Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (25 page)

Putting this together, if we replay the tape of either cosmic or biological evolution, we simply can't make a rational and logical argument that the appearance of humanoids was inevitable—and we can make a good argument that it was not. Any other answer involves either wishful thinking or unscientific claims grounded in theology, like God-directed mutations.

In the end, theistic evolution is not a useful compromise between science and religion. Insofar as it makes testable predictions, it has been falsified, and insofar as it makes claims that can't be tested, it can be ignored.

Does evolution pose further problems for theology? Yes, and big ones. There is no obvious explanation, for instance, why an omnipotent and loving God who directed evolution would lead it into so many dead ends. After all, over 99 percent of the species that ever lived went extinct without leaving descendants. The cruelty of natural selection, which involves endless wastage and pain, also demands explanation. Wouldn't a loving and all-powerful God simply have produced all existing species de novo, as described in Genesis?

As we saw in the last chapter, the usual response is to transform the unpalatable necessities of evolution into virtues, as does the Catholic theologian John Haught:

The idea that secondary causes
[natural selection], rather than direct divine intervention, can account for the evolution of life may even be said to enhance rather than diminish the doctrine of divine creativity. Isn't it a tribute to God that the world is not just passive putty in the Creator's hands but instead an inherently active and self-creating process, one that
can evolve and produce new life on its own? If God can make things that make themselves, isn't that better than a magician-deity who pulls all the strings, as theological “occasionalists” have supposed?

But one could easily make the opposite argument: that de novo
creation is “better” because it avoids the suffering, waste, and extinction inherent in evolution. How does one weigh the value of creativity against the suffering of sentient creatures, including the several close relatives of modern humans, like Neanderthals, who went extinct?

Theistic evolution also comes in handy in theodicy, for you can use it, as does the evolutionist Francisco Ayala, to get God off the hook for all that “natural evil”:

The theory of evolution provided
the solution to the remaining component of the problem of evil. As floods and drought were a necessary consequence of the fabric of the physical world, predators and parasites, dysfunctions and diseases were a consequence of the evolution of life. They were
not
a result of deficient or malevolent design: the features of organisms were not
designed
by the Creator.

The flavor of special pleading is strong here, for surely God, were he really omnipotent, could have designed a world whose physical fabric lacked floods, drought, and evolutionary suffering. And, of course, if God gets the credit for the adaptive mutations that led to humans, why is he exculpated for the maladaptive ones, like mutations that cause cancers, genetic diseases, and deformed children? If mutation were a process designed by God, there's no reason why the vast majority of mutations should be harmful—though that's exactly what you'd expect if the process were purely a naturalistic one involving random errors. Unsurprisingly, theologians like Alvin Plantinga have an answer to that one, too:

But any world that contains atonement
will contain sin and evil and consequent suffering and pain. Furthermore, if the remedy is to be proportionate to the sickness, such a world will contain a great deal of sin and a great deal of suffering and pain. Still further, it may very well contain sin
and suffering, not just on the part of human beings but perhaps also on the part of other creatures as well. Indeed, some of these other creatures might be vastly more powerful than human beings, and some of them—Satan and his minions, for example—may have been permitted to play a role in the evolution of life on earth, steering it in the direction of predation, waste and pain. (Some may snort with disdain at this suggestion; it is none the worse for that.)

It is astounding to see something like this coming from a respected philosopher. Not only do we encounter special pleading involving a God who makes animals atone for the sin of humans, but also the invocation of another source of evil: Satan. We are asked to believe, for instance, that the genetically based facial cancer wiping out Tasmanian devils could involve satanic manipulation of their chromosomes—innocent marsupials suffering horribly because of the sin of a primate. Snorting with disdain is in fact the proper response to this kind of ad hoc-ery, at least until Plantinga gives us some evidence for Satan.

It won't do for religious people to say that these answers are necessarily speculative because we have no idea how God works in evolution. If you admit that kind of ignorance, then you must also admit that we have no idea
whether God has
anything to do with evolution
. It is curious that those who claim such firm knowledge about God's nature and works become silent when asked about God's methods.

The biggest problem with theistic evolution, as with all attempts to twist theology to fit new facts, is that it's simply a metaphysical add-on to a physical theory, a supplement demanded not by evidence but by the emotional needs of the faithful. It's what the philosopher Anthony Grayling calls an “
arbitrary superfluity
”: the cosmological twiddling that Laplace rejected when he told Napoleon that the God hypothesis wasn't needed. And in fact, you find these superfluities only in evolutionary biology—and occasionally cosmology—for other sciences don't conflict with people's cherished beliefs. If you stretch science to include medicine, then we also have the arbitrary superfluity of seeing disease as a product of faulty thinking or spiritual error, a view that, as we'll see in the final chapter, has led many to reject science-based medicine and to suffer the consequences.

Finally, theistic evolution makes a common error of accommodationism: confusing
logical possibilities
with
probabilities
. Yes, it is logically possible either that God started the evolutionary process, created the first organism, and then stood back to watch the action, or that he intervened from time to time, creating new organisms or mutations. But from what we know about evolution, that's unlikely. The process shows every sign of being naturalistic, material, unguided, and lacking divine assistance. To a scientist, theistic evolution fails because it requires that with one part of your brain—the “evolution” part—you accept only those things that are tested and supported by evidence and reason, while with the “theistic” part you rely on faith, assuming things that are either unnecessary or unevidenced. It's an unholy matrimony between science and religion, theology wearing a lab coat. We'll discuss the harms of this dysfunctional marriage in the last chapter, but some of the effects include the public misunderstanding of science (as in thinking that “theistic evolution” is scientific); the belief that religion can give us answers that currently elude science (e.g., why do the laws of physics permit the existence of life?); and the idea that there are “other ways of knowing,” including revelation, that can yield truths about the cosmos. These are not just academic issues, for they have serious (and harmful) consequences for the real world: implications for morality, medicine, politics, ecology, and the general well-being of our species.

When I was working as a pastor
I would often gloss over the clash between the scientific world view and the perspective of religion. I would say that the insights of science were no threat to faith because science and religion are “different ways of knowing” and are not in conflict because they are trying to answer different questions. Science focuses on “how” the world came to be, and religion addresses the question of “why” we are here. I was dead wrong. There are not different ways of knowing. There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world.

—Mike Aus

T
he failure of accommodationism has led believers to engage with science in other than conciliatory ways. One way is for religion itself to don the mantle of science, claiming that there are some observations about nature that are best explained—or
only
explained—by the existence of a god. I call this strategy the “new natural theology,” because it descends from earlier efforts to discern God's hand in nature. A related argument is that religion, like science, philosophy, and literature, is simply another “way of knowing” about the universe, possessing unique methods that yield valid truths. Some further argue that religion should get
credit
for science, because science was supposedly an outgrowth of faith—usually Christian faith.

When all else fails, believers find ways to denigrate science. Science is said to be an unreliable way to find knowledge (after all, scientific “truths”
often change), is susceptible to misuse (read: atomic bombs and Nazi eugenics), and promotes “scientism,” the view that science aims to engulf all other disciplines, forcing areas like history, literature, and art to become scientific or become irrelevant.

There are two more diagnostic signs that accommodationists have been pushed against the wall: their insistence that “science can't prove that God
doesn't
exist” (also known as “you can't prove a negative”), and their claim that science is just as fallible as religion because both ultimately rest on faith. As the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has pointed out, denigrating science is often more appealing than making theological “god of the gaps” arguments, for “
there must always be many extraordinary facts
that could potentially discredit the conventional world-view [science], but relatively few facts that could provide positive support for a specific alternative [religion]. The project of doing down science was therefore always more likely to make headway than the project of bolstering a new kind of parascience.”

These ideas, while not rare, are scattered through a huge literature, and some, like the “other ways of knowing” trope, are rarely discussed critically. In this chapter I'll examine the most common critiques of science. This is not just a tempest in an academic teapot, for by unfairly denigrating the field and trying to privilege indefensible “ways of knowing,” the critiques do serious damage to science, and ultimately to society.

No one infers a god
from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.

—Robert Green Ingersoll

While faith can be seen as belief without evidence, or belief with insufficient evidence to convince most rational people, that doesn't mean that the religious completely abjure evidence. If it supports their preconceptions, they'll accept it. Further, they'll even
seek
such evidence, and not just
through revelation. The perpetual search for Jesus's tomb and Noah's Ark underline this yearning for evidence.

But there are also difficult problems that science hasn't yet explained—the origin of life and the biological basis of consciousness are two—and, given their difficulty, some may never be solved. These lacunae constitute openings for theology: opportunities to propose God as a solution. These are, of course, the famous “god of the gaps” arguments, and while the problem with proposing a god as a solution to obstinate scientific puzzles is obvious (science has a history of filling the gaps and displacing gods), supernatural solutions continue to appear whenever science faces a really hard problem. These arguments might in fact be seen as a backhanded form of accommodationism: the use of religion to supplement and complete the task of science. And they are at the same time a form of apologetics: if a god is the best explanation for a natural phenomenon, then that validates the existence of gods.

“Natural theology” represents the attempt to discern God's ways, or find evidence for his existence, by observing nature directly instead using revelation or scripture (“revealed theology”). It operates, or is supposed to operate, in a manner similar to that of science: aiming to show that for some of nature's puzzles, using God gives better answers than using naturalism. The philosopher Herman Philipse defines natural theology as “
the attempt to argue for the truth
of a specific religious view on the basis of premises that non-believers will be able to endorse, that is, without appealing to the alleged authority of a revelation.” Natural theology is popular because, by offering God as the only reasonable solution to a scientific problem, it appeals to science-friendly believers as well as to theologians, both of whom realize that divine solutions can strengthen the faith of coreligionists and convert those on the fence.

Although natural theology has been practiced for centuries, it was especially popular in the West after science arose but before religion began to wane—between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. And it was part of the scientific toolkit. As we've learned, Isaac Newton invoked the action of God to stabilize planetary orbits. In the absence of other natural explanations, that was convincing at the time.

Perhaps the most famous argument for natural theology was that of the clergyman/philosopher William Paley, whose 1802 book
Natural Theology
(subtitled
Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity
) argued that the “design” of animals and plants gave convincing evidence for a beneficent God. His most famous argument involved the “camera” eye of humans, an organ so complicated and composed of so many interrelated parts that it simply couldn't be explained by natural processes. As he said, “
As far as the examination of the instrument goes
, there is precisely the same proof that the eye was made for vision, as there is that the telescope was made for assisting it.”
Even the young Darwin initially found this argument convincing, though he later refuted it decisively by showing that natural selection alone could produce organs as complex as the eye.

It's a bit Whiggish to criticize early natural theology. At the time it could be seen as science, for it had the positive agenda of understanding nature using the best available explanations. Among the many phenomena thought to have a divine cause were mental illness, lightning, the origin of the universe, magnetism, and, of course, evolution. Natural
theology was also scientific in that at least some versions went beyond post facto rationalizations to make predictions and testable claims. Creationism, for instance, makes claims about the age of the Earth, the absence of transitional forms between “kinds” of creatures, and so on. In 1859, it was a valid competitor to evolution, which is why Darwin spent so much time in
On the Origin of Species
showing how his new theories explained the data better than did creationism.

By the mid-nineteenth century, theology had finally lost its cachet as a form of science. This resulted largely from Darwin's own dismantling of the best argument for God ever derived from nature, as well as from the success of physics and medicine in replacing religious explanations with natural ones. Its decline was also hastened by philosophy, as Hume and Kant had given cogent arguments against miracles, deliberate design, and the logical arguments for God.

Yet natural theology has recently had a comeback. This is partly due to the rise of “intelligent design,” which claims to identify evolutionary gaps fillable only by invoking an intelligent designer. While ID advocates argue that the designer is not necessarily the Judeo-Christian God—it could, they say, be an alien from another planet—this is disingenuous. The Christian
roots of ID, and the private statements of its proponents, show that it's intended to replace the “disease” of naturalism with purely Christian metaphysics. ID is simply creationism gussied up to sound more scientific, in a vain attempt to circumvent U.S. court rulings prohibiting religious incursions into public schools.

Criticisms of “god of the gaps” arguments go back as far as ancient Greece, as we see from a famous statement by the physician Hippocrates of Cos:

Men think epilepsy divine
, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.

The theological dangers of this tactic were pointed out by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison before the Nazis executed him for plotting against Hitler:

How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap
for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know.

Nearly everyone recognizes this problem, as did Ingersoll in the eloquent quote that heads this section. Yet believers continue to invoke God to explain unsolved scientific puzzles. This probably reflects a yearning not just for answers, but for answers that support the existence of one's faith. This might explain the equivocation of some religious scientists. For instance, Francis Collins, perhaps America's most visible scientist, is a strong opponent of intelligent design, and has repeatedly warned about using “god of the gaps” arguments:

A word of caution is needed
when inserting specific divine action by God in this or that or any other area where scientific understanding is currently lacking. From solar eclipses in olden times to the movement of the
planets in the Middle Ages, to the origins of life today, this “God of the gaps” approach has all too often done a disservice to religion (and by implication, to God, if that's possible). Faith that places God in the gaps of current understanding about the natural world may be headed for crisis if advances in science subsequently fill those gaps.

Indeed. Yet in the same book Collins violates his own prescription, arguing that God is the best explanation for not only the “fine-tuning” of the universe's physical constants, but also the innate moral feelings shared by most people.

The soothing feeling of having quasi-scientific evidence for your God is simply too alluring, leading even liberal believers to show the kind of ambivalence we saw in Collins. Here are some phenomena repeatedly cited by the new natural theology as evidence for God:

The fine-tuning of the physical constants that allow our universe (and our species) to exist

The existence of physical laws themselves

The origin of life from inanimate matter

The inevitability of human evolution

Instinctive human morality (the “Moral Law” described above by Collins)

The existence of consciousness

The reliability of our senses at detecting truth

The fact that the universe is even comprehensible by humans

The amazing effectiveness of mathematics in describing the universe

When facing “scientific” arguments for God like these, ask yourself three questions. First, what's more likely: that these are puzzles only because we refuse to see God as an answer, or simply because science hasn't yet provided a naturalistic answer? In other words, is the religious explanation so compelling that we can tell scientists to stop working on the evolution and mechanics of consciousness, or on the origin of life,
because
there
can never be a naturalistic explanation
? Given the remarkable ability of science to solve problems once considered intractable, and the number of
scientific phenomena that weren't even known a hundred years ago, it's probably more judicious to admit ignorance than to tout divinity.

Second, if invoking God seems more appealing than admitting scientific ignorance, ask yourself if religious explanations do anything more than rationalize our ignorance. That is, does the God hypothesis provide
independent and novel predictions
or clarify things once seen as puzzling—as truly scientific hypotheses do? Or are religious explanations simply stopgaps that lead nowhere? As I explained in
Why Evolution Is True,
Darwin's hypothesis for the change and diversity of life was accepted not just because it fit existing data but because it led to testable and verified predictions (e.g., where in the geological record would we find intermediates between reptiles and mammals?) and explained things that once baffled biologists (why do humans develop a coat of hair as six-month embryos, but then shed it before birth?). Intelligent design makes no such predictions or clarifications. Does invoking God to explain the fine-tuning of the universe explain anything
else
about the universe? If not, then that brand of natural theology isn't really science, but special pleading.

Finally, even if you attribute scientifically unexplained phenomena to God, ask yourself if the explanation gives evidence for
your
God—the God who undergirds your religion and your morality. If we do find evidence, for, say, a supernatural origin of morality, can it be ascribed to the Christian God, or to Allah, Brahma, or any one god among the thousands worshipped on Earth? I've never seen advocates of natural theology address this question.