Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (13 page)

In fact, changes like the elimination of limbo don't come from new information, but from secular currents in society that make church dogma seem insupportable or even barbaric. The idea of hell, for instance, has become morally repugnant, and so has morphed from an underground barbecue into a more temperate “separation from God.”

Just as many churches don't want to be seen as rejecting science, neither do they wish to lag too far behind public morality, and so they often tweak their religious “truths” to reflect the zeitgeist. Perhaps the most obvious example is the Mormon policy on blacks in the priesthood. Although African Americans were permitted to be priests until 1852, church president Brigham Young then barred them from the priesthood (Mormons have a lay priesthood) and from participating in certain religious ceremonies—all because their pigmentation supposedly reflected the mark of Cain. A century later this doctrine came under pressure from the American civil rights movement, as well as from the church's desire to make converts in Brazil, a nation where its racial policy would be particularly odious. This produced a timely revision in 1978, ten years after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., when the governing body of the church declared that God, having heard their prayers, sent them a “revelation” giving blacks full privileges as Mormons.

Does anybody believe this account besides Mormons themselves? It's simply too convenient, too opportunistic. And why didn't God know from the outset that discrimination against black Mormons was wrong? What we see here, which holds for many religious doctrines, is “truth” arising not from observation or even revelation but from collusion.

Despite the claims of creationists, who see evolutionary theory as a similar collusion among scientists, there are no such conspiracies in science. The chemist Peter Atkins correctly observed, “
Natural selection was a revolution
and a stepping-stone to fame; so was relativity, and so was quantum theory. The sheer thrill of discovery is the spur to greater effort. All young scientists aspire to revolution.” The same can't be said for theologians (Martin Luther is a rare exception), who either bear their heresies in silence or aspire only to trivial reinterpretations of church doctrine.

Falsifiability

I've already noted that a good scientific theory should be one capable of being shown wrong. When sufficient evidence accumulates that makes a theory no longer tenable, that theory is either altered or discarded.

The attitude toward evidence differs in religion. It's important to note at the outset that religion doesn't automatically
reject
scientific evidence. If we could find nonbiblical confirmation, for example, for the Crucifixion of Jesus, or non-Quranic confirmation for the existence of djinn—the disembodied evil spirits that interact with Muslims—religion would be the first to tout that evidence. If prayers to Allah (but not the Christian God) reliably worked, if amputees or the eyeless could be healed by visiting Lourdes, if archaeological evidence was found for the Exodus from Egypt, religion would proclaim the scientific evidence from the mountaintops, just as would the Christians who still seek the remnants of the Ark on Turkey's Mount Ararat. For decades creationists have tried to show how science supports the story of Genesis.

Where religion diverges from science is how its adherents behave when the evidence
doesn't
support their beliefs. In some cases they behave rationally, and abandon those beliefs—though we shouldn't forget that 64 percent of Americans and 41 percent of British Christians would ditch the science instead. But certain core doctrines are off-limits, and have been immunized against disproof by the construction of a watertight theological edifice—apologetics.

Take the Resurrection of Jesus, for which the only supporting evidence is the contradictory accounts of the Gospels. But suppose we could get
evidence
against
it—say, the discovery of ancient texts that tell of a Jesus who didn't revive? It wouldn't matter. Several prominent believers have proclaimed with finality that nothing—nothing—could shake their belief in this and other fundamental claims of Christianity. Here's the prominent theologian William Lane Craig:

And therefore, if in some historically contingent circumstances
the evidence that I have available to me should turn against Christianity, I don't think that that controverts the witness of the Holy Spirit. In such a situation I should regard that as simply a result of the contingent circumstances that I'm in, and that if I should pursue this with due diligence and with time, I would discover in fact that the evidence—if I could get the correct picture—would support exactly what the witness of the Holy Spirit tells me.

Justin Thacker, a theologian at Cliff College, agrees:

Let's take the resurrection
of Jesus Christ. If science somehow, and I can't even imagine how, but if it told me that the resurrection of Jesus Christ was just categorically impossible, could not happen, I would disbelieve that and continue to believe what the Bible teaches about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, because if you take away the resurrection there is no Christian faith, it just doesn't exist.

These statements are, to speak plainly, irrational. Thacker, for instance, deems the Resurrection immune to disproof not because it's supported by strong evidence, but because its absence would undermine his religion. Craig is convinced that with sufficient mental contortions, he'd manage to save his beliefs despite their refutation.

Finally, the liberal Catholic theologian John Haught, who has argued strongly for a harmony between science and religion, has also claimed that if one could have put a camera in Jesus's tomb, it would not have captured an image of Jesus's revival, adding that “
if you ask me
whether a scientific experiment could verify the Resurrection, I would say that such an event is entirely too important to be subjected to a method which is devoid of all religious meaning.”

Now, this is simply a devious way to make an empirical claim but shield it from the possibility of being refuted. Imagine if a cosmologist pronounced the Big Bang too important to be tested!

I haven't cherry-picked these responses while ignoring dissenting views: I've simply never seen any Christian avow in print that he'd abandon belief in the Resurrection if science proved it wrong. Of course, such evidence would be difficult to get, but because the only evidence for the Resurrection is the Bible, which is known to be unreliable in many other matters, it seems judicious to avoid defending Jesus's revival so strongly.

Earlier we heard from Karl Giberson, the evangelical Christian physicist who argued, “Religion often makes claims about ‘the way things are.'” Nevertheless, Giberson sees those claims as unfalsifiable, constituting a Procrustean bed into which any annoying facts must be fitted:

As a believer in God
, I am convinced in advance
that the world is not an accident and that, in some mysterious way, our existence is an “expected” result. No data would dispel it. Thus, I do not look at natural history as a source of data to determine whether or not the world has purpose. Rather, my approach is to anticipate that the facts of natural history will be compatible with the purpose and meaning I have encountered elsewhere. And my understanding of science does nothing to dissuade me from this conviction.

There can be no clearer statement about the different ways science and religion approach matters of fact. By asserting at the outset that your mind is closed to facts bearing on your beliefs—by asserting that you're
using
faith to buttress your beliefs—you're admitting that you're behaving irrationally. One hopes that Giberson doesn't practice his physics the way he practices his religion.

Cherry-Picking Your “Truths” from Scripture or Authority

Perhaps the most common criticism of prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins is that they see
all
religion as being literalist, and their criticisms are attacks on straw men, comprising at best only a small fraction of
believers. This is invariably accompanied by the assertion that literalism is unwarranted because “the Bible isn't a book of science.” The arguments come from scientists like Francisco Ayala:

Genesis is a book of religious revelations
and of religious teachings, not a treatise of astronomy or biology.

From liberal theologians like Langdon Gilkey:

As we have seen
, religious explanations are based on special sorts of experience, special insights or revelations, not objective, sharable experiences. Religious theories or beliefs cannot, therefore, be falsified by evidence or by new evidence.

And even from the pope himself:

How should we understand the narratives of Genesis
? The Bible is not intended as a manual of the natural sciences; it wants to help us understand the authentic and profound truth of things.

As I've noted, these are actually claims that the Bible doesn't give us facts.
Unfortunately, many believers
think it does, including the 30 percent of Americans who regard the book as the actual word of God, and at least some of the 49 percent who see it as a work of humans
inspired
by God. And, of course, most Muslims see the Quran as literally true—and some as a science textbook as well. We'll see later that accommodationist Muslims often argue that the Quran makes truth claims that are perfectly consonant with the findings of modern science.

Sometimes it seems that scriptural literalists are more intellectually honest than the “scripture is not a textbook” crowd, who, rather than admit that science has falsified much of the Bible—and, by implication, has cast doubt on the rest of it—argue that the book is effectively one long parable. After a stiff dose of pick-and-choose apologetics, the words of the Australian creationist Carl Wieland seem like a gust of fresh air:

The Bible's prime purpose
certainly concerns salvation, not scientific explanation. But to use this to evade the clear teaching of origins in the foundational book of Genesis is intellectually illegitimate, if not dishonest. . . . Even though the Bible's purpose is not to teach history as such, the history it teaches is true. It states that Jesus was crucified at a specific moment in real history
via
a specific person, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. It would be bizarre to claim that it didn't matter whether these events were true or not, “because the Bible's not a textbook.”

The account of Jesus rising from the dead cannot be classified as only one form of truth; i.e. it cannot be a Christian or “religious” truth without at the same time being a historical truth (unless language loses all of its meaning); and it cannot be
historically
true unless it is also
scientifically
true.

The problems with cherry-picking from scripture are obvious. First, we can't step into the minds of the Bible's authors to see what they meant when they wrote it. But we can say this: except for items like the parables of Jesus, clearly meant to be fictitious tales with a moral point, there's no hint in the Bible (or the Quran) that its stories and claims about issues like heaven and hell were meant as anything other than literal truths. That's not to say that these factual claims weren't also meant to convey moral or spiritual lessons, but that those lessons must be discerned from things
that really happened
. In that sense, as Wieland argues, the Bible is indeed a science book, if by that you mean “a book that makes claims about our universe that are really true.” And that is how the Bible was interpreted by many, both laypeople and theologians, for millennia—and how the Quran is still interpreted. If the Bible was intended as
pure
allegory, that fact somehow escaped the notice of churches and theologians for centuries.

And if you wed yourself to metaphor rather than fact, how do you know which interpretation is correct? With a bit of imagination—after all, there's no guide to truth here—you can pick almost any biblical story, say, that of Adam and Eve, and discern several competing explanations. In fact, even as I write, theologians, annoyed by the genetic disproof of Adam and Eve as our literal ancestors, are engaged in mental gymnastics trying to find metaphors
in a story that has been falsified. The story of Job has baffled scholars for centuries, for its “meaning” is murky, yet there is no lack of those willing to give it a metaphorical spin.

The big problem for believers, of course, is to find a consistent method for distinguishing fact from metaphor. If Adam and Eve are metaphors, could the Resurrection be a metaphor as well—perhaps for spiritual rebirth? And how are we supposed to interpret God's commands in the Old Testament that a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath should be put to death, as should practicing homosexuals, adulterers, and those who curse their parents? Because these are no longer seen as valid moral prescriptions, are they really metaphors for something else, or did God simply change his mind?

The way liberal believers winnow fact from metaphor is in fact to use science: whatever science has falsified becomes metaphor, and what has not yet been falsified can retain its status as fact. But this makes religious dogma subservient to science. The accommodationist strategy of accepting both science and conventional faith, then, leaves you with a double standard: rational on the origin of blood clotting, irrational on the Resurrection; rational on dinosaurs, irrational on virgin births. Scientists, archaeologists, and historians can tell us which parts of scripture are false, but who can affirm what is true? There are no good criteria.

Turning Scientific Necessities into Theological Virtues

This tactic goes beyond converting a false religious claim into a metaphor: the metaphor is further turned into a
virtue
. In other words, by correcting scripture, science gives us a theology that's even better than we were able to glean from the Bible in prescientific days.