Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (20 page)

Theists' typical response to these failures is to say either “God won't let himself be tested” or “That's not what prayer is about: it's simply a way to converse with God.” But you can bet that had these studies shown a large positive effect, the religious would be noisily flaunting this as evidence for God. The confirmation bias shown by accepting positive results but explaining away negative ones is an important difference between science and religion.

There's no substantive difference
between the paranormal and the supernatural, and demonstrations of paranormal phenomena have also failed in medicine—including nonreligious methods of “cure” such as therapeutic touch, inhaling flower scents, and using magnets—as well as in other areas like ESP, telekinesis, and past-life regression. One can envision many other tests of religious claims. Does rain dancing help Native Americans relieve drought? Can God affect evolution by raising the probability of an adaptive mutation when conditions change?

So what would convince a skeptic like me of a miracle—a phenomenon that violated the laws of nature? Several of Fishman and Boudry's examples from the list above would suffice. And because humans, unlike salamanders, don't have the ability to regenerate lost limbs, if a religious healer could repeatedly regrow missing limbs by saying prayers over the afflicted, and this was documented with reliable evidence and testimony by multiple doctors, I would consider that a miracle, and perhaps evidence for God. But it hasn't escaped people's notice that “miracle” healings are always of the kind, like the disappearance of tumors, that can happen naturally, even without prayer. The Vatican itself, which requires a miracle to beatify someone, and two miracles to make that person a saint, is none too scrupulous about the medical evidence needed to elevate someone to the pantheon.
The “miracle” that clinched
the beatification of Mother Teresa, for instance, was the supposed disappearance of ovarian cancer in Monica Besra, an Indian woman who reported she was cured after looking at a picture of the nun. It turns out, though, that her tumor wasn't cancerous but tubercular, and, more important, she'd received conventional medical treatment in a hospital, with her doctor (who wasn't interviewed by the Vatican) taking credit for the cure.

More convincing forms of healing are simply never seen. Anatole France brought this up in his book
Le Jardin d'Épicure:

When I was at Lourdes
in August, I visited the grotto where innumerable crutches had been put on display as a sign of miraculous healing. My companion pointed out these trophies of illness and whispered in my ear:

“One single wooden leg would have been much more convincing.”

Indeed.
The question “Why won't God heal amputees
?” is almost a cliché of atheism, but isn't it reasonable to ask why wooden legs and glass eyes aren't on exhibit at Lourdes? France had a response:

That seems sensible
, but, philosophically speaking, the wooden leg has no more value than a crutch. If an observer with true scientific spirit witnessed the regrowing of a man's severed leg after immersion in a sacred pool or the like, he would not say “Voilà—a miracle!” Rather, he would say, “A single observation like this would lead us to believe only that circumstances we don't fully understand could regrow the leg tissues of a human—just like they regrow the claws of lobsters or the tails of lizards, but much faster.”

Here France rejects the supernatural in favor of natural laws that we haven't yet discovered. Such healings, for example, could be the work of altruistic space aliens with advanced abilities to regrow tissue. But it doesn't matter. If we consider the regeneration of limbs or eyes not as absolute evidence for God, but—as a scientist would—
provisional
evidence, then it points us toward the divine. And if these miracles occur repeatedly, are documented carefully, and occur only under religious circumstances, then the evidence for a supernatural power grows stronger.

In his book
The
Varieties of Scientific Experience
—deliberately named to mimic William James's classic study of religion—Carl Sagan describes how ancient scripture
could
have given us scientific evidence for God. It could, for instance, have presented information not known to humans when the sacred texts were written. These include statements like, “Thou shalt not travel faster than light” or “Two strands entwined is the secret of life.” God could also have made his presence known by engraving the Ten Commandments in large letters on the Moon. Unless defined tautologically, then, the supernatural is either in principle or in practice within the realm of science. And when we consider all the failures to find it—the lack of accurate predictions in scripture, the failure of science to confirm testable religious claims, the failure of a god to make its presence unimpeachably known—we find a big hole: the absence of evidence when the evidence
should be there
. Our rational response should be to tentatively reject the existence of any supernatural beings or powers.

Evidence for the supernatural, of course, is not evidence for a god or, especially, for the tenets of a particular religion. That requires other information. But some nonbelievers reject the possibility of
any
evidence for gods, claiming that the concept of a god itself is so nebulous, so incoherent, that there could never be evidence to support one. I disagree, and I think most scientists could think of some observations that would convince them of the existence of God. Even Darwin himself had some ideas, which he mentioned in a letter to the American botanist Asa Gray in 1861:

Your question what would convince me
of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, & I was convinced, from others seeing him, that I was not mad, I shd. believe in design.—If I could be convinced thoroughily [
sic
] that life & mind was in an unknown way a function of other imponderable forces, I shd. be convinced.—If man was made of brass or iron & no way connected with any other organism which had ever lived, I shd. perhaps be convinced. But this is childish writing.

Well, perhaps not so childish, for it tells us that Darwin, like a good scientist, was open to evidence for “Design,” by which he surely meant “God.”

I too could be convinced of the Christian God. The following (and
admittedly contorted) scenario would give me tentative evidence for Christianity. Suppose that a bright light appeared in the heavens, and, supported by wingèd angels, a being clad in a white robe and sandals descended onto my campus from the sky, accompanied by a pack of apostles bearing the names given in the Bible. Loud heavenly music, with the blaring of trumpets, is heard everywhere. The robed being, who identifies himself as Jesus, repairs to the nearby university hospital and instantly heals many severely afflicted people, including amputees. After a while Jesus and his minions, supported by angels, ascend back into the sky with another chorus of music. The heavens swiftly darken, there are flashes of lightning and peals of thunder, and in an instant the skies clear.

If this were all witnessed by others and documented by video, and if the healings were unexplainable but supported by testimony from multiple doctors, and if all the apparitions and events conformed to Christian theology—then I'd have to start thinking seriously about the truth of Christianity. Perhaps such eyewitness evidence isn't even necessary. If, as Sagan suggested, the New Testament contained unequivocal information about DNA, evolution, quantum mechanics, or other scientific phenomena that couldn't have been known to its authors, it would be hard not to accept some divine inspiration.

Perhaps other scientists would call me credulous. My scenario about a visiting Jesus could, they say, be a gigantic con game played by aliens with the technology to pull off such a stunt. (Curiously, those who make such arguments never extend them to their logical conclusion, that all life on Earth could be merely a Matrix-like computer simulation run by aliens.) After all, the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke's “third law” was “
Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.” But I think you can substitute “God” for “magic.” And this is why my acceptance of God would be provisional, subject to revocation if a naturalistic explanation arose later. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but we can never say that such evidence is impossible.

Now turn the question around: ask religious people what evidence it would take to make them abandon their faith. While some will actually give thoughtful responses, what you'll hear most often is the answer of Karl Giberson cited in the previous chapter:
no
data could dispel his belief in God.
He also gave some reasons for this stand, reasons that Christians don't often admit:

As a purely practical
matter
, I have compelling reasons to believe in God. My parents are deeply committed Christians and would be devastated, were I to reject my faith. My wife and children believe in God, and we attend church together regularly. Most of my friends are believers. I have a job I love at a Christian college that would be forced to dismiss me if I were to reject the faith that underpins the mission of the college. Abandoning belief in God would be disruptive, sending my life completely off the rails.

This shows what we already know: belief may arise by indoctrination or authority, but is often maintained by social utility. But if no conceivable evidence can shake your faith in a theistic God, then you've deliberately removed yourself from rational discourse. In other words, your faith has trumped science.

Scientific analysis of miracles, at least those that happened in the distant past, suffers from two problems: determining whether they occurred at all, and determining whether they violated the laws of nature. If those miracles are supposed to be purposefully caused by a deity, that adds a third problem—or even a fourth if we want evidence that the miracles vindicate a specific faith like Christianity. Because miracles by definition can't be replicated, it's no coincidence that the pivotal doctrines of many religions now rest on ancient, one-off events like the dictation of the Quran by Allah and the Resurrection of Jesus. Must we then suspend judgment on such things? I think not. Let's take the Resurrection as an example.

The physicist Ian Hutchinson argues that the uniqueness of miracles makes them immune to science. If human levitation occurred repeatedly, he argues, science could test it, but “
a religious faith that depended upon a belief
that levitation was demonstrated on one particular occasion, or by
one particular historic character, does not lend itself to such a scientific test. Science is powerless to bring unique events to the empirical bar.”

But this can't be true, for historians have ways of confirming whether unique events are likely to have occurred. Those methods depend on multiple and independent corroboration of those events using details that coincide among different reporters, reliable documents that attest to those events, and accounts that are contemporaneous with the event. In this way we know, for example, that Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of conspirators in the Roman Senate in 44 BCE, though we're not sure of his last words. As has been pointed out many times, the biblical account of the Crucifixion and Resurrection fails these elementary tests because the sources are not independent, none are by eyewitnesses, all contemporary writers outside of scripture fail to mention the event, and the details of the Resurrection and empty tomb—even among the Gospels and the letters of Paul—show serious discrepancies. Nor, despite ardent searching, have biblical archaeologists found such a tomb.

Theologians, of course, have their own arguments for why the Resurrection is true: Paul had a vision of the resurrected Christ; the empty tomb was found by women (bizarrely, some see this as “evidence” because a fictional Resurrection concocted in those sexist times would not involve the testimony of women); and although the scriptures and Paul's vision were not written down within Jesus's lifetime, they were described only a few decades later. But if you see that as convincing evidence, consider the “testimonies” that begin the Book of Mormon. Opening the book, you'll find two separate statements, signed by eleven named witnesses, all swearing they actually
saw
the golden plates given to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni. Three of the witnesses—Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris—add that an angel personally laid the plates before them. Unlike the story of Jesus, this is
actual eyewitness testimony
! Christians of other sects reject this testimony, but why then do they accept the tales about Jesus in the New Testament that are not only secondhand but produced by unknown writers? That's not a consistent way to deal with evidence.

The classic test for the truth of miracles
is that of the Scottish philosopher David Hume.
Foreshadowing Sagan's principle of “extraordinary evidence,” Hume claimed that miracles were so extraordinary that to accept
them, you would have to regard the suspension of nature's laws as
more
likely than any other explanation—including fraud or mistakes. When weighing evidence for nonmiraculous explanations, you should also consider if the witnesses stand to benefit from describing the miracle. Because we know that mistakes, fraud, and confirmation bias aren't that rare, to Hume they became the default explanation. Using this principle, if you reject the eyewitness testimony of eleven Mormons as fraud, error, or delusion, then you must also reject the Resurrection.

This is simply the scientific principle of parsimony: when you have several explanations for a phenomenon, it's usually (but not always) best to go with the one that has the fewest assumptions. And when miracles are sufficiently recent or sufficiently common to study scientifically, Hume's principle has held up.
The Shroud of Turin
, bearing the image of a half-naked man with wounds, has been considered for centuries as the burial shroud of Jesus, whose image was miraculously imprinted on the cloth. Although the Catholic Church does not give it official status as a genuine relic, it has been endorsed by several popes, including Pope Francis, in a way that implies that it might be real. Nevertheless, radiocarbon dating shows that the shroud was produced in medieval times, and its image of Jesus has been reproduced by an Italian chemist using materials available in medieval Europe.