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

by Coyne, Jerry A.

  Finally, we’d lose a lot of the divisiveness that threatens to tear our world apart. Muslim against Christian and Jew, Hindu against Muslim, Buddhist against Hindu, Catholic against Protestant, Sunni against Shiite—all hatred based solely on faith would disappear. Of course, there would still be strife and xenophobia, which probably rest largely on evolution, but can you really claim that hatred based on religion would inevitably be replaced by hatred based on something else, as if the world had to fulfill a given quota of enmity? After all, Sunnis and Shiites are still Muslims, and have the same cultural background. They kill each other for faith alone.

  And there is no reason that a world without faith, particularly religious faith, would be a programmed Stalinesque society, like a hive of bees. We know this because, as we’ll see shortly, the largely nonreligious societies of Europe are good ones, certainly more livable and perhaps more moral than those—including Western religious cults like the Amish—that are essentially theocracies.

  I’ve argued that pure faith of any stripe, be it in God, homeopathy, or ESP, should be rejected. But is that always the case? Could it ever be good to have faith? That is, are there important situations—ones on which your life or well-being heavily depend—when you should act in the absence of information you could have obtained, or against relevant information? Are there situations in which you should guide yourself by wish-thinking, revelation, or unevidenced dogma?

  My answer is “sometimes, but not very often”—and there are a few caveats that go with that answer. By “faith” I mean, as always, belief without verifiable evidence. And, of course, the answer to the question of “is it good?” is not simple, for one must distinguish what’s good for the believer from what’s good for others, or for society as a whole.

  A common example of a supposedly useful faith is the “dying grandmother” scenario. Your grandmother is on her deathbed, and is deeply consoled by thinking that she’ll soon be in heaven, reunited with her late husband and ancestors. You don’t believe a bit of it, but refrain from saying anything. What’s wrong with that?

  Nothing. If that faith eases her last moments, it would be churlish to attack it, for the costs are high and the benefits nil. Unfortunately, this scenario is often used as a criticism of atheists, who, say critics, are supposedly champing at the bit to dispel the poor woman’s illusions about an afterlife. But I know of no nonbeliever who would sanction that, or say there’s anything wrong with allowing the dying to retain their faith. In fact, it is theists who try to convert people on their deathbeds, informing the terminally ill that they’ll burn in hell unless they accept Jesus. As a prominent atheist, the late Christopher Hitchens was particularly subject to this form of harassment.

  But while having that kind of faith might be beneficial at the end of a believer’s life, that doesn’t mean that society in general is better for having such faith. As we’ve seen, there are strong arguments against that. Apart from the harmful effects of buying into a religious morality, most people live a long time before they die, and for many their lives would differ substantially if they didn’t believe they were facing eternal reward or punishment.

  As for having faith, religious or otherwise, that you’ll beat a life-threatening illness, there’s little harm in that—with one exception. While such optimism may stave off depression (though it doesn’t seem to help much with cures), it has the bad side effect of putting off your preparations for the likely result: making peace with old enemies, saying good-bye to loved ones, putting one’s affairs in order, and so on. Although religion can buy consolation, it often does so at the expense of practicality.

  This trade-off between consolation and practicality is important when considering one of the most common arguments for the value of faith—one used by both atheists and believers alike. Even if we have little or no evidence for the divine, the argument goes, it’s still beneficial for people to believe in a god. This argument takes two forms, depending on the population you’re considering. If you’re thinking of society as a whole, one can argue that faith is a critical social glue, bonding us together in solidarity, comity, and morality. If you’re considering only the downtrodden, marginalized, or poor, you can claim that religious belief gives such people hope and a reason to go on—often because they believe all will be set right in the afterlife. And even if that hope is specious and death is final, they’ll never know the difference, but their life will have been less torturous.

  Both of these notions exemplify what Daniel Dennett calls “belief in belief”: the claim that faith doesn’t necessarily have to be true to be useful. I’ve heard many fellow atheists make this argument, which from their mouths sounds deeply condescending: “We’re sophisticated enough to dispense with gods, but the Little People must have theirs. After all, they’re not susceptible to reasoned argument, and can’t be fulfilled without faith.” But even coming from the faithful, the first argument, that religion is a social necessity and will always be with us, is dubious. It can be demolished with only two words: northern Europe.

  Once deeply religious (Spinoza, after all, was expelled from Amsterdam’s Jewish community for heresy), northern Europe has in the last few centuries become largely atheistic. The degree of pure atheism—those who agree with the statement “I don’t believe there is any sort of spirit, god, or life force”—runs between 25 and 40 percent of the population of countries like Germany, Denmark, France, and Sweden. The level of nontheistic spirituality (“I believe there is some sort of spirit or life force, but not God”) is even higher: 25 to 47 percent. When you add the two groups to get the total proportion of nontheists, it’s a majority: 71 percent in Denmark, 73 percent in Norway, 79 percent in Sweden, 67 percent in France, 52 percent in Germany, and 58 percent in the United Kingdom. In contrast, nontheists in America constitute only 18 percent of the population, while 80 percent affirm a belief in God.

  Now, there’s no evidence that northern Europe is socially dysfunctional. In fact, one could make a good case that in many ways those nations function better than does the highly religious United States. Sociologists measure the well-being of countries using indices of social dysfunction that include things like levels of divorce, homicide, incarceration, juvenile mortality, alcohol consumption, poverty, income inequality, and so on. And on those scales Scandinavia and northern Europe rank much higher in well-being than the United States, which among seventeen First World countries surveyed was dead last. (The four most “successful” societies were Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands.) My own analysis further showed a negative relationship between societal well-being and religiosity: the least religious societies were the most successful. While this correlation doesn’t by itself implicate a cause, neither does it support the claim that religion is essential for a harmonious society. Nor does northern Europe appear to be a hotbed of immorality, despite the claim that religion both furnishes and enforces morality.

  Although Europeans’ reliance on faith must surely have waned over the last few centuries, their social harmony doesn’t seem to have suffered. While Europe’s experience cannot necessarily be taken as universally applicable, and secularization has been much slower in the United States, the data fail to support the claim that faith is both inevitable and necessary for a well-ordered society.

  The second argument for faith is that it gives solace to the marginalized and destitute. And that’s no doubt true. When you see yourself as being without hope, there is consolation in thinking that God and Jesus are looking out for you (even if they’re not helping much), and in thinking that all will be set right in the next world. I suspect that’s why European countries with strong social safety nets—including government-sponsored medical care, paternity and maternity leave, and institutionalized care for the sick and aged—are the least religious. When the state is looking out for you, there’s less need to seek help from above.

  There is plenty of evidence that when people see themselves as less we
ll off than others, or as in dismal situations or environments where they feel they have no control, they either become more religious or cling to their faith more tenaciously. A strong predictor of both religiosity and people’s feeling of well-being is income inequality: even if you’re relatively well off compared with other people in the world, you’ll still feel marginalized if your countrymen are richer than you. Napoleon Bonaparte clearly saw the palliative effect of religion on this inequality, and its value in running a country: “I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation so much as the mystery of the social order. It introduces into the thought of heaven an idea of equalization, which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor.”

  In the United States, income inequality is one of the statistics most highly correlated with the national level of religious belief: the higher the inequality, the higher the average degree of religiosity. Tellingly, the two factors fluctuate in tandem, with religiosity increasing only after income inequality rises and decreasing only after it falls. This time delay, with the strength of religious belief changing after income inequality, and in the same direction, suggests that it’s the inequality that breeds faith rather than the other way around.

  Increasingly, then, we see that religious belief is a response to the uncertainties and hardships of life on this planet—a response to those difficulties, but not a way to lessen them. I am not a Marxist, but Marx got at least one thing right: for many, religion weakens the incentive to fix both personal and societal problems. And that is the biggest problem with seeing faith as a social palliative. People often criticize Marx for denigrating religion, citing his statement that “Religion . . . is the opium of the people.” But seen in context, the quote is far more nuanced—a call for social change that would make religion superfluous:

  Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

  To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion.

  Can There Be Dialogue Between Science and Faith?

  People regularly call for dialogue between science and religion, in which theologians, priests, and rabbis should sit down with scientists and hash out their differences. By “dialogue,” the proponents don’t just suggest that scientists and believers should talk to each other, but insist that such an exchange will dispel misunderstandings, benefiting both science and religion. Such conclaves are in fact held regularly, even at the Vatican. The motivation behind them is expressed in a famous quote from Albert Einstein: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” But that quote is torn from its context, where it’s clear that what Einstein meant by “religion” is simply a deep awe before the puzzles of the universe. Einstein repeatedly denied the existence of a personal, theistic God, and saw Abrahamic faiths as fallacious and man-made institutions. He was at best a pantheist, viewing nature itself as “the divine.” The blindness of science without religion refers to his belief that science goes nowhere without a profound and deep curiosity and wonder—traits that Einstein considered “religious.” Einstein’s views, often misconstrued, should give no solace to the majority of believers who are theists, nor to those who think that a science/faith dialogue would be mutually productive.

  Nevertheless, is it possible to have a constructive dialogue? My response is that anything useful will come from a monologue—one in which science does all the talking and religion the listening. Further, the monologue will be constructive for only the listener. While scientists can learn more about the nature of belief by talking to the faithful, those benefits can accrue to anyone who wants to learn more about religion. In contrast, religion has nothing to tell scientists that can improve their trade. Indeed, the progress of science has required shedding all vestiges of religion, whether those be the beliefs themselves or religious methods for finding “truth.” We do not need those hypotheses.

  On the other hand, religion can benefit from science in several ways—if we conceive of “science” broadly and of “religion” as not just the beliefs but the institutions. First, science can tell us, at least in principle, about the evolutionary, cultural, and psychological basis of religious belief. There are many theories for why humans created religion, including fear of death, desire for a father figure, a need for social interaction, the wish of some people to control others, and the innate proclivity of humans to attribute natural events to conscious agents. It’s my guess that, given the origins of religion in the distant and unrecoverable past, we’ll never fully understand why and how it began. Nevertheless, we’ve seen new religions begin in recent years—Christian Science and Scientology are two—giving us the opportunity to study the psychological appeal of religion and perhaps the neurological correlates of belief.

  Further, biblical scholarship, which when done properly is simply historical science applied to literature, can shed considerable light on the origins of scripture—light that can at least help the faithful make sense of their sacred books. We are now fairly sure, for instance, that the two creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, which contradict each other about the origin of the Earth and its creatures, involve separate creation myths concocted several centuries apart.

  Finally, what might be considered a real contribution of science to religious belief is the empirical demonstration that some of those beliefs are wrong. The many falsified biblical claims include the creation story, the claim of Adam and Eve as the ancestors of humanity, the Exodus of Jews from Egypt, and the census of Augustus that according to the Gospel of Luke brought Joseph and a pregnant Mary to Bethlehem. Because liberal and science-friendly faiths presumably don’t want factually incorrect theologies, this forces them to turn what was previously taken literally into metaphors, and then into theological virtues. One can see these scientific corrections as “improving” faith, but only by removing the parts that are factually wrong.

  Of course, it’s useful for everyone, including scientists, to learn more about religion, for it’s one of the driving impulses of humanity, directing the course of history (as in the present Middle East), profoundly affecting society (politics in modern America would be a mystery without understanding our hyperreligiosity), and contributing to the creation of great art, music, and literature. Macbeth is loaded with biblical allusions, and without a rudimentary knowledge of Christianity, Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks is simply a picture of a man, a woman, and two infants. But the historic and artistic importance of religion is not the point of religion/science dialogues, whose real aim is either to defend religion against science, to infuse science with religion, or to demonstrate that the two areas are valid and complementary ways of finding truth.

  • • •

  I have argued that religion is to science as superstition is to reason; indeed, that is the very reason they are incompatible. I’ve also maintained that this incompatibility rests on two pillars. One is that in some ways religion is like science, for most religions make claims about what exists in the universe, and purport to give evidence for those claims. (I emphasize again that there is far more to religion than truth claims!) And the value of a religion to its believers, regardless of what behavior it motivates, depends heavily on assenting to at least some of those claims. If Muslims knew that Muhammad, like Joseph Smith, was making up the words that became dogma; if Christians knew that Jesus was neither divine nor resurrected, but merely one of many apocalyptic preachers of that era; if theists knew that there were no documented interventions of God into the universe—then believers would melt away like spring snow. Yes,
there are some sophisticated believers and theologians who see religion as independent of facts, but they are in the minority, and by and large their “religion”—often more a philosophy—does little harm to either science or society.

  Irrationality enters when religion’s truth claims are based not on reason or any kind of systematic investigation, but on faith—belief in matters for which there’s no convincing evidence, but which are seen as true simply because people want them to be true, or were taught that they were true. This is, as Father Consolmagno said, thinking with the heart instead of the head. Coronary thinking is incapable of finding truth: millennia of religious conflicts and strife, resting on conflicting “truths” divined by faith, attest to that. In the Middle Ages theology was called “the Queen of the Sciences,” but of course at that time “science” referred to any area of investigation. Nowadays, when we have real science, we realize that theology—the study of God, his nature, and his attributes—is as useless at understanding reality as when Thomas Paine characterized it in 1795: