Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516)
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Reason #3—Churches come across as antagonistic to science. One of the reasons young adults feel disconnected from church or from faith is the tension they feel between Christianity and science. The most common of the perceptions in this arena is “Christians are too confident they know all the answers” (35%). Three out of ten young adults with a Christian background feel that “churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in” (29%). Another one-quarter embrace the perception that “Christianity is anti-science” (25%). And nearly the same proportion (23%) said they have “been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate.” Furthermore, the research shows that many science-minded young Christians are struggling to find ways of staying faithful to their beliefs and to their professional calling in science-related industries.
If the incompatibility of science and religion is an illusion, it’s one that’s powerful enough to make these young Christians vote with their feet. They may not abandon religion, but they certainly break ties with their church.
While some liberal churches deal with the conflict by simply accepting the science and modifying their theology where required, more conservative ones put up a fight. One of the more remarkable demonstrations of this resistance occurred in September 2013, when a group of parents, with the help of a conservative legal institute, filed suit against the Kansas State Board of Education. Their goal was to overturn the entire set of state science standards from kindergarten through twelfth grade, arguing that those standards gave students a “materialistic atheistic” worldview that was inimical to their religion. Just as this book went to press, the lawsuit was dismissed.
Finally, if religion and science get along so well, why are so many scientists nonbelievers? The difference in religiosity between the American public and American scientists is profound, persistent, and well documented. Further, the more accomplished the scientist, the greater the likelihood that he or she is a nonbeliever. Surveying American scientists as a whole, Pew Research showed that 33 percent admitted belief in God, while 41 percent were atheists (the rest either didn’t answer, didn’t know, or believed in a “universal spirit or higher power”). In contrast, belief in God among the general public ran at 83 percent and atheism at only 4 percent. In other words, scientists are ten times more likely to be atheists than are other Americans. This disparity has persisted for over eighty years of polling.
When one moves to scientists working at a group of “elite” research universities, the difference is even more dramatic, with just over 62 percent being either atheist or agnostic, and only 23 percent believing in God—a degree of nonbelief more than fifteenfold higher than among the general public.
Sitting at the top tier of American science are the members of the National Academy of Sciences, an honorary organization that elects only the most accomplished researchers in the United States. And here nonbelief is the rule: 93 percent of the members are atheists or agnostics, with only 7 percent believing in a personal god. This is almost the exact opposite of the data for “average” Americans.
Why do so many scientists reject religion compared with the general public? Any answer must also explain the observation that the better the scientist, the greater the likelihood of atheism. Three explanations come to mind. One has nothing to do with science per se: scientists are simply more educated than the average American, and religiosity simply declines with education.
While that is indeed the case, we can rule it out as the only explanation from a 2006 survey of religious belief of university professors in different fields. As with scientists, American university professors were more atheistic or agnostic than the general populace (23 percent versus 7 percent nonbelievers, respectively). But when professors from different areas were polled, it became clear that scientists were the least religious. While only 6 percent of “health” professors were atheists or agnostics, this figure was 29 percent for humanities, 33 percent for computer science and engineering, 39 percent for social sciences, and a whopping 52 percent for physical and biological scientists together. When disciplines were divided more finely, biologists and psychologists tied as the least religious: 61 percent of each group were agnostics or atheists. So, among academics with roughly equal amounts of higher education, scientists still reject God more often. The tentative conclusion is that the atheism of scientists doesn’t simply reflect their higher education, but is somehow inherent in their discipline.
That leaves two explanations for the atheism of scientists, both connected with science itself. Either nonbelievers are drawn to become scientists, or doing science promotes the rejection of religion. (Both, of course, can be true.) Accommodationists prefer the first explanation because the latter implies that science itself produces atheism—a view that liberal believers abhor. Yet there are two lines of evidence that practicing science does erode belief. The first is that elite scientists were raised in religious homes nearly as often as nonscientists, yet the former still wind up being far less religious. But this may mean only that religious homes can produce nonbelievers, who then are preferentially drawn to science.
But there’s further evidence. If you survey American scientists of different ages, you find that the older ones are significantly less religious than the younger. While this suggests that the erosion of faith is proportional to one’s tenure as a scientist, there’s an alternative explanation: a “cohort effect.” Perhaps older scientists were simply born in an era when religious belief was less pervasive, and have retained their youthful unbelief. But that seems unlikely, for the trend is actually in the opposite direction: the religiosity of Americans has declined over the last sixty years. The “cohort hypothesis” predicts that older scientists would be more religious, and they’re not.
All of this suggests that lack of religious belief is a side effect of doing science. And as repugnant as that is to many, it’s really no surprise. For some people, at least, science’s habit of requiring evidence for belief, combined with its culture of pervasive doubt and questioning, must often carry over to other aspects of one’s life—including the possibility of religious faith.
In chapter 3 I’ll argue that the existence of religious scientists does not constitute strong evidence for the compatibility of science and faith. Isn’t it then hypocritical to argue that the existence of atheistic scientists is evidence for an incompatibility between science and faith? My response is that religious scientists are in some ways like the many smokers who don’t get lung cancer. Just as those cancer-free individuals don’t invalidate the statistical relationship between smoking and the disease, so the existence of religious scientists doesn’t refute an antagonistic relationship between science and faith. Scientists of faith happen to be the ones who can compartmentalize two incompatible worldviews in their heads.
On the whole, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion—based on the paucity of religious scientists, the incessant stream of books using contradictory arguments to promote accommodationism, the constant reassurance by scientific organizations that believers can accept science without violating their faith, and the pervasiveness of creationism in many countries—that there is a problem in harmonizing science and religion, one that worries both sides (but mostly the religious).
After a period of relative quiescence since the books of Draper and White, why has the issue of science versus religion been revived? I see three reasons: recent advances in science that have pushed back the claims of religion, the rise of the Templeton Foundation as a major funder of accommodationist ventures, and, finally, the appearance of New Atheism and its explicit connection with science, especially evolution.
The deadliest blow ever struck by science against faith was Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. But that was in 1859. The conflict between religion and evolution didn’t really get going until religious fundamentalism arose in early-twentieth-century America. An organized push for creationism began around 1960, and then, after a series of court cas
es prohibiting its teaching in public schools, creationism assumed the guise of science itself—first as the oxymoronic “scientific creationism,” pretending that the Bible supported the very facts of science. When that failed, creationism turned into “intelligent design” (ID), whose teaching was also struck down by the courts in 2005. With the failure of ID, which is about as watered down as creationism can get, those who reject evolution have become more defensive and vociferous, eager to find other ways to go after science. Ironically, as the credibility of creationists grows smaller, their voices get louder.
In contrast, evolution goes from strength to strength, as new data from the fossil record, molecular biology, and biogeography continue to affirm its hegemony as the central organizing principle of biology. Creationists waiting for the decisive evidence against evolution, evidence that ID promised to deliver, have been disappointed. As I said in my previous book, “Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right. That is as close as we can get to a scientific truth.” And now the new field of evolutionary psychology, by studying the evolutionary roots of human behavior, gradually erodes the uniqueness of many human traits, like morality, once imputed to God. As I’ll discuss in chapter 4, we see in our evolutionary relatives behaviors that look very much like rudimentary morality. This suggests that many of our “moral” feelings could be the result of evolution, while the rest could result from purely secular considerations.
Recent advances in neuroscience, physics, cosmology, and psychology have also replaced supernatural explanations with naturalistic ones. Although our knowledge of the brain is still scanty, we’re beginning to learn that “consciousness,” once attributed to God, is a product of diffuse brain activity and not some metaphysical “I” sitting inside our skulls. It can be manipulated and altered with surgery and chemicals, making it a phenomenon that is surely a product of brain activity. The notion of “free will”—a linchpin of many faiths—now looks increasingly dubious as scientists not only untangle the influence of our genes and environments on our behavior, but also show that some “decisions” can be predicted from brain scans several seconds before people are conscious of having made them. In other words, the notion of pure “free will,” the idea that in any situation we can choose to behave in different ways, is vanishing. Most scientists and philosophers are now physical “determinists” who see our genetic makeup and environmental history as the only factors that, acting through the laws of physics, determine which decisions we make. That, of course, kicks the props out from under much theology, including the doctrine of salvation through freely choosing a savior, and the argument that human-caused evil is the undesirable but inevitable by-product of the free will vouchsafed us by God.
In physics, we are starting to see how the universe could arise from “nothing,” and that our own universe might be only one of many universes that differ in their physical laws. Far from making us the special objects of God’s attention, such a cosmology sees us simply as holders of a winning lottery ticket—the inhabitants of a universe that had the right physical laws to allow evolution.
Bit by bit, the list of phenomena that once demanded an explanatory God is being whittled down to nothing. Religion’s response has been to either reject the science (the tactic of fundamentalists) or bend their theology to accommodate it. But theology can be bent only so far before, by rejecting theological nonnegotiables like the divinity of Jesus, it snaps, turning into nonreligious secular humanism.
That gives another clue to the rise in accommodationism, at least in America: the recent decline in formal religious affiliation. The percentage of Americans who either are nonbelievers or claim no religious affiliation—the so-called nones—is rising rapidly. The proportion of atheists, agnostics, and those who are spiritual but not religious stood at 20 percent in 2012, up 5 percent from 2005. This makes “nones” the fastest-growing category of “believers” in America. This trend is well known and recognized by the churches, and, as we’ve seen, partly reflects how young people are turned off by religion’s perceived antagonism to science.
How can religion stem this attrition? For those who want to keep the comforts of their faith but not appear backward or uneducated, there is no choice but to find some rapport between religion and science. Besides trying to retain adherents, churches have a further reason to embrace science: liberal theology prides itself on modernism, and there is no better way to profess modernity than to embellish your theology with science. Finally, everyone, including believers, recognizes the remarkable improvements in our quality of life over the past few centuries, not to mention remarkable technical achievements like sending space probes to distant planets. And everyone knows that those achievements come from science, its ability to find the truth and then to use those findings to promote not only further understanding but improvements in technology and human well-being. If you see your religion as also making salubrious claims about the truth, then you must recognize that it is in some ways competing with science—and not too successfully. After all, what new insights has religion produced in the last century? This disparity in outcome might well cause some cognitive dissonance, a mental discomfort that can be resolved—though not very well—by arguing that there’s no conflict between science and religion.
Much of the recent spurt of accommodationism has been fueled by the funds of a single organization—the John Templeton Foundation. Templeton (1912–2008) was a billionaire mutual-fund magnate knighted by Queen Elizabeth after he moved to the Bahamas as a tax exile. Although a Presbyterian, he was convinced that other religions also held clues to “spiritual” realities and that, indeed, science and religion could be partners in solving the “big questions” of purpose, meaning, and values. To that end he bequeathed his fortune—the endowment is now $1.5 billion—to his eponymous foundation, set up in 1987. Its philanthropic mission reflects Templeton’s push for accommodationism:
Sir John believed that continued scientific progress was essential, not only to provide material benefits to humanity but also to reveal and illuminate God’s divine plan for the universe, of which we are a part.
The foundation’s main philanthropic goal is funding work on what it calls “the Big Questions”: areas that clearly mix science with religion. As the foundation states:
Sir John’s own eclectic list featured a range of fundamental scientific notions, including complexity, emergence, evolution, infinity, and time. In the moral and spiritual sphere, his interests extended to such basic phenomena as altruism, creativity, free will, generosity, gratitude, intellect, love, prayer, and purpose. These diverse, far-reaching topics define the boundaries of the ambitious agenda that we call the Big Questions. Sir John was confident that, over time, the serious investigation of these subjects would lead humankind ever closer to truths that transcend the particulars of nation, ethnicity, creed, and circumstance.
. . . For Sir John, the overarching goal of asking the Big Questions was to discover what he called “new spiritual information.” This term, to his mind, encompassed progress not only in our conception of religious truths but also in our understanding of the deepest realities of human nature and the physical world. As he wrote in the Foundation’s charter, he wanted to encourage every sort of opinion leader—from scientists and journalists to clergy and theologians—to become more open-minded about the possible character of ultimate reality and the divine.
The Templeton Foundation distributes $70 million yearly in grants and fellowships. To put that in perspective, that’s five times the amount dispensed annually by the U.S. National Science Foundation for research in evolutionary biology, one of Templeton’s areas of focus. Given Templeton’s deep pockets and not overly stringent criteria for dispensing money, it’s no wonder that, in a time of reduced financial support, scientists line up for Templeton grants.
And from that support flows a constant stream of conferences, books, papers, and magazine articles, many arguing for harmony betw
een faith and science. You may have encountered the foundation through its full-page ads in the New York Times, with noted scholars (many already supported by Templeton) discussing questions like “Does science make belief in God obsolete?” and “Does the universe have a purpose?”
The foundation’s most famous award, originally named the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, is now called simply the Templeton Prize, given to “[honor] a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.” It goes to a single individual, who gets £1.1 million (roughly $1.8 million), an amount deliberately set to exceed that of the Nobel Prize (about $1.2 million, shareable by up to three recipients). Originally awarded to religious figures, theologians, and philosophers, including Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, and Watergate conspirator Charles Colson, the prize is now also given to religion-friendly scientists like the evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala and the cosmologist Martin Rees.
The change in both the prize’s name and the nature of its recipients suggests an increasing desire of the foundation to downplay its religious side and acquire more of the cachet of science. After all, many scientists are reluctant to engage with explicitly religious organizations. Indeed, Templeton does fund some pure science. But its mission, to promote accommodationism, has remained the same, and the funded projects nearly always have a theological side. Templeton, for instance, funded the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge, which also runs a program for children, “Test of Faith,” showing how Christianity comports with science. Templeton funds the BioLogos Foundation, which is designed to show evangelical Christians that they can accept both Jesus and Darwin. Templeton funds the Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a curiously theological arm of a large scientific organization, one designed to promote the idea that the relationship between science and religion is purely positive.