Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (35 page)

This is related to the claim that science and religion are
compatible
because many scientists are still religious.

What can we make of these claims? It would be petulant to argue that religion, or Christianity in particular, made no contribution to science, or has always impeded science. Some scientists, like Newton and the nineteenth-century British natural theologians, apparently
were
motivated by their faith, and produced valuable work as a result. Some medieval theologians argued that God gave us reason to help us to understand the world. Monasteries were often the only repositories of scientific knowledge from earlier thinkers. And churches helped create and support European universities in the Middle Ages, some of which encouraged prescientific inquiry.

Overall, however, the assertion that “religion birthed science” doesn't hold water. But first we must admit that even if this thesis were true, it gives no credence to the tenets of faith, or to the value of religion in finding truth. Even institutions founded on falsity can sometimes mature by casting aside
their childish things. Alchemy was the predecessor of chemistry—Robert Boyle, who made immense contributions to chemistry, also dabbled extensively in alchemy—but we've long since abandoned the notion of turning lead into gold. Boyle's accomplishments in chemistry don't burnish the image of alchemy.

And if Christianity was
required
for science to emerge, why was there such a burst of science in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as China and Islamic countries? Many ancient Greeks and Romans embraced rationalism and scientific inquiry as a way to understand the world. Think of the accomplishments of people like Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Democritus, Archimedes, Pliny the Elder, Theophrastus, Galen, and Euclid.
As the historian Richard Carrier has argued
, if any faith should get credit for science, it would be paganism. And there's little evidence that Greek and Roman science was anything other than a secular endeavor motivated by pure curiosity.

The historians Richard Carrier, Toby Huff, Charles Freeman, and Andrew Bernstein
have noted that although Christianity took hold in Europe about 500 CE, science didn't come into its own until much later. In their view (which is, of course, contested), the authoritarianism of the church suppressed the kind of freethinking that really did produce modern European science. Heresies like Arianism (the notion of God not as a trinity but a single being) and Manichaeism (the belief that God is benevolent but not omnipotent) were brutally suppressed. Indeed, the notion of “heresy” itself is explicitly antiscientific. If science required Christianity for its genesis, why that thousand-year delay? Why, if Christianity promoted scientific innovation during the Middle Ages, did Europe show no economic growth for a millennium? Reviewing Rodney Stark's defense of Christianity as critical for the birth of science, Andrew Bernstein argued that the hiatus of science during the Dark Ages reflected the diversion of brainpower from empirical issues to apologetics:

In the Middle Ages, the great minds
capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony—decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and
plague, dying in droves in their twenties—the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies. Again, these fundamental philosophical points bear heavily against Stark's argument, yet he simply ignores them.

The notion that Christianity was pivotal in producing science also fails to explain why science didn't arise in the
Eastern
Empire, which was Christian, prosperous, and endowed with rich libraries holding the scientific works of ancient Greeks and Romans.

In the end, we don't know why modern science arose for keeps in Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, while arising and then vanishing in China and Islamic countries. Besides Christianity, there were other differences between the West and other areas that could have promoted European science, including the advent of the printing press, the greater mobility of Europeans, a critical mass of population that could promote intellectual interaction, and the questioning of authority (including the religious kind)—in other words, everything that brought about the Enlightenment. The rise of modern science in Europe is a complex affair that, as a one-off historical event, defies conclusive explanation. Christianity may be one factor, but we can't rerun the tape of history to see if science would have arisen later in a Europe that lacked religion.

But we can at least show that, in some respects, Christianity impeded free inquiry. Many theologians from Aquinas on advocated the killing of heretics, hardly an endorsement of freethinking. Martin Luther was famous for his attacks on reason. Besides persecuting Galileo and Giordano Bruno for their heresies, some of which involved science, and burning Bruno alive, the Catholic Church famously condemned the University of Paris in 1277 for teaching 219 philosophical, theological, and scientific “errors.” And what are we to make of the church's infamous
Index Librorum Prohibitorum,
which for four centuries protected its flock from theologically incorrect thinking? That apparently included science, for the list included works by Kepler, Francis Bacon, Erasmus Darwin (Charles's grandfather, who had his own theory of evolution), Copernicus, and Galileo. Why would an institution that promoted science make it a sin to read books by scientists? And
why would an institution in favor of free inquiry ban philosophy books by Pascal, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Hume?

Finally, what about those famous scientists who were religious? We shouldn't be too quick to give scientific credit to their Christianity. Newton, for instance, was an Arian who rejected the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and the notion of an immortal soul. But the argument that the existence of Christian scientists proves that Christianity caused science is wholly unconvincing, for it's based simply on correlation. In medieval and Renaissance Europe, nearly
everyone
was a Christian, or at least professed to be, simply because it was a universal belief that prominent people defied at peril of execution. If Christianity gave rise to science between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, then you could give religion credit for
everything
that humans devised in that period.

And we can firmly reject any contribution of religion to
modern
science. As we know, scientists are on average far less religious than are laypeople, and the most accomplished scientists are nearly all atheists. This means that virtually no modern scientific research
can be
motivated by religion, and I'm aware of no scientific advances made by those who claimed religious inspiration. Most of the major scientific achievements of our time—advances in evolution, relativity, particle physics, cosmology, chemistry, and modern molecular biology—were made by nonbelievers. (While intelligent design creationism does have religious roots, it is those very roots that have discredited it as valid science, for there's simply no evidence for the claimed intervention of a teleological designer in evolution.)

James D. Watson once told me that while searching for the structure of DNA, he and Francis Crick were strongly motivated by naturalism: they wanted to show that the “secret of life”—the replicating molecule that is the recipe for all organisms—was pure chemistry, with no divine intervention required. If we're going to give religion credit for the birth of science, then by the same lights we must give nonbelief credit for most of the scientific advances of the last century, which were driven by ruthless adherence to naturalism. Every bit of truth clawed from nature over the last four centuries has involved completely ignoring God, for even religious scientists park their faith at the laboratory door.

As for religion's positive contribution to the
morality
of science, the case
is weak. You'd be hard pressed to show that the ethics imbuing modern science—treating laboratory animals humanely, not falsifying data, giving people due credit for their contributions—come from religious beliefs rather than secular reason. And religious morality has clearly impeded modern science, by producing bans on much stem cell research, promoting the AIDS epidemic through Catholic claims that condoms don't prevent the disease (as well as encouraging population growth by discouraging contraception), and hindering vaccination through religiously based opposition by Muslims and Hindus.

Religion has undoubtedly contributed to the work of some scientists, and may even have played some role in the rise of the discipline, at least through sponsoring universities that nurtured early scientists. But balancing religion's beneficial versus repressive role in science is a task for historians, who, after much bickering, have failed to reach a consensus.

Science Does Bad Things

Defenders of religion often try to balance the undeniable benefits of science by arguing that it has also been responsible for many of the world's woes. The biologist Kenneth Miller's argument is typical:

Science is a revolutionary activity
. It alters our view of nature, and often puts forward profoundly unsettling truths that threaten the status quo. As a result, time and time again, those who feel threatened by the scientific enterprise have tried to restrict, reject, or block the work of science. Sometimes, they have good reason to fear the fruits of science, unrestrained. To be sure, it was religious fervor that led Giordano Bruno to be burned at the stake for his scientific “heresies” in 1600. But we should also remember more recently that it was science, not religion, that gave us eugenics, the atomic bomb, and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.

A similar note is sounded by the novelist Jeffrey Small, an Episcopalian:

Critics of religion
enjoy pointing out how many wars and how much suffering has been caused in the name of religion. But only science has given
us the tools to kill each other in ways never before imagined. Biologists have produced viral and bacterial weapons; chemists have developed gunpowder and ever more destructive explosives; physicists have given us the power to destroy our very existence with nuclear weapons. Scientific advances in mechanical and chemical engineering have made our businesses more productive than at any time in history, bringing us comfort and prosperity. These same advances have also polluted our environment to the point of endangering our planet.

Statements like these have one aim: to show that while religion may have done bad things, science has too. They are
tu quoque
arguments: “See, you're as bad as we are!” As the journalist Nick Cohen noted about accusations that atheism is like religion, “
It's not a charge I'd throw around
if I were seeking to defend faith. When people say of dozens of political and cultural movements from monetarism to Marxism that their followers treat their cause ‘like a religion,' they never mean it as a compliment. They mean that dumb obedience to higher authority and an obstinate attachment to dogma mark its adherents.”

Notice that these indictments are aimed not at scientists, but at “science”—as if the discipline itself, rather than its practitioners, is responsible for this malfeasance. But science is simply a way of investigating the world, a set of tools to discover what's out there. The compelling force that produced nuclear weapons, gunpowder, and eugenics was not science but
people:
the scientists who decide to use discoveries in a certain way, the technologists who convert those discoveries into things like weapons, and the people who make decisions to use technology for purposes that may be harmful or immoral. Although physicists produced the work on nuclear fission that made possible the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, the executive order that started work on the bomb in America was signed by Franklin Roosevelt, and the Manhattan Project was directed not by a scientist, but by a soldier, Major General Leslie Groves. Roosevelt's decision was in fact partly a response to a letter he received from Albert Einstein urging the United States to stockpile uranium because Einstein feared (rightly) that Germany was trying to develop an atomic bomb. The decision to drop the bomb on Japan was made by President Harry Truman. In other words, between the science itself and its devastating effects was a chain of people making tactical and ethical decisions.

The findings of science are morally neutral; it is how they are
used
that is sometimes a problem. While one might be tempted to make a similar argument about religion, I'll claim that there are important differences between science and faith that make religion itself complicit in its misuse.

When I read indictments of science for its harmful results, I think of the following: “Toolmaking has given us shovels, hammers, chisels, and knives. But sometimes those tools are used to kill people, so we must remember that, although a valuable enterprise, toolmaking has also brought us misery.” But, like those of science, the misuses of toolmaking are far outweighed by its benefits. Blaming a field of endeavor, rather than misguided people, for its misuse
is like blaming architecture
for giving Nazis the means to build gas chambers. And when you pin overpopulation and pollution on “science,” is it really the institution and methodology that are to blame, or is it greedy, shortsighted people? Are Darwin and Mendel to blame for eugenics, or is it the corruption of those enterprises by racists and xenophobes? In the end, the solution is not to stop science, or even blame science, but to correct the mind-set that results in bending it toward nefarious or socially harmful ends. Clearly, so long as science is practiced by humans it will never be free from misuse by bad people. And it will always have some bad effects.

But then what about religion? If we can exculpate science for the ills it causes, can't you exculpate religion on the same grounds? Can't you say that the evils of religion—things like the Inquisition or the terror bombings of radical Muslims—come not from dogma or scripture but from their misapplication by flawed human beings? My answer is that here science differs from religion in an important way: unlike science,
faith itself
can corrupt decent people,
leading directly to bad behavior.