Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (32 page)

When drawn from everyday life, such subjective experience serves as the last resort for adherents to the other-ways-of-knowing argument. The classic version, which I often hear from believers, is this: “I know my wife loves me”—supposedly a claim of knowledge beyond the ken of science. Like religious “truths,” this assertion is said to be based on faith. Of course, someday science may indeed study love by measuring neurological activity or one's titer of hormones, and by correlating these things with one's claimed emotions, but until that day there's another scientific method: observation of behavior. As one of the commenters on my Web site argued:

We know the ways in which humans express
romantic interest and/or love, and when we want to know if someone likes or loves us, we do so by inferring from his/her behavior.

What are teenage girls doing when they huddle around, dissecting how a particular boy is acting with a girl who is interested in him? They endlessly discuss all the clues, all the evidence in his behavior that suggests he is romantically interested . . . or not. My wife spends lots of time talking to her single friends. “Did he call you back the next day? Did he tell you he was going on that trip? Did he ask you to come?” etc. . . . all an analysis of the available observations looking for
evidence
of romantic feelings.

Why is it we think a guy—“Bill”—has a screw loose who turns up at a TV station with flowers ready to propose marriage to a pretty news anchorwoman who has never met him?

What about if “Susan” just went up to a guy on the street she'd never met, assuming the guy loves her and would immediately marry her?

What is the difference in these scenarios that mark them as “nut-case, irrational actions” vs. normal, loving relationship scenarios? It's that Bill and Susan are operating under a total lack of evidence for their belief that
these people love them. So in direct contradiction to the claims of the religious apologist, we recognize mere “faith based” inferences of love as irrational, false, and non-indicative of how normal people conclude someone loves them.

“I'm hungry,” my friend tells me, and that too is seen as extrascientific knowledge. And indeed, any feeling that you have, any notion or revelation, can be seen as
subjective
truth or knowledge. What that means is that
it's true that you feel that way
. What that doesn't mean is that the epistemic content of your feeling is true. That requires independent verification by others. Often someone claiming hunger actually eats very little, giving rise to the bromide “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”

Which brings us to religion. In a way, this discussion has been a digression, for until now it has skirted the real issue: the ability of religion to find truth. The reason believers argue for “other ways of knowing” is simply to show that science has no monopoly on finding truth, and therefore that religion might muscle in alongside archaeology and history. But as we've seen, insofar as archaeology, economics, sociology, and history produce knowledge, they do so by using the methods of science broadly construed: verifiable, tested, and generally agreed-upon results of empirical study.

But even construing science broadly, one can't stretch it far enough to encompass religion. For even the most elastic notion of science doesn't include the methods that supposedly allow religion to gain knowledge: unverifiable authority of ancient books, faith, subjective experience, and personal revelation. As William James argued, it is the subjective and revelatory aspect of religion that gives it the most purchase: the feeling of certainty that religious claims are true. But when one has a religious experience, what is “true” is only that
one has had that experience,
not that its contents convey anything about reality. To determine that, one needs a way to verify the contents of a revelation, and that means science. After all, while some Christians accept the existence of Jesus because they have mental conversations with him, Hindus have mental conversations with Shiva, and Muslims with Allah. All the revelations in all the world's scriptures have never told us that a molecule of benzene has six carbon atoms arranged in a ring, or that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It is this asymmetry of knowledge
that, despite religion's truth claims, makes its adherents embrace the fallacious claim that religion and science occupy separate magisteria.

The other-ways-of-knowing claim is often coupled with accusations of “scientism”: a behavior in which science or its practitioners are said to overstep their boundaries. Scientism is seen as an intrusion of science where it doesn't belong, an unwarranted invasion of philosophy, the humanities, ethics, and even theology. These are examples of what Stephen Jay Gould, in his NOMA argument, called the boundary violations of science. How dare, the critics say, science tell us
anything
about morality or aesthetics?

When we examine the behaviors described as “scientism,” they're diverse and often unrelated. The physicist Ian Hutchinson sees it as an attempt to apply scientific methods to disciplines in which they're useless, trying to answer the “big questions” supposedly reserved for theology:

It is not merely the misapplication
of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural science to the human world. Scientism is all of these, but something profoundly more. It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called “science” can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like “What is life, and when, and why?”

The philosopher Susan Haack, on the other hand, sees scientism as science refusing to recognize its own limits, along with the problems this causes:

What I meant by “scientism
” was . . . a kind of over-enthusiastic and uncritically deferential attitude towards science, an inability to see or an
unwillingness to acknowledge its fallibility, its limitations, and its potential dangers.

Finally, the physician and bioethics expert Leon Kass characterizes scientism as the attempt to replace religion—and everything else—with science, a strategy that, he claims, could rend the very fabric of Western society:

But beneath the weighty ethical concerns
raised by these new biotechnologies—a subject for a different lecture—lies a deeper philosophical challenge: one that threatens how we think about who and what we are. Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity. A quasi-religious faith has sprung up among us—let me call it “soul-less scientism”—which believes that our new biology, eliminating all mystery, can give a complete account of human life, giving purely scientific explanations of human thought, love, creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe in God. . . . Make no mistake. The stakes in this contest are high: at issue are the moral and spiritual health of our nation, the continued vitality of science, and our own self-understanding as human beings and as children of the West.

The diverse notions of scientism have only one thing in common: they're all pejorative. In fact, the entry on “scientism” in
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy
begins:

“
Scientism” is a term of abuse
. Therefore, perhaps inevitably, there is no one simple characterization of the views of those who are thought to be identified as prone to it.

And ends like this:

A successful accusation of scientism usually relies upon a restrictive conception of the sciences and an optimistic conception of the arts as hitherto
practiced. Nobody espouses scientism; it is just detected in the writings of others.

But dire warnings like those of Kass are exaggerated. The dangers of scientism, no matter how you define it, are virtually nonexistent. To examine these supposed dangers, let's group the definitions into a few discrete categories. “Scientism” usually denotes one or more of the following four claims. First, science is the sole source of reliable facts about the universe; that is, it is the only reliable “way of knowing.” Alternatively, scientism could mean that the humanities should be
subsumed
under the rubric of science. That is, areas like history, archaeology, politics, morality, art, and music should be viewed
only
through a scientific lens, and when possible should adopt the methods of science. Scientism could also refer to the idea that questions that can't be answered by science aren't worth considering or discussing. Such questions include those involving morality, ways to live, beauty, emotions, and, of course, religion. The most damning definition of scientism is the idea that scientists are arrogant, lack humility, and are reluctant to admit that their findings might be wrong.

As for the first claim, I've argued that science, construed broadly as a commitment to the use of rationality, empirical observation, testability, and falsifiability, is indeed the only way to gain
objective
knowledge (as opposed to subjective knowledge) about the universe. I've also argued that disciplines not normally considered “science” (like economics and sociology) can also produce knowledge when they use the methods of science. Finally, mathematics and philosophy produce a more restricted kind of knowledge: the logical results of assuming a set of axioms or principles. In the first sense of the term, then, most of my colleagues and I are indeed guilty of scientism. But in that sense scientism is a virtue—the virtue of holding convictions with a tenacity proportional to the evidence supporting them.

A few academics
like Edward O. Wilson and Alex Rosenberg have indeed argued that eventually all areas of inquiry, including the humanities, will be not only united with science, but subsumed by it. The philosopher Julian Baggini argues for the futility of this takeover: “
History, for example
, may ultimately depend on nothing more than the movement of atoms, but
you cannot understand the battle of Hastings by examining interactions of fermions and bosons.”

This accusation is unfair. I've never heard a scientist claim that a knowledge of particle physics could give us insight into history. (Of course, many of us feel that if we had the unattainable perfect knowledge of every particle in the universe, we could in principle explain such macroscopic events.) A far more common claim is that many areas of the humanities, including politics, sociology, and literary scholarship, could be
improved
by insights from evolutionary biology and neuroscience. And really, who could disagree? Is there no room for empirical investigation in any of these areas—no way, for instance, that we could gain insights into human psychology by seeing it as partly a product of natural selection?

Indeed, archaeology, history, and sociology—even biblical scholarship—are increasingly informed by modern science. In a vigorous defense of that trend, Steven Pinker describes many other areas that have benefited from more rigorous, science-oriented approaches: evolutionary psychology is now a valid branch of psychology, articles in linguistics journals rely more on rigorous methodological inquiry, and data science promises to extract new information from economics, politics, and history. Naturally, some of the applications of science to these fields will be poorly motivated or executed, but that's not a problem of science itself, only of its misapplication. Presumably humanities scholars, like scientists, can recognize bad experimental design, flawed data analysis, or unsupported conclusions. And I'm certain that nearly all scientists agree with Pinker that our hope to help our colleagues in the humanities “
is not an imperialistic drive
to occupy the humanities; the promise of science is to enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanistic scholarship, not to obliterate them.”

As for the claim that only scientific questions are worth discussing, I've met hundreds of scientists in my career, and I've never heard one say anything like that. Like all people, scientists can be arrogant and overbearing about their work, but so can novelists, artists, and historians! Nevertheless, more questions than we think can be
informed
by science, including those involving history, politics, the source of artworks, and issues of morality. After all, if you support the death penalty because you think it's a deterrent,
or that certain offenders can never be rehabilitated, those opinions can be supported—or derailed—by empirical observation.

As we learn more about ourselves from evolution, psychology, and the neurosciences, more and more of the humanities become open to scientific study. Ian Hutchinson misses an important point when he judges beauty and emotionality as off-limits to science (accusations of scientism, of course, often come from the faithful):

Consider the beauty of a sunset
, the justice of a verdict, the compassion of a nurse, the drama of a play, the depth of a poem, the terror of a war, the excitement of a symphony, the significance of a history, the love of a woman. Which of these can be reduced to the clarity of a scientific description? . . . This is not a problem for science. It simply means that science is not able to deal with topics like these.

Not so fast. I'm confident that, someday, studies of neurology, genetics, and cognition will help us understand why some works of art move us and others don't, why some people are compassionate and others not, and why we see sunsets and waterfalls as beautiful but are repelled by wastelands. It's common to hear that love is a matter of “chemistry,” but that's not just a metaphor, for surely the intense emotions that accompany love—sometimes verging on psychosis—are amenable to scientific analysis. Someday, for instance, we may be able to gauge the intensity (or even the presence) of love using neurology and biochemistry. That day may be decades away, but I'm not only sure that it will come, but just as sure that it won't stop poets and composers from writing paeans to love.