Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (8 page)

Feynman went a bit far in claiming that he wasn't absolutely sure of anything, for he surely knew that he'd die one day (sadly, that day came too soon), and that he'd fall if he stepped off his roof. But his statement does encapsulate the doubt that is endemic—and necessary—in science. It's not only endemic: it's one of science's attractions. A scientist lacking a big, juicy unsolved problem is a scientist bereft. H. L. Mencken compared the scientific investigator to “
the dog sniffing tremendously
at an infinite series of rat-holes,” and that was meant as a compliment. Our living with doubt contrasts strongly with the way many people regard their religion. True, some believers wrestle with doubt and uncertainty, but it's a mind-set that's neither encouraged, common, nor comfortable. Clerics and coreligionists usually urge the doubter to wrestle with those uncertainties and, in the end, resolve them. But with religion, there's no real way to resolve them, for there's no procedure for checking whether your doubts are justified. You're then faced with either returning to your original faith or becoming an unbeliever.

Collectivity

One of the best parts of science's toolkit is its international character, or rather, its transcendence of nationality, for although there are scientists
throughout the world, we all work by the same set of rules.
The participants in the discovery
of the Higgs boson, for instance, came from 110 countries, with 20 of those nations being official collaborators in the project. When I visit Turkey, Russia, Austria, or India, I can discuss my work with my colleagues without any cultural awkwardness or misunderstandings. Although scientists come in all faiths, including no faith at all, there is no Hindu science, no Muslim science, and no Jewish science. There is only science, combining brainpower from the whole world to produce one accepted body of knowledge. In contrast, there are thousands of religions, most differing profoundly in what they see as “true.”

Curiously, the earliest scientific test I know of is actually described in the Bible. If you look at the First Book of the Kings (18:21–40), you'll find a controlled experiment designed to reveal which god is real—Baal or the Hebrew god Yahweh. The test, proposed by the prophet Elijah, involved two bullocks, each killed, dressed, and placed on a separate pyre. Worshippers of each god were then told to ask their deity to ignite the pyre. Importuning Baal had no effect, even when his acolytes cut themselves with knives and lancets. But the Hebrew god came through, for even when his pyre was drenched with water, it burst into flame. Score one for Yahweh, scientifically shown to be the true god. In this case the penalty for being wrong was severe: the worshippers of Baal were summarily slain. But this story also invalidates the common claim that God won't be tested, for God willingly participated in this experiment.

Along with the methodology that I've described as “science” come the accoutrements of
professional
science: having grant support for one's research (usually from peer-reviewed applications to the government), submitting papers that are refereed by your peers before publication, having a job that can be categorized as “a scientist,” and so on. But these are ancillary to the methods themselves, which are in fact used by many people who aren't usually considered scientists. In fact, I see science, conceived broadly, as
any
endeavor that tries to find the truth about nature using the tools of reason, observation, and experiment. Archaeologists use science when they date and study ancient civilizations. Linguists use science when they reconstruct the historical relationships between languages. Historians use science when they try to discover how many people died in the Holocaust, or refute the claims of Holocaust deniers. Art historians use science when dating
paintings or trying to discern whether one is a forgery. Economists and sociologists use science when they try to understand the causes of social phenomena, although “truths” in those areas can be elusive. Native peoples use science when figuring out which local plants are useful in illness. (The use of quinine to cure malaria, for instance, was derived from the Quechua of Peru, who made an early version of “tonic” by mixing sweetened water with the bitter ground bark of the cinchona tree.) Even biblical scholars use science when reconstructing how and when the Bible was written. Not all of these areas, of course, are entirely scientific: much of the writing about history, for instance, involves untestable speculation about what caused various events.

The methods of science aren't even limited to academics. Car mechanics use science when working out a problem in your electrical system, for they make and test hypotheses about where the defect lies. Plumbers use science, and their knowledge of hydraulics, when finding the source of leaks. The kinship between “professional” science and plumbing was engagingly described by Stephen Jay Gould. In 1981, Gould was in Little Rock, Arkansas, testifying in the famous trial of
McLean v. Arkansas,
during which a federal judge adjudicated (and eventually rejected) a state law requiring “balanced treatment” of evolution and creationism in public schools. On that visit Gould encountered a plumber:

As I prepared to leave Little Rock
last December, I went to my hotel room to gather my belongings and found a man sitting backward on my commode, pulling it apart with a plumber's wrench. He explained to me that a leak in the room below had caused part of the ceiling to collapse and he was seeking the source of the water. My commode, located just above, was the obvious candidate, but his hypothesis had failed, for my equipment was working perfectly. The plumber then proceeded to give me a fascinating disquisition on how a professional traces the pathways of water through hotel pipes and walls. The account was perfectly logical and mechanistic: it can come only from here, here, or there, flow this way or that way, and end up there, there, or here. I then asked him what he thought of the trial across the street, and he confessed his staunch creationism, including his firm belief in the miracle of Noah's flood.

As a professional, this man never doubted that water has a physical source and a mechanically constrained path of motion—and that he could use the principles of his trade to identify causes. It would be a poor (and unemployed) plumber indeed who suspected that the laws of engineering had been suspended whenever a puddle and cracked plaster bewildered him. Why should we approach the physical history of our earth any differently?

This anecdote shows not only the continuity of scientific methods (and “ways of knowing”) across disparate areas, but also the disparity between science and religion embodied in a plumber who believed in Noah's flood.

Defining “religion” is a thankless task, for no single definition will satisfy everyone. Belief in a god would seem mandatory, but some groups that look like religions, such as Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Unitarian Universalism, don't even have that. Other “religions,” like Tibetan Buddhism, may not worship gods, but do accept supernatural phenomena like karma and reincarnation.

Rather than argue semantics, I'll choose a definition that fits most people's intuitive conceptions of religion, and certainly corresponds to the tenets of the three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—that comprise
about 54 percent of the world's inhabitants
. This is also the form of religion that most often conflicts with science.
The definition is taken from the
Oxford English Dictionary:

Religion.
Action or conduct indicating belief in, obedience to, and reverence for a god, gods, or similar superhuman power; the performance of religious rites or observances.

One can derive three characteristics of religion from this definition, all part of the Abrahamic faiths. The first is
theism:
the claim that God interacts with the world. The notion of “superhuman power” implies that God's
power is exercised, and the ideas of obedience and reverence, as well as performance of rites, imply that God must not only observe you but judge you, and his approval implicitly carries rewards or punishment. This means that I am considering religion as largely theistic, rather than a deistic belief in a remote, noninteractive God. As we'll see, few religionists are strict deists anyway. But even deism, though denying God's influence in the world, conflicts with science by making claims about God's existence, and often about his creation of the universe.

The second feature of religion is its embrace of a
moral system.
If the supernatural agent confers or denies approval based on obedience, that means there are behaviors and thoughts that are either worthy or unworthy of that approval, including obedience itself. This yields a framework of divinely based morality. Even faiths like Taoism and Jainism that, lacking gods, could be considered philosophies still have moral codes. (Jains, for instance, devoutly abjure harming any creatures, including insects, and even try to avoid injuring plants!)

Codes of morality imply the third trait of religion: the idea that God interacts directly with
you
in a personal relationship. In
The Varieties of Religious Experience,
William James saw the ideas of a moral code and a personal connection to God as the nucleus of all religions:

[
T]here is a certain uniform deliverance
in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts [an uneasiness and its solution]:

1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.

2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

Finally, what do we mean by a “supernatural agent”? As we'll see, the term “supernatural” is slippery, for even supernatural powers can affect natural processes, bringing the supernatural into the realm of empirical study. I'll rely again on the
Oxford English Dictionary
's definition of the adjective: “Belonging to a realm or system that transcends nature, as that of divine, magical, or ghostly beings; attributed to or thought to reveal some force beyond scientific
understanding or the laws of nature; occult, paranormal.” Here “beyond scientific understanding” means “outside the realm of the material world.” As a supernatural being, God is often seen as a “bodiless mind,” but one with humanlike emotions.

From now on I'll concentrate on religions that make empirical claims about the existence of a deity, the nature of that deity, and how it interacts with the world. But what do we mean by “claims”? Are they the claims of the church itself (that is, official doctrine and dogma), the claims of theologians (which, of course, differ, even among clerics within a faith), or the claims of regular believers, which needn't coincide with those of either theologians or church doctrine?
We all know Catholics
, for instance, who consider themselves members of the church although rejecting its doctrines on homosexuality and abortion, as well as the theory of evolution, which is accepted by the Vatican but rejected by many Catholics.
When I discuss the claims of “religion,” I'll simply go back and forth between theologians, believers, and dogma, trying to make clear which I'm discussing. Except for those rarefied theologians whose claims are either terminally obscure or close to atheism, it makes little difference, for believers, dogma, and theologians alike make existence claims and promote “ways of knowing” that make their faith incompatible with science. But do religions really make such claims? One needn't look far to discover that most do, although more sophisticated believers and theologians tend to downplay that fact.

Does Religion Look for Truth?

It seems obvious that if religion is based on the existence of a god, then that is a contention about reality, and such a reality constitutes a basis for belief. In other words, the existence of God is taken as a fact. Surprisingly, some theologians come close to denying this, saying that God cannot be described, or is beyond all ken, thus rejecting any empirical claims about a deity save its existence. Religion, they say, has little or nothing to do with facts, but is about morals, building a community, or finding a way of life. Here are two examples of such denial from believers, the first from Francis Spufford, a Christian, and the second from Reza Aslan, a Muslim:

Religion isn't a philosophical argument
, just as it isn't a dodgy cosmology, or any other kind of alternative to science. In fact, it isn't primarily a system of propositions about the world at all. Before it is anything else, it is a structure of feelings, a house built of emotions. You don't have the emotions because you've signed up to the proposition that God exists; you entertain the proposition that God exists because you've had the emotions.

It is a shame that this word
,
myth,
which originally signified nothing more than stories of the supernatural, has come to be regarded as synonymous with falsehood, when in fact myths are always true. By their very nature myths inhere both legitimacy and credibility. Whatever truths they convey have little to do with historical fact. To ask whether Moses actually parted the Red Sea, or whether Jesus truly raised Lazarus from the dead, or whether the word of God indeed poured through the lips of Muhammad, is to ask totally irrelevant questions. The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is “What do these stories mean?”

But regardless of whether the emotions precede the belief (William James's thesis in
The Varieties of Religious Experience
) or the belief yields the emotions, the belief is still required to channel your emotions into a moral code, a way of life, and religiously based actions. Spufford, after all, has to “entertain the proposition” of God. Aslan reduces the Quran and the Bible to collections of metaphors on which one can base a philosophy, but hardly a religion. One can only imagine what most Muslims would say about Aslan's contention, in a book about Islam, that it's irrelevant whether Muhammad was really a prophet of God. Such a statement would get one killed if uttered publicly in some Muslim lands.