Chapter 9
Scientism and religion
9.1 Militant atheism
The relationship between religion and the
natural sciences, as we have noted in some previous chapters, is
currently of great social significance. It is the subject of ongoing
legal battles, the focus of concern about education, and a topic that
provokes passionate debate. There has over the past decade been a
spate of aggressive atheist polemic books arguing that religious
belief is disproved by science, explained away by science, and in any
case intrinsically evil. The phrase recently used most widely to
denote these polemics is `the New Atheism'. We'll have a little bit
more to say about the extent to which their arguments are new; but
certainly they are immoderate, dismissive, disdainful, and
discourteous. Some have called them `hysterical atheism', but let's
settle for a more neutral adjective, `militant'171. These militant atheist
arguments are notable for their assertive scientism. We will examine a
few examples.
Science disproves religion
Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is
perhaps the best known of the militant atheist books of the early
twenty-first century. In it Dawkins is pretty much as direct as he can
be. About the existence of God he writes "Either he exists or he
doesn't. It is a scientific question; one day we may know the answer,
..."172
Or again, "Contrary to [T.H.] Huxley, I shall suggest that the
existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other. ... God's
existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe,
discoverable in principle if not in practice."173
Actually Dawkins' book does not "suggest", or even argue, it
assumes, and repeatedly asserts that the question is a scientific
question. For example he later states "The presence or absence of a
creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question
..."174
It then goes on at length to try to show that, regarded as a scientific
question, the existence of God has poor evidence in its support. The
question of the strength of the evidence is important but that's not
what I want to focus on. I am drawing attention to the remarkable fact
that Dawkins asserts that the existence of God is a scientific
question. Why so remarkable? Well, if there were ever any meaningful
distinction between "scientific" questions and other possible types
of question, surely the distinction between scientific, physical
questions (about nature) and metaphysical questions (about God)
is the most obvious and traditional one. But Dawkins does not even
bother to acknowledge the possibility of such a distinction. Instead
he castigates those who regard themselves as agnostics as failing to
pay attention to the scientific evidence (or lack thereof) in forming
their theological opinions.
But since the existence of God has, from time immemorial, been
considered not to be scientific question, or, to express it less
anachronistically, not a question of natural philosophy, how can
Dawkins get away with a bald assertion to the contrary? It is because
he is relying on the widespread acceptance of his scientistic outlook,
even among those who disagree with his theological views. The
reference to "scientific fact" betrays his implicit assumption that
all significant "facts" are scientific. Otherwise, it would be just
as sensible to assert that the existence or non-existence of God is a
historical fact, or a legal fact, or a sociological
fact, or a religious fact.
In criticizing evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould's
avowed agnosticism and
"Non
Overlapping Magisteria" approach to the relationship between science
and religion, Dawkins betrays himself
further. He is at pains to oppose Gould and other scientists who draw
back from using science to dictate metaphysical conclusions, because
he thinks their reticence is motivated by the attitude "theologians
have nothing worthwhile to say about anything else; let's throw them a
sop and let them worry away at a couple of questions that nobody can
answer and maybe never will."175
Then he is overtaken by his own rhetoric in questioning
Gould's de facto atheism by asking "On what basis did he make
the judgement, if there is nothing to be said about whether God
exists?"176
Again this is elementary scientism at work. Actually, although Gould
betrays his own substantial scientism by implying that religious
matters are not matters of fact, he never asserts "there is
nothing to be said about" God's existence. Gould's position appears
to be that science does not prove or disprove it. Dawkins'
"nothing to be said" reinterpretation of Gould is a distortion of
his position, one that could be overlooked only by someone who
completely takes for granted that the only sound basis for judgement
is science. In other words, Dawkins' whole viewpoint is sustained by
overriding scientism; without it his arguments are utterly hollow.
About questions of the historicity of Biblical events such as the
resurrection, Dawkins says "There is an answer to
every such question, whether or not we can discover it in practice,
and it is strictly a scientific answer. The methods we should use to
settle the matter, in the unlikely event that relevant evidence ever
became available, would be purely and entirely scientific methods."
Well, actually, no. These are questions about history. Natural science
is almost completely powerless to answer historical questions about
unique events of human history. If you insist that there is no useful
evidence except that of "purely and entirely scientific methods",
then of course there is not going to be such evidence. But that's not
all the evidence that historians consider for these or for any events
of history. Only a blatant scientism would insist on "purely and
entirely scientific methods" for historical matters.
Science explains the mind
The
evolutionary psychologist Steven
Pinker
is a more multidimensional figure in the
scientistic front line. His book How the Mind Works is a an
eclectic smorgasbord of ideas and opinions ranged artistically around
the main course consisting of the advocacy of the computational theory
of mind and of evolutionary psychology. Pinker contradicts many of the
more mechanistic approaches to psychology such as Behaviorism. The
"big picture" he says is "that the mind is a system of organs of
computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced
by our evolutionary ancestors in their foraging way of life."
The computational theory of mind is that "beliefs and desires are
information, incarnated as configurations of symbols. The
symbols are physical states of bits of matter, like chips in a
computer or neurons in the brain... the symbols corresponding to one
belief can give rise to symbols corresponding to other beliefs ... The
computational theory of mind thus allows us to keep beliefs and
desires in our explanations of behavior while planting them squarely
in the physical universe.
It allows meaning to cause and be caused."177
"Beliefs and desires" as information is innocuous enough. Something like
this `computational' description (vague though it is) may well turn
out to reflect reality, though science is a very long way from
demonstrating that it does. More positively, Pinker clearly
acknowledges that beliefs and desires can't possibly be excluded
from a description of the actions of humans (or animals) without
making nonsense of what we know introspectively to be the case for
ourselves, and what we routinely use with great success to explain the
behavior of others.
The evolutionary part of the argument, which is its major subject, is
less persuasive. Pinker echoes Dawkins in saying "Natural selection
is the only explanation we have of how complex life can
evolve..." and dismissing teleological explanation with
"One of the
reasons God was invented was to be the mind that formed and executed
life's plans. The laws of the world work forwards, not backwards: rain
causes the ground to be wet; the ground's benefiting from being wet
cannot cause the rain. What else but the plans of God could effect the
teleology (goal directedness) of life on earth? Darwin showed what
else."178
This forwards-causality argument sounds plausible. But let's
dig a bit deeper. Consider irrigation; it is precisely an example of
the ground's benefitting from being wet causing the `rain'.
Irrigation does not happen to concrete patios, rocky outcrops, or
lakes. Neither theist nor atheist attributes crop irrigation to
something supernatural. It is attributed to the intentionality of the
human agents that implemented it. But Pinker's argument dismissing
God could equally well be applied as follows "One of the reasons
human mind was invented was to be the mind that formed and executed
life's plans. The laws of the world work forwards, not backwards: rain
causes the ground to be wet; the ground's benefiting from being wet
cannot cause the rain."
Does Pinker really mean to imply, as his argument does, that we are in
error when we speak of human
intentionality as a cause? Presumably
not, since he has allowed "beliefs and desires" as explanations. But
then why is the intentionality explanation disallowed when God is
referenced? Perhaps the Darwinian theory removed the necessity
to posit a Creator, at least in respect of biological diversity, but
it hardly rules one out. It disabled the argument from design as far
as it is based on biological adaptation. Perhaps, by Dawkins'
memorable overstatement, "Darwin made it possible to be an
intellectually fulfilled atheist", but he did not make it impossible
to be an intellectually fulfilled theist.
It seems that if Pinker, and those who argue in the same way, concede
that humans and their intentionality are part of nature, then as a
consequence there can in nature be such a thing as "backward
causation", call it teleology, purpose, or intentionality. Either
that or he must reverse his opinion that human intentionality is a
process of the physical universe. He's trying to have it both
ways. But either explanation in terms of intentionality is permitted
by natural science, or else human (as well as divine)
intentionality is ruled out in scientific explanations. Both Pinker
and I think that intentional teleological explanations are not part of
science's methods, that the laws of science do "work forwards, not
backwards". My position is that intentionality is nevertheless a
perfectly acceptable (indeed obvious) way to understand many
phenomena, but that it is part of non-scientific knowledge and
explanation. Pinker however is trapped in a contradictory
scientism. Scientism's argument against God amounts in summary to the
following.
Purpose and personal agency is deliberately omitted
in science's descriptions of the world. All real explanations are
scientific explanations. Therefore all real explanations are
impersonal; God, being personal, is not a real explanation. Impersonal
evolutionary explanation remains.
But this argument, whether Pinker
likes it or not, applies equally to any explanation in terms of human
agency. It rules out human purpose as a valid explanatory factor,
which seems to me, and to many, as a disqualifying fault.
A key weakness of evolutionary psychology is that it makes even fewer
specific predictions than biological evolution. It is generally
content instead with composing stories that are purported to explain
some fact of psychology in terms of a hypothesized evolutionary
history. In most cases such stories are independent of other
phenomena. They are not integrated into a scientific explanatory web
that would make them a robust part of theory; they are
subject-specific, and regularly sound like special pleading or mere
speculation. In this respect they contrast with evolutionary
explanations of biology and physiology, some of which do gain strong
plausibility from serving as consistent integrated explanations of
multiple phenomena. Evolutionary psychologists often cite successes of
evolutionary explanation in physiology or physical biology as
arguments in favor of evolutionary psychology. This seems a
non-sequitur. It is perhaps appropriate to explore the degree to which
evolution can be extended to explain psychology, but sometimes the
evolutionary enthusiasm of the advocates gets the better of them. For
example, Pinker sets out to counter the claim that "natural selection
is a sterile exercise in after-the-fact storytelling" by quoting Mayr
The adaptationist question, "What is the function of a given structure
or organ?" has been for centuries the basis of every advance in
physiology. If it had not been for the adaptationist program, we
probably would still not yet know the functions of thymus, spleen,
pituitary, and pineal. Harvey's question "Why are there valves in the
veins?" was a major stepping stone in his discovery of the circulation
of the blood179.
And Pinker immediately goes on "... everything we have learned in biology
has come from an understanding, implicit or explicit, that the
organized complexity of an organism is in the service of its survival
and reproduction."
Pinker's escalation of Mayr's already hyperbolic claim is based on a
fundamental confusion. He is confusing the search for function,
which has indeed been a vital principle of biology for millennia, with
Darwinian adaptation. Notice that when Mayr wrote about what
had been the case "for centuries", it was only 123 years after
Darwin's "Origin" was published. His example of the circulation of
the blood dates from Harvey's notes in 1615. So Mayr could not
justifiably have meant Darwinist when he said adaptationist. He
presumably meant nothing more than that organs have valuable functions
and we learn most by looking for their function. Certainly adaptation,
in the sense of fitness to the environment, was noted long before
anyone thought to address it in terms of evolution. But for the
purpose of his argument Pinker makes the further unjustified leap that
all biological knowledge comes from a focus on survival and
reproduction, on a Darwinist program. He's implying in effect that,
even before Darwin, biology proceeded only by a closet ("implicit")
Darwinism. That is a ludicrous attempt to have it both ways.
Darwin's ideas made a big difference to the progress of biology, but you
can't prove it by saying that centuries before his time scientists
were dependent on those ideas by some mysterious `implicit' process.
The sort of psychological explanation that Pinker favors, which would
escape the just-so-story criticism, is when predictions are made on
the basis of evolutionary arguments, and prove to be correct. To cite
such occasions is a principled approach to trying to demonstrate his
case. How convincing is it? Here's one example concerning the question
"How do parents make Sophie's Choice and sacrifice a child when
circumstances demand it? Evolutionary theory predicts that the main
criterion should be age ... right up until sexual maturity." In
order to try to validate the `prediction' based on life expectancy,
that parents would not sacrifice an older child when a younger one is
born (actually a postdiction, since this is already an observation in
all existing cultures) he offers this. "When parents are asked to
imagine the loss of a child, they say they would grieve more for older
children, up until the teenage years. The rise and fall of anticipated
grief correlates almost perfectly with the life expectancies of hunter
gatherer children."180
This "almost perfectly" is an almost perfectly
gratuitous claim of numerical correlation that can't possibly be
backed up. Grief can't be unambiguously quantified or measured. It
obviously does not possess the Clarity required for such
quantification. That's quite apart from the fact that the life
expectancies of
hunter gatherer children from prehistory are
thoroughly speculative. Pinker refers to them (strangely) as
"actuarial tables", although he appears to mean three numbers
derived from guesses at mortality rates.
Pinker devotes two pages to birth-order arguments like this, which by
the way, even his own sources acknowledge to be considered by the
majority in the field as a "mirage"181.
Just pause for a moment from
the evolutionary enthusiasm and consider the possibility that parents
feel the way they report, not because of some evolutionarily
programmed survival calculus, but because they realize that their love
for their children grows through the shared experiences of their years
together. This seems a far more sensible explanation, but of course it
doesn't have the honorific of being scientific, or evolutionary. I
suppose that is why Pinker prefers his actuarial tables.
When it comes to religion, Pinker no longer offers anything even as
feeble as this in support of his opinions. "What we call
religion in the modern West", he opines, "is an alternative culture
of laws and customs that survived alongside those of the nation-state
because of accidents of European history."182
A profoundly ill-informed
remark like this about the roots of western culture hardly constitutes
an argument. It is of a piece with his purely rhetorical litany
of the evils and self-interest of religion. Referring to witches,
shamans, ancestor worship, the Bible, rites of passage, and so on, we
are informed that although "Religion is not a single topic", it
"cannot be equated with our higher, spiritual, humane, ethical
yearnings". Clearly Pinker wants to leave the field free for ethics
and `spirituality' without having the unpleasantness of religion. We
get the picture. He's against religion. But it would have made his
diatribe more an integral part of his exposition of evolutionary
psychology if he'd actually offered some evidence relating the two.
Without it, we are in a position analogous to that of the two Victorian
parishioners discussing the week's sermon:
"What was the sermon about?"
"Sin."
"And what did the Vicar say?"
"He was against it."
Pinker is of course completely at liberty to advocate his opinions
about what people believe and why they believe it. In the case of
religion he doesn't seem to think that he needs any justification for
those opinions. In the case of many other beliefs, his book offers
evolutionist stories in justification, or explanation, of his opinions
about them. In all too many cases those justifying stories appear to
be just-so stories, plausible sometimes - sometimes not - but hardly
compelling, falling far short of what most scientists consider
demonstration demands, yet all too often spuriously portrayed as some
kind of scientific consensus, rather than what they are: his opinions.
Evolutionary psychology seems to draw much of its momentum from a
fundamentalist scientism, which regards naturalist explanation as the
only explanation worth having - even of the human mind and
society. It has appeal as a way to incorporate consciousness and
culture into a scientistic world-view, especially for those who want a
stick with which to beat religion. But it falls far short of the
convincing explanations science offers of the physical world, of
nature. And it must do so, because much of psychology does not possess
the characteristics that are required for scientific analysis.
Science explains away religion
Daniel Dennett, even though he is a philosopher, not a scientist, does
try to offer evidence that relates evolutionary psychology to
religion. Indeed, his Breaking The Spell. Religion as a Natural
Phenomenon sets out to argue that religion is convincingly
explained by evolutionary arguments about human psychology, and that
it is thereby debunked.
Right from the outset, Dennett wants to draw on, and exploit indirectly,
descriptions of the natural world for his argument. Religion is to be
understood as analogous to a parasite invading our brains, causing us
to set aside our personal interests in order to further the interests
of an idea: religion. For his purposes, Dennett defines
religions as
"social systems whose participants avow belief in a
supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be
sought"183: a
definition, as he readily admits, crafted to avoid the "delicate
issue" that the scientism that permeates his views is arguably a
religious commitment and certainly a metaphysical commitment. Let's pass
quickly over the difficulty that his definition excludes Confucianism,
Buddhism, most Deism, and sundry other obviously religious teachings
from its scope.
"Eventually", says Dennett, "we must arrive at questions about
ultimate values, and no factual investigation could answer them". But
it is "high time that we subject religion as a global phenomenon to
the most intensive multidisciplinary research we can
muster..."184. Even
though (three pages later) this "might" break the spell of
religion, we must carry out a
"forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as
one natural phenomenon among many."185
Wait a minute, though, what just
happened to "questions about ultimate values", or
"multidisciplinary"? Well, any scientific discipline is
allowed, I guess. In Dennett's view the neglect of this scientific
program has been because of a
"largely unexamined mutual agreement that scientists and other
researchers will leave religion alone"186, but now we need to "set about studying religion
scientifically".
The study of religion as a natural phenomenon, Dennett asserts, is no
more presupposing atheism than is the study of Sports as a
Natural Phenomenon or Cancer as a Natural Phenomenon. The
metaphor gets a bit out of hand when sports "miracles", by a strange
transition, become the topic. But a miracle, and presumably by
extension all of religion, requires us to "demonstrate it
scientifically"
Was Gould right that there is a boundary between two domains of human
activity? Dennett shows his identification of "scientific"
with "factual" by saying, "That is presumably a scientific, factual question,
not a religious question"187.
Dennett shares in the disingenuousness of most of the militant atheist
writers when he bemoans the neglect of this project as caused by
academic distaste begotten by biased prior studies, and portrays
himself as representing a small band of "brave neuroscientists and
other biologists who have decided to look at religious
phenomena"188. The embattled
potential-martyr self-portrait - even though he's not the first to
paint it - is not particularly convincing for a best-seller author
on the fashionable anti-religion band-wagon.
Dennett spends significant effort confronting the [supposed189]
"worry that such an investigation might actually kill all the
specimens" [of religion]. In the process we learn that
"music is another natural phenomenon ... but is
only just beginning to be an object of the sort of scientific study I
am recommending", by which he means for example "why is it beautiful
to us? This is a perfectly good biological question."190 It does not
appear to cross Dennett's mind that there might be structural or
methodological reasons why scientific study of non-scientific
topics like music and religion are circumscribed. His concern is to
combat what he thinks is simply the "propaganda ... from a variety of
sources" that religion is "out-of-bounds".
Dennett thinks that goods (moral and physical), for which he instances
deliberately problematic cases: sugar, sex, alcohol, music, and money,
can anchor their value only in "the capacity of something to provoke
a preference response in the brain quite directly."191 A co-evolutionary
"bargain that was struck about fifty million years ago between plants
blindly "seeking" a way of dispersing their pollinated seeds, and
animals similarly seeking efficient sources of energy" explains
"sharpening our ancestors' capacity to discriminate sugar by its
"sweetness." " All values "started out as instrumental", as a
biologically programmed preference conferring survival value, and
"The same sort of investigation that has unlocked the mysteries [sic]
of sweetness and alcohol and sex and money" needs to be applied to
religion.
The argument here becomes puzzling and self-contradictory, which makes
it hard to summarize. On the one hand a biologically costly activity
(like religion) can persist only if "it somehow provokes its own
replication ... to ask what pays for one evolved biological
feature ... nicely captures the underlying balance of forces observed
everywhere in nature, and we know of no exceptions to this
rule"192. [Emphasis his. Actually
organs like the human appendix are such exceptions if they are truly
vestigial, as one major evolutionary argument maintains.] On the
other hand, the spectrum of possible evolutionary explanations of religion
includes both those that maintain there are benefits to religion, and
also those that "we may call the pearl theory: religion is
simply a beautiful by-product." By pearl theory, Dennet means that
"religion is not for anything, from the point of view of
biology; it doesn't benefit any gene, or individual, or group, or
cultural symbiont." This description appears to be almost the same as
what Gould and
Lewontin call a
spandrel.
Figure 9.1:
The spandrel referred to by Gould and
Lewontin.
The word refers to the
tapering triangular surface region that occurs where the bases of arches
meet, notably in St Mark's Cathedral in Venice, where
they are exquisitely decorated with mosaics that exploit their
geometry. The spandrel might be thought
the reason for the surrounding architecture, but this would invert the
proper interpretation. The spandrel is a by-product of the overall
architectural design. It is then used opportunistically by the
mosaicists for their purposes193.
In evolution, argue
Gould and Lewontin, some things are not justified by an adaptationist
story, they are just opportunistic by-products. Incidentally, their
article exemplifies some penetrating criticism by biologists of
evolutionary explanations in anthropology and psychology (E.O.Wilson
being an author cited, and cannibalism the topic!). In fact their
criticism is precisely of the position adopted by Dennett's "we know
of no exceptions". Their whole point is that there are
exceptions. I am tempted to speculate that inventing a new metaphor
(pearl) rather than adopting the one already in common currency
(spandrel) is motivated by Dennett's realization of this fact, and his
desire to avoid promoting the ideas of two of the strongest critics of
sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Gould and Lewontin.
Returning to the evolutionary explanation of religion, at times it seems
that Dennett is going to settle for the pearl/spandrel
theory, seeing
religion as a result of "our overactive disposition to look for
agents"194. But it serves his approach
better to remain non-committal and follow a speculative and eclectic
narrative pathway that allows different (and sometimes incompatible)
stories to serve for different phenomena.
Dennett's ideas and those of E. O. Wilson and Pinker, which he freely
draws from, have been directly subjected to withering criticism from
many quarters. The more pertinent of these criticisms have come not
from religious advocates, but from atheists and agnostics. Perhaps the
most telling are from evolutionary biologists, such as Richard
Lewontin and
H. Allen Orr, from experts in cognitive psychology and
computational linguistics such as Stephen Chorover and Robert Berwick,
and from philosophers of science such as Philip Kitcher195.
Pinker attributes this criticism to left-wing ideology,196
which he dates to the strong repudiation (in 1975) of Wilson's
book
Sociobiology in a review by 17 authors, including five
Harvard professors197.
But the more plausible reading is the one given originally in the critiques
and re-expressed in a response to Pinker:
"To us Darwinian fundamentalism is a form of irrationalism that, left
un-checked, erodes the very theory of evolution it embraces."198
Experts who understand evolution, psychology, and the philosophy of
science quite well, and who see the weakness of applying simplistic
adaptationist arguments to society and religion don't want biology to
be tarnished by the association.
It would not be very interesting go into greater detail and rebut the
individual assertions that Dennett makes, or to dissect the logical
argument, in so far as there is one. What I have been trying to do,
though, is to draw attention to the all-pervasive scientism that
informs his position. I see no reason to deny there is such a thing
as human nature, or that human nature has been influenced by
biological evolution as well as cultural evolution (meaning cultural
development). It is not that discussing religion (or music, or
anything else for that matter) from a scientific, or even a
specifically evolutionary, perspective is improper or
out-of-bounds. Rather, the fallacy is to imply that by doing so one is
discovering their real explanation, the scientific facts
that render superfluous all other descriptions, that debunk
other claims of significance or knowledge.
Actually it is even worse than that, and this is a feature of
evolutionary argument that, I must admit, drives this physicist
crazy. When Dennett says "The only honest way to defend" an
explanation of religion in terms of God's actions is to consider
"alternative theories of the persistence and popularity of religion
and rule them out"199, he is privileging
so-called scientific explanation to the extent that in order to
displace non-scientific explanation, even in non-scientific fields, it
only has to meet the standard of not being ruled out. Since
when has not being ruled out been enough to sustain a theory in
science - or in any other discipline? This astonishingly lowered
standard of what will count as a sufficient scientific demonstration
and explanation is one reason for the low esteem in the natural
science community, and elsewhere, of the specific theories of
evolutionary psychology. Not only that, but since music is in fact
well explained to the satisfaction of its professionals in ways that
actually provide useful predictive knowledge but are expressed in
non-scientific, musical terms, would it not be folly to discard those
explanations in favor of a scientific analysis of music? If so, why
would one think this way for religion? On what basis does it make
sense to rule inadmissible religious explanation of the things of
religion, and prefer a list of alternative, unsupported, speculative,
possible, `scientific' explanations? Only on the basis of
scientism.
Summarizing the Militant Atheist Arguments
The popular militant atheist writers of this
century spend a great deal of effort to retell anti-religious
arguments which have a long history, dating from the nineteenth
century and in some cases much earlier. That is only natural. However,
the strong impression is given by writers that I've already cited and
others such as
Christopher Hitchens, and
Sam Harris, that there is new knowledge that
supports their arguments. It seems nearer the truth that there are
some new twists on the old arguments. It is worth trying to gather
them systematically, in the light of our discussion of scientism. In
broad strokes, the case made by the militant atheists consists of
three assertions: (1) God is a scientific hypothesis that has been
essentially disproved200 by science. (2) Evolution explains religion as nothing
more than a natural phenomenon. (3) Religion is demonstrably evil.
(1) The existence of God is, in my view, a factual question. Either
he exists or he doesn't. I see no reason to dispute
this. But insisting that God's existence is
a scientific question is a leap further that only scientism
justifies.
To identify factual with scientific - with knowledge gained through
the methods of the natural sciences - is the fallacy I am
addressing. It is so much a part of modern thought that even Michael
Polanyi falls into it in the midst of his systematic repudiation of
scientism. In his book Personal Knowledge, Polanyi's intent is
to describe knowledge as founded on personal commitment, more than a
supposed objectivity. He says "We owe our mental existence
predominantly to works of art, morality, religious worship, scientific
theory and other articulate systems which we accept as our dwelling
place and as the soil of our mental development. Objectivism has
totally falsified our conception of truth, by exalting what we can
know and prove, while covering up with ambiguous utterances all that
we know and cannot prove, even though the latter knowledge
underlies, and must ultimately set its seal to, all that we can
prove."201 This is an important thread
of Polanyi's argument. It is that scientific knowledge depends for its
existence upon much knowledge that is completely informal,
unspecified, and unscientific, for example our understanding of the
meaning of language. But Polanyi, most unhelpfully, identifies fact
and natural science, for example when saying
Ever since the attacks of philosophers like Bayle and Hume on the
credibility of miracles, rationalists have urged that the
acknowledgment of miracles must rest on the strength of factual
evidence. But actually, the contrary is true: if the conversion of
water into wine or the resuscitation of the dead could be
experimentally verified, this would strictly disprove their miraculous
nature. Indeed, to the extent to which any event can be established in
the terms of natural science, it belongs to the natural order of
things. However monstrous and surprising it may be, once it has been
fully established as an observable fact, the event ceases to be
supernatural. ...
Observation may supply us with rich clues for our belief in God; but
any scientifically convincing observation of God would turn religious
worship into an idolatrous adoration of a mere object, or natural
person.202
I completely concur with this important recognition that miracles, by
their very character, cannot be scientifically proved. The main reason
is that they are, practically by definition, not reproducible. If they
were reproducible, they would instead be part of natural science, as
Polanyi notes. But I find it most unhelpful and confusing when he implies
that resting on "factual evidence" is equivalent to being
"experimentally verified", or that being "established in the terms
of natural science" means the same as "established as an observable
fact". Polanyi wants to draw some fine distinctions: "The words
`God exists' are not, therefore, a statement of fact, such as `snow is
white', but an accreditive statement, such as ` "snow is white" is
true'... " And the way he sees it is that God exists but "not as a
fact - any more than truth, beauty, or justice exist as facts"203. Yet he immediately afterwards
tells us that religious conviction depends on factual evidence. I want
to be clearer than this. As far as I am concerned, there are
scientific facts, and there are non-scientific facts, such as facts of
history, jurisprudence, politics, personal acquaintance, and
religion. Just as science is not all the knowledge there is,
scientific facts are not all the facts there are. This is where I
contradict the presumptions of the atheists.
A crucial recent move of the militant atheists is the
argument that evolutionary explanations are intrinsically more
satisfactory than others because they explain the complex in terms of
the simple. Complex life is explained in terms of simpler chemical and
physical laws of nature. In contrast it is argued that explaining
anything in terms of God is to explain the simpler (things in the
world) in terms of the more complex (God). We've dispensed with
that argument in section 5.4.
(2) Explaining away religion as a natural phenomenon is not
new. Seeing religion as a product of human psychology is as old as
religion itself. Religions recognize the religious impulse as a
universal part of human nature. They have not regarded the
universality of spiritual yearning per se as a disproof of its
truthfulness; on the contrary, they argue that a universal religious
tendency is just what one might expect if God really
exists. Unbelievers doubtless have thought religion was merely
natural. Seeing religion as having developed over human history is a
similarly ancient understanding, and is similarly accommodated by most
faiths. For example, the Bible portrays God's self-revelation as
developing through a sequence of events of history. Explicitly
Darwinist explanations of religion are, practically speaking, as old
as Darwin, even though the Origin of Species was at pains to
avoid that hot issue. So there's nothing new in the idea that religion is
a universal part of human nature or in atheists arguing that
religion is nothing but a natural phenomenon. What is taken to be the
recent arguments' additional plausibility is based upon the `progress'
in evolutionary psychology and sociobiology in recent decades. I have
pointed out the controversial standing of these disciplines within the
science community.
For the most part, the arguments that
are offered to explain away religion are not scientific. We do not
require any evolutionary theory to tell us that humans can deceive
themselves, are prone to wishful thinking, exercise commitment to
ideas, or have heightened ability to detect agents. These traits might
lead to stubborn belief in the supernatural, which might be
mistaken. But the ideas surrounding them are not scientific. They are
pop-psychology to which is being attached a spurious honorific as if
they were derived from scientific analysis. Yet, trite as they are,
these are essentially the explanatory options that evolutionary
psychology supposes itself to have `discovered'. What's more, the
polemicists have no basis for making specific choices between the
options, so they leave them open. For their purposes, it does not
matter which of the dozens of different evolutionary explanations
might be correct. Provided we can be persuaded that some
natural explanation or combination of explanations is going to work,
their point is made. It does not matter to them whether the
explanation is of the type that variously sees religion as having
actual survival value for the group, or is of the type that sees it as
a by-product of some other trait with survival value for the
individual. The by-product theories include for example, "children
are native teleologists and many never grow out of
it"204, "Could irrational religion be
a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms that were originally
built into the brain by selection for falling in
love?"205, "irrationally strong
conviction is a guard against fickleness of mind", "hiding the truth
from the conscious mind the better to hide it from others", "a
tendency for humans consciously to see what they want to
see."206. And if these
biological-evolution explanations don't seem persuasive, one can
always fall back on the concept of
"memes", those hypothetical
entities which "evolve" as viruses of the mind, providing the aura
of scientific explanation to anthropological analysis of cargo cults,
for example, but working just as well or as poorly, as far as I can
see, for pretty much any fashion of the moment.
A truly scientific explanation ought to be different. It ought to be
uncomfortable with the myriad of possible explanations (with no way to
decide between them) not, like the polemicists, seemingly happy to
pile up more and more possibilities as if their multiplicity somehow
made the argument weightier. In any case, psychological analyses,
whether evolutionary or not, do not decide whether the content of the
beliefs analyzed is true. Dawkins might say that I believe in God
because I was taught to do so by my parents, or because it comforts me
to do so, or because I was programmed by evolution to do so. I might
say that Dawkins disbelieves because he was taught so by his parents,
or because it serves his desire for personal liberty to do so, or
because he was programmed to disbelieve by evolution. The arguments on
both sides are, I suppose, as convincing or unconvincing as one
another, but they don't settle the question of whether God exists one
way or the other. That's quite apart from the self-defeating logical
status of psychological determinism. If one supposes that the ideas
humans have are fully explained by a physical analysis of the brain,
or by a behaviorist analysis of training, or an evolutionist
description of inherited predispositions, or some combination of these
or other `scientific' analyses, then presumably the very belief that
this is the case is determined just by these influences. If that were
so, then why should we suppose the content of the belief to be true? In
short, if our beliefs are determined by evolution or psychology, why
should one believe so?
(3) The assertion that
religion is evil is not really part of the
scientism discussion, but for completeness I offer a few observations.
The fact that religious organizations and individuals do evil is amply
demonstrated by history.
1
1 1
1 2 1
1 3 3 1
1 4 6 4 1
1 5 10 10 5 1
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 9.2: Pascal's Triangle. It is a table whose nth row
contains the coefficients of algebra's "binomial expansion" of
(x+y)n. Each entry is the sum of the adjacent values of the row
above. The number of rows is unlimited.
Blaize Pascal, a convinced and earnest
Christian, as well as a remarkable mathematician and scientist, said
it in the mid seventeenth century "Men never do evil so completely
and cheerfully as when they do it from religious
conviction."207 What Pascal recognized was, first,
the simple point that people do evil intending and thinking that they
do good when they do it from conviction. Second is the more complex
point, that religious conviction has no monopoly on truth, yet is
conviction's strongest form. In
Steven
Weinberg's memorable atheist aphorism, the claim becomes "With or
without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people
doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes
religion." Weinberg's punch line is either patently false, since
obviously many non-religious people who are otherwise `good' do evil
things, or else, if we charitably seek a serious meaning for the
aphorism, it is an extrapolation of Pascal to the point of asserting
that people do evil they take to be good only by religious
conviction. But even that is false unless you remove the word
religious, and say "only by conviction". The convictions that have
led people to what one might term `principled evil' have almost all
not been religious during the past couple of hundred
years. Realizing that, one is left only with the practically
tautological first part of the meaning of Pascal's pensée: people do
evil they take to be good only by conviction.
When it comes to assessing how good is the track record of
Christianity in its influence on society and history, it is not enough
simply to point to the evil that it may have inspired, demanded, or
permitted. One must ask, how good compared to what? From this
perspective, the recent militant atheist writings betray
themselves. They recount the now familiar list of evils of religion,
but largely ignore the evils of the atheist alternatives, which in the
twentieth century have inflicted suffering and death on an
unprecedented scale. By the simple measure of executions, for example,
atheist regimes have already outstripped the body-count of
Christianity for its entire history by an enormous factor208. Perhaps sensing the weakness of their position on
this score, the militant atheists try to minimize the extent to which
religion inspires good, and maximize its responsibility for
evil. Mother Teresa is scurrilously attacked by Christopher Hitchens,
and if Dawkins is to be believed, Martin Luther King's "religion was
incidental"209. They argue "Individual atheists may do evil
things but they don't do evil things in the name of
atheism. ... Religious wars really are fought in the name of religion,
and they have been horribly frequent in history. I cannot think of any
war that has been fought in the name of
atheism."210 This is double-think,
which can immediately be refuted. No war has ever been fought in the
name of generic `religion' or `theism'. Wars have been fought in the
name of specific religious beliefs and groups. Similarly no war has
ever been fought in the name of a generic `areligion' or
`atheism'. But many have been fought in the name of specific atheistic
beliefs and groups. The atheists' argument is: when religious people
do good, their religion is incidental, but when they do evil, their
religion is to blame; when atheists do good it is because they are
enlightened, but when atheists do evil, they do it as individuals, and
their atheism is not to blame, or if it looks as if they are motivated
by shared conviction, then this conviction is a kind of `religion', so
religion is (still) to blame. The inconsistency and special-pleading
is palpable.211
9.2 Rocks of Ages: A niche for religion
One of the better-known attempts at a kind of reconciliation of
science and faith of the past decade or two comes from a person active on the
evolutionist side of the school textbook debate, Stephen Jay Gould. In
his (1999) Rocks of Ages Gould puts forward
his "central principle of respectful noninterference ... the Principle
of NOMA, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria"212.
He summarizes this simple approach by saying "Science tries to
document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop
theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the
other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different,
realm of human purposes, meanings, and values - subjects that the
factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never
resolve."
Gould cites the example of Thomas Burnet (1635-1715) whose The
Sacred Theory of the Earth is now dismissed as trying "to reimpose
the unquestionable dogmas of scriptural authority upon the new paths
of honest science". Incidentally, this is the same Burnet who played
a vital role in the accession of William of Orange to the English
throne and whose History of his own time served as one of the
major sources for Macaulay's History of England since the
accession of James the second, which I've cited earlier. Gould
gives several examples from twentieth century textbooks of
unrestrained condemnations of Burnet's concordist approach to natural
history. The Sacred Theory is largely an attempt at
harmonization of the Bible with the science of the day. In Gould's
view Burnet was unfairly castigated because, though he practiced both
magisteria, he kept them separate.
Gould quotes from Burnet as saying
'Tis a dangerous thing to engage the authority of scripture in
disputes about the natural world in opposition to reason; lest time,
which brings all things to light, should discover that to be evidently
false which we had made scripture assert.213
Gould's fairness and scholarship are evident in many places, for
example his discussion of the
reasons for Darwin's loss of faith, largely as a reaction to the
problem of suffering, brought into sharp personal relief by the
untimely death of his daughter. But Gould's attempts to argue that
T.H.Huxley also practiced NOMA and is unfairly portrayed as being
anti-religious, ring hollow. Or perhaps rather, one should say
that they reveal the very limited qualities of what Gould allows as
religion. The shallowness of Gould's and Huxley's permissible form of
religion is epitomized by this quote from Huxley's letter to Kingsley,
saying that he is led
... to know that a deep sense of religion was compatible with the
entire absence of theology. Secondly, science and her methods gave
me a resting-place independent of authority and tradition. Thirdly,
love opened up to me a view of the sanctity of human nature, and
impressed me with a deep sense of responsibility ...
I may be quite wrong, and in that case I know I shall have to pay
the penalty for being wrong. But I can only say with Luther, "Gott
helfe mir, Ich kann nichts anders".214
What Huxley (and it becomes clear Gould too) values, then, is a "deep
sense of religion" totally devoid of doctrinal content, or indeed
apparently any factual content. The authority that remains is science and her
methods. Huxley's image of himself is the embattled hero,
standing, like Luther, before a modern-day Diet of Worms, willing to
sacrifice his immortal soul for what he believes. For all the ironic
oratory, Huxley as martyr is not exactly a convincing
portrait. Though perhaps it is more convincing than the
similar self-portraits of the militant atheists of the early
twenty-first century.
For Gould the second magisterium seems to consist of matters of
value. He says that it is "dedicated to a quest for consensus, or at
least a clarification of assumptions and criteria, about ethical
`ought', rather than search for any factual `is'..." and includes
"much of philosophy, and part of literature and history" as well as
religion.
He rightly denies to science the ability to say anything about "the
morality of morals", citing as an example that the possible
anthropological discovery of adaptively beneficial characteristics of
infanticide, genocide, or xenophobia doesn't at all justify behaving in
that manner.
Gould is at his best when supporting the idea of NOMA by deflating the
excessive portrayal of warfare between science and religion. He
summarizes the arguments of Mario Biagioli215
to the effect that the Galileo
affair was more a matter of court intrigue than intellectual
contest.
And he discusses the openness of the Roman church to evolution, as
represented by Popes Pius XII (Humani Generis, 1950), and John
Paul II (1996). He devotes substantial space to critiques of Andrew
Dickson White's famous "History of the warfare between science and
theology in Christendom"216 (1896) and of the similar "History of the
conflict between religion and science" by John William Draper (1874)
and some of the political background of their times.
The flat-earth myth - that the church taught that the earth was flat,
and had to recant when Columbus proved otherwise - is delightfully
exploded. As shown by J.B.Russell Inventing the flat earth
(Prager, 1991) this fairy tale can be proved fictitious by documentary
evidence. The earth's sphericity was known from Greek antiquity and
promulgated throughout the middle ages by the Venerable Bede, Roger
Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, and others, who represented the cosmological
orthodoxy within Christianity, not the rare enlightened
individual. History texts prior to 1870 rarely mention the flat-earth
myth, while almost all those after 1880 do. It is not a coincidence
then, that the flat-earth myth gains its currency at just about the
time of the warfare advocates, and that both White and Draper cite it as a
prime example of warfare.
Gould points out that
the celebrated exchange between Bishop Wilberforce and T.H.Huxley on
the descent of man took place at an 1860 meeting of the British Association
whose formal paper was an address by the same Draper on the
"intellectual development of Europe considered with reference to the
views of Mr. Darwin". In other words, it arose not in the context of a
scientific debate, but following an early discussion of "social
Darwinism".
Gould cites with approval the physiologist J.S.Haldane, whom he calls
a "deeply religious man", in whose Gifford Lectures for 1927 a most
telling phrase appears "If my reasoning has been correct, there is no
real connection between religion and the belief in supernatural events
of any sort or kind".
This is the religion that Gould has in mind as the candidate for NOMA,
because he says "... NOMA does preclude the additional claim that
such a God must arrange the facts of nature in a certain set and
predetermined way. For example, if you believe that an adequately
loving God must show his hand by peppering nature with palpable
miracles, ... then a particular, partisan (and minority) view of
religion has transgressed in the magisterium of science
..."217
The creationism and evolution textbook debate is one
in which Gould was directly involved. Two important general points
that he makes are that
there is probably a majority of clergy (as well as scientists) against
imposition of specific theological doctrine on the science curricula
of public schools; and that the controversy is a remarkably American
phenomenon. "No other Western nation faces such an incubus as a
serious political movement".
He attributes the latter predominantly to America's "uniquely rich
range of sects". I think there may be more cogent reasons218. Gould's
recounting of the Scopes trial of 1925 is interesting in
focusing on the difference between the reality and the 1955 cinematic
version of Inherit the Wind, not to mention the polemic of
H.L.Mencken. Both the Dayton creationists and their opponents, the
ACLU, were looking forward to a guilty verdict so that the case
could move on to higher courts where the real issues of
constitutionality were to be fought. The conviction was overturned on
the technicality that the judge had no authority to impose the fine of
$100 (exceeding his limit of $50) and although this is portrayed by
evolutionists as a victory, it was more like a defeat for both sides,
since it prevented the real issues from being joined.
Gould also writes passionately about
William Jennings Bryan, the famous creationist prosecutor of the
Scopes trial, recalling that, far from being by nature a benighted
traditionalist, he was, for his whole political career, a liberal and
progressive reformer. Gould attributes Bryan's uncharacteristic
position to his misunderstanding.
Bryan's
attitude to evolution rested upon a three-fold error. First, he made
the common mistake of confusing the fact of evolution with the
Darwinian explanation of its mechanism. He then misinterpreted natural
selection as a martial theory of survival by battle and destruction of
enemies. Finally, he fell into the logical error of arguing that
Darwinism implied the moral virtuousness of such deathly
struggle.219
While acknowledging that Bryan was in part responding to the misuse of
Darwinism by scientists and their acolytes, he concludes that
"The originator of an idea [Darwin] cannot be held responsible for egregious
misuse of his theory"
I take Gould's intentions in advocating what he calls NOMA to
be entirely constructive. He undoubtedly has an agenda to defend the
independence of science. But there seems no reason to doubt his
genuine concern to find a place in intellectual thought for morality
and value. He associates these (though not uniquely) with religious
underpinnings, rather than with any vain attempts to derive ethics
from science or natural history.
Gould's NOMA principle has been much criticized. As we've seen, it
does not satisfy the militant atheists, of course, but it also does
not satisfy militant, or even tolerably robust, theists. The weakness
of Gould's position is primarily that it is scientistic. When he
identifies the magisterium of science as "our drive to understand the
factual character of nature" he is saying that facts are discovered
by science (alone), or in other words that the only real knowledge is
scientific. Undoubtedly Gould wishes to set up a contrast between
facts (science) and values (religion). The problem with this common
opposition is that values are not the natural disjoint of facts. The
plain converse of the view that facts are the domain of science
is that the domain of religion is feelings, or worse still
fantasy. Gould does not mean that converse (I think), and intends to
express respect for religion; but he can't avoid the implication. To
be fair, he does qualify the "facts" by the phrase "of nature",
and were it not for the rest of his exposition, that might leave open
the possibility of there being facts "of something else". But he
never refers to the domain of religion as being a question of
knowledge or fact. The religion that he is making room for is a
religion empty of any claims to historical or scientific fact,
doctrinal authority, and supernatural experience. Such a religion,
whatever may be its attractions to the liberal scientistic mind, could
never be Christianity, or for that matter, Judaism or Islam.
For all of his justified critical
analysis of Andrew Dickson White's polemic of 100 years earlier, and
for all that he aspires to a more balanced interpretation of history,
the logic of Gould's position is therefore scarcely different from
White's. White was at pains to say that science's warfare was
not with religion but with "theology". By this, as he clearly
stated in his introduction, White meant distinctive religious
doctrines that he called sectarian, but which might more descriptively
be called confessional or foundational. In White's portrayal,
religion's claims to knowledge or authoritative teaching are what
science is disputing. For White, and for Gould, there is room for a
vague religiosity which serves useful purposes as a civic religion and
as an emotional source of moral authority. Both men welcome, and even
promote, that religiosity. But neither has left room for anything that
looks like orthodox Christianity, based on unique events two thousand
years ago: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
9.3 Behind the mythology
Science and Christianity have had a lot of interactions during and
since the Scientific Revolution, but none has become so iconic as that
of
Galileo and the Roman Catholic church.
Figure 9.3: Galileo before the Inquisition, Cristiano Banti, oil on
canvas.
The popular image of this confrontation is wonderfully captured in the
painting by Cristiano Banti, Figure 9.3220.
Galileo stands
in a heroic pose, his head set-off by what almost seems a halo of
light behind it. His interrogators have their backs to the wall
literally as well as figuratively. The unhappy faces of the passive
inquisitors, one of which is partly shrouded by a hood, are averted
from the brightness of Galileo's face. The central accuser leans
forward to confront Galileo, pointing to an open scroll, next to which
stands a quill and ink. He is commanding Galileo to sign a confession
or a recantation.
The plain wall is bright behind them, with only the legs of a crucifix
visible. It seems almost as if the brightness has come directly from
Galileo's saintly head, metaphorically illuminating the darkness of
the nether regions and benighted religious with the breaking light of science.
Of course this portrait deliberately sets out to make a statement and
to promote a viewpoint: that Galileo was an early martyr and hero in
the long war between science and Christian faith. What is really
interesting about it, though, is not so much its portrayal, as its
date: 1857. This is the image of Galileo that was promoted in the
mid-nineteenth century, more than two hundred years after the events.
Almost all the empirical philosophers of the Scientific Revolution in
the seventeenth century soon did adopt the heliocentric model of the
solar system, in whose defense Galileo had fallen
into papal disfavor. But even those who were Galileo's friends and
admirers could hardly have seen the events of the confrontation in the
way Banti paints them. Galileo's scientific evidence was weak, and
some of his theories were plain wrong. He had been allowed remarkable
latitude, in those troubled times, to pursue his science, provided he
kept out of theology and Bible interpretation. The pope himself had
been his friend and encourager. But Galileo had drained all this
good-will, enraged his enemies, and alienated most of his powerful
friends by publishing through what seemed like subterfuge an arrogant
populist imagined dialogue promoting his ideas and portraying their
opponent as `Simplicio', the Simpleton. Both the heliocentric solar
system and also Galileo's approach to scriptural interpretation are
now commonplace inside and outside the Roman church. And by 1857 one
could see that these and other key contributions had been fully
vindicated. Yet in his time, Galileo did not heroically stand on
principle embodying the light of science before the ignorant
Inquisition; the frightened old man would do whatever he had to do to
preserve his life and comfort. One should not blame him for
that. Besides, he remained a good Catholic, and so far as we can tell
had not been seeking to alienate the church, or to undermine its
authority, except in so far as it was represented by the schoolmen.
So, to summarize, Banti's painting is revealing not of the events or
the spirit of the seventeenth century, but of the attitudes towards
science, and the scientism, of the mid-nineteenth.
There had not, in the minds of most scientists, been an entrenched
warfare or even much of an ongoing intellectual confrontation between
science and Christianity in the intervening centuries. But it served
the purposes of many academics to persuade themselves that there had
been.
Andrew Dickson White was just
beginning his campaign with Ezra Cornell to found a new model of
university. They considered the influence of what they called
sectarian religion to be detrimental to learning and to society; so
their intention was to spearhead a new movement of essentially secular
education, in place of the Christian universities which still
dominated academia. Cornell University was to be an institution in
which religious doctrine was to have no place221. The content of the pamphlets and articles
that were his propaganda in support of this campaign eventually became
White's famous book The warfare of science with theology in
christendom (1896).
In it he gathered and recounted numerous
historical examples of areas in which the growth of what he called
science encroached upon traditionally religious intellectual
territory. Each development is portrayed as initially meeting with
stubborn resistance from the entrenched theological power structures,
but eventually from sheer force of evidence and argument overthrowing
that resistance and moving forward into greater knowledge and
enlightenment. The theme is repeated over and over in this long and
eventually tedious book, but it lends itself to stirring melodrama,
complete with martyrs, heroes and villains; intrigues and battles; and
all the elements that go to make a good story.
White, like many of his contemporaries, used the word science with an
enormously wide meaning; so that it encompassed the entirety of
liberal scholarship. In addition to astronomy, chemistry, geology and
the other natural sciences, his book has chapters on Egyptology and
Assyriology, philology, comparative mythology, economics, and biblical
criticism, referring to all as science, and implying that the
intellectual methodologies of all are similar.
This book, and presumably the pamphlets before it, captured the
imaginations of many of the academics of the day and its thesis
gradually became accepted even by many Christians as representing a
fact of history that science and theology were perpetually at war. For
academics, who at that stage almost universally regarded science as
the guiding example of all rational thought, it meant so much the
worse for religion. For Christians whose faith ruled their lives, it
meant, by contrast, so much the worse for science. And thus the
warfare metaphor as it was gradually accepted by both sides became a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
The relationship of science and Christianity in the three centuries
prior to this transition had been complicated, and sometimes
tense. But the men who pushed forward the growing knowledge of nature,
during that period, were more often pious believers than they were
outspoken infidels or scientistic secularists. The universities were
of course Christian foundations, Oxford and Cambridge required their
ordinary college fellows to be ordained if they remained beyond a
limited tenure.
Figure 9.4: The importance of religion in the founding and life of ancient
universities is still evident in the dominance of the chapels
among their buildings. This, for example, is the Chapel at King's
College Cambridge.
But even scientists outside the universities were
often either independent gentlemen motivated in part by Christian
commitments, or parish clergy who saw no inherent contradiction
between their professional religion and their amateur science. The
tensions that exist between the `Experimental Philosophy' and
Christianity were a concern for
Robert Boyle, one of the founders of
the
Royal Society.
In the terminology of 1690 someone who understood
and cultivated experimental philosophy was frequently referred to as
a
`virtuoso'. In his book The Christian
Virtuoso222, Boyle's
intention was to show "that, by being addicted to Experimental
Philosophy, a man is rather assisted than indisposed to be a good
Christian". He addresses himself to the puzzlement apparently expressed
that that he should be both "a diligent cultivater of experimental
philosophy, [and] a concerned embracer of the Christian religion". So
the question of the compatibility of science and Christianity was,
even then, a live one. But the danger Boyle addressed was less that of a
philosophical atheism than it was of a practical atheism: "... the
profane discourses and licentious lives of some virtuosi, that boast
much of the principles of the new philosophy. And I deny not, but
that, if the knowledge of nature falls into the hands of a resolved
atheist, or a sensual libertine, he may misemploy it to oppugn the
grounds, or discredit the practice, of religion." While Boyle
therefore is familiar with those for whom he considers "their
immorality was the original cause of their infidelity", he says his
personal observations make him think atheists are rarer among
scientists than is popularly imagined. "And though my conversation
has been pretty free and general among naturalists, yet I have met
with so few true atheists, that I am very apt to think, that men's
want of due information, or of their uncharitable zeal, has made them
mistake or misrepresent many for deniers of God..."
Protagonists over the whole spectrum of scientific and non-scientific
debate, in those days, frequently charged their opponents with
religious heterodoxy, when it served their rhetorical purposes. But
that was simply a characteristic of an age when religion was the
foremost intellectual authority.
Undoubtedly there were many occasions when the presumptions of
cosmologies based upon traditional interpretations of the Bible were
challenged by the development of science, whether it was the
demonstration of the vastness of the universe or its far greater age
than imagined by those who interpreted Genesis as literal history. In
this sense there was an ongoing process of accommodation and
reinterpretation. The scientific revolution had accelerated the pace
of discovery, and thereby of this accommodation and
reinterpretation. But it had a long prior history.
Augustine had, at
the end of the fourth century A.D. wrestled with the meaning of the
first chapters of
Genesis. Lest incorrect interpretation and ignorant
Christian speech be the cause of ridicule by a more knowledgeable
unbeliever, he warned against jumping to conclusions and said he had
"explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of
obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to
the prejudice of another and perhaps better
explanation."223
It certainly was not the case that religion and science were
thought non-overlapping magisteria. The Bible was widely taken as a
serious guide to life, in respect of morality, yes, but also in
respect of history, politics, cosmology, and much else. What the
virtuosi recognized was that much of what passed for Christian
theology, particularly in areas that overlapped with empirical
philosophy, was not Biblical, but Aristotelian. Moreover, they saw
that there was a much more fruitful approach to understanding the
empirical world than the scholastic logic-chopping that characterized
the schoolmen. This new empirical approach was also supported by a
fully Christian perspective that Bacon had expressed as "... let no
man, upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation,
think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too well studied
in the book of God's word or in the book of God's works; divinity or
philosophy;"224. Both of the two
books, scripture and nature, according to this widespread
viewpoint,
told of God's majesty and complemented each other in what
they revealed to the scholar. It was of course held that the two books
could not contradict one another, but it was not at all the view that
their concerns were non-overlapping. When overlapping claims seemed
incompatible, it called for reinterpretation either of the science or
of the Bible.
The early development of the field of Geology, representative of late
eighteenth century concerns, is full of interesting examples of
intellectual conflict and confrontation, such as the competition
between uniformitarian and catastrophist theories of the earth's
past. But as has been amply documented225, the conflict was predominantly not
what has often been portrayed: between hidebound scriptural
literalists and open-minded scientists; it was between rival
scientific interpretations held by equally religious, and equally
scientific, advocates.
By the nineteenth century this process was two-hundred years on. The
more directly
concordist approach, of which Thomas Burnet's work is
an early example, was much less plausible in 1890 than it had been in
1690. Not only had science discredited the details of so many such
concordist efforts, but also the hoped-for convergence of the two
books into a unified picture of the world did not seem to be
happening. Science seemed to be progressing toward a comprehensive
description of the universe without any assistance from scriptural
revelation. And it increasingly strained credulity to suppose that
reading the first two chapters of Genesis as natural history - even
a highly stylized natural history - was compatible with what seemed
to be established by the natural sciences. The disappointment of the
simplistic concordist expectations did not greatly perturb Christians
who based their faith on historic revelation, the broad sweep of
philosophical arguments, and personal experience. And many scientists
took this approach. It did, however, seriously undermine a strand of
Christian thought and apologetics that had adopted natural theology,
and the argument from design, especially in biology, as its primary
rationale. The presumption that science was going to prove
religion was, in effect, a subverting concession to scientism. It had
led many Christian thinkers into a blind alley whose end was
approaching. There seemed no prospect that this proof was going to be
forthcoming, or even that traditional arguments from natural theology
were going to emerge unscathed. What seemed more plausible was that
science was going to continue its triumphant progress, sorting out the
details of physics and taking over more and more of the rest of
intellectual endeavor, until it fully unified and actually monopolized
knowledge. This scientistic vision allowed a determined push by the
university secularizers to win the day. The century since then has
seen the philosophical foundation for this monopoly dissolve away, and
the compliance of the academy to the scientistic unifying ambitions
also substantially decay. Yet many in academia even today speak as if
the secular `defeat' of religion based upon the scientistic outlook of
the nineteenth century still holds.
In fact, however, both the scientistic attempt to found religion upon
scientific proofs, and also the wider expectation that science will
provide a complete unification of all knowledge - the ambition of
scientism as a whole - are now intellectually unsupportable. There
remain many people, both theists and atheists, who don't realize it,
and who continue to thrash out the old arguments. But they are trapped
in a nineteenth-century time-warp.
Probably an even greater influence on the nineteenth-century religious
debate than science itself was the rise of `higher criticism'
sometimes called `historical criticism' of the Bible. The Reformation
had transformed the
Bible from a mysterious religious artifact written
in an ancient language incomprehensible to the populace, into the one
book that every literate person read. Catholics still granted to the
church hierarchy alone the authority to interpret the
Bible. Maintaining that authority, in the face of Protestant arguments
and armies, was, by the way, undoubtedly a driving factor in the
Papacy's handling of Galileo. But Protestant doctrine gave a much
greater role to the individual conscience. The Bible was translated
into the language of the common people.
The first translators had no
doubt about its divine inspiration. Their profound commitment was to
represent faithfully its meaning in translation. Their concerns
naturally led to a scholarly attempt to establish and understand the
accuracy and provenance of the text of the Bible - textual
criticism. But as subsequent textual criticism gradually became a
critique of the supposed sources and content of scriptures, it became
more and more dependent upon both linguistic analysis, seen as
`scientific', and also presumptions imported from outside the Bible,
from the wider realms of philosophy and science. These
supposed-scientific presumptions were increasingly thought to bring
into question the Bible's reliability. Eventually, it began to be
analyzed by some scholars as if it were simply another book, to be
interpreted by whatever were the prevailing academic standards of the
day. And by then the prevailing standards were scientistic and
naturalistic. It would take us too far from our theme to pursue any
significant discussion of the history of historical criticism of the
Bible. Today even theologically orthodox and conservative Christian
intellectuals, who believe the Bible to be the word of God,
acknowledge there is some value in the analysis of its authorship and
dating - topics which constitute a large part the critical focus. In
the nineteenth century there were deep divisions in the church and in
academia about how to respond to higher criticism's challenges to
traditional views of Biblical authorship. Much of the controversy
arose not because of questions of scholarship, but because of the
heterodox theological views of many of higher criticism's
champions. For the church, the question was, justifiably enough,
whether or not the critics' teaching was still meaningfully
Christian. In many cases it was not. And it hardly seems unjustified
in those cases for the church to discontinue its sponsorship: to give
the offenders the push.
A major part of the strategy of those committed to what would now be
called the
liberal theological perspective, was to portray
their position as scientific226. But of course hardly any of
the analyses that they offered bore any resemblance to the natural
sciences, or depended upon science in any significant way. Their
presuppositions were indeed often scientistic. It was commonly held
that
miracles were impossible; so Biblical descriptions of them were,
ipso facto, clearly false. Or it was believed that prophecy
could never be predictive; so one could reliably date writings that
referred (even obliquely) to historical events as being after
the events. In general, naturalistic and physicalistic analysis became
not just an important part of Bible scholarship, but by far the
preferred type of explanation of the whole of the scriptures.
It was a crucial part of the rhetoric to argue that the liberal
position was progressive and scientific, while the orthodox position
was hidebound and dogmatic. The rebuttal, though it was vociferous,
was intellectually confused. Science still held a strong appeal for
the orthodox. They resisted the worst excesses of the scientistic
presuppositions, but were often ill-equipped to differentiate them
from science. The rhetorical battle was often lost to a portrayal that
the conservatives were - `once again', as A D White would have had
it - blindly opposing the progress of science by their intellectual
fossilization. Scientism was the ultimate victor.
9.4 Mutual support
A serious reading of history enables us to escape the mythological
grip of the warfare story. When we do so, it becomes possible to
recognize that Christian believers were very active in science during its
modern development. We see that, while there was a small fraction of the
Scientific Revolution's philosophers who entertained atheistic
speculations, the majority were Christians; while there were those who
in the Age of Reason adopted the anti-religious cause of the
philosophes, they were by no means predominant; and while there were
some Victorian scientists who thought that science had disproved
Christianity, there were more who accorded an independence to
scientific professionalism and research, but still personally practised
a Christian commitment. In short, science and the Christian faith were not
incompatible.
Scientism was adopted by influential individuals for various reasons
of conviction or expedience. It had not, during the seventeenth to the
nineteenth centuries, achieved the dominance that was present by the
start of the twentieth. If we reject scientism, we find room once
again for the intellectual significance of religious claims to
knowledge, alongside those of science about nature.
In fact, however, history suggests that an even more
constructive relationship exists between science and Christianity than
mutual toleration. The thesis, as
Stanley Jaki puts it, is that there
is a "single intellectual avenue forming both the road of science and
the ways to God. Science found its only viable birth within a cultural
matrix permeated by a firm conviction about the mind's ability to find
in the realm of things and persons a pointer to their
creator."227
One needs to be cautious, and not claim too much for this
interpretation of history. It is, like most historical theses,
neither rigorously demonstrable nor universally accepted. No one is
denying the influences of the historical and social environment as a
whole. Key factors may include: the means of dissemination through printing,
other vital technologies that were directly used in experiments, and
sufficient social stability to allow time and support for science. It
is extremely difficult to assess the importance of these practical
influences in comparison to the influences of philosophy itself. But the
argument for a strong influence of philosophical preconceptions does
have considerable evidence to support it.
There are two complementary sides of this analysis. One side is the
negative. It is the observation that modern science did not arise in
any of the civilizations except that of Europe. The other is
positive. It is the observation that there are, in the world-view of
Christianity228, conceptions that are hospitable to
science, which in combination may provide a uniquely fertile mental
habitat in which modern science first flourished.
A.N. Whitehead, in
1925, put the negative side thus
There have been great civilizations in which the peculiar balance of
mind required for science has only fitfully appeared and has produced
the feeblest result. For example, the more we know of Chinese art, of
Chinese literature, and of the Chinese philosophy of life, the more we
admire the heights to which that civilization attained. For thousands
of years, there have been in China acute and learned men patiently
devoting their lives to study. Having regard to the span of time, and
to the population concerned, China forms the largest volume of
civilization which the world has seen. There is no reason to doubt the
intrinsic capacity of individual Chinamen for the pursuit of
science. And yet Chinese science is practically negligible. There is
no reason to believe that China if left to itself would have ever
produced any progress in science. The same may be said of
India.229
The interesting question is why? Why didn't these great civilizations
of the past produce a scientific revolution? Whitehead's answer is
that these and the other civilizations that predated science, the
Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, lacked an implicit faith, "the
inexpungable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated
with its antecedents in a perfectly general manner, exemplifying
general principles."
His "explanation is that faith in the
possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of
modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval
theology."230 According to Whitehead,
moreover, it was the anti-rationality of the early modern scientists,
tempered by this faith, that was the secret of their success. The
scholastic philosophers that they rejected were not irrational, or
anti-rational, as many modern commentators imply. On the contrary, the
schoolmen were the rationalists of the day. It took the virtuoso's
revolutionary - and by contemporary standards irrational -
insistence on the primacy of empirical "irreducible stubborn facts",
studied for their own sake, combined with the whole of society's
inherited faith in the world's rationality, to germinate the new
synthesis.
Historian of science,
R Hookyaas, in his Religion and the rise
of modern science (1972), sees it similarly. The weaknesses in
Greek science, which "medieval science made no move to eliminate",
needed to be corrected by "`de-deification' of nature, a more modest
estimation of human reason, and a higher respect for manual
labor". And he sets out to "... identify some general trends of
thought in the Bible which could exert a healthy influence on the
development of science ..."231
I would summarize some of these trends of thought as follows.
The Bible teaches that the
world is the free contingent creation of a rational Creator -
that God had free choices about how the world was to be. Such a teaching
implies that the world can't be understood simply by theoretical
philosophy, in the way that the Greeks thought it could and should. We
need to do experiments to find out how God chose to create
it. Experiments are the foundation of modern science.
The Bible teaches that God declared the Creation "good". This
teaching contrasts with a common rejection of the physical as
intrinsically evil or degrading. On the contrary, it is worthy of
detailed study and investigation on its own merits, again motivating
the empirical emphasis.
The Bible teaches that the world is not itself God. In contrast
with the pantheism of the Greeks and Romans, and the nature worship of
the tribal neighbors of the Hebrews, the God of Israel is eternal and
transcendent. He brings forth a separate creation by his will, and
upholds it by his word of power. "[N]ature is not a deity to be
feared and worshipped, but a work of God to be admired, studied and
managed."232 Christians can investigate
the physical and biological universe without fear of violating the
divine.
The Bible teaches that humans have been given a degree of authority
and responsibility over the Creation. Therefore they have direct
permission and duty to probe its secrets, provided they are
truly acting as stewards of it, and respecting God's creatures.
The Bible teaches that human rationality is in the image of the
creator. This gives us reason to believe that we are capable of
understanding the creation, at least in part, despite its radical
contingency. It provides a rationale for thinking that the order that we
see in nature is not merely an arbitrary construction of the human
mind, but is a reflection of a deeper rationality: the mind of God.
The Bible teaches that God is a steadfastly-consistent
law-giver. This gives us reason to believe that we might
discover general laws that govern the course of nature, interpreted as
the regular orderly progress of the world in accordance with God's
ordinances.
These are philosophical, and in fact theological encouragements
to the work of empirical science. When contrasted with the relative
scientific sterility observed in other cultures, they give reason to
believe that far from being an atmosphere stifling to science, the
Christian world-view of the West was the fertile cultural and
philosophical climate in which science was able to grow and flourish.
Obviously science has now become largely self-sustaining. From a
purely philosophical viewpoint, in the west we no longer need to be
persuaded of the fruitfulness of the scientific empirical approach. An
appreciation of the power of science is practically intrinsic to our
cultural subconscious, and all too readily grows into a monopolistic
scientism. What I wish to argue, though, is that it would make it
easier to appreciate the true status of scientific knowledge if we
recognize the underlying philosophical developments that served as its
midwife. These extra-scientific beliefs and character traits are, I
think, not irrelevant to a comprehensive account of knowledge, nor
indeed to the continued health of science.
One current concern that illustrates the dependence of science on
extra-scientific traits is the question of scientific fraud. Modern
science has an elaborate and long-standing system surrounding the
publishing of scientific work. Each scientific journal, when it
receives the submission of a new article, sends out the article to be
reviewed by one or more experts.
Their job is to ensure that it
constitutes a significant new contribution to the field of the
journal, that it positions itself in relation to prior knowledge by
appropriate citations, that it meets professional standards of
descriptive and mathematical clarity, and that it appears to be free
of egregious error. The peer review process is definitely a human and
flawed undertaking. Professional and personal rivalries at times
distort the results. Seminal papers are sometimes rejected. Erroneous
papers are all too often accepted. But it is a process that has
developed over centuries and, for all its weaknesses, provides an
important contribution to the filtering and evaluation of scientific
communication. Incidentally, the job of the expert referees in
peer-review is almost universally carried out voluntarily and
anonymously. The only reward a referee usually receives is the
opportunity to read the latest paper before it is published, and the
verbal thanks of the journal's editorial staff. Reviewing perhaps
ten papers a year, as I and many of my colleagues do, is a
contribution to the scientific enterprise that involves not
insignificant effort, but is part of the normal professional life of a
scientist.
Conscientious
referees obviously read papers carefully to try to
ensure they are free from error. What referees do not do is to read
a paper with a view to detecting deliberate deception. The starting
presumption of referees and editors is that the descriptions submitted
are honest. It is perfectly possible for scientists to deceive
themselves inadvertently, especially when their results contain random
perturbing influences. The
apprenticeship in science that is served
through post-graduate and post-doctoral education and experience helps
to train scientists to avoid self-deception by systematic application
of the best practices of data collection and analysis, and of
mathematical rigor. The reviewing process helps to enforce the
observation of those practices. What reviewers can't easily do,
though, is to detect deliberate fabrication or deceptive selection
(`falsification') of data. Actually, inexpert fabrication or
falsification is often easily discernible; and this helps to protect
the journals from cranks and nuisance submissions; but falsification
by someone who really knows a field is sometimes very hard to detect
in the peer-review process. Because of science's focus on
reproducibility, significant falsified results - at least results
that are contrary to the actual behavior of nature - are
eventually usually disproved and discounted. This
correctability of science is much hailed and important, but not
automatic. But in the mean time, false results can have a major impact
on the field, and thereby cause extensive and costly misdirection of
effort. In the case of engineering, applied science and medicine, they
may lead to injury or death.
Perhaps the most famous scientific falsification of the twentieth
century was the `discovery', in 1912, of Piltdown Man: a skull from
Sussex, England, purporting to be the fossilized remains of a
missing-link in evolution between apes and humans. Although there were
puzzles and skepticism about this find from quite early on, it took
over forty years for it to be definitively proven to be a fraud,
consisting of a relatively recent human skull combined with a small
orangutan jaw that had been stained and filed to assist with the
deception233.
Meanwhile, its misleading influence on research into human
ancestors was substantial.
There have been several high-profile cases of deliberate falsification
of scientific results during the past decade or two, which have drawn
the attention of the public and politicians. In a society whose public
money supports most science it is fully justified for the government
to demand stringent efforts to prevent scientific fraud and
misconduct.
What this all illustrates is that science depends for its proper
functioning on traits of individuals, and society as a whole, that are
not scientific.
It depends upon honesty, integrity, truthfulness,
openness, and so on, which today's society finds, sometimes to its
surprise, are not enforced by science. Indeed these traits are the
sorts of traits that have traditionally been viewed as the province of
religion. Not that religious people or organizations have any monopoly
on the practice of them, but that they are moral virtues which
in the west historically have been taught by Christianity, and
enforced as much by the church and the moral expectations of society
as they have by legal sanction. So what is clearer than ever today is
that science is itself dependent upon certain virtues of individuals
and society. This is an area where science and religion are plainly
mutually supportive.
9.5 True contradiction
A very important result of properly rejecting scientism, but not
science, is that it accords to both scientific and non-scientific
rationality their full scope. And it permits them to interact
fruitfully. This is true for all non-scientific thought but it is
especially significant for religious thought. It is rarely the case
that scientific and non-scientific approaches are completely
`non-overlapping'. As I've shown already, science certainly
influences religious thought, and religious thought influences
science. There is nothing improper about these influences
provided that they account for the intrinsic character of the
different areas of, and approaches to, knowledge. What's more, these
interactions need not just be at the level of encouragements or mutual
support. In some cases they are going to be mutual correction, and
even contradiction.
The fact that religious knowing is non-scientific does not free
religion from paying attention to science's knowledge. And the fact
that science can proceed without explicit reference to religion does
not free it from paying attention to religious knowledge.
A religious faith that depended upon the belief that humans can
routinely levitate runs directly up against the scientific demand for
a demonstration. This demand is perfectly reasonable if the claim is
for routine levitation
,
because that is in effect a scientific
claim. It is a claim to a reproducible effect with sufficient clarity
to be addressed by scientific tests. In such a situation science and
faith might well contradict one another about the same matter. They
are not non-overlapping, and most people, myself included, would
regard the scientific conclusions as the cogent ones. However, a
religious faith that depended upon a belief that levitation was
demonstrated on one particular occasion, or by one particular historic
character, does not lend itself to such a scientific test. Science is
powerless to bring unique events to the empirical bar. It can of
course assert that such an event is inconsistent with the normal
course of nature. But such an assertion brings nothing to the
discussion that we didn't already know. After all, the whole point was
that this was apparently impossible under normal
circumstances. Science might sometimes be able to help in the analysis of
the evidence surrounding that event. The discovery of powerful
electromagnets in the basement of the levitating guru, for example,
might, in the light of our scientific knowledge, be highly suggestive
that well-understood natural forces had been deployed in the phenomenon under
discussion. This scientific interpretation would then definitely give
rise to what might be decisive legal evidence in deciding whether
fraud played a part in the event, as well as convincing us of what the
probable explanation of it is. But the situation that is much
more often encountered is that no such legal evidence is forthcoming. Then
science has little or nothing useful to say.
In matters of natural history, there is also potential for true
contradiction. As we've seen, even though science is rarely definitive
for distinct events of the past, scientific investigation of the
overall development of the universe, and the earth, is increasingly
powerful. Religious believers who feel obliged to maintain, for
example, that the earth is young, face justifiable scientific
skepticism. The overwhelming evidence, which is woven into the fabric
of our description of the world in modern physical sciences, is that
the earth and the universe are billions of years old. It is possible
to save a literalistic Bible chronology of a 6000 year-old earth only
by supposing that God has deliberately made it look as if the earth is
much older than it actually is234.
This theory was most notably espoused by
Philip Gosse, in his book
Omphalos235 published in 1857, two years
before Darwin's Origin. Gosse frames his argument around the
repetitive circularity of nature, cycling through seasons and
lives. Into this circle, instantaneous creation is obliged to break,
but Gosse says it must do so by creating the requisite history of
prior cycles. Thus Gosse concludes that Adam had a navel, even though
he did not need this remnant of the umbilical cord, since he was not
born. But God could create him with one,
nevertheless. (Omphalos is Greek for navel.) While the view that God
created the world with the appearance of age is a position that can't
be logically disproved, it is theologically
disastrous. It makes God into a deceiver, deliberately misleading us
mortals by placing deceptive evidence into nature that leads us to
think the earth is old, when `really' it is young.
Even Charles Kingsley, Gosse's friend, called the idea a proposal that God had
"written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all
mankind"236.
It is not so much that the view is obscurantist as that it dismisses
the faithfulness of God, which presumably is the main rationale for
the young-earth viewpoint. The argument for a young-earth creationist
position is that the Bible is the revelation of God, and that since
God is faithful, his revelation is free from error; consequently the
Biblical account of creation ought to be accepted as true. But if the
`acceptance' advocated leads to the conclusion that God has deceived
us by constructing a world that appears to be different from (older
than) what it really is, we have undermined our starting premise. Such
a deceiver God is not faithful; and thus we have no reason to continue
to suppose that what the Bible says is inerrant.
In light of this contradiction, the intellectually consistent position
for a Christian who holds a high view of Biblical inspiration, but
also recognizes the compelling force of the scientific evidence, is to
adopt a different `acceptance' of the creation account. It is
to recognize that the scriptural account was addressed originally to
an ancient and unscientific people, and expressed in context and
metaphor that reflects the wider culture of that age. This is
precisely the position most Christian scientists adopt. The American
Scientific Affiliation, is a fellowship of Christians in science,
whose members are required to assent to a statement of faith of which
the first article is "We accept the divine inspiration,
trustworthiness and authority of the Bible in matters of faith and
conduct". In other words, these members are theologically
conservative Christians who hold a high view of scriptural authority.
The ASA polled its membership in 2010 on various questions concerning
creation and human
origins237. Approximately
86% of the respondents affirmed the statement "The universe is
approximately 14 billion years old" is "supported by credible
scientific evidence". Plainly science has had a very important
influence on the opinions of these Christians, many of whom are
thought-leaders on the topic of science and faith in their
communities. Science does influence, and sometimes contradict, aspects
of religion.
The influence of religion on
science, beyond the philosophical and
cultural encouragement we have already discussed, and the personal
motivations of individual believing scientists, comes to a matter of
contradiction mostly in topics where religion finds its most potent
authority. The ethical and moral acceptability of scientific practices
is strongly dictated by religious beliefs and commitments. Every
research institution that receives financial support from the US
government is required by federal law238
to have an Institutional Review Board that evaluates the use of human
subjects in research. At a minimum this review board must ensure that
risks to subjects are minimized, consent is obtained, the data is
monitored and privacy observed, and that possibly vulnerable subjects
are protected. There is therefore already in our system an
acknowledgement that science practice must be subject to some ethical
restrictions. The hot-button topic in the past decade in respect to
ethical restrictions on research has been the question of research
using embryonic
stem cells. These cells, which are capable of growing
indefinitely in a laboratory environment, and can differentiate into
almost any body tissue, are technically very useful for biological
research. It is thought that the research that they enable has the
potential for producing, in the future, powerful medical treatments
for deadly diseases. However, their use generally involves the
destruction of a human embryo, which raises questions of great moral
significance for the dignity and value of human life. Opinion is
divided on where the limits ought to be drawn on this sort of
research, but plainly the decisions ought not to be made on purely
technical grounds. The religious component of this discussion is of
immense importance, and cannot be excluded. Science, thoughtfully
understood, does not have to exclude it. Scientists, who may or may
not be believers themselves, can take the opinions of religious and
moral philosophers seriously. Unfortunately there has been a more
belligerent response from some scientists and activists, who have
argued that religious viewpoints have no legitimate voice in the
discussion; that purely pragmatic considerations overrule any
foundational ethics; and that pragmatic, secular, ethics leads to a
much more liberal attitude in the employment of these cells. One
thread of this debate implies that it is somehow improper for science
to be subject to religious criticism. This viewpoint often finds its
rationale in a scientistic world-view. After all, if science is all
the real knowledge we have, then it does seem to follow that there is
nothing outside of science that can legitimately regulate the
activities of science. But whether scientistic or not, an intransigent
insistence of the freedom of science-practice from contradiction or
constraint by non-scientific arguments, including religious ones,
seems almost a mirror image of a religious fundamentalist denial of
science.
In summary, then, there is an intellectual rivalry, involving mutually
contradictory claims of priority and authority, that might reasonably
be spoken of as
warfare. This war is not between science and
religion. It is between scientism and a whole lot of other routes to
knowledge, including religious faith.