Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (21 page)

In 2012, a statue of Jesus
in Mumbai began oozing water from its feet. The “holy water,” some of which was consumed, was seen as a miracle, and hundreds of Catholics flocked to worship the image. Unfortunately, the Indian skeptic Sanal Edamaruku discovered that the “miracle” was due to faulty plumbing: blocked drainage of a nearby toilet caused the statue to wick fecally contaminated water into the base, emerging at Jesus's feet. One would think that would settle the matter, but outraged believers caused Edamaruku to be indicted for violating Indian laws against hurting religious sentiments. He fled the country to avoid jail, a refugee from superstition. In an age of critical scrutiny and public media, the regular debunking of such miracles should give pause to those who see ancient miracles as genuine.

Hume's principle also promotes scientific reasoning in another way: look for alternative explanations. If you can think of a naturalistic, nondivine explanation for a “miracle,” you should become agnostic about that miracle, and if you can't test it, then refuse to accept it. If there
are
such alternatives, the last thing
you should do is make that miracle the pivot on which your whole faith turns.

There are, for instance, many alternative and nonmiraculous explanations for the story of Jesus's Resurrection.
One was suggested by the philosopher Herman Philipse
. It seems likely—for Jesus explicitly states this in three of the four Gospels—that his followers believed he would restore God's kingdom in their lifetime. Further, the apostles were told they'd receive ample rewards in their lifetime, including sitting on twelve thrones from which they'd judge the tribes of Israel. But, unexpectedly, Jesus was crucified, ending everyone's hope for glory. Philipse suggests that this produced painful cognitive dissonance, which in this case was resolved by “collaborative storytelling”—the same thing modern millennialists do when the world fails to end on schedule. The ever-disappointed millennialists usually agree on a story that somehow preserves their belief in the face of disconfirmation (for example, “We got the date wrong”). Philipse then suggests that in the case of the Jesus tale, the imminent arrival of God simply morphed into a promise of eternal life, a promise supported by pretending that their leader himself had been resurrected.

If you accept that an apocalyptic preacher named Jesus existed, who told his followers that God's kingdom was nigh, this story at least seems reasonable. After all, it's based on well-known features of human psychology: the behavior of disappointed cults and our well-known attempts to resolve cognitive dissonance. Like disillusioned millennialists, the early Christians could simply have revised their story. Is this really less credible than the idea that Jesus arose from the dead? Only if you have an a priori
commitment to the myth.

It's no surprise then that the Jesus Seminar, a group of more than two hundred religious scholars charged with evaluating the historical truth of the words and deeds of Jesus, concluded that there was no credible evidence for either the Resurrection, the empty tomb, or Jesus's postmortem reappearance. They commented dryly, “
The body of Jesus probably decayed
as do all corpses.” And they added a warning:

The pre-eminent danger faced by Christian scholars assessing the gospels is the temptation to find what they would like to find. As a consequence, the inclination to fudge tends to be high—even among critical scholars—when working with traditions that have deep emotional roots
and whose critical evaluation has sweeping consequences for the religious community.

Of course, more conservative Christians
have criticized this historical approach, even branding the work of the Jesus Seminar as heresy.

Does Hume's criterion mean, then, that we can never accept miracles? I don't think so, for Hume took it too far.
No
amount of evidence, it seems, could ever override his conviction that miracles were really the result of fraud, ignorance, or misrepresentation. Yet perhaps there are some events, though they're hard to imagine, when a divinely produced violation of nature's laws is more likely than human error or deception. It would be a close-minded scientist who would say that miracles are impossible in principle. But Hume was right about one thing: to have real confidence in a miracle, one needs evidence—massive, well-documented, and either replicated or independently corroborated evidence from multiple and reliable sources. No religious miracle even comes close to meeting those standards.

When science disproves religious beliefs that are negotiable—that is, parts of church doctrine that aren't critical parts of belief—the faithful are often happy to simply jettison them. Such beliefs include Jonah and the giant fish (no fish could swallow a human whole, much less keep him alive in its stomach for three days) and the tale of Noah's Ark, which defies not only geology but reason (how could all of Earth's species, including dinosaurs, stay alive for a year on an ark with a single window?).

But not all beliefs are negotiable. For Christians, the story of how sin came into the world through Adam and Eve, and was expiated by Christ's death, is vital. It is the fundamental belief of Christianity, and rests critically on the historical existence of Adam and Eve and their status as the genetic ancestors of all humanity. Without their existence, and their transgression in the Garden of Eden, there would be no inherited sinfulness of humans, and without such sin there was no need for Jesus to appear on Earth, undergoing Crucifixion and Resurrection to redress our sins.

For other believers, the creation story as portrayed in Genesis, while perhaps not literally true, must somehow affirm the uniqueness of humans among all species—something that doesn't comport with purely naturalistic evolution. The involvement of God in the appearance of humans is, for many believers, nonnegotiable. After all, Genesis specifies that “
God created man in his own image
, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” This explains why, among those Americans who
do
accept human evolution, more than half of them believe that the process was guided by God, with the “guidance” usually nudging evolution toward our own species.

Finally, a critical claim of Mormonism is that Native Americans—including Moroni, the supposed creator of the golden plates that became the Book of Mormon—descend from a group of people who migrated to North America from the Middle East around 600 BCE.

Genetics, evolutionary biology, and archaeology show that all these claims are dead wrong. But because they are among the “nonnegotiables,” they must somehow be saved. That is a job for accommodationists. Let's examine the claims and see how their believers buttress them against the winds of scientific evidence. We'll find that their defense demonstrates the failure of accommodationism: despite attempts to torture the facts into compliance with religious dogma, this strategy fails miserably. I concentrate on these cases not only because they involve crucial religious beliefs, but also because they involve my own areas of study: evolution and genetics. Further, more than any other area of science, it is biology in general and evolution in particular that are seen as being in direct opposition to scripture. With the possible exception of cosmology, which we'll discuss in the next chapter, religion can live happily with the modern findings of chemistry, physics, and nonevolutionary areas of biology like physiology and development.

Adam and Eve

The central lesson of Christianity is that sin was brought into the world by the transgression of Adam and Eve, the Primal Couple, and expiated by the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, whose acceptance as savior removes
the taint of sin. You can hardly call yourself a Christian without accepting these claims.

The idea that sin arrived with Adam and Eve's transgression originated in the epistles of Paul, but was transformed into dogma by Augustine and Irenaeus several centuries later. None of these writers doubted the historical existence of the Primal Couple. What could be clearer than Paul's declaration, “
For since by man came death
by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die even so in Christ shall all be made alive”?
As we've learned, Augustine
, often praised for seeing Genesis as an allegory, actually regarded Adam and Eve as historical figures.
Finally, the
Catechism of the Catholic Church
affirms a historical First Couple: “
The account of the fall
in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.”

There's not much wiggle room here.
And Americans as a whole
take this doctrine literally as well: in a 2010 poll, 60 percent of them agreed with the proposition “All people are descendants of one man and one woman—Adam and Eve.”

But science has completely falsified the idea of a historical Adam and Eve, and on two grounds. First, our species wasn't poofed into being by a sudden act of creation. We know beyond reasonable doubt that we evolved from a common ancestor with modern chimps, an ancestor living around six million years ago. Modern human traits—which include our brain and genetically determined behaviors—evolved gradually. Further, there were many species of proto-humans (all called “hominins”) that branched off and died before the ancestors of our own species remained as the last branch. As many as four or five species of humanlike primates may have lived at the same time! Some of these extinct groups, like the Neanderthals, had culture and big brains, and were “modern” humans in all but name. Theologians, then, are forced to square the sudden incursion of sin with the gradual evolution of humans from earlier primates.

More important, evolutionary geneticists now know that the human population could never have been as small as only two individuals—much less the eight who rode out the flood on Noah's Ark. Since sequencing of
human genomes became possible on a large scale, we can back-calculate from the observed genetic diversity in our species to find out roughly when different forms of human genes diverged from one another, and how many forms of a given gene existed at a given time. Because each human has two copies of each gene, this gives us a minimum estimate of how many
humans
existed at a given time. We've also been able to use genes to trace the path of ancient human populations as they spread from Africa throughout the world.

The genetic evidence tells us
several things. First, the genes in all modern humans diverged from one another a long time ago—long before the 6,000 to 10,000 years estimated from scripture. We can, for example, trace all the Y chromosomes of existing males back to a single man who lived between 120,000 and 340,000 years ago. This individual is often called “Y-chromosome Adam.” But that's a bit misleading, for although all the Y chromosomes of modern humans descend from this one individual, the
rest
of our genome descends from a multitude of different ancestors who lived at various times ranging from 10,000 to about 4 million years ago. Our genome testifies to literally hundreds of “Adams and Eves” who lived at different times—a result of the fact that different parts of our DNA were inherited differently based on the vagaries of reproduction and the random division of genes when sperm and eggs are formed.

The observations that different parts of our genomes have different ages, some going back millions of years, and that they come from different ancestors, completely dispel the biblical date of human origins and the idea that all of our DNA was bequeathed by a Primal Couple.

But the evidence is even stronger
, for we can also back-calculate from DNA sequences the
size
of human populations at different times in the past. And we know that when our ancestors left Africa between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago to colonize the world, the size of the migrating group dropped to
a minimum of 2,250 individuals
—and that's an underestimate. The population that remained in Africa stayed larger: a minimum of about 10,000 people. The total number of ancestors of modern humans, then, was not two but over 12,000 individuals.
This is a very strong scientific refutation of the Adam and Eve scenario.

And it puts Christians in a tight spot. If there were no Adam and Eve,
then whence the original sin? And if there was no original sin transmitted to Adam's descendants, then Jesus's Crucifixion and Resurrection expiated nothing: it was a solution without a problem. In other words, Jesus died for a metaphor.

The scientific data have vexed many Christian theologians. Conservatives like the Southern Baptist Albert Mohler are predictably outraged:

The denial of an historical Adam and Eve
as the first parents of all humanity and the solitary first human pair severs the link between Adam and Christ which is so crucial to the Gospel. If we do not know how the story of the Gospel begins, then we do not know what that story means. Make no mistake: a false start to the story produces a false grasp of the Gospel.

Mike Aus, a liberal Protestant pastor, eventually left the church when he realized that Christian doctrine on Adam and Eve didn't square with evolution:

Really, without a doctrine of original sin
there is not much left for the Christian program. If there is no original ancestor who transmitted hereditary sin to the whole species, then there is no Fall, no need for redemption, and Jesus' death as a sacrifice efficacious for the salvation of humanity is pointless. The whole
raison d'être
for the Christian plan of salvation disappears.

Nevertheless, the Catholic Church continues to affirm the historicity of Adam and Eve and their original sin, its position unlikely to be reversed soon. Pope Pius XII's encyclical from 1950, explicitly denying multiple ancestors of modern humans, remains church doctrine: