Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (16 page)

But, of course, they aren't. Religions make truth claims that have been repeatedly disproved, claims involving both natural and supernatural phenomena (I'll say more about the supernatural later). The disproved religious claims involve biology, geology, history, and astronomy, and include these assertions: animals and plants were created in their present form over a short period of time, the Earth is young and was once completely inundated by a great flood, modern humans descend from only two progenitors, Native Americans descend from immigrants from the Middle East, and Caucasians are the results of a breeding experiment by a black scientist. These are all wrong, and it's science, not faith, that has shown them to be wrong.

Even the
historical
claims of religion, not counting the various origin myths, are often dubious. There is, for instance, no evidence for the Exodus of Israelites from Egypt, or for the census of the entire Roman Empire around the time of Jesus's birth as described in the Gospel of Luke. As we've seen, there's no reliable historical account—and there
should
be one—for the Crucifixion miracles, like earthquakes and resurrected saints, described in the Gospel of Matthew. How did historians of the time miss
that
?
True, some historical facts adduced in the Bible are accurate, for it was written by people living in those times. There is evidence, for instance, for a Roman governor of Judaea named Pontius Pilate, though no extrascriptural evidence that he judged Jesus. But biblical archaeology has, by and large, experienced one failure after another. If you have no problems rejecting biblical incidents like the Exodus or the census of Caesar Augustus, incidents that, like the Resurrection, come solely from scripture, why accept the Resurrection itself?

For if the checkable truths of religion—the “natural truths”—are faulty, why should we give credence to the harder-to-test “divine truths”? Did those claims—the existence of souls, the birth of Jesus from a virgin and his
subsequent execution and Resurrection, the presence of an afterlife, the existence of demons, the ascent of Muhammad to heaven on a wingèd horse—just happen to be the ones that God or his scribes got correct, while they erred on many others? If the Bible can't even get the basic facts of history right, much less those of science, how can we claim divine authority or influence in its authorship? Was it beyond God, speaking either directly or through his emissaries, to tell his creatures that it was advisable to wash their hands after defecating, or that animals and plants weren't created suddenly but evolved from other forms over a long period of time?

Over the years, I've repeatedly challenged people to give me a single verified fact about reality that came from scripture or revelation alone and then was confirmed only later by science or empirical observation. This parallels Christopher Hitchens's moral challenge, often leveled at religious opponents in debates: “
Name me an ethical statement
or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.”
Like Hitchens, I've never had a credible response.

The methodological conflicts between science and religion have ultimately produced a conflict in philosophy: whether or not one sees gods as a realistic possibility. It's important to realize that this philosophical difference between scientists and believers was not established at the outset as an integral part of science, but arose gradually as a by-product of science's success.

Science is now deeply wedded to
naturalism,
the view that all of nature operates according to laws—or rather, “regularities,” for the word “laws” implies a lawgiver—and that a combination of theoretical and empirical study can reveal those laws. (A related phenomenon is
materialism,
the view that matter and energy are all there is to the universe. I prefer to use “naturalism” because it's always possible that we'll find some stuff, like “dark matter,” that is neither matter nor energy as we understand them now.) One of the main criticisms of science by philosophers and theologians is that scientists are
committed
to naturalism, almost as if we had to swear allegiance to the idea when we got our science degrees. But this criticism is wrong. Naturalism is
not something that was always part of science, for at one time science
did
rely on supernatural explanations. As modern science established itself, there was a period when both natural and supernatural explanations abounded, and only gradually did science slip the bonds of the divine. Creationism is one example—the only credible explanation, before 1859, for the remarkable fit of organisms to their environments. But invoking principles other than naturalism never helped us make progress. It was Darwin's reliance on the naturalistic idea of natural (as opposed to supernatural) selection that correctly explained biological adaptation and diversity.

An anecdote about the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace provides the classic example of why we adopted naturalism. The backstory involves the astronomical work of Isaac Newton. Genius that he was, Newton nevertheless invoked God as a scientific hypothesis. He thought, for instance, that the orbits of the planets would be unstable without God's occasional intervention to keep them in place. It was Laplace who later showed that such divine twiddling was unnecessary, and that natural law alone was adequate. The superfluity of religious explanations is described in a story that, though often told, may well be apocryphal. Laplace was said to have given Napoleon Bonaparte a copy of his great five-volume work on the solar system, the
Mécanique Céleste
. Aware that the books contained no mention of God, Napoleon supposedly taunted him, “Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.” Laplace answered, famously and brusquely, “Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-la”—“I have had no need of that hypothesis.” And scientists haven't needed it since.

Our reliance on naturalism, then, is not an assumption decided in advance, but a result of experience—the experience of men like Darwin and Laplace who found that the only way forward was to posit natural rather than supernatural explanations. Because of this success, and the recurrent failure of supernaturalism to explain
anything
about the universe, naturalism is now taken for granted as the guiding principle of science. Its use in all scientific studies is called
methodological naturalism
or—because it's used to explain observations—
methodological empiricism
.

Nevertheless, some scientists persist in claiming, wrongly, that naturalism is a set-in-stone rule of science. One of these is my Ph.D. adviser, Richard
Lewontin. In a review of Carl Sagan's wonderful book
The Demon-Haunted World,
Lewontin tried to explain the methods of science:

It is not that the methods and institutions of science
somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our
a priori
adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

That quotation has been promulgated with delight by both creationists and theologians, for it seems to show the narrow-mindedness of scientists who refuse to even admit the
possibility
of the supernatural and immaterial.

But Lewontin was mistaken. We can
in principle
allow a Divine Foot in the door; it's just that we've never seen the Foot. If, for example, supernatural phenomena like healing through prayer, accurate religious prophecies, and recollection of past lives surfaced with regularity and credibility, we might be forced to abandon our adherence to purely natural explanations. And in fact we've sometimes put naturalism aside by taking some of these claims seriously and trying to study them. Examples include ESP and other “paranormal phenomena” that lack any naturalistic explanation.

Sadly, arguments similar to Lewontin's—that naturalism is an unbreakable rule of science—are echoed by scientific organizations that want to avoid alienating religious people. Liberal believers can be useful allies in fighting creationism, but accommodationists fear that those believers will be driven away by any claim that science can tackle the supernatural. Better to keep comity and pretend that science
by definition
can say nothing about the divine. This coddling of religious sentiments was demonstrated by Eugenie Scott, the former director of an otherwise admirable anticreationist organization, the National Center for Science Education:

First, science is a limited way of knowing
, in which practitioners attempt to explain the natural world using natural explanations. By definition, science cannot consider supernatural explanations: if there is an omnipotent deity,
there is no way that a scientist can exclude or include it in a research design. This is especially clear in experimental research: an omnipotent deity cannot be “controlled” (as one wag commented, “you can't put God in a test tube, or keep him out of one”). So by definition, if an individual is attempting to explain some aspect of the natural world using science, he or she must act as if there were no supernatural forces operating on it. I think this methodological materialism is well understood by evolutionists.

Note that Scott claims naturalism as part of the
definition
of science. But that's incorrect, for nothing in science prohibits us from considering supernatural explanations. Of course, if you define “supernatural” as “that which cannot be investigated by science,” then Scott's claims become tautologically true. Otherwise, it's both glib and misleading to say that God is off-limits because he can't be “controlled” or “put in a test tube.” Every study of spiritual healing or the efficacy of prayer (which, if done properly, includes controls) puts God into a test tube. It's the same for tests of nondivine supernatural phenomena like ESP, ghosts, and out-of-body experiences. If something is supposed to exist in a way that has tangible effects on the universe, it falls within the ambit of science. And supernatural beings and phenomena can have real-world effects.

In the end, the incompatibility between the methods of science and religion ultimately yields a genuine
philosophical
incompatibility. Working scientists are constantly steeped in doubt and criticality, leading to an ingrained skepticism about truth claims—not a bad thing, really. If you combine that attitude with the proven value of naturalism over the history of science, and mix in the repeated failure to find evidence for the supernatural, then you arrive at the following philosophy: because there is no evidence for supernatural entities or powers, although there
could
have been such evidence, one is justified in thinking that
those entities and powers do not exist
. This attitude is called
philosophical naturalism
.

The philosopher Barbara Forrest defends the connection between methodological and philosophical naturalism:

Taken together, the
(1) proven success of methodological naturalism combined with (2) the massive body of knowledge gained by it, (3) the
lack of a comparable method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of any conclusive evidence for the existence of the supernatural, yield philosophical naturalism as the most methodologically and epistemologically defensible world view.

This is where philosophical naturalism wins—it is a
substantive
world view built on the cumulative
results
of methodological
naturalism, and there is nothing comparable to the latter in
terms of providing epistemic support for a world view. If knowledge
is only as good as the method by which it is obtained, and
a world view is only as good as its epistemological underpinning,
then from both a methodological and an epistemological
standpoint, philosophical naturalism is more justifiable than any other world view that one might conjoin with methodological naturalism.

Although Forrest wrongly implies that science can't examine the supernatural, her overall argument makes sense. If you spend your life looking in vain for the Loch Ness Monster, stalking the lake with a camera, sounding it with sonar, and sending submersibles into its depths, and yet still find nothing, what is the more sensible view: to conclude provisionally that the monster simply isn't there, or to throw up your hands and say, “It
might
be there; I'm not sure”? Most people would give the first response—unless they're talking about God.

Some scientists succeed at being methodological naturalists on the job and supernaturalists at other times, but it's hard to reconcile an ingrained skepticism toward the claims of your colleagues with complete credulity toward the claims of fellow believers. The skepticism usually leaks through, explaining both why many scientists become atheists and why many believers instinctively distrust or even disparage science. The hemorrhage of scientific doubt into the body of faith is also, I think, why older scientists are less religious than younger ones (they've been critical for longer), and why more-accomplished scientists are also less religious (their criticality, and willingness to question authority, is what brought them renown).

It's important to realize that philosophical naturalism is, like atheism, a
provisional
view. It's not the kind of worldview that says, “I
know
there is no god,” but the kind that says, “Until I see some evidence, I won't accept the existence of gods.” Even so, philosophical naturalism is anathema to
accommodationists, who, even though they may be atheists themselves, avoid flaunting their beliefs. And even scientists who embrace that philosophy tend to keep quiet about it, for, at least in America, we're surrounded by believers, some of whom fund our research and others who help us fight creationism and pseudoscience. It's not clear whether professing atheism would endanger those alliances, but in America, where an atheist is a skunk in the woodpile, it seems better to play it safe.