Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (36 page)

Most religions, and certainly the Abrahamic ones, have three features that are foreign to science. The most important is religion's linkage to moral codes that define and enforce proper behavior, behavior supposedly reflecting God's will. The second is the widespread belief in eternal reward and punishment: the notion that after death not just your fate but everyone else's depends on adherence to conduct mandated by
your
religion. And the third is the notion of absolute truth: that the nature of your god, and what it wants, is unchanging. While some believers see their ability to fathom
God's nature as limited, and don't accept the notion of a heaven or a hell, the certainty of religious dogma is far more absolute and far less provisional than the pronouncements of science.

This combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic. It is what leads many believers not only to accept unenlightened views, like the disenfranchisement of women and gays, opposition to birth control, and intrusions into people's private sex lives, but also to force those views on others, including their own children and society at large, and sometimes even to kill those who disagree. It is this toxic mixture, which we'll discuss in the next chapter, that the physicist Steven Weinberg indicted when he said, “
With or without religion
, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.” He did not mean, of course, that religion turns all good people bad, but merely some of them, depending on their religion and their ardor. Without religion, for instance, it's hard to imagine the eternal enmity between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, often people from identical national and ethnic backgrounds who nevertheless slaughter each other over the question of who were Muhammad's proper heirs. The eternal persecution of the Jews is a purely religious matter, turning on their presumed status as killers of Christ.

But the same things cannot be said of science, for the discipline contains nothing prescriptive (save “find the truth” and “don't cheat”), nor any intimation of eternal rewards. Physicists do not kill each other when they differ about the value of string theory or who first came up with the idea of evolution.

Actually, Weinberg wasn't quite correct. For good people to do evil doesn't require only religion, or even
any
religion, but simply one of its key elements: belief without evidence—in other words, faith. And that kind of faith is seen not just in religion, but in any authoritarian ideology that puts dogma above truth and frowns on dissent. This was precisely the case in the totalitarian regimes of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, whose excesses are often (and wrongly) blamed on atheism. And it is in such societies, where free inquiry is suppressed, that we find bad science becoming an institution.

Perhaps the most famous example of pernicious, ideology-based science is the “Lysenko affair,” in which a bogus form of genetics held sway in the
Soviet Union between 1935 and the mid-1960s. “Lysenkoism” was a cult of personality centered on both Stalin and his handpicked “expert” in agriculture, the mediocre agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Catching Stalin's ear with exorbitant and bogus claims that he could produce more crops by treating seeds with extreme cold and moisture, Lysenko became in effect the dictator of Soviet agriculture and genetics. His methods rested on the unscientific and unsubstantiated claim that environmental treatments could affect the heredity of plants, a claim that conflicts with everything we know about genetics. Western genetics and plant breeding were abandoned as decadent, and, with Lysenko's approval, famous geneticists were either executed or sent to the gulag. Other scientists, hoping to avoid punishment, simply faked their data to conform to Lysenko's ideas.

Lysenkoism failed miserably. It didn't improve crop yield, and the purge of geneticists set Soviet biology back by decades. Is it then a black mark on science? Hardly, for it marked the abandonment of real science for something like creationism: empirical statements based on wish-thinking and supported by fealty to a religious-like god (Stalin) and his anointed son (Lysenko). It was the faith in these methods, and the suppression of the normal criticism and dissent of science, that caused the debacle. As Richard Feynman said in his report on the failed O-rings that doomed the space shuttle
Challenger,
“
For a successful technology
, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

But Weinberg
was
on the money
when he (and the philosopher Karl Popper) argued that the problems imputed to “science” are really the problems afflicting all of humanity: venality, irrationality, and immorality:

Of course science has made its own contribution to the world's sorrows, but generally by giving us the means of killing each other, not the motives. Where the authority of science has been used to justify horrors, it really has been in terms of perversions of science, like Nazi racism and “eugenics.” As Karl Popper has said, “On the other hand, it is only too obvious that it is irrationalism and not rationalism that has the responsibility for all national hostility and aggression, both before and after the Crusades, but I do not know of any war waged for a ‘scientific' aim, and inspired by scientists.”

Science Is Fallible and Its Results Are Unreliable

This is another
tu quoque
argument from beleaguered believers. If religion can be wrong, the argument runs, then so can science. If we have our doubts about religious truths, well, scientific truths are also shaky. After all, hasn't scientific “knowledge” been overturned time after time? The author Jeffrey Small expresses this sentiment in an article called “The Common Ground Between Science and Religion”:

We must also be careful
not to overstate the infallibility of the scientific method. Scientific knowledge has inherent limitations. Science is not truth; it's an approximation of truth. . . . Another limitation with the scientific method is that all scientific theories rely on human conception, interpretation and evaluation. The history of science shows that the process of one scientific theory supplanting another is a bumpy one.

This argument is not unique to religionists and accommodationists: it's a staple of postmodernists and assorted pseudoscientists, including advocates of creationism, alternative medicine, global-warming denialism, and the supposed dangers of vaccination. In Texas, for instance, the “science is wrong” trope appears in the biology curriculum of a publicly funded “charter school”:

Many other historical blunders
of science could be mentioned. What we need to keep in mind is that scientists are human beings. The assumption that they are completely objective, error-free, impartial, “cold machines” dressed in white coats is, of course, absurd. Like everyone else, scientists are influenced by prejudice and preconceived ideas. You should also remember that just because most people believe a particular thing does not necessarily make it true.

The “particular thing” under discussion is, of course, evolution.

The response is simple.
Of course
science can be wrong, and has been many times before—but that's what's right about it. Naturally scientists are only human, and sometimes reluctant to part with their pet theories, but they also make mistakes. That, in combination with the limited understanding we have
at any one time, guarantees that many scientific “truths” will fall by the wayside. Some scientific results are flat wrong, as in the cases of faster-than-light neutrinos, cold fusion, bacteria with arsenic in their DNA, and the notion of static continents, while others have simply replaced useful paradigms, like Newtonian mechanics, with more inclusive ones, like quantum mechanics. And beyond simple error, there's been fraud. The most famous case is Piltdown Man, a hoax involving a humanlike skull. Supposedly found in a gravel pit in East Sussex, the skull was shown to scientists in 1912 by the amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson, stunning them with its combination of a modern skull and apelike teeth. Many saw it as a transitional form between primitive and modern humans: proof that we evolved. It took four decades for that skull to be revealed as a forgery, a mélange of a medieval human skull, the jaw of an orangutan, and teeth from a chimpanzee. (The identity of the forgers remains a mystery, but suspects include the writer Arthur Conan Doyle and the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.) Piltdown Man is still a staple of creationist literature, regularly trotted out to show that evolutionary biology and its practitioners can't be trusted.

But notice that all of these hoaxes and false results were exposed
by
scientists themselves
. It was suspicious anthropologists and paleontologists who uncovered the Piltdown forgery, so there was no collusion (as implied by creationists) to buttress the “lie” of evolution with a phony fossil. And, of course, we now have a panoply of genuine fossils attesting to human evolution. The “arsenic” DNA, faster-than-light neutrinos, and cold fusion were all quickly debunked by other scientists trying to replicate the results.

And that's the point. Science has a huge advantage over “other ways of knowing”: built-in methods of self-correction. These include not only the familiar attitude of doubt, but also an arsenal of empirical weapons to test and replicate the results of others. After all, renown accrues to scientists who show up their peers (we're just as ambitious as anyone else), and one way to do that is to disprove a result that has gained a lot of attention. Certainly some scientists are reluctant to part with theories that have made them famous, and paradigms do get entrenched in some fields (the idea that continents don't move is one example), for scientists are, with good reason, conservative. But ambition and the desire to know will ultimately lead to good science driving out the bad.

Although scientific research may change some of our conclusions over
the years, many of those conclusions will remain intact. It's unlikely, for instance, that we'll find that continental drift is wrong, for we can actually see and measure the movement of continents using satellites and lasers. Few scientists doubt that, several centuries from now, DNA will remain the genetic material in multicellular species, that the speed of light in a vacuum will remain within 1 percent of its reported value, and that a molecule of methane will have one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. These things can be regarded, in the vernacular, as “proven.” In fact, we've seen that the very people who argue that science is fallible and its results are untrustworthy put their trust in science every day. Why would they do that?

But none of this criticism of science makes religion even a tiny bit more credible. While science has been wrong, it's been right enough to improve our understanding of the universe in a way that's immeasurably advanced the well-being of our own species and our understanding of nature. Even a simple scientific advance can save millions of lives. The Green Revolution is well known, but a more recent innovation is
the development of “golden rice
,” a genetically engineered crop that incorporates a precursor to vitamin A, an essential nutrient, into the rice genome. The product is nutritious, perfectly safe, distributed without charge to subsistence farmers, and, best of all, could save the lives of nearly three million children who die annually of vitamin deficiency. Sadly, misguided people who are suspicious of all genetically modified organisms—GMOs—have prevented widespread distribution of the product.

In contrast, religion has
never
been right in its claims about the universe—at least not in a way that all rational people can accept. There is no reliable method to show that the Trinity exists, that God is loving and all-powerful, that we'll meet our dead relatives in the afterlife, or that Brahma created the universe from a golden egg. Lacking a way to show its tenets are wrong, religion cannot show them to be right, even provisionally.

Although this chapter may have had the flavor of an academic debate, what with the emphasis on charge and countercharge, argument and answer, the stakes are far higher than simple intellectual victory. For mixing science with faith, or assuming that they are coequal ways of finding truth, harms not just intellectual discourse but also people's lives. The next chapter describes the damage of such accommodationism.

A surgeon once called upon a poor cripple
and kindly offered to render him any assistance in his power. The surgeon began to discourse very learnedly upon the nature and origin of disease; of the curative properties of certain medicines; of the advantages of exercise, air and light, and of the various ways in which health and strength could be restored. These remarks ware so full of good sense, and discovered so much profound thought and accurate knowledge, that the cripple, becoming thoroughly alarmed, cried out, “Do not, I pray you, take away my crutches. They are my only support, and without them I should be miserable indeed!” “I am not going,” said the surgeon, “to take away your crutches. I am going to cure you, and then you will throw the crutches away yourself.”

—Robert Green Ingersoll

E
ven if you agree that science and religion are incompatible, what's the harm in that? After all, most religions aren't opposed to science in general, and many religious scientists happily ignore God while they do their day job, even if they abandon that attitude when they go to church on Sunday.

The harm, as I've said repeatedly, comes not from the existence of religion itself, but from its reliance on and glorification of
faith—
belief, or, if you will, “trust” or “confidence”—
without supporting evidence
. And faith, as employed in religion (and in most other areas), is a danger to both science and society. The danger to science is in how faith warps the public understanding of science: by arguing, for instance, that science is based just as
strongly on faith as is religion; by claiming that revelation or the guidance of ancient books is just as reliable a guide to truth about our universe as are the tools of science; by thinking that an adequate explanation can be based on what is personally appealing rather than on what stands the test of empirical study.

Religious scientists undermine their own profession by diluting the rigor of science with claims about the supernatural—claims that are, broadly construed, scientific. Despite Stephen Jay Gould's declaration that “proper” religion stays away from making assertions about the natural world (we've learned that, for theistic religions, there is no clear distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural” world), religion regularly becomes improper, making clear claims about reality. Both scientists and theologians have shown that Gould was wrong in asserting that Abrahamic religions are, in Ian Hutchinson's words, “
empty of any claims
to historical or scientific fact, doctrinal authority, and supernatural experience.”

Historical facts are, of course, scientific facts, but the new natural theology also makes scientific
claims
. Perhaps the most damaging are the “god of the gaps” arguments: caulking the holes in our understanding of nature with divine explanations. Not only are such explanations easily destroyed by the advances of science (and this has happened repeatedly), but they also give people the false impression that some questions about the universe are simply refractory to scientific explanation, for the explanation lies outside of science.

When Francis Collins argues that because altruism and innate moral feelings cannot be explained by science, and therefore must have been given to us by God, he's making a claim about both nature and science: morality will
always
elude naturalistic explanations. When theologians argue that both consciousness and the ability of our senses to detect truth will never be explained by science, they are not only misleading the public, but acting as “science stoppers,” implicitly suggesting that scientists should simply give up studying these phenomena. When religious biologists say that the evolution of humans, or of a humanlike species, was inevitable, they are making a claim that
sounds
scientific, but really rests on scriptural notions of humans as God's special species. When theistic evolutionists state that God acts by moving electrons around in an undetectable way, or by creating the
odd mutation to produce a desired species, they are making claims that have no scientific basis but are superfluities tacked on to science to fulfill emotional needs. And when we hear that the laws of physics, and the so-called fine-tuning of the universe's physical constants, have no explanation save God, I know that nearly all physicists disagree.

But does the public
hear
their disagreement and understand their counterarguments? More likely the layperson, at least in the United States, thinks that, yes, science has indeed reached its explanatory limits, and beyond those limits lies God. That is a distortion of science. As we've learned, science does indeed have provisional explanations for morality, altruism, consciousness, the specificity of the laws of physics in our universe, and the fact that many of our beliefs are true. Those explanations may be wrong, but how can we know without even more science? Unfortunately, “god of the gaps” arguments discourage further research by claiming that science
can never produce
such explanations.

As a scientist, I am distressed by this constant elbowing of religion into questions of reality, and even more so when it leads to unsubstantiated claims about evolution. As we've seen, religion has no warrant and no method for decreeing what is and what is not beyond science. Certainly science has some hard problems, and just as certainly some of those problems will never be solved (why
is
the speed of light in a vacuum constant?), simply because the final answer will be “That's just the way it is.” We may reach the limits of explanation for several reasons: because the evidence eludes us (many ancient species, for example, simply weren't fossilized) or because our brains aren't configured to puzzle out the answers. But consider how many questions religion once told us could never be answered—and were taken as evidence for God—and yet ultimately were solved by science. Evolution, infectious disease, mental illness, lightning, the stable orbits of planets: the list is long. Religious people often call for scientists to be “humble,” ignoring the beam in their own eyes, which see things like morality as forever inexplicable by science. How much more arrogant, and ignorant of history, to argue that our failures of understanding are somehow evidence for a god! And how much more egotistical to believe that that god is the god of
your own religion
!
If the “other ways of knowing” of your faith provide concrete answers, then tell us not only what those answers
are, but how they would convince either nonbelievers or members of other faiths. And let those “other ways of knowing” make predictions in the same way that science does.

The damage to science I've emphasized so far involves the public perception of science. The practice of science itself isn't seriously harmed by accommodationism, but there is one exception. And that is when the direction of science is warped by organizations like the John Templeton Foundation, which can actually steer research down certain avenues congenial to its aims: the harmony among science, faith, and spirituality. Not all of Templeton's funding goes to that kind of research, but one can argue that because of its priorities there is more work on “spiritual” topics like near-death experiences than we'd have if scientists themselves (as they do in many government agencies) decide which research gets funded. The “core funding areas” of the Templeton Foundation in the life sciences include these:

The Foundation supports projects
investigating the evolution and fundamental nature of life, human life, and mind, especially as they relate to issues of meaning and purpose. Projects are welcome from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including the biological sciences, neuroscience, archeology, and paleontology.

“Meaning and purpose” are human constructs, products of intelligent minds, and “purpose” implies forethought of such minds, either human or divine. These are teleological ideas that are not part of science, except in work on human behavior. Here we see the subtle bending of scientific research toward unanswerable religious questions.

We see similar distortion in Templeton's funding of the human sciences:

The Foundation supports projects that apply the tools of anthropology, sociology, political science, and psychology to the various moral and spiritual concepts identified by Sir John Templeton. These include altruism, creativity, free will, generosity, gratitude, intellect, love, prayer, and purpose.

Clearly these areas are motivated by curiosity not about nature but about the numinous.

But far worse things happen when faith, seen as a valid route to empirical truth, is accompanied by other aspects of religion: the notions that you possess absolute truth about divine aspects of the universe, that adherents to other faiths are simply wrong, and that God has given you a code of behavior enforced by a system of eternal rewards and punishments. That can lead to missionizing: attempts to enforce one's unsubstantiated beliefs on others. And while more liberal religions avoid such missionizing (have you ever had a pair of Unitarians knock on your door?), they often act as enablers of more extreme, antiscience creeds. If religious faith is generally harmful, as I think it is, then any religion whose beliefs rest on faith or that extol faith contributes to that harm.

Nowhere is this missionizing, and its support by religion in general, more toxic than in those sects that reject medical care in favor of prayer and faith healing, and enforce this belief on their children. Denied the benefits of modern scientific medicine, those children often endure prolonged and horrible deaths. Their stories are appalling testimony not only to the incompatibility of science and faith, but to the fact that this incompatibility is embraced not just by biblical literalists, but by members of more sophisticated and less marginalized faiths. And all of us, even nonbelievers, have contributed to these deaths, at least in the United States, by passing laws allowing children to be denied medical care on religious grounds. Underlying it all is the privileging of faith—giving a pass to religious beliefs that contradict science.

Christian Science (the official name is the Church of Christ, Scientist) is not just an oxymoron, but also a mainstream faith, with over a thousand churches in the United States and perhaps several hundred thousand members worldwide (the numbers are kept secret). Its members are not Bible-thumping fundamentalists, but often educated and affluent members of the community. Because Christian Scientists believe that disease and injury are illusions caused by faulty thinking, many of them reject modern medicine, relying instead on Christian Science “practitioners” who are given a mere two weeks of training—none of it in genuine medical care. The church
also runs sanatoriums and nursing homes where patients are given prayer instead of medicine. Curiously, Christian Scientists are allowed to go to dentists and optometrists—apparently bad teeth and eyes are exceptions to the view of bodily infirmities as illusions—and can have broken bones set. Many of them also supplement Christian Science “healing” with modern medicine, though that's against church rules. But when they treat their children's maladies with prayer alone, the results are heartbreaking, for the children are either too young to understand or have been indoctrinated into the dogma of faith healing.
One of the most horrible cases
involved a young girl, Ashley Elizabeth King.

Ashley was the only child of Catherine and John King, prosperous middle-class Christian Scientists in Phoenix (John was a real estate developer). In 1987, at the age of twelve, Ashley developed a lump on her leg. Her parents sought no medical aid, and the lump continued to grow. When it became too large and painful to allow her to go to school, they withdrew her, and although Ashley was supposed to receive in-home instruction by teachers, her parents refused it.

Ashley's lump—a tumor—kept growing, and the Kings continued to ignore it. In May 1988, a detective, alerted by neighbors who hadn't seen the child for months, managed to enter the Kings' home, and saw that the problem was serious. Although Ashley tried to cover the tumor with a pillow, the detective immediately realized that she was in fact dying. A court order put her in custody of child protective services, which sent her to Phoenix Children's Hospital. But by the time she got real medical attention, it was far too late. Her tumor was an osteogenic sarcoma—bone cancer—and had metastasized to her lungs. Her heart was dangerously enlarged from trying to pump blood to the growing tumor, and since she couldn't move because of the pain, her genitals and buttocks were covered with bedsores. Her tumor had grown to thirteen inches across, larger than a basketball, and the stench from her rotting flesh permeated the hospital floor. The doctors recommended amputating the leg—not to save her life, for her condition was terminal—but to ease her pain and give her a bit more time. One doctor said that Ashley was experiencing “one of the worst kinds of pain known to mankind.”

The Kings refused amputation, and on May 12 moved their daughter to
a Christian Science sanatorium where there was no medical care, not even pain medication. Instead, there were seventy-one calls to Christian Science practitioners for Ashley's “treatment”: prayer alone. When she cried out in agony, she was told that she was disturbing the other patients. Ashley died on June 5, 1988, a martyr to her parents' delusions. At the subsequent trial of her parents, a prosecutor described her tumor at death as “about the size of two watermelons.” The doctors believed that had she been diagnosed early, there was a 50 to 60 percent chance she could have been saved.

Arizona is one of the few states that don't give parents immunity from prosecution for child abuse if they withhold medical care on religious grounds. (If you withhold it on nonreligious grounds, you're culpable everywhere.) The Kings were tried for that abuse after a charge of negligent homicide was dropped. They pleaded no contest, were convicted of one count of reckless endangerment, a misdemeanor, and were given a slap on the wrist—three years'
unsupervised
probation and 100 to 150 hours of community service.