Knocking on Heaven's Door (10 page)

No doubt Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have had Holmes express similar methodology for unraveling the secrets of the universe. Practitioners of science attempt to keep human limitations or prejudices from clouding the picture so that they can trust themselves to obtain an unbiased understanding of reality. They do so with logic and collective observations. Scientists try to objectively figure out how things happen and what underlying physical framework could account for what they observe.

As a sidebar, however, someone should let Sherlock know that he’s using inductive, not deductive logic, as do most detectives and scientists when they are trying to piece together the evidence. Scientists and detectives inductively work from observations to try to establish a consistent framework that matches all the measured phenomena. Once the theory is in place, scientists and detectives make deductions, too, in order to predict other phenomena and relationships in the world. But by then—for detectives at least—the work is done.

Religion is yet another approach that many use to respond to the challenge that Gregerson described of relating to the hard-to-access aspects of the universe. The seventeenth-century British author Sir Thomas Browne wrote in his
Religio Medici,
“I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O altitudo.”
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For Browne and others like him, logic and the scientific method are believed to be insufficient to access all truth—which they trust religion alone to address. The key distinction between science and religion might well be the character of the questions they choose to ask. Religion includes questions that fall outside the domain of science. Religion asks “why,” in the sense of the presumption of an underlying purpose, whereas science asks “how.” Science doesn’t rely on any sense of an underlying goal for nature. That is a line of inquiry we leave to religion or philosophy, or abandon altogether.

During our Los Angeles conversation, the screenwriter Scott Derrickson told me that there was originally a line in
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(he directed a remake of the 1951 version in 2008) which troubled him so much that he thought about it for days afterward. The Jennifer Connolly character, when talking about her husband’s death, was supposed to have commented that “the universe is random.”

Scott was disturbed by those words. Underlying physical laws do include randomness, but their whole point is to encapsulate order so that at least some aspects of the universe can be regarded as predictable phenomena. Scott told me that it took several weeks after the line was removed for him to identify the word he had been looking for—“indifferent.” My ears perked up when I heard that exact line in the TV show
Mad Men,
enunciated by the lead character, Don Draper, in a way that made it sound distasteful.

But an unconcerned universe is not a bad thing—or a good one for that matter. Scientists don’t look for underlying intention in the way that religion often does. Objective science simply requires that we treat the universe as indifferent. Indeed, science in its neutral stance sometimes removes the stigma of evil from human conditions by pointing to their physical, as opposed to moral, origins. We now know, for example, that mental disease and addiction have “innocent” genetic and physical sources that can shift them into the category of diseases exempt from the moral sphere.

Even so, science doesn’t address all moral issues (though it doesn’t disown them either as is sometimes alleged). Nor does science ask about the reasons for the universe’s behavior or inquire into the morality of human affairs. Though logical thinking certainly helps in dealing with the modern world and some scientists today do search for physiological bases for moral actions, science’s purpose, broadly speaking, is not to resolve the status of humans’ moral standing.

The dividing line isn’t always precise, and theologians can sometimes ask scientific questions while scientists might get their initial ideas or directions from a worldview that inspires them—sometimes even a religious one. Moreover, because science is done by human beings, intermediate stages during which scientists are formulating their theories will frequently involve unscientific human instincts such as faith in the existence of answers or emotions about particular beliefs. And, needless to say, this works the other way too: artists and theologians can be guided by observations and a scientific understanding of the world.

But these sometimes blurry divisions don’t eliminate the distinctions in ultimate goals. Science aims for a predictive physical picture that can explain how things work. The methods and goals of science and religion are intrinsically different, with science addressing physical reality, and religion addressing psychological or social human desires or needs.

The separate aims shouldn’t be a source of conflict—in fact they seem in principle to create a nice division of labor. However, religions don’t always stick to questions of purpose or comfort. Many religions attempt to address the external reality of the universe as well, as can be seen even in the definition of the word:
The American Heritage Dictionary
tells us that religion is “belief in a divine or superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and worshiped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe.” Dictionary.com says that religion is “A set of beliefs concerning the causes, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observations, and of constructing a moral code governing the morality of human affairs.” Religion in these definitions is not only about people’s relationship to the world—be it moral or emotional or spiritual—but it’s about the world itself. This leaves religious views open to falsification. When science encroaches on domains of knowledge that religion attempts to explain, disagreements are bound to arise.

Despite humanity’s shared desire for wisdom, people using different methods to ask questions and find answers or people with different goals haven’t always gotten along and the pursuit of truth hasn’t always neatly separated along lines that would avoid controversy. When people apply religious beliefs to the natural world, observations of nature can push back, and religion has to accommodate these findings. This was as true for the early church—which had, for example, to reconcile free will with God’s infinite powers—as it is for religious thinkers today.

ARE SCIENCE AND RELIGION COMPATIBLE?

Science and religion didn’t always face this quandary. Before the scientific revolution, religion and science peacefully coexisted. In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church was content to allow a generous interpretation of scripture, which lasted until the Reformation threatened the church’s dominance. Galileo’s evidence for the Copernican heliocentric theory, which contradicted the church’s claims about the heavens, was particularly troubling in this context—the publication of his results not only defied church orders, but explicitly questioned the church’s sole authority in interpreting scripture. The clergy were therefore none too fond of Galileo and his claims.

More recent history has provided numerous instances of conflict between science and religion. The second law of thermodynamics, which says that the world is moving toward increasing disorder, can dismay people who believe that God created an ideal world. The theory of evolution of course creates similar problems, erupting most recently with “debates” over intelligent design. Even the expanding universe can be disturbing to those who want to believe that we live in a perfect universe, notwithstanding that it was Georges Lemaie, a Catholic priest, who first proposed the Big Bang theory.

One of the more amusing examples of a scientist confronting his faith concerned the English naturalist Philip Gosse. He faced a quandary when—in the early nineteenth century—he realized that the Earth’s strata, which hold fossils of extinct animals, contradicted the idea that the Earth could be only 6,000 years old. In his book
Omphalos,
he resolved his conflict by deciding the Earth was created recently—but included specially created “bones” and “fossils” from animals that had never existed and other misleading signs of its (nonexistent) history. Gosse posited that a world in working order should show marks of change, even if they had never actually occurred. This interpretation might sound silly, but technically it does work. However, no one else has ever seemed to take this interpretation very seriously. Gosse himself switched to marine biology to avoid the annoying tests of faith that the dinosaur bones posed.

Happily, most correct scientific ideas become less radical-seeming and more acceptable over time. In the end, scientific discoveries generally prevail. Today no one questions the heliocentric point of view or the universe’s expansion. But literal interpretations do still cause problems like Gosse’s for believers who take them too seriously.

Less literal readings of scripture helped avoid such conflicts prior to the seventeenth century. In a conversation over lunch, the scholar and historian of religion Karen Armstrong explained how the current conflict between religion and science didn’t really exist early on. Religious texts were then read on many levels, so interpretation was less literal and dogmatic and consequently less confrontational.

In the fifth century, Augustine made this viewpoint explicit: “Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances, and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, lest the unbeliever see only ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.”
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Augustine, in his subtlety, went even further. He explained that God deliberately introduced riddles into scripture to give people the pleasure of figuring them out.
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This referred as much to obscure words as to passages that required metaphorical interpretation. Augustine seems to have had some fun with the logic and illogic of it all, and tried to interpret basic paradoxes. How could anyone completely understand or appreciate God’s plan, for example—at least in the absence of time travel?
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Galileo himself adhered closely to the Augustinian stance. In a 1615 letter to Madame Christina of Lorraine, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, he wrote, “I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the Holy Bible can never speak untruth—whenever its true meaning is understood.”
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He even claimed that Copernicus felt similarly, asserting that Copernicus “did not ignore the Bible, but he knew very well that if his doctrine were proved, then it could not contradict the Scripture when they were rightly understood.”
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In his zeal, Galileo also wrote, quoting Augustine, “If anyone shall set the authority of Holy Writ against clear and manifest reason, he who does this knows not what he has undertaken; for he opposes to the truth not the meaning of the Bible, which is beyond his comprehension, but rather his own interpretation; not what is in the Bible, but what he has found in himself and imagines to be there.”
¹⁸

Augustine’s less dogmatic approach to scripture assumed the text always had a rational meaning. Any apparent contradiction with observations of the external world necessarily represented the reader’s misunderstanding, even if the explanation wasn’t manifest. Augustine viewed the Bible as the product of human formulation of divine revelation.

Construing the Bible, at least in part, as a reflection of the writers’ subjective experiences, Augustine’s interpretation of scripture comes close in some respects to our definition of art. The church wouldn’t need to backtrack in the face of scientific discoveries with the Augustinian cast of mind.

Galileo realized this. For he and others who thought similarly, science and the Bible couldn’t possibly be in conflict if the words were properly interpreted. Any apparent conflict lies not with the scientific facts, but with human understanding. The Bible might be incomprehensible to humans at times and might superficially appear to contradict our observations, but according to the Augustinian interpretation, the Bible is never wrong. Galileo was devout and didn’t think he had the authority to contradict scripture, even when logic would tell him to do so. Many years later, Pope John Paul II went so far as to declare Galileo a better theologian than those who had opposed him.

But Galileo also believed in his discoveries. In a bit of religious trash talking, he presciently advised: “Take note, theologians, that in your desire to make matters of faith out of propositions relating to the fixity of sun and earth you run the risk of eventually having to condemn as heretics those who would declare the earth to stand still and the sun to change position—eventually, I say, at such a time as it might be physically or logically proved that the earth moves and the sun stands still.”
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Clearly Christian religions didn’t always stick to such a philosophy, or Galileo wouldn’t have been imprisoned and newspapers today wouldn’t be reporting controversies over intelligent design. Though many practitioners of religion have flexible beliefs, a rigid interpretation of physical phenomena is likely to prove problematic. A literal reading of scripture is a risky point of view to uphold. Over time, as technology permits us to scale new regimes, science and religion will have more overlapping domains and potential contradictions can only increase.

Today, a significant proportion of the world’s religious population aims to avoid such conflicts through a more liberal interpretation of their faith. They don’t necessarily rely on a strict interpretation of scripture or the dogma of any particular faith. They believe they maintain the tenets of their spiritual life while accepting the findings of rigorous science.