Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (11 page)

Saint Augustine of Hippo, who commented extensively on Genesis, was quite explicit that the text, though it had a spiritual message, was based on historical events:

The narrative indeed
in these books is not cast in the figurative kind of language you find in the Song of Songs, but quite simply tells of things that happened, as in the books of the Kingdoms and others like them. But there are things being said with which ordinary human life has made us quite familiar, and so it is not difficult, indeed, it is the obvious thing to do, to take them first in the literal sense, and then chisel out from them what future realities the actual events described may figuratively stand for.

Augustine was also a literalist about many things later refuted by science: a young Earth, instantaneous creation, the historical reality of Adam and Eve, paradise, and Noah and his Ark. It's ironic that both he and Aquinas are constantly touted by accommodationists as having a “nonliteral” theology that is completely compatible with science in general and with evolution in particular. Such a claim can be made only by those who haven't read these theologians or are dedicated to whitewashing church history.

I could go on, but two more examples will suffice. The Protestant reformer John Calvin believed in the virginity of Mary, a historical Adam and Eve, and a literal hell. Like Aquinas, he also believed that heretics should be killed. As for metaphorical interpretation of the Quran, that's simply not on the menu: as we saw above, the majority of the world's Muslims see that document as literally true.

Sullivan's rage about Adam and Eve raises my second point. If you want
to read much of the Bible as allegory, you must overturn the history of theology, rewriting it to conform to your liberal, science-friendly faith. Besides pretending that you're following in the tradition of ancient theologians, you must also explain the way you can discern truth amid the metaphors. What is allegory and what is real? How do you tell the difference? This is particularly difficult for Christians, because the historical evidence for Jesus—that is, for a real person around whom the myth accreted—is thin. And evidence for Jesus as the son of God is unconvincing, resting solely on the assertions of the Bible and interpretations of people writing decades after the events described in the Gospels.

If faith is often grounded on facts, we might expect one of two results if those facts were shown to be wrong: either people would abandon their faith—or some parts of it—or they would simply deny the evidence that contradicted their beliefs.

There isn't much data on the first possibility, but there's some suggestion that at least major parts of faith are resistant to scientific disproof. As we've seen, 64 percent of Americans would retain a religious belief even if science disproved it, while only 23 percent would consider changing that belief. The results were only slightly less disheartening in
Julian Baggini's online survey
of British churchgoing Christians, 41 percent of whom either agreed or tended to agree with the statement “If science contradicts the Bible, I will believe the Bible, not science.”

Evolution: The Biggest Problem

The clearest example of religion's resistance to science is, of course, its attitude toward evolution. While not the only scientific theory that contradicts scripture, evolution has implications, involving materialism, human exceptionalism, and morality, that are distressing to many believers.
And yet it is supported
by mountains of scientific data—at least as much data as support the uncontroversial “germ theory” that infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms.

And indeed, evolution
is largely rejected by the faithful. Among twenty-three countries surveyed in a 2011 Ipsos/Reuters poll on acceptance of human evolution, 28 percent of all people rejected it in favor of creationism,
with the rejection higher in more religious countries. Saudi Arabia and Turkey were the biggest deniers of evolution. (This relationship also holds among states within the United States: the most religious states show the most denial of evolution.) The situation is especially dire in the United States, a country considered scientifically advanced. Yet when it comes to evolution, many Americans remain in the Bronze Age. A 2014 Gallup poll of American attitudes toward human evolution showed that fully 42 percent were straight biblical young-Earth creationists, agreeing that humans were created in our present form within the last ten thousand years. Another 31 percent were “theistic evolutionists,” accepting evolution with the caveat that it was supernaturally guided or prompted by God. And only 19 percent of Americans—fewer than one in five—accepted evolution the way biologists do, as a naturalistic, unguided process. These figures have remained almost constant over the last three decades, with perhaps a slight and recent rise in those accepting naturalistic evolution.

This rejection of evolution can't be explained simply by Americans' ignorance of the evidence. We live in an age of unprecedented science popularization: think of people like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, David Attenborough, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Edward O. Wilson. The evidence for evolution is everywhere—only a few clicks away on the Internet, a perusal of
National Geographic,
or a single push on the remote control. Yet evolution is rejected by Americans as strongly as it was three decades ago.

The reason is clear.
When asked in 2007
why they denied evolution, Americans gave as the main reasons their belief in Jesus (19 percent of respondents), God (16 percent), or religion in general (16 percent), all exceeding those who thought there was “not enough scientific evidence” for evolution (14 percent). Other studies show that although religious people in the United States know slightly less about science than do nonbelievers, their knowledge about what the theory of evolution actually
says
is about the same. Nevertheless, regardless of how science-savvy they are, the religious deny the fact of evolution much more often than do the nonreligious; in fact, the more the faithful know about science, the more they reject evolution!
This arrant rejection of facts
is clearly based not on lack of education or ignorance, but on religious belief.

Indeed, faith can trump facts even when church authority accepts the
facts. The Catholic Church, for instance, accepts a form of theistic evolution, largely naturalistic but still tweaked by God, who instilled souls in
Homo sapiens
at some point in our evolution.
Nevertheless, 27 percent
of American Catholics cling to biblical creationism, believing that humans were created instantaneously by God and have remained unchanged ever since. Resistance to evolution in America, then, can be laid completely at the door of religion. You can find some religions without creationism, but you can't find creationism without religion.

It's a useful exercise to ask religious people what it would take for them to either abandon the “nonnegotiables” of their faith—like the view that Jesus was divine or that the Quran is the word of Allah—or to give up their faith entirely. Very often you will get the answer “Nothing could make me give up those beliefs.” As we'll see below, that's one of the many incompatibilities between the attitudes toward religious “truth” and scientific truth. Scientists are not only constantly looking for evidence that would prove their pet theories wrong, but often know exactly what kind of evidence would do it. There are no “nonnegotiables” in science.

Can You Have Faith Without Truth Claims?

Religion, of course, is not
solely
concerned with truth claims. As Francis Spufford noted, many—perhaps most—people aren't religious because they're convinced by their church's arguments for God and scripture. Often religion really
is
“a structure of feelings, a house built of emotions.” Belief in God often comes not from evidence, but from teaching or indoctrination by peers, or some revelation that
seems
real. The “evidence,” often confected by theologians who specialize in justifying beliefs acquired in childhood, comes after. Or perhaps never, for how many religious people are even acquainted with the arguments for God's existence, or with the particulars of their belief?
A survey of Americans
in 2010 found, for instance, that Christians were abysmally ignorant about the details and doctrines of Christianity: only 42 percent of Catholics could name Genesis as the first book of the Bible, while only 55 percent knew that the bread and wine of the Communion
become,
rather than symbolize, the body and blood of Christ.

Further, it's often argued that the social and emotional aspects of belonging
to a faith, rather than its dogma, are the real motivating force for membership.
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt
, for example, sees religious communality as the main motivation for faith-based social action. This idea needs further exploration, particularly because some data contradict it. In Baggini's study of British Christians, for instance, the percentage of people who went to church to worship God far exceeded those who went to feel part of a community or receive spiritual guidance from readings and sermons.

But even if religion provides solace and social benefits, we need to know how much those benefits rest on the belief that your religion's claims are true.
How many Christians
would
remain
Christian were they to know for sure that Christ was neither divine nor resurrected but, as some biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman believe, simply an apocalyptic preacher of the ancient Middle East? How many Mormons would retain their faith were they to know for certain that Joseph Smith inscribed the golden plates supposedly presented by the angel Moroni? It's hard to answer such questions, but what we do know is this: many of those who abandoned their religion ascribe it not to losing their feeling of community, but to losing their belief in its doctrines.

In her acclaimed book
When God Talks Back,
the Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann concluded, “
People come to faith
not just because they decide that the propositions are true but because they experience God directly. They feel God's presence. They hear God's voice. Their hearts flood with an incandescent joy.” Her thesis is that it takes hard work to learn how to converse with God. But would those who succeed experience that joy if they didn't think that they were actually talking to someone who
listened
? Surely not much bliss accrues to those who think they're talking only to themselves.

It appears that theologians are ambivalent toward the empirical claims of religion. When writing for academics or liberal clerics, they downplay those claims, but when talking to “regular” believers, they affirm that faith rests on assertions about what's real in the universe. Alvin Plantinga, for instance, argues in one book that the literal truth of the Bible is subordinate to its moral lessons:

The aim is to discover
what God is teaching us in a given passage, and to do so in the light of these assumptions; the aim is not to determine
whether what is taught is true, or plausible, or well supported by the arguments.

But only a year earlier, Plantinga claimed not only that God exists, but also that he has definite humanlike qualities:

[
In Christianity, Judaism, and Islam
], theism is the belief that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing perfectly good immaterial person who has created the world, has created human beings “in his own image,” and to whom we owe worship, obedience and allegiance. . . . Now God, according to theistic belief, is a person: a being who has knowledge, affection (likes and dislikes), and executive will, and who can act on his beliefs in order to achieve his ends.

The question to ask believers is this: “Does it really matter whether what you believe about God is true—or don't you care?” If it does matter, then you must justify your beliefs; if it doesn't, then you must justify belief itself.

As we'll soon learn, both theologians and garden-variety believers show strong resistance to arguments that strive to falsify the ideas and character of God, and often devise ways to justify religious claims in the face of counterevidence. This kind of defense suggests that people really
do
care that their religious beliefs are true and are not just psychologically useful fictions.

The next definition we need, of course, is one for “incompatibility,” as there's always a way to construe that term that would make faith and fact seem compatible.

Let me first say what I
don't
mean by incompatibility. I don't mean
logical
incompatibility: that the existence of religion is simply and a priori
incompatible with the practice of science. That's clearly wrong, for in principle there could be both science and a god to be worshipped. Nor do I mean
practical
incompatibility: the idea that one simply can't be a religious
scientist or a science-friendly believer. That's clearly false as well, for there are many examples of both. Finally, I am not claiming that religious people are in general opposed to either science in general or the facts it reveals. Although some believers have problems with evolution and cosmology, the vast majority of religious people have no problem with issues like how genetics works, what causes disease and how to treat it, how molecules react chemically with one another, and the principles of aerodynamics. Indeed, nearly everyone in modern societies puts their trust in science every day.

My definition of “compatibility” is the second one given by the
Oxford English Dictionary
(the first is “participating in suffering, sympathetic”):

Mutually tolerant; capable of being admitted together, or of existing together in the same subject; accordant, consistent, congruous, agreeable.

While religion and science could be considered “mutually tolerant,” in that some scientists and believers tolerate each other's existence, and could even be seen as “capable of being admitted together,” as with religious scientists, I don't see them as “existing together in the same subject” or as “accordant, consistent, congruous, agreeable.”