Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (17 page)

The most objectionable thing an American scientist can say about belief is this: “Science and religion are incompatible, and you must choose between them.” After all, many people embrace both, and we know that when forced to choose, many would keep their faith. On such grounds accommodationists argue that forcing that choice is both unseemly and damaging to science. But if you are trying to be consistent in how you get reliable knowledge about our universe, and if you already reject unevidenced claims like those of ESP and homeopathy, or claims of religions other than yours, then in the end you
must
choose—and choose science. That doesn't mean that you must accept an unchanging set of scientific facts, but simply that you choose reason and evidence over superstition and wish-thinking.

There is no harmony between religion and science
. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: “Let us be friends.” It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: “Let us agree not to step on each other's feet.”

—Robert Green Ingersoll

“C
ognitive dissonance” is a well-known phenomenon
in which you experience psychological discomfort from holding two conflicting beliefs or attitudes, or from behaving in a way that is inconsistent with your beliefs. Such a dilemma causes mental discomfort, compelling you to find a way to reduce that distress. A common solution is to convince yourself that there's not really a conflict. People who think of themselves as honest may cheat a bit on their taxes, but then rationalize it, preserving their self-image, by saying, “It's not so bad, because
everyone
does it, and anyway, the government wastes a lot of money.”

Accommodationism—claiming that science and religion are not in conflict—is the solution to another form of cognitive dissonance, the one that appears when you live in a culture that reveres science but you still cling to pseudoscientific and religious myths. Many people want to be seen as pro-science, but they also need the comfort of their faith. And so they cobble together a variety of solutions that let them have both.

The most visible accommodationists are religious people, especially theologians, who are liberal, friendly to science, but see that scientific inquiry
poses some threat to their beliefs. The dissonance is especially strong in religious
scientists,
whose practice at work directly conflicts with their faith's “ways of knowing.” Surprisingly, though, many of the most prominent accommodationists are atheists or agnostics.
Some of these, whom I call “faitheists
,” see religion as a falsehood, but one that's good for society (the philosopher Daniel Dennett has called this attitude “belief in belief”).

There are also political reasons for accommodationism. As I've noted, American science educators and science organizations coddle faith to gain religious allies in our fight against creationism, to reassure a religious government (the main supporter of research) that science isn't equivalent to atheism, and to avoid a reputation as rabble-rousers or, worse, God-haters. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the claim that publicly professed atheism harms the acceptance of evolution. Here's one example from Roger Stanyard, founder and former spokesperson of the British Centre for Science Education (BCSE). When I wrote an open letter to American scientific organizations, criticizing their claims that professing nonbelief is inimical to the public acceptance of evolution, Stanyard commented on my Web site:

We have a political battle
, to keep the creationists out of state-funded schools. It requires our very limited resources to be tightly focused on what is a single issue matter.

Moreover, it will fail if it involves a general attack on religion because:

1. You'll lose a pile of allies.

2. The message immediately becomes confused and will be ignored.

3. It will immediately lead to a huge over stretching of resources.

If you want creationism out of schools, it's not an intellectual battle. It's politics and you have to play politics to win. That includes forming alliances with whom you might find distasteful and keeping your distance from many you might agree with.

The brands of accommodationism fall into just a few categories, and I'll describe them in increasing order of intellectual rigor.

Logical Compatibility

This argument is used but rarely, for its claim is merely that there is no
logical
reason why religion and science are incompatible. It could be true, for instance, that deities exist who have never interfered with the workings of the universe. But pure deism is a rare brand of faith. Alternatively, there could be religions that alter their doctrines every time one becomes incompatible with a new finding of science, or with reason itself. Such beliefs, though compatible with science, are almost nonexistent as well. Ultraliberal forms of Christianity, like those that accept a personal God but deny miracles such as the Resurrection, may accept science but nevertheless still defy reason by making unsubstantiated claims.

Mental Compatibility

This is the most common—though hardly the most convincing—argument for accommodationism. It runs like this: “Many scientists are religious, and many religious people embrace science, so the two
must
be compatible.” It is what Stephen Jay Gould had in mind when he said, “
Unless at least half of my colleagues
are inconsiderate dunces there can be—on the most raw and direct empirical grounds—no conflict between science and religion.”

People making this claim often point to famous religious scientists of the past, like Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and J. J. Thomson. But of course in the early days of science
everyone
was religious, so this hardly counts as evidence of compatibility. Because publicly professed belief was ubiquitous, religion could be touted as compatible with all human endeavors.

What we must consider more seriously are the modern scientists who publicly avow their faith, for scientists have little to lose by professing atheism. Such “scientists of faith” include Francis Collins, a geneticist and an evangelical
Christian, the Anglican paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, and the Catholic cell biologist Kenneth Miller.
Even Indian scientists
, before they launch spacecraft, visit Hindu temples to ask their deities for blessings.
In America, religious scientists
aren't rare: a survey by the sociologist Elaine Ecklund showed that 23 percent of U.S. scientists believe in God with varying degrees of confidence, even though that's only one-fourth the proportion of believers among Americans as a whole.

Does this class of modern believers, then, demonstrate that science is compatible with religion? Well, that would be a very odd kind of compatibility, for it simply construes “compatibility” as the ability of two divergent worldviews to be simultaneously held in one person's mind. That says nothing about whether those views, or the methodologies they employ, are “accordant, consistent, congruous, or agreeable.” This form of accommodationism confuses
coexistence
with
compatibility
.

And if religion and science are compatible in this way, so are marriage and adultery. After all, many married people are unrepentant adulterers. Astrology and science also become compatible, because many science-friendly people still consult their horoscopes. Indeed, because some scientists—often chemists or engineers—believe that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, and that God created all species simultaneously, we might even say that science and
creationism
are compatible! We all know people who hold incompatible views, whether or not that causes them distress.

Syncretism

According to the
Oxford English Dictionary,
syncretism is the “attempted union or reconciliation of diverse or opposite tenets or practices, esp. in philosophy or religion.” When discussing science and religion, syncretists claim that they are two sides of a single practice: finding truth. They're claimed to be harmonious in diverse ways, including seeing the cosmos and its laws as a religion (“pantheism”), holding that science and religion
cannot
conflict because they're both God-given ways of approaching truth, and claiming that the truths of science are already embodied in ancient scripture.

Syncretism, then, makes science and religion compatible by redefining
one so that it includes the other. We may argue, for instance, that “God” is simply the name we give to the order and harmony of the universe, the laws of physics and chemistry, the beauty of nature, and so forth. This is the naturalistic pantheism of Spinoza, whose most famous recent advocate was Albert Einstein, often—and wrongly—described as accepting a personal God. One of Einstein's quotes is often used to show this:

The most beautiful and deepest experience
a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.

But this is clearly a paean not to the Abrahamic God, but to the mysteries of the universe. Although Einstein isn't the final authority on the harmony between science and faith, as he grew older his spirituality became increasingly synonymous with the laws of nature, and at odds with the religions of his American countrymen. In his biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson recounts how Herbert Goldstein, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi in New York, sent Einstein a telegram asking directly, “Do you believe in God?” Einstein answered, “
I believe in Spinoza's God
, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” In other words, Einstein was at best a pantheist. The reason why accommodationists are so obsessed with Einstein's view of religion is that he's often viewed as the smartest man in history, so his approbation of religion would give faith a special imprimatur.

The big problem with pantheism, in which science does not marry religion so much as digest it, is that it leaves out God completely—or at least a monotheistic God who has an interest in the universe. Such a god is unacceptable to most religious people. As we've learned, more than 65 percent of Americans believe in a personal God who interacts with the world, as well
as in the divinity of Jesus, heaven, and miracles. In his popular book
Finding Darwin's God,
Kenneth Miller attacked pantheism because it “
dilutes religion to the point of meaninglessness
.” He added, “Such ‘Gods' aren't God at all—they are just clever and disingenuous restatements of empirical science contrived to wrap an appearance of religion around them, and they have neither religious nor scientific significance.” Most believers would probably agree.

Another syncretic argument is to equate “spirituality” with religion, disregarding the diverse forms of spirituality, many having nothing to do with the supernatural. Interviewed by
National Geographic
at his study site in Egypt, Owen Gingerich, a renowned paleontologist who has done seminal work on the evolution of whales, synonymized religion and spirituality:

Gingerich is still baffled
by the conflict that many people feel between religion and science. On my last night in Wadi Hitan, we walked a little distance from camp under a dome of brilliant stars. “I guess I've never been particularly devout,” he said. “But I consider my work to be very spiritual. Just imagining those whales swimming around here, how they lived and died, how the world has changed—all this puts you in touch with something much bigger than yourself, your community, or your everyday existence.” He spread his arms, taking in the dark horizon and the desert with its sandstone wind sculptures and its countless silent whales. “There's room here for all the religion you could possibly want.”

Gingerich's “spirituality,” which he clearly sees as religious, nevertheless approaches the kind of emotion described by Albert Einstein. And there are few scientists who haven't felt that way about either their work or the amazing discoveries constantly falling into the hopper of science. Further, despite the stereotype of scientists as cold automatons, immune to beauty and devoid of wonder, we're people first. We love the arts (I'd maintain that scientists appreciate the arts more than humanities scholars appreciate science); we have the same emotions as everyone else (as well as a special kind: the wonder we feel when discovering something that no one ever knew before); and sometimes we feel individually insignificant but connected to the larger universe we study.

If emotion, awe, wonder, and yearning are considered “spirituality,” then call me spiritual, for I often feel the same “
frisson in the breast
” described by Richard Dawkins, a die-hard atheist, as his own form of spirituality. But emotionality isn't the same as religious belief in the divine or the supernatural, and it's not helpful for scientists like Gingerich to conflate them.

Yet the effort goes on. Elaine Ecklund, whose work on sociology is funded by the Templeton Foundation, has devoted much of her career to showing that scientists are more religious than everyone thinks. When she and her collaborator Elizabeth Long surveyed spirituality among scientists, they concluded, “
Our results show unexpectedly
that the majority of scientists at top research universities consider themselves ‘spiritual.'” In reality, Ecklund and Long's “majority” was only 26 percent of all scientists—barely a quarter! The authors go on to admit, “Our results show that scientists hold religion and spirituality as being qualitatively different kinds of constructs,” adding that “in contrast to their views on spirituality, what scientists in this group specifically dislike about religion is the sense of faith that they think often leads religious people to believe without evidence.” The difference between a “religious” and a “spiritual” scientist couldn't be clearer, but Ecklund still uses this kind of data to argue for harmony between science and religion.