Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (33 page)

Like moral questions, there are many issues worth discussing that ultimately come down to matters of preference. How should I balance work versus play? Who was a better painter, Turner or Van Gogh? To which journal should I send my latest paper? I discuss things like these all the time with my fellow scientists. The notion that we disdain such questions is nonsense; even though we know there are no objective answers, we still might learn something.

Scientism is in fact a mug's game, a grab bag of disparate accusations that are mostly inaccurate or overblown. Nearly all articles criticizing
scientism not only fail to convince us that it's dangerous, but don't even give any good examples of it. In the end, as Daniel Dennett argues, scientism “
is a completely undefined term
. It just means science that you don't like.” Why don't people like it? Some in the humanities fear (without justification, I think) that science will render their disciplines passé, while religious believers labor under the misapprehension that tearing down science will somehow elevate religion.

Given its diverse meanings and lack of specificity, the word “scientism” should be dropped. But if it's to be kept, I suggest we level the playing field by introducing the term
religionism,
which I'll define as “the tendency of religion to overstep its boundaries by making unwarranted statements about the universe, or by demanding unearned authority.” Religionism would include clerics claiming to be moral authorities, arguments that scientific phenomena give evidence for God, and unsupported statements about the nature of a god and how he interacts with the world. And here we find no lack of examples, including believers who blame natural disasters on homosexuality, tell us that God doesn't want us to use condoms, argue that the acceptance of evolution by scientists is a conspiracy, and insist that human morality and the universe's “fine-tuning” are evidence for God.

It would take volumes to answer all the criticisms leveled at science by believers and accommodationists. Here I'll briefly consider a half dozen of the most common claims.

Science Can't Prove That God Doesn't Exist

When an atheist debates a believer, the conversation often ends with the believer huffily asserting, “Well, anyway, you can't prove a negative.” What he means is this: “No matter what arguments you raise against God, science can't demonstrate to me—or anyone—that he doesn't exist. For, as we all know, science can't prove that
anything
doesn't exist.” That's a philosophical claim, one I hear quite often. Surprisingly, one claimant is the author and atheist Susan Jacoby:

Of course an atheist can't prove
there isn't a God, because you cannot prove a negative. The atheist basically says that based on everything I see
around me, I don't think so. Every rational thing I see and have learned about the world around me says there isn't a God, but as far as proving there isn't a God, no one can do that. Both the atheist and the agnostic say that.

Believers like the biologist Kenneth Miller, a Catholic, say the same thing:

The issue of God
is an issue on which reasonable people may differ, but I certainly think it's an over-statement of our scientific knowledge and understanding to argue that science in general, or evolutionary biology in particular, proves in any way that there is no God.

An alternative form of this argument is to claim that “the absence of evidence [for God] isn't evidence of [God's] absence.”

Well, of course, if by “proof” you mean “absolute, unchangeable proof” (or in this case “absolute disproof”), Jacoby and Miller are right. Our understanding of reality—science's “truth”—is always provisional, and we can never rule out some kind of deity with absolute certainty.

But you can “disprove” God's existence in another way, by making two assumptions. First, the god under scrutiny must be theistic—one who has certain specified traits and interacts with the world. If you posit a deistic god who doesn't do anything, or a nebulous “Ground of Being” god lacking defined traits, then, of course, there's no way to get evidence either for or against it. But that also means there's no reason to take it seriously either, for assertions lacking evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Second, we must construe “proof” not as absolute scientific proof, but in the everyday sense of “evidence so strong you would bet your savings on it.” In that sense, we can surely prove that there's no God. This is the same sense, by the way, in which we can “prove” that the earth rotates on its axis, that a normal water molecule has one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, and that we evolved from other creatures very different from modern humans.

With the notion of a theistic god and a vernacular notion of “proof” in hand, we can disprove a god's existence in this way:
If a thing is claimed to exist, and its existence has consequences, then the absence of those consequences is evidence against the existence of the thing.
In other words, the
absence of evidence—
if evidence should be there
—is indeed evidence of absence.

A famous example of this argument is Carl Sagan's chapter “The Dragon in My Garage” in his book
The Demon-Haunted World
. Someone claims that there's a fire-breathing dragon in his garage. The skeptic's demand for evidence is then met with a series of evasions: the dragon is invisible, so you can't see it; it floats, so you can't detect its footprints in scattered flour; its fire isn't hot, so you can't feel its breath. Eventually, says Sagan, the rational course is to reject the dragon's existence until some evidence actually surfaces.
His point was that the “you can't prove nonexistence” claim is fatuous when the evidence
should
be there. As he notes at the end of his parable:

Once again, the only sensible approach
is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

This was clearly aimed at both pseudoscience and religion, for Sagan was a stronger opponent of faith than most people recall.

We can in fact prove many negatives. Can you prove that I don't have two hearts? Of course you can: just do a CAT scan. Can you prove that I don't have a brother? For all practical purposes, yes: just dig through birth records, ask people, or observe me. You won't find any evidence. Can you prove that I didn't write
Ulysses
? Of course: I wasn't alive when it was published. Can you prove that leprechauns don't live in my garden? Well, not absolutely, but if you never see one, and they have no effects, then you can provisionally conclude that they don't exist. And so it is with all the fanciful features and creatures we firmly believe don't exist.

Many gods claimed to exist
should
have observable effects on the world. The Abrahamic God, in particular, is widely believed to be omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient. Some also believe that he gives us an afterlife in which we find either eternal bliss or torment, that he answers prayers, and that he had a divine son who can bring us salvation. If these claims are true, there should be evidence for them. But the evidence isn't there: we see no miracles or miracle cures in today's world, much less any wondrous signs
of a God who presumably wants us to know him; scientific tests of prayer show that it doesn't work, ancient scriptures show no knowledge of the universe beyond that available to any normal person who was alive when the texts were composed; and science has disproved many of the truth claims of scripture. Finally we are left with that nagging problem of evil: why would a loving and all-powerful God inflict “natural evil” on the world—allowing thousands of innocent people to die from physical disasters like tsunamis, earthquakes, and cancer?

Putting all this together, we see that religion is like Sagan's invisible dragon. The missing evidence for any god is simply too glaring, and the special pleading too unconvincing, to make its existence anything more than a logical possibility. It's reasonable to conclude, provisionally but confidently, that the absence of evidence for God is indeed evidence for his absence.

Science Is Based on Faith

I often hear that science, like religion, is actually based on faith. This argument smacks a bit of desperation, a
tu quoque
response by beleaguered believers. But it also stems from postmodernism's view that even in science, truth is a fungible commodity, with different and incompatible assertions carrying equal weight. As we'll see, the “based on faith” argument against science is purely semantic, resting on two different usages of the word “faith,” one religious and the other vernacular.

The surprising thing is that the claim of faith-based science often comes from scientists themselves. Here, for instance, are three religious scientists who argue that accepting the laws of nature is a form of “faith.” The first is from the physicist Karl Giberson and the physician and geneticist Francis Collins:

Finally, we note
that it requires a certain level of faith to answer the scientific questions of how something happens. Answers to scientific questions assume that the laws of the universe are constant or, if recent speculations turn out to be true, the laws are changing in only the most subtle ways. This requires faith in the orderliness of nature. With or without belief in an ultimate creator, we must have faith that this
universal order is real, reliable, and accessible to the limited powers of our minds.

The physicist Paul Davies makes a similar claim:

Clearly, then, both religion
and science are founded on faith—namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence. . . . But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

Sometimes “faith in science” is meant not just as belief in physical laws, but as blind deference to authority: an unthinking acceptance of the conclusions of scientists in other fields or, if you're a layperson, of scientists in general. This argument was made in, of all places, the pages of
Nature,
one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals. Here Daniel Sarewitz, director of a science and policy think tank, sees belief in the Higgs boson, a particle whose field gives mass to all other particles, as an “act of faith” resembling the superstitions of Hinduism:

If you find the idea
of a cosmic molasses that imparts mass to invisible elementary particles more convincing than a sea of milk that imparts immortality to the Hindu gods, then surely it's not because one image is inherently more credible and more “scientific” than the other. Both images sound a bit ridiculous. But people raised to believe that physicists are more reliable than Hindu priests will prefer molasses to milk. For those who cannot follow the mathematics, belief in the Higgs is an act of faith, not of rationality.

A political science professor at Rutgers University argues that “faith” is often imputed to those of us who rely on Western medicine and its authorities—doctors and medical researchers:

I'm not a biologist
; I have never actually seen a microbe in person. But I believe in them. Likewise, I take it on faith when my doctor tells me a particular medication will work in a particular way to address a particular malady.

Finally, the theologian John Haught asserts that the faith of scientists has no philosophical basis: you can't use science itself to show that science is the best way—or even the only way—to discover truths about the universe.

There's the deeper worldview
—it's a kind of dogma—that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It's a deep faith commitment because there's no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It's a creed.

Let's start with the last view, one often raised by philosophers (the argument is called “justificationism”). As a professional scientist, I have always been puzzled by this criticism. It sounds quite sophisticated, and in fact it's technically correct: science cannot justify
by reason alone
that it's the surest route to truth. How can you prove from philosophy and logic alone that scientific investigation, rather than, say, revelation, is the best way to determine the sequence of a newly discovered gene? There's no a priori philosophical justification for using science to understand the universe.

But we don't need one. My response to the “no justification” claim is that the superiority of science at finding objective truth comes not from philosophy but from
experience
. Science gives predictions that work. Everything we know about biology, the cosmos, physics, and chemistry has come through science—not revelation, the arts, or any other “way of knowing.” And the practical applications of science, channeled into engineering and medicine, are legion.
Many older readers
would, like me, be dead were it not for antibiotics, for until these drugs were discovered in the twentieth century, infection was surely the main cause of mortality throughout the evolution of our species. Science has completely eradicated smallpox and rinderpest (a disease of cattle and their wild relatives), is on the way to wiping out malaria and polio, and produced the Green Revolution, saving millions of lives by improving crops and agricultural
methods. Every time you use a GPS device, a computer, or a cell phone, you're reaping the benefits of science. In fact, most of us regularly trust our very lives to science: when you have an operation, when you fly in an airplane, when you get your children vaccinated. If you were diagnosed with diabetes, would you go to the doctor or consult a spiritual healer? (I'm appealing to our solipsism here by emphasizing how science has improved human welfare, but most scientists are involved less with helping humanity than with satisfying their own curiosity. After all, our big brains, fueled with food, are still hungry for answers. How old is the universe? How did Earth's species get here? Science alone has given the answers.)