 1983, but it was too late: most states had enacted the religious exemptions, which are still in place.) The government, or rather the taxpayers, further support religious child abuse by subsidizing Christian Science practitioners and their nursing homes with Medicare and tax exemptions—despite their complete failure to provide any medical care. Other tax support involves allowing federal employees, some state employees, and members of the armed forces to join health plans that include Christian Science nursing and practitioner care.
Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) Page 30