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

by Coyne, Jerry A.

  Data are sparser from the rest of the world, but also show a high degree of religious literalism, especially outside Europe. The 2011 Ipsos/Reuters poll showed that belief in the existence of heaven or hell was held by 19 percent of the combined inhabitants of twenty-three countries surveyed, ranging from only 3 percent of Swedes to 62 percent of Indonesians. The same belief was entertained by 41 percent of Americans and only 10 percent of Britons. We see some disparities between these results and those of the Harris poll, which showed a higher percentage of Americans believing in heaven and hell. These disparities might be due to the way the questions are asked, and should make us wary of taking any statistic as a precise estimate. Nevertheless, no polls show that most believers see scripture metaphorically rather than literally.

  The world’s Muslims are especially pious and literalistic. It’s no surprise that a 2012 Pew survey of thirty-eight thousand professed Muslims in thirty-eight countries showed that belief in God and in Muhammad as his prophet was nearly universal (the median percentage ranged from 85 percent in southeastern Europe to between 98 percent and 100 percent in the Middle East and North Africa). But it might be a surprise to those unfamiliar with Islam that in all countries surveyed, more than half of Muslims asserted that the Quran “should be read literally, word for word”: figures ranged from 54 percent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to 93 percent in Cameroon (data were not available for the Middle East). Muslim belief in angels ranged from a low of 42 percent in Albania to a high of 99 percent in Afghanistan (90 percent in the United States), with twenty-three of thirty-eight countries showing more than 80 percent.

  The survey shows that on the whole, most Muslims are Quranic literalists, even more faithful to scripture than are highly religious Americans. Islamic literalism is one reason why, when Muslims perceive an offense to their faith, like the Danish cartoons that mocked Muhammad, they rise up en masse, often in violent sprees. One must take seriously the claim that they really believe what they say they believe, and that faith, not reason, can be a major cause of religious malfeasance. Islam is, of course, not unique in this way; as we’ll see in the final chapter, the dangers of faith are inherent in many other religions as well.

  It is a staple of accommodationists, and of those atheists who “believe in belief,” to exculpate religion by ascribing what are clearly religiously motivated acts to “politics” or “social dysfunction.” (In many Muslim countries, however, there’s virtually no demarcation between religion, politics, and social mores.) This is simply an extension of the claim that religion doesn’t really involve truth claims about the universe. In a debate with Steven Pinker about “scientism”—the notion that science often intrudes into areas where it doesn’t belong—the New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier wrote, “Only a small minority of believers in any of the scriptural religions, for example, have ever taken scripture literally.” But that’s simply wrong. Perhaps some Christians see the Bible largely as allegory, but there are some nonnegotiable beliefs that are virtually diagnostic of each religion. William Dembski, a Southern Baptist and prominent advocate of intelligent design creationism, has specified the “non-negotiables of Christianity” as these: divine creation, reflection of God’s glory in the world, the exceptionalism of humans made in the image of God, and the Resurrection of Christ. These constitute the epistemic claims of faith, and virtually every believer entertains some. (For Christians, the ultimate redoubt is often the Resurrection.) As I often say, some believers are literalists about nearly everything, but nearly every believer is a literalist about something.

  Is Scripture Literal or Allegorical?

  This brings us to the thorny question of metaphor and allegory (allegory is just extended metaphor: an entire story that is not meant to be taken literally, but symbolizes an underlying message). A recurrent pattern in theology is this: as branches of science—evolutionary biology, geology, history, and archaeology—have disproved scriptural claims one by one, those claims have morphed from literal truths into allegories. This is one of the big differences between science and religion. When a scientific claim is disproved, it goes into the dustbin of good ideas that simply didn’t pan out. When a religious claim is disproved, it often turns into a metaphor that imparts a made-up “lesson.” Although some biblical events are hard to see as allegories (Jonah’s ingestion by a fish and Job’s trials are two of these), the theological mind is endlessly creative, always able to find a moral or philosophical point in fictitious stories. Hell, for instance, has become a metaphor for “separation from God,” and now that we know that Adam and Eve cannot have been the literal ancestors of all living people (see chapter 3), the “original sin” they bequeathed is seen by some believers as a metaphor for our evolved selfish nature.

  Further, many liberal believers are affronted by claims that nearly anything in the Bible should be taken literally. One of their most common arguments against such literalism is this: “The Bible is not a textbook of science.” When I see that phrase, I automatically translate it as, “The Bible is not entirely true,” for that is what it means. The “nontextbook” claim, of course, is a rationale for believers to pick and choose what they consider really true in scripture—or, for liberal Muslims like Reza Aslan, in the Quran.

  Indeed, even saying that there’s a historical tradition of taking scripture literally can deeply upset “modern” believers, for the fashion is to argue that literalism is purely a modern phenomenon. When I wrote on my Web site that the story of Adam and Eve could not be literally true, for evolutionary genetics had shown that the population of modern humans was always much larger than two, the writer Andrew Sullivan took me to task for even suggesting that believers saw the First Couple as historical figures:

  There’s no evidence that the Garden of Eden was always regarded as figurative? Really? Has Coyne read the fucking thing? I defy anyone with a brain (or who hasn’t had his brain turned off by fundamentalism) to think it’s meant literally.

  Yet for centuries, Christians, and that includes the Catholic Church, to which Sullivan belongs, took the story of Adam and Eve as the sole ancestors of humanity literally. And no wonder, for the description in the Bible is straightforward, without the slightest hint that it’s an allegory.

  Now, when Jesus recites parables, like that of the Good Samaritan, it’s clear that he’s simply telling a story to make a point. But that’s not the way that Genesis reads. Catholics have in fact always adhered literally to religious monogenism, the biological descent of all humans from Adam and Eve. The reality of the Garden of Eden, the Fall, and Adam and Eve as our ancestors was accepted by early theologians and church fathers like Augustine, Aquinas, and Tertullian, although some, like Origen, were unclear on the issue. In 1950, however, Pope Pius XII affirmed monogenism in his encyclical Humani Generis. After asserting that the church didn’t oppose research and discussion of evolution—so long as everyone agreed that, during the process, only humans were given a soul by God—the pope denied such latitude about Adam and Eve:

  When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism [our descent from ancestors beyond Adam and Eve], the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

  There is no room for waffling here. The authority of the church insists that a historical Adam committed a sin passed on to his offspring—as if sin were a gene that never gets lost—and those sinful offspring g
rew into all of humanity.

  The historical emphasis on the existence of a literal Adam and Eve, and the couple’s crucial position in theology, is emphasized by the historian David Livingstone in his book Adam’s Ancestors:

  Regardless of how differently the Garden of Eden may have been conceived from ancient times through the medieval period to more recent days, and no matter the differences in computations of the creation date of the earth, the idea that every member of the human race is descended from the biblical Adam has been a standard doctrine in Islamic, Jewish and Christian thought. In this respect, if in no other, the catechisms of the seventeenth-century Westminster divines can be taken to speak for them all when they declare that “all mankind” descended from Adam “by ordinary generation.” People’s sense of themselves, their understanding of their place in the divinely ordered scheme of things, their very identity as human beings created in the image of God, thus rested on a conception of human origins that assumed the literal truth of the biblical narrative and traced the varieties of the human race proximately to the three sons of Noah and ultimately to Adam and Eve.

  I dwell on Adam and Eve for two reasons. The first is simply to show that despite the claims of religious liberals like Sullivan, there’s no denying that over history much of the Bible has been seen literally, particularly when—as in the case of the First Couple—an important doctrine is at stake. I often hear theologians argue that their predecessors like Aquinas and Augustine were not literalists, and that literalism began only in the nineteenth or twentieth century. But that’s a distortion of history, one designed to save churches from the embarrassment of having taken seriously stories now seen as palpably fictitious.

  Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, is often praised for having argued that scripture can be read metaphorically. Such a claim, though, is inaccurate, easily dispelled if you simply read his writings. Aquinas actually argued that scripture could be read both literally and metaphorically. In other words, he waffled, but, importantly, emphasized that if there was a conflict between metaphorical and literal interpretations of the Bible, literalism must win.

  Here, for example, is Aquinas discussing the reality of paradise, the abode of Adam and Eve, in Summa Theologica. Responding to the words of his predecessor Saint Augustine, Aquinas shows how historical truth trumps metaphor (my emphasis):

  Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. viii, 1): “Three general opinions prevail about paradise. Some understand a place merely corporeal; others a place entirely spiritual; while others, whose opinion, I confess, pleases me, hold that paradise was both corporeal and spiritual.”

  I answer that, As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xiii, 21): “Nothing prevents us from holding, within proper limits, a spiritual paradise; so long as we believe in the truth of the events narrated as having there occurred.” For whatever Scripture tells us about paradise is set down as matter of history; and wherever Scripture makes use of this method, we must hold to the historical truth of the narrative as a foundation of whatever spiritual explanation we may offer.

  Aquinas believed not only in paradise, but also in the instantaneous creation of species and of Adam and Eve as humanity’s ancestors, as well as in a young Earth (less than six thousand years old) and the literal existence of Noah and his great flood. Further, Aquinas was obsessed with angels. Not only did he see them as real but devoted a large section of the Summa Theologica (“Treatise on the Angels”) to their existence, number, nature, how they move, what they know, and what they want. The philosopher Andrew Bernstein describes such theological analysis of arcane and unevidenced claims as “the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—studying nothing.”

  Saint Augustine of Hippo, who commented extensively on Genesis, was quite explicit that the text, though it had a spiritual message, was based on historical events:

  The narrative indeed in these books is not cast in the figurative kind of language you find in the Song of Songs, but quite simply tells of things that happened, as in the books of the Kingdoms and others like them. But there are things being said with which ordinary human life has made us quite familiar, and so it is not difficult, indeed, it is the obvious thing to do, to take them first in the literal sense, and then chisel out from them what future realities the actual events described may figuratively stand for.

  Augustine was also a literalist about many things later refuted by science: a young Earth, instantaneous creation, the historical reality of Adam and Eve, paradise, and Noah and his Ark. It’s ironic that both he and Aquinas are constantly touted by accommodationists as having a “nonliteral” theology that is completely compatible with science in general and with evolution in particular. Such a claim can be made only by those who haven’t read these theologians or are dedicated to whitewashing church history.

  I could go on, but two more examples will suffice. The Protestant reformer John Calvin believed in the virginity of Mary, a historical Adam and Eve, and a literal hell. Like Aquinas, he also believed that heretics should be killed. As for metaphorical interpretation of the Quran, that’s simply not on the menu: as we saw above, the majority of the world’s Muslims see that document as literally true.

  Sullivan’s rage about Adam and Eve raises my second point. If you want to read much of the Bible as allegory, you must overturn the history of theology, rewriting it to conform to your liberal, science-friendly faith. Besides pretending that you’re following in the tradition of ancient theologians, you must also explain the way you can discern truth amid the metaphors. What is allegory and what is real? How do you tell the difference? This is particularly difficult for Christians, because the historical evidence for Jesus—that is, for a real person around whom the myth accreted—is thin. And evidence for Jesus as the son of God is unconvincing, resting solely on the assertions of the Bible and interpretations of people writing decades after the events described in the Gospels.

  If faith is often grounded on facts, we might expect one of two results if those facts were shown to be wrong: either people would abandon their faith—or some parts of it—or they would simply deny the evidence that contradicted their beliefs.

  There isn’t much data on the first possibility, but there’s some suggestion that at least major parts of faith are resistant to scientific disproof. As we’ve seen, 64 percent of Americans would retain a religious belief even if science disproved it, while only 23 percent would consider changing that belief. The results were only slightly less disheartening in Julian Baggini’s online survey of British churchgoing Christians, 41 percent of whom either agreed or tended to agree with the statement “If science contradicts the Bible, I will believe the Bible, not science.”

  Evolution: The Biggest Problem

  The clearest example of religion’s resistance to science is, of course, its attitude toward evolution. While not the only scientific theory that contradicts scripture, evolution has implications, involving materialism, human exceptionalism, and morality, that are distressing to many believers. And yet it is supported by mountains of scientific data—at least as much data as support the uncontroversial “germ theory” that infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms.

  And indeed, evolution is largely rejected by the faithful. Among twenty-three countries surveyed in a 2011 Ipsos/Reuters poll on acceptance of human evolution, 28 percent of all people rejected it in favor of creationism, with the rejection higher in more religious countries. Saudi Arabia and Turkey were the biggest deniers of evolution. (This relationship also holds among states within the United States: the most religious states show the most denial of evolution.) The situation is especially dire in the United States, a country considered scientifically advanced. Yet when it comes to evolution, many Americans remain in the Bronze Age. A 2014 Gallup poll of American attitudes toward human evolution showed that fully 42 percent were straight biblical young-Earth creationists, agr
eeing that humans were created in our present form within the last ten thousand years. Another 31 percent were “theistic evolutionists,” accepting evolution with the caveat that it was supernaturally guided or prompted by God. And only 19 percent of Americans—fewer than one in five—accepted evolution the way biologists do, as a naturalistic, unguided process. These figures have remained almost constant over the last three decades, with perhaps a slight and recent rise in those accepting naturalistic evolution.

  This rejection of evolution can’t be explained simply by Americans’ ignorance of the evidence. We live in an age of unprecedented science popularization: think of people like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, David Attenborough, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Edward O. Wilson. The evidence for evolution is everywhere—only a few clicks away on the Internet, a perusal of National Geographic, or a single push on the remote control. Yet evolution is rejected by Americans as strongly as it was three decades ago.

  The reason is clear. When asked in 2007 why they denied evolution, Americans gave as the main reasons their belief in Jesus (19 percent of respondents), God (16 percent), or religion in general (16 percent), all exceeding those who thought there was “not enough scientific evidence” for evolution (14 percent). Other studies show that although religious people in the United States know slightly less about science than do nonbelievers, their knowledge about what the theory of evolution actually says is about the same. Nevertheless, regardless of how science-savvy they are, the religious deny the fact of evolution much more often than do the nonreligious; in fact, the more the faithful know about science, the more they reject evolution! This arrant rejection of facts is clearly based not on lack of education or ignorance, but on religious belief.