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

by Coyne, Jerry A.

  Indeed, faith can trump facts even when church authority accepts the facts. The Catholic Church, for instance, accepts a form of theistic evolution, largely naturalistic but still tweaked by God, who instilled souls in Homo sapiens at some point in our evolution. Nevertheless, 27 percent of American Catholics cling to biblical creationism, believing that humans were created instantaneously by God and have remained unchanged ever since. Resistance to evolution in America, then, can be laid completely at the door of religion. You can find some religions without creationism, but you can’t find creationism without religion.

  It’s a useful exercise to ask religious people what it would take for them to either abandon the “nonnegotiables” of their faith—like the view that Jesus was divine or that the Quran is the word of Allah—or to give up their faith entirely. Very often you will get the answer “Nothing could make me give up those beliefs.” As we’ll see below, that’s one of the many incompatibilities between the attitudes toward religious “truth” and scientific truth. Scientists are not only constantly looking for evidence that would prove their pet theories wrong, but often know exactly what kind of evidence would do it. There are no “nonnegotiables” in science.

  Can You Have Faith Without Truth Claims?

  Religion, of course, is not solely concerned with truth claims. As Francis Spufford noted, many—perhaps most—people aren’t religious because they’re convinced by their church’s arguments for God and scripture. Often religion really is “a structure of feelings, a house built of emotions.” Belief in God often comes not from evidence, but from teaching or indoctrination by peers, or some revelation that seems real. The “evidence,” often confected by theologians who specialize in justifying beliefs acquired in childhood, comes after. Or perhaps never, for how many religious people are even acquainted with the arguments for God’s existence, or with the particulars of their belief? A survey of Americans in 2010 found, for instance, that Christians were abysmally ignorant about the details and doctrines of Christianity: only 42 percent of Catholics could name Genesis as the first book of the Bible, while only 55 percent knew that the bread and wine of the Communion become, rather than symbolize, the body and blood of Christ.

  Further, it’s often argued that the social and emotional aspects of belonging to a faith, rather than its dogma, are the real motivating force for membership. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt, for example, sees religious communality as the main motivation for faith-based social action. This idea needs further exploration, particularly because some data contradict it. In Baggini’s study of British Christians, for instance, the percentage of people who went to church to worship God far exceeded those who went to feel part of a community or receive spiritual guidance from readings and sermons.

  But even if religion provides solace and social benefits, we need to know how much those benefits rest on the belief that your religion’s claims are true. How many Christians would remain Christian were they to know for sure that Christ was neither divine nor resurrected but, as some biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman believe, simply an apocalyptic preacher of the ancient Middle East? How many Mormons would retain their faith were they to know for certain that Joseph Smith inscribed the golden plates supposedly presented by the angel Moroni? It’s hard to answer such questions, but what we do know is this: many of those who abandoned their religion ascribe it not to losing their feeling of community, but to losing their belief in its doctrines.

  In her acclaimed book When God Talks Back, the Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann concluded, “People come to faith not just because they decide that the propositions are true but because they experience God directly. They feel God’s presence. They hear God’s voice. Their hearts flood with an incandescent joy.” Her thesis is that it takes hard work to learn how to converse with God. But would those who succeed experience that joy if they didn’t think that they were actually talking to someone who listened? Surely not much bliss accrues to those who think they’re talking only to themselves.

  It appears that theologians are ambivalent toward the empirical claims of religion. When writing for academics or liberal clerics, they downplay those claims, but when talking to “regular” believers, they affirm that faith rests on assertions about what’s real in the universe. Alvin Plantinga, for instance, argues in one book that the literal truth of the Bible is subordinate to its moral lessons:

  The aim is to discover what God is teaching us in a given passage, and to do so in the light of these assumptions; the aim is not to determine whether what is taught is true, or plausible, or well supported by the arguments.

  But only a year earlier, Plantinga claimed not only that God exists, but also that he has definite humanlike qualities:

  [In Christianity, Judaism, and Islam], theism is the belief that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing perfectly good immaterial person who has created the world, has created human beings “in his own image,” and to whom we owe worship, obedience and allegiance. . . . Now God, according to theistic belief, is a person: a being who has knowledge, affection (likes and dislikes), and executive will, and who can act on his beliefs in order to achieve his ends.

  The question to ask believers is this: “Does it really matter whether what you believe about God is true—or don’t you care?” If it does matter, then you must justify your beliefs; if it doesn’t, then you must justify belief itself.

  As we’ll soon learn, both theologians and garden-variety believers show strong resistance to arguments that strive to falsify the ideas and character of God, and often devise ways to justify religious claims in the face of counterevidence. This kind of defense suggests that people really do care that their religious beliefs are true and are not just psychologically useful fictions.

  The Incompatibility

  The next definition we need, of course, is one for “incompatibility,” as there’s always a way to construe that term that would make faith and fact seem compatible.

  Let me first say what I don’t mean by incompatibility. I don’t mean logical incompatibility: that the existence of religion is simply and a priori incompatible with the practice of science. That’s clearly wrong, for in principle there could be both science and a god to be worshipped. Nor do I mean practical incompatibility: the idea that one simply can’t be a religious scientist or a science-friendly believer. That’s clearly false as well, for there are many examples of both. Finally, I am not claiming that religious people are in general opposed to either science in general or the facts it reveals. Although some believers have problems with evolution and cosmology, the vast majority of religious people have no problem with issues like how genetics works, what causes disease and how to treat it, how molecules react chemically with one another, and the principles of aerodynamics. Indeed, nearly everyone in modern societies puts their trust in science every day.

  My definition of “compatibility” is the second one given by the Oxford English Dictionary (the first is “participating in suffering, sympathetic”):

  Mutually tolerant; capable of being admitted together, or of existing together in the same subject; accordant, consistent, congruous, agreeable.

  While religion and science could be considered “mutually tolerant,” in that some scientists and believers tolerate each other’s existence, and could even be seen as “capable of being admitted together,” as with religious scientists, I don’t see them as “existing together in the same subject” or as “accordant, consistent, congruous, agreeable.”

  My claim is this: science and religion are incompatible because they have different methods for getting knowledge about reality, have different ways of assessing the reliability of that knowledge, and, in the end, arrive at conflicting conclusions about the universe. “Knowledge” acquired by religion is at odds not only with scientific knowledge, but also with knowledge professed by other religions. In the end, religion’s methods, unlike those of science, are useless for understanding reality. This form
of incompatibility is the one expressed—albeit more humorously—by the science writer Natalie Angier in the quote that heads this chapter.

  One might argue, using the dictionary definition, that religion and science are actually compatible because they are “consistent” in one respect: science’s realm involves facts about the universe, while that of religion is supposedly limited to morals, meaning, and purpose. In other words, they are compatible because they are complementary. I will argue in the next chapter that this idea, made famous by Stephen Jay Gould, fails on two counts: religion also deals with facts about the universe, and even if religion claims to deal with the “big questions” about human purpose and value, so do other fields, like secular philosophy, that don’t use the concept of a god.

  Clearly, religions that don’t make existence claims, like Taoism, Confucianism, and pantheism, aren’t incompatible in the way I describe. But theistic faiths, those that posit God’s intervention in the world, conflict with science on three levels: methodology, outcomes, and philosophy.

  Looking at methodology, I claim that the difference between science and religion can be summarized in how their adherents answer the question “How would I know if I was wrong?”

  The difference in methods yields a difference in outcomes. Because the ways that science and religion come to understand reality are at odds, they are expected to produce different outcomes: different “facts.” To the extent that scientific facts contravene religious doctrines, this creates incompatibilities.

  Finally, the first two incompatibilities lead to the third: a disparity in philosophy. Science has learned through experience that assuming the existence of gods and divine intervention has been of no value in helping us understand the universe. This has led to the working assumption—some might call it a “philosophy”—that supernatural beings can be provisionally seen as nonexistent. I’ll take up these issues in order.

  Conflicts of Method

  The different methods that science and religion use to ascertain their “truths” couldn’t be clearer. Science comprises an exquisitely refined set of tools designed to find out what is real and to prevent confirmation bias. Science prizes doubt and iconoclasm, rejects absolute authority, and relies on testing one’s ideas with experiments and observations of nature. Its sine qua non is evidence—evidence that can be inspected and adjudicated by any trained and rational observer. And it depends largely on falsification. Nearly every scientific truth comes with an implicit rider: “Evidence X would show this to be wrong.”

  Religion begins with beliefs based not on observation, but on revelation, authority (often that of scripture), and dogma. Most people acquire their faith when young via indoctrination by parents, teachers, or peers, so that religious “truths” depend heavily on who spawned you and where you grew up. Beliefs instilled in this way are then undergirded with defenses that make them resistant to falsification. While some religious people do struggle with their beliefs, doubt is not an inherent part of belief, nor is it especially prized. No honors accrue to the Southern Baptist who points out that while there is plenty of evidence for evolution, there is none for the creation story of Genesis.

  Some religious claims are untestable because they involve knowing about the irrecoverable past. There is almost no way to show, for instance, that Jesus was the son of God, that Allah dictated the Quran to Muhammad, or that the souls of Buddhists are reincarnated in other humans or animals. (There could, however, be at least some evidence for such claims, such as concordant eyewitness accounts of the miracles that supposedly accompanied Jesus’s Crucifixion, including the darkness at noon, the rending of the Temple’s curtain, the earthquakes, and the rising of saints from their graves. Unfortunately, the many historians of the time have failed to report these phenomena.) What science can do is point out the absence of evidence for such claims, taking them off the table until some hint of evidence arrives. When scientists don’t know something, like the nature of the mysterious “dark matter” that fills the universe, we don’t pretend to understand it based on “other ways of knowing” that don’t involve science. There is tantalizing evidence for dark matter, but we won’t claim to know what it is until we have hard evidence. That is precisely the opposite of how the faithful approach their own claims of truth.

  In the end, religious investigations of “truth,” unlike those of science, are deeply dependent on confirmation bias. You start with what you were taught to believe, or what you want to believe, and then accept only those facts that support your prejudices. This is the basis for the theological practice of “apologetics,” designed to defend religion against counterarguments and disconfirming evidence. The fact of evolution, for instance, was once seen by many as strong evidence against God. As we’ll see, apologists have now decided that it is exactly what we’d expect from a good creator, who would, of course, allow life to blossom gradually instead of producing a boring and static creation ex nihilo. In contrast, science has no apologetics, for we test our conclusions by trying to find counterevidence.

  The difference in methodology between science and faith involves several opposing practices and attitudes.

  Faith

  The most important component of the incompatibility between science and religion is religion’s dependence on faith, a word defined in the New Testament as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The philosopher Walter Kaufmann characterized it as “intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.” Because Kaufmann was an atheist, we might seek a more neutral definition by going again to the Oxford English Dictionary, which gives this “theological” definition of faith:

  Belief in and acceptance of the doctrines of a religion, typically involving belief in a god or gods and in the authenticity of divine revelation. Also (Theol.): the capacity to spiritually apprehend divine truths, or realities beyond the limits of perception or of logical proof, viewed either as a faculty of the human soul, or as the result of divine illumination.

  Note that what promote acceptance of religious doctrine are revelation, “divine illumination,” and spiritual apprehension, leading to acceptance of “realities beyond the limits of perception or of logical proof.” This is in fact quite similar to Kaufmann’s definition, for surely the apprehension of truths that lie beyond normal perception and logic are not sufficient to convince most people.

  Theologians intensely dislike the definition of faith as belief without—or in the face of—evidence, for that practice sounds irrational. But it surely is, as is any system that requires supporting a priori beliefs without good evidence. In religion, but not science, that kind of faith is seen as a virtue.

  If you doubt the claim of my Lutheran debate opponent that faith is a virtue (and the concordant implication that reason is overrated), you can find ample evidence in the works of Christianity, both scriptural and exegetical. Doubting Thomas, who insisted on thrusting his hands into Christ’s wounds, was seen as misguided: as Jesus remarked, “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Paul and the early church fathers and theologians were unrelenting in their attacks on reason, a doctrine encapsulated in fideism, the view that faith and reason are not only incompatible, but also mutually hostile, and that religious belief must be justified by faith alone. Fideism embodies the incompatibility—nay, the war—between science and religion, and is embodied in these two passages, the first from the New Testament and the second from Tertullian (Kierkegaard had similar sentiments):

  But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

  The Son of God died: it is immediately credible—because it is silly. He was buried, and rose again: it is certain—because it is impossible.

  It might seem bizarre to believe in something because it is absurd, but it makes a kind
of sense: faith is required for belief only when you lack good reasons for that belief. Fideism sometimes reaches Orwellian proportions, as it did with Saint Ignatius Loyola:

  To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it, believing that between Christ our Lord, the Bridegroom, and the Church, His Bride, there is the same Spirit which governs and directs us for the salvation of our souls.

  The view of freethought and curiosity as inferior to faith and religious authority continues today. Although Pope Francis is celebrated for bringing a new spirit of tolerance and modernity to the Vatican, in November 2013 he denigrated the “spirit of curiosity” in a homily at Mass:

  The spirit of curiosity is not a good spirit. It is the spirit of dispersion, of distancing oneself from God, the spirit of talking too much. . . . [And Jesus also] tells us something interesting: this spirit of curiosity, which is worldly, leads us to confusion. . . . The Kingdom of God is among us. . . . [Do not] seek strange things, [do not] seek novelties with this worldly curiosity. Let us allow the Spirit to lead us forward in that wisdom, which is like a soft breeze. This is the Spirit of the Kingdom of God, of which Jesus speaks. So be it.

  This is a strange attitude given that the Vatican has an astronomical observatory run by priests, complete with a large telescope.

  The abnegation of reason is not unique to Catholicism. Martin Luther, for instance, was famous for his many vehement claims that reason was incompatible with Christianity itself. Here are but two:

  For reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but—more frequently than not—struggles against the Divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.

  There is on earth among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed and adroit reason. . . . Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed.