Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) (41 page)

Increasingly, then, we see that religious belief is a response to the uncertainties and hardships of life on this planet—a response to those difficulties, but not a way to lessen them. I am not a Marxist, but Marx got at least one thing right: for many, religion weakens the incentive to fix both personal and societal problems. And that is the biggest problem with seeing faith as a social palliative. People often criticize Marx for denigrating religion, citing his statement that “Religion . . . is the opium of the people.” But seen in context, the quote is far more nuanced—a call for social change that would make religion superfluous:

Religious
distress is at the same time
the
expression
of real distress and also the
protest
against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the
opium
of the people.

To abolish religion as the
illusory
happiness of the people is to demand their
real
happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the
demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.
The criticism of religion is therefore
in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears,
the
halo
of which is religion.

People regularly call for dialogue between science and religion, in which theologians, priests, and rabbis should sit down with scientists and hash out their differences. By “dialogue,” the proponents don't just suggest that scientists and believers should talk to each other, but insist that such an exchange will dispel misunderstandings, benefiting both science and religion. Such conclaves are in fact held regularly, even at the Vatican. The motivation behind them is expressed in a famous quote from Albert Einstein: “
Science without religion is lame
, religion without science is blind.” But that quote is torn from its context, where it's clear that what Einstein meant by “religion” is simply a deep awe before the puzzles of the universe. Einstein repeatedly denied the existence of a personal, theistic God, and saw Abrahamic faiths as fallacious and man-made institutions. He was at best a pantheist, viewing nature itself as “the divine.” The blindness of science without religion refers to his belief that science goes nowhere without a profound and deep curiosity and wonder—traits that Einstein considered “religious.”
Einstein's views, often misconstrued
, should give no solace to the majority of believers who are theists, nor to those who think that a science/faith dialogue would be mutually productive.

Nevertheless, is it possible to have a constructive dialogue? My response is that anything useful will come from a
monologue
—one in which science does all the talking and religion the listening. Further, the monologue will be constructive for only the listener. While scientists can learn more about the nature of belief by talking to the faithful, those benefits can accrue to anyone who wants to learn more about religion. In contrast, religion has nothing to tell scientists that can improve their trade. Indeed, the progress of science has required shedding all vestiges of religion, whether those be the beliefs themselves or religious methods for finding “truth.” We do not need those hypotheses.

On the other hand, religion can benefit from science in several ways—if we conceive of “science” broadly and of “religion” as not just the beliefs but the institutions. First, science can tell us, at least in principle, about the evolutionary, cultural, and psychological basis of religious belief.
There are many theories
for why humans created religion, including fear of death, desire for a father figure, a need for social interaction, the wish of some people to control others, and the innate proclivity of humans to attribute natural events to conscious agents. It's my guess that, given the origins of religion in the distant and unrecoverable past, we'll never fully understand why and how it began. Nevertheless, we've seen new religions begin in recent years—Christian Science and Scientology are two—giving us the opportunity to study the psychological appeal of religion and perhaps the neurological correlates of belief.

Further, biblical scholarship, which when done properly is simply historical science applied to literature, can shed considerable light on the origins of
scripture—light that can at least help the faithful make sense of their sacred books. We are now fairly sure, for instance, that the two creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2, which contradict each other about the origin of the Earth and its creatures, involve separate creation myths concocted several centuries apart.

Finally, what might be considered a real contribution of science to religious
belief
is the empirical demonstration that some of those beliefs are wrong. The many falsified biblical claims include the creation story, the claim of Adam and Eve as the ancestors of humanity, the Exodus of Jews from Egypt, and the census of Augustus that according to the Gospel of Luke brought Joseph and a pregnant Mary to Bethlehem. Because liberal and science-friendly faiths presumably don't want factually incorrect theologies, this forces them to turn what was previously taken literally into metaphors, and then into theological virtues. One can see these scientific corrections as “improving” faith, but only by removing the parts that are factually wrong.

Of course, it's useful for everyone, including scientists, to learn more about religion, for it's one of the driving impulses of humanity, directing the course of history (as in the present Middle East), profoundly affecting society (politics in modern America would be a mystery without understanding our hyperreligiosity), and contributing to the creation of great art, music, and literature.
Macbeth
is loaded with biblical allusions, and without a rudimentary knowledge of Christianity, Leonardo da Vinci's
Virgin of the Rocks
is simply a picture of a man, a woman, and two infants. But the historic and artistic importance of religion is not the point of religion/science dialogues, whose real aim is either to defend religion against science, to infuse science with religion, or to demonstrate that the two areas are valid and complementary ways of finding truth.

 • • • 

I have argued that religion is to science as superstition is to reason; indeed, that is the very reason they are incompatible. I've also maintained that this incompatibility rests on two pillars. One is that in some ways religion is like science, for most religions make claims about what exists in the universe, and purport to give evidence for those claims. (I emphasize again that there is far more to religion than truth claims!) And the value of a religion to its
believers, regardless of what behavior it motivates, depends heavily on assenting to at least some of those claims. If Muslims knew that Muhammad, like Joseph Smith, was making up the words that became dogma; if Christians knew that Jesus was neither divine nor resurrected, but merely one of many apocalyptic preachers of that era; if theists knew that there were no documented interventions of God into the universe—then believers would melt away like spring snow. Yes, there are some sophisticated believers and theologians who see religion as independent of facts, but they are in the minority, and by and large their “religion”—often more a philosophy—does little harm to either science or society.

Irrationality enters when religion's truth claims are based not on reason or any kind of systematic investigation, but on
faith—
belief in matters for which there's no convincing evidence, but which are seen as true simply because people
want
them to be true, or were
taught
that they were true. This is, as Father Consolmagno said, thinking with the heart instead of the head. Coronary thinking is incapable of finding truth: millennia of religious conflicts and strife, resting on conflicting “truths” divined by faith, attest to that. In the Middle Ages theology was called “the Queen of the Sciences,” but of course at that time “science” referred to any area of investigation. Nowadays, when we have real science, we realize that theology—the study of God, his nature, and his attributes—is as useless at understanding reality as when Thomas Paine characterized it in 1795:

The study of theology
, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. Not any thing can be studied as a science, without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is not the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.

The second pillar of incompatibility is that the scientific pretenses of religion, when challenged, become pseudoscientific. That is, when the inevitable clashes ensue between brain- and heart-based thinking, religion resorts to the same pseudoscientific defenses used by Holocaust deniers, UFO
devotees, and advocates of extrasensory perception. The vast majority of believers don't want their faith examined skeptically, nor do they honestly examine other faiths to find why they see their own as true and those others as false. Finally, like true pseudoscience, religion defends its claims by turning them into a watertight edifice immune to refutation. And what cannot be refuted cannot be accepted as true.

In the end, why isn't it better to find out how the world really works instead of making up stories about it, or accepting stories concocted centuries ago? And if we don't know the answers, why shouldn't we simply admit that we don't know, as scientists do regularly, and keep looking for answers using evidence and reason? Isn't it time that we take to heart the Apostle Paul's advice to the Corinthians to grow up and put away our childish things? Every obeisance we pay to faith buttresses those faiths that do real damage to our species and our planet.

It is time for us to stop seeing faith as a virtue, and to stop using the term “person of faith” as a compliment. After all, we don't call someone who believes in astrology, homeopathy, ESP, alien abduction, or even Scientology a “person of faith,” even though that's precisely what such people are. The irony of extolling unfounded beliefs was expressed by Bertrand Russell, the most outspoken atheist of his time, in the very first sentence of his collection
Sceptical Essays:

I wish to propose
for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

Or, as Sam Harris, Russell's modern counterpart, argues, “
Pretending to be certain
when one isn't—indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable—is both an intellectual and a moral failing.”

Finally, although I'm a scientist, am deeply moved by the wonders that science has brought to us in its short five centuries, and feel that religion is not only incompatible with science, but a roadblock to scientific progress, I am not proposing a robotic world governed by science. The world I want is
one in which the strength of one's beliefs about matters of fact is proportional to the evidence. It is a world where it is okay to reserve judgment if one doesn't know the answer, and where it's not seen as offensive to doubt the claims of others.

A world that is faithless would not be without the arts, either. Those don't rest on faith, so imaginative art, literature, and music would still be with us. Too, we would retain justice, law, and compassion, perhaps in even greater measure than now, for our judgment wouldn't be warped by adherence to unevidenced divine strictures.

But wouldn't the end of faith also mean the end of morality and of the social benefits that come with religion? No, for the experience of Europe tells us this need not happen. Secular morality and nonreligious forms of communal experience are perfectly able to fill in the gaps when religion wanes. Indeed, secular morality, which is not twisted by adherence to the supposed commands of a god, is superior to most “religious” morality. And faith need not be replaced with other brands of faith: Europeans haven't shifted their belief in God to belief in ghosts and other paranormal phenomena. They've simply abandoned superstition altogether, and don't seem to need the “atheist churches” that are sprouting in the United States and United Kingdom.

I want to end with two stories about faith and science.
The first involves
Robert L. Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland. On September 3, 2000, Park was on his customary jog through the woods when he had a gruesome accident. Its footing weakened by recent rains, a large oak tree beside the path fell on him as he was running by, crushing him and severely fracturing his arm and femur, which was driven right through the skin of his leg. He was pinned and unconscious. Fortunately, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador found Park and called for help on his cell phone. Without the Salvadoran's phone, a product of science-based technology, Park, who was half a mile from the trailhead, would certainly have died. Two priests were also on the scene, but all they could offer was last rites.

Yet even when rescued, Park still would have died without modern medicine, especially antibiotics, which first appeared on the market in the mid-1940s. Because he had a large open wound through which soil bacteria entered his body, he required not only multiple surgeries and a temporary
metal rod to bind his shattered femur, but also a catheter threaded through his arm into a vein near his heart, through which new and powerful antibiotics were infused into his body. It took nearly a year of this treatment before doctors beat back the infection.