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

by Coyne, Jerry A.

  The tangle of laws, in which parents in some states can be exculpated from abuse or neglect but convicted of manslaughter, has led to mass confusion in the courts. The result is that when parents are found guilty of medically neglecting their children on religious grounds, their convictions can be thrown out of court because of conflicting laws. Or when parents are convicted, religiously based sympathy for them results in trivial punishments, usually probation or a small fine. Only rarely do such parents go to jail. This unwarranted sympathy for faith eliminates the stiff sentences that might deter other parents from using religious healing on their children.

  It’s not just medical care that’s subject to religious exemption in America. You can, on religious grounds alone, refuse to have your newborn children tested for metabolic diseases or given prophylactic eyedrops. You can refuse to have your children tested for lead in their blood. In Oregon and Pennsylvania there are even religious exemptions from wearing bicycle helmets. In California, public school teachers can refuse to be tested for tuberculosis on religious grounds, which, of course, could endanger their students.

  Religious exemptions for vaccinations, allowed in forty-eight of the fifty U.S. states (all except Mississippi and West Virginia), endanger not only the children who don’t get immunized, but the community in general, for even those who are vaccinated don’t always acquire immunity. To attend public schools and many colleges, like the one where I teach, students must show evidence of vaccination for diseases like hepatitis, measles, mumps, diphtheria, and tetanus. The only exemptions permitted are for medical reasons, like a compromised immune system—and religion.

  Nor are Christians the only believers who oppose immunization. Islamic clerics in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria urge their followers to oppose polio vaccination, declaring it a conspiracy to sterilize Muslims. These efforts may prevent the complete eradication of polio from the human species, something already achieved for smallpox. Dr. A. Majid Katme, spokesman and former head of the Islamic Medical Association of the United Kingdom, described by the Guardian as “a respected figure in the British Muslim community,” has come out against all childhood vaccination, claiming that “the case of vaccination is first an Islamic one, based on Islamic ethos regarding the perfection of the natural human body’s immune defense system, empowered by great and prophetic guidance to avoid most infections.” Taking his advice would, of course, be disastrous.

  Few records are kept on adult deaths caused by religious “healing,” but we can get an idea of the problem from a study of childbirth in women belonging to the Faith Assembly, an antimedical religious group in Indiana. Not only was mortality of late fetuses and early newborns three times higher than for the state as a whole, but the maternal mortality rate during childbirth was ninety-two times higher!

  Of course, nobody considers prosecuting adults who favor spiritual treatment for themselves over modern medicine, as they are presumed capable of making their own decisions, however foolish. Yet their choices may not be as free as we think. For many of the parents who withhold medical care from their children once were those children, raised in the faith and indoctrinated in its tenets. Of course, the Kings should have been punished more severely than they were, both to prevent them from repeating their behavior and to deter others from imitating it, but it’s hard to argue that parents raised in such a faith are completely free to reject what was drilled into them when they were young and credulous.

  I have dwelt on medical exemptions because they clearly show the conflict between science and faith, as well as the grievous harm that this can cause. Medicine can cure; faith cannot. But such faith need not be religious. In 2013, Tamara Sophie Lovett, a Canadian, was charged with negligence for treating her seven-year-old son Ryan, severely infected with streptococcus, with homeopathic and herbal remedies. Although such infections can usually be cured easily with a dose of penicillin, Ryan didn’t have that option, and died. What killed him was not religious faith, but faith in alternative medicine. As one investigating officer said, “We have no direct information that religious beliefs factored into this, but there was a belief system and homeopathic medicine did factor in.” Faith is faith, and in this case it too conflicted with science.

  While the conflict between creationism and evolution reduces Americans’ scientific literacy, nobody dies from not learning about evolution. Faith-based healing is a different matter. A single child killed in the name of faith is one too many. How many will it take before we realize that our exaggerated respect for religion will allow these deaths to continue indefinitely? The case of the Kings, and others like it, is a good example of Steven Weinberg’s argument that “for good people to do evil—that takes religion”—or sometimes just faith.

  Many of the parents who injure or kill their children through medical neglect are not toothless Bible-thumpers, nor even biblical fundamentalists. Many, like Christian Scientists, can even been seen as religious “moderates”—a group that, accommodationists claim, are relatively harmless, or even helpful as allies in the fight against creationism.

  But Americans of even liberal faiths—which can include the legislators who write religious exemptions and tax breaks into laws, the believers who lobby for such laws (even if they don’t endorse faith healing), and the prosecutors and judges who are reluctant to prosecute such cases, or dole out light sentences upon conviction—all are complicit in the death of those children. Sadly, the real guilty parties, the churches that promulgate faith healing, are always exempt from punishment. Political pressure—the “antireligion” characterization that would attach to American politicians who lobby against religious exemptions—prevents any movement to repeal these unfair and harmful laws.

  Why does this continue? Faith enables other faith, of course, and there’s “belief in belief,” the idea that religions, regardless of their tenets, should be encouraged as a social good. Religious lobbies such as the Christian Science church, which has always pushed hard for medical-care exemption laws, strengthen this attitude. Further, many Americans already use prayer as an adjunct to regular medicine. Within a given year, for instance, between 35 percent and 62 percent of adults employ prayer for health reasons. If you think that prayer can supplement regular medicine, it becomes easier to accept the view of some sects that prayer can substitute for regular medicine. And some “mainstream” faiths hold views that come perilously close to faith healing. The Vatican, for instance, has an official exorcist—Gabriele Amorth, who claims to have performed the rite over seventy thousand times—and the Catholic Church recently gave formal recognition to the International Association of Exorcists, comprising 250 priests in thirty countries. How many Catholics are aware that their church officially recognizes demonic possession and has procedures to deal with it? And who knows how many disturbed people have been subjected to a frightening procedure that is harmless at best, but potentially dangerous, especially when those who use it misconstrue and thus ignore the real causes of mental illness?

  Even scientists have given their imprimatur to faith-based healing. In 1992, the U.S. Congress funded an Office of Alternative Medicine, which seven years later became the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), still associated with the prestigious National Institutes of Health. In the two decades ending in 2012, the government sank $2 billion into NCCAM. Despite that huge expenditure, the center has never produced one bit of evidence for the value of “alternative medicine”—and that includes acupuncture, reiki, and various forms of spiritual healing. (The joke among advocates of scientific medicine is “What do you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine.”) The work funded by NCCAM included studies on the effects of “distance healing”—including prayer—on HIV and glioblastoma (brain cancer), on coffee enemas as a palliative for cancer, and on magnetic mattress pads as cures for arthritis. None of these studies gave positive results; indeed, many of their results haven’t even been published.

  W
hile “alternative medicine” is often secular, it bears many similarities to religion, for they share many characteristics of pseudoscience. Practitioners of both tend to ignore counterevidence or reject it with special pleading; embrace unfalsifiable claims (“It won’t show up in double-blind tests,” equivalent to “You can’t test God”); accept questionable data as “proof”; argue that the scientific method doesn’t apply to their claims; reject replication and verification by outsiders and skeptics; and refuse to consider alternative hypotheses. Above all, religion, faith healing, and alternative medicine all show the diagnostic feature of faith: an agenda not to find the truth, but to support one’s biases, emotions, and personal beliefs. In fact, the growing popularity of “integrative medicine”—a mélange of traditional medicine and more “holistic” therapies—can be seen as a form of accommodation between science and spirituality.

  In the preceding chapter I argued that, unlike science, religion comes with a built-in plan of action, for if your beliefs are wedded to both a moral code and the promise of eternal reward or punishment, you may feel the duty to inculcate not only your children with those beliefs, but others as well. Rodney Stark, a Christian sociologist of religion, compares the duty to spread one’s beliefs with the duty to disseminate a lifesaving vaccine:

  Imagine a society’s discovering a vaccine against a deadly disease that has been ravaging its people and continues to ravage people in neighboring societies, where the cause of the disease is incorrectly attributed to improper diet. What would be the judgment on such a society if it withheld its vaccine on the grounds that it would be ethnocentric to try to instruct members of another culture that their medical ideas are incorrect, and to induce them to adopt the effective treatment? If one accepts that one has the good fortune to be in possession of the true religion and thereby has access to the most valuable possible rewards, is one not similarly obligated to spread this blessing to those less fortunate? . . . Only One True God can generate great undertakings out of primarily religious motivations, and chief among these is the desire, indeed the duty, to spread knowledge of the One True God: the duty to missionize is inherent in dualistic monotheism.

  Suppression of Research and Vaccination

  Religious missionizing doesn’t always involve visiting people’s houses to let them in on the Good News. It usually takes the more subtle form of trying to force others to conform to your moral beliefs through political lobbying or trying to make new law. When such political action rests on religious beliefs that conflict with science, as it has with medical-care exemption laws, that means that both science and society suffer. This has happened, and is still happening, in several other areas where science clashes with faith in the public arena.

  One involves is research on embryonic stem cells (ESSs), cells that are initially undifferentiated but have the capacity to develop into a variety of different tissues. That gives them enormous potential for curing human diseases, regrowing tissues and organs, and attacking a variety of previously intractable medical problems like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and spinal cord injuries. The cells are usually extracted from early-stage embryos (less than a week old) that have been frozen as a surplus product of in vitro fertilization, which involves producing many embryos in the laboratory. When thawed, those embryos can be implanted in a woman’s uterus, usually with about a 50 percent success rate. Extra embryos are made in case the first implantation is unsuccessful.

  There are hundreds of thousands of these frozen embryos languishing in cylinders of liquid nitrogen, never to be implanted in women. They are simply leftovers. But although their cells have enormous potential to help living humans, both children and adults, their use has been restricted for years—because of faith. Many religions hold that a single fertilized egg is equivalent to a person, and that destroying early-stage embryos is therefore murder. It is because of this opposition that in 1995, President Bill Clinton, acting against the advice of a panel from the National Institutes of Health, banned federal funding for any research involving the destruction of frozen human embryos. Six years later, President George W. Bush restricted the expansion of the few ESS lines approved for research, limiting the number to just twenty-one. In 2006, Bush used his first presidential veto to override a congressional bill allowing federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. A born-again Christian, Bush gave clearly religious reasons, characterizing the bill as one that “would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others,” adding that “it crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect.”

  The situation has improved a bit since President Obama expanded federal funding for ESS lines and increased the number of lines supported by that funding from twenty-one to sixty-four. The use of “pluripotent” stem cells from adults, as well as private funding, has helped fill the gap. But the number of lines is still limited—clearly on moral grounds—and some states like Louisiana and the Dakotas still ban all ESS research. There is little doubt that without religiously based opposition, stem cell research would be several years ahead of where it is. And that almost certainly means that some humans will die needlessly.

  One of the most egregious forms of religious opposition to science involves vaccination against the human papillomavirus (HPV), the major cause of cervical cancer in women, but also a cause of cancers of the anus, vulva, vagina, and pharynx, as well as genital warts. Spread through sexual contact, the infection can be almost completely prevented with a series of three safe injections, and is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for boys and girls eleven or twelve years old. Cervical cancer is deadly: it causes about four thousand deaths per year in the United States and almost two hundred thousand worldwide, most of which could be prevented by vaccination of preteens.

  In the United States, both religious and right-wing political organizations (their membership shows considerable overlap) often favor the availability of anti-HPV vaccines, but strongly oppose attempts to make immunization mandatory. (Surprisingly, in 2007 Governor Rick Perry of Texas, a religious and conservative Republican, signed an executive order making vaccination mandatory for young girls in his state, but it was overturned by the state legislature. Perry, probably under pressure from believers, later admitted, “If I had it to do over again, I would have done it differently.”)

  Although HPV is spread through sexual contact alone, given the dire consequences of cervical cancer, and the vaccination’s known safety and effectiveness, there is no reason not to make it as mandatory as vaccinations for measles and diphtheria. That is, there is no reason save one: by eliminating one dangerous side effect of sex, the vaccination supposedly encourages promiscuity, both pre- and postmarital. And many Christians oppose any sex outside of marriage. Despite studies showing no apparent increase in sexual activity following HPV vaccination, religious people still oppose requiring it. In a position paper on the vaccine, for instance, Focus on the Family, a conservative American religious organization, favored abstinence over vaccination:

  The seriousness of HPV and other STIs [sexually transmitted infections] underscores the significance of God’s design for sexuality to human wellbeing. Thus Focus on the Family affirms—above any available health intervention—abstinence until marriage as the best and primary practice in preventing HPV and other STIs.

  As one might expect given its view of nonmarital sex as sinful, the Catholic Church has been one of the biggest opponents of mandatory HPV vaccination, and not just in the United States. Although the Canadian government provides free vaccinations for children, the Catholic bishop of Calgary, Fred Henry, publicly opposed endorsement of the vaccine by Catholic school boards in Canada—schools funded by the government—because it would “undermine the schools’ effort to teach children about abstinence and chastity in accord with the teachings of the Catholic Church.” Pressure from the Catholic Church has also halted the administration of anti-HPV vaccines in
Trinidad and Tobago, with the church going so far as to question, in the face of all scientific fact, the safety of the vaccine.

  It’s well documented that abstinence vows and abstinence-based education are largely useless at reducing teen pregnancy and the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. Yet even if such programs were partly effective, those for whom they don’t work are still at risk for infection. The cost of three injections is much less than that of treatment for HPV-induced cancer. Given the sexual activity of young people, and the risk involved in sex with an infected person, the prevention of HPV is a more severe public health problem than that of measles, for which—except for some religions—vaccination is required. Given the exaggerated respect for faith in the United States, it’s certain that even were HPV vaccination required for schoolchildren, there would still be exemptions based not on any dangers of the vaccine but, given its supposed (but false) encouragement of sex, on religious belief. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their sons and daughters for HPV are making a conscious decision to let their children risk death if they have premarital sex. They are kin to the Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and faith healers who martyr their children to their faith, and to the Catholic hospitals that allow both a mother and her baby to die in childbirth rather than offer an abortion.

  Religion further impedes treatment of disease by imputing epidemics to God, implying that the cures lie in correcting immoral behavior rather than in medical attention. (This is similar to Christian Science on a large scale.) In America we regularly hear that earthquakes, tornadoes, and droughts are due to God’s wrath about, say, homosexual behavior or abortion. As I write, the Ebola virus is ravaging West Africa, and there’s no telling whether it will be stemmed or will spread widely. But the situation isn’t helped by local religious leaders, including the Liberian Council of Churches, which blamed corruption and immorality, including “homosexualism,” for the epidemic. This led Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, to call for three days of prayer and fasting to ask for God’s mercy. This has only fueled Liberians’ suspicion about Western medicine, leading them to refuse medical attention and turn away government workers. We’re seeing a return to medieval days when the Black Death that ravaged Europe was seen as God’s punishment for sin. The difference is that now we have medical treatment to help cure Ebola, and epidemiology to plot the best strategy to attack it.