Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (10 page)

Readers from the United Kingdom are undoubtedly thinking, “Well, that's the hyperreligious United States. We're not
nearly
that pious.” And that's true, but Britain still shows a surprisingly high level of religious literalism. In 2011,
Julian Baggini, an atheist philosopher who was nevertheless sympathetic to religion, grew tired of the claims of “strident” atheists, who, he said, wrongly saw Christianity as depending heavily on facts.
To get data on the content
of religious belief, Baggini surveyed nearly eight hundred churchgoing Christians in an online poll in the
Guardian
. Now, this is hardly the kind of rigorous “scientific” poll conducted by Harris or Gallup, and the results could have been biased by a greater willingness of more religious people to respond. Nevertheless, Baggini was astonished at the literalism of those who answered. Asked why they went to church, for instance, 66 percent responded that they did so “to worship God,” while only 20 percent went for the “feeling of community” (so much for claims that the social aspects of religion far outweigh its dogma!). There was also widespread agreement that the stories in Genesis, such as Adam and Eve, really happened (29 percent), that Jesus performed miracles such as that of the loaves and fishes (76 percent), that Jesus's death on the cross was necessary for forgiveness of human sin (75 percent), that Jesus was bodily resurrected (81 percent), and that eternal life required accepting Jesus as lord and savior (44 percent). Chastened, Baggini retracted his previous views:

So what is the headline finding? It is that whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral insight of mythos than the factual claims of logos, the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value. . . . This is, I think, a firm riposte to those who dismiss atheists, especially the “new” variety, as being fixated on the literal beliefs associated with religion rather than ethos or practice. It suggests that they are not attacking straw men when they criticise religion for promoting superstitious and supernatural beliefs.

Data are sparser from the rest of the world, but also show a high degree of religious literalism, especially outside Europe.
The 2011 Ipsos/Reuters poll
showed that belief in the existence of heaven or hell was held by 19 percent of the combined inhabitants of twenty-three countries surveyed, ranging from only 3 percent of Swedes to 62 percent of Indonesians. The same belief was entertained by 41 percent of Americans and only 10 percent of
Britons. We see some disparities between these results and those of the Harris poll, which showed a higher percentage of Americans believing in heaven and hell. These disparities might be due to the way the questions are asked, and should make us wary of taking any statistic as a precise estimate. Nevertheless, no polls show that most believers see scripture metaphorically rather than literally.

The world's Muslims
are especially pious and literalistic. It's no surprise that a 2012 Pew survey of thirty-eight thousand professed Muslims in thirty-eight countries showed that belief in God and in Muhammad as his prophet was nearly universal (the median percentage ranged from 85 percent in southeastern Europe to between 98 percent and 100 percent in the Middle East and North Africa). But it might be a surprise to those unfamiliar with Islam that in all countries surveyed, more than half of Muslims asserted that the Quran “should be read literally, word for word”: figures ranged from 54 percent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to 93 percent in Cameroon (data were not available for the Middle East). Muslim belief in angels ranged from a low of 42 percent in Albania to a high of 99 percent in Afghanistan (90 percent in the United States), with twenty-three of thirty-eight countries showing more than 80 percent.

The survey shows that on the whole, most Muslims are Quranic literalists, even more faithful to scripture than are highly religious Americans. Islamic literalism is one reason why, when Muslims perceive an offense to their faith, like the Danish cartoons that mocked Muhammad, they rise up en masse, often in violent sprees. One must take seriously the claim that
they really believe what they say they believe,
and that faith, not reason, can be a major cause of religious malfeasance. Islam is, of course, not unique in this way; as we'll see in the final chapter, the dangers of faith are inherent in many other religions as well.

It is a staple of accommodationists, and of those atheists who “believe in belief,” to exculpate religion by ascribing what are clearly religiously motivated acts to “politics” or “social dysfunction.” (In many Muslim countries, however, there's virtually no demarcation between religion, politics, and social mores.) This is simply an extension of the claim that religion doesn't really involve truth claims about the universe. In a debate with Steven Pinker about “scientism”—the notion that science often intrudes into areas
where it doesn't belong—the
New Republic
editor Leon Wieseltier wrote, “
Only a small minority of believers
in any of the scriptural religions, for example, have ever taken scripture literally.” But that's simply wrong. Perhaps some Christians see the Bible largely as allegory, but there are some nonnegotiable beliefs that are virtually diagnostic of each religion. William Dembski, a Southern Baptist and prominent advocate of intelligent design creationism, has specified the “
non-negotiables of Christianity
” as these: divine creation, reflection of God's glory in the world, the exceptionalism of humans made in the image of God, and the Resurrection of Christ.
These constitute the epistemic claims of faith, and virtually every believer entertains some. (For Christians, the ultimate redoubt is often the Resurrection.) As I often say, some believers are literalists about nearly everything, but nearly every believer is a literalist about something.

Is Scripture Literal or Allegorical?

This brings us to the thorny question of metaphor and allegory (allegory is just extended metaphor: an entire story that is not meant to be taken literally, but symbolizes an underlying message). A recurrent pattern in theology is this: as branches of science—evolutionary biology, geology, history, and archaeology—have disproved scriptural claims one by one, those claims have morphed from literal truths into allegories. This is one of the big differences between science and religion. When a scientific claim is disproved, it goes into the dustbin of good ideas that simply didn't pan out. When a religious claim is disproved, it often turns into a metaphor that imparts a made-up “lesson.” Although some biblical events are hard to see as allegories (Jonah's ingestion by a fish and Job's trials are two of these), the theological mind is endlessly creative, always able to find a moral or philosophical point in fictitious stories. Hell, for instance, has become a metaphor for “separation from God,” and now that we know that Adam and Eve cannot have been the literal ancestors of all living people (see chapter 3), the “original sin” they bequeathed is seen by some believers as a metaphor for our evolved selfish nature.

Further, many liberal believers are affronted by claims that nearly anything in the Bible should be taken literally. One of their most common
arguments against such literalism is this: “The Bible is not a textbook of science.” When I see that phrase, I automatically translate it as, “The Bible is not entirely true,” for that is what it means. The “nontextbook” claim, of course, is a rationale for believers to pick and choose what they consider
really
true in scripture—or, for liberal Muslims like Reza Aslan, in the Quran.

Indeed, even saying that there's a historical
tradition
of taking scripture literally can deeply upset “modern” believers, for the fashion is to argue that literalism is purely a modern phenomenon. When I wrote on my Web site that the story of Adam and Eve could not be literally true, for evolutionary genetics had shown that the population of modern humans was always much larger than two, the writer Andrew Sullivan took me to task for even suggesting that believers saw the First Couple as historical figures:

There's no evidence
that the Garden of Eden was always regarded as figurative? Really? Has Coyne read the fucking thing? I defy anyone with a brain (or who hasn't had his brain turned off by fundamentalism) to think it's meant literally.

Yet for centuries, Christians, and that includes the Catholic Church, to which Sullivan belongs, took the story of Adam and Eve as the sole ancestors of humanity literally. And no wonder, for the description in the Bible is straightforward, without the slightest hint that it's an allegory.

Now, when Jesus recites parables, like that of the Good Samaritan, it's clear that he's simply telling a story to make a point. But that's not the way that Genesis reads. Catholics have in fact always adhered literally to
religious monogenism,
the biological descent of all humans from Adam and Eve. The reality of the Garden of Eden, the Fall, and Adam and Eve as our ancestors was accepted by early theologians and church fathers like Augustine, Aquinas, and Tertullian, although some, like Origen, were unclear on the issue. In 1950, however, Pope Pius XII affirmed monogenism in his encyclical
Humani Generis
. After asserting that the church didn't oppose research and discussion of evolution—so long as everyone agreed that, during the process, only humans were given a soul by God—the pope denied such latitude about Adam and Eve:

When, however, there is question
of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism [our descent from ancestors beyond Adam and Eve], the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

There is no room for waffling here. The authority of the church insists that a historical Adam committed a sin passed on to his offspring—as if sin were a gene that never gets lost—and those sinful offspring grew into all of humanity.

The historical emphasis on the existence of a literal Adam and Eve, and the couple's crucial position in theology, is emphasized by the historian David Livingstone in his book
Adam's Ancestors:

Regardless of how differently
the Garden of Eden may have been conceived from ancient times through the medieval period to more recent days, and no matter the differences in computations of the creation date of the earth, the idea that every member of the human race is descended from the biblical Adam has been a standard doctrine in Islamic, Jewish and Christian thought. In this respect, if in no other, the catechisms of the seventeenth-century Westminster divines can be taken to speak for them all when they declare that “all mankind” descended from Adam “by ordinary generation.” People's sense of themselves, their understanding of their place in the divinely ordered scheme of things, their very identity as human beings created in the image of God, thus rested on a conception of human origins that assumed the literal truth of the biblical narrative and traced the varieties of the human race proximately to the three sons of Noah and ultimately to Adam and Eve.

I dwell on Adam and Eve for two reasons. The first is simply to show that despite the claims of religious liberals like Sullivan, there's no denying that over history much of the Bible has been seen literally, particularly when—as in the case of the First Couple—an important doctrine is at stake. I often hear theologians argue that their predecessors like Aquinas and Augustine were not literalists, and that literalism began only in the nineteenth or twentieth century. But that's a distortion of history, one designed to save churches from the embarrassment of having taken seriously stories now seen as palpably fictitious.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, is often praised for having argued that scripture can be read metaphorically. Such a claim, though, is inaccurate, easily dispelled if you simply read his writings. Aquinas actually argued that scripture could be read
both literally and metaphorically
. In other words, he waffled, but, importantly, emphasized that if there was a conflict between metaphorical and literal interpretations of the Bible, literalism must win.

Here, for example, is Aquinas discussing the reality of paradise, the abode of Adam and Eve, in
Summa Theologica
. Responding to the words of his predecessor Saint Augustine, Aquinas shows how historical truth trumps metaphor (my emphasis):

Augustine says
(Gen. ad lit. viii, 1): “Three general opinions prevail about paradise. Some understand a place merely corporeal; others a place entirely spiritual; while others, whose opinion, I confess, pleases me, hold that paradise was both corporeal and spiritual.”

I answer that, As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xiii, 21): “Nothing prevents us from holding, within proper limits, a spiritual paradise; so long as we believe in the truth of the events narrated as having there occurred.” For whatever Scripture tells us about paradise is set down as matter of history; and
wherever Scripture makes use of this method, we must hold to the historical truth of the narrative as a foundation of whatever spiritual explanation we may offer
.

Aquinas believed not only in paradise, but also in the instantaneous creation of species and of Adam and Eve as humanity's ancestors, as well as in a young Earth (less than six thousand years old) and the literal existence of
Noah and his great flood. Further, Aquinas was obsessed with angels. Not only did he see them as real but devoted a large section of the
Summa Theologica
(“Treatise on the Angels”) to their existence, number, nature, how they move, what they know, and what they want. The philosopher Andrew Bernstein describes such theological analysis of arcane and unevidenced claims as “
the tragedy of theology
in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—studying nothing.”