Flanagan, Problem of the Soul, 319.
69. See Angier, “My God Problem,” 131–34.
8: Is Religion Opposed to Science?70
When we hear the words “science” and “religion” we immediately think of the stormy history of their relationship. But the chronicle of religion’s encounter with science is by no means only one of warfare. Here we shall examine four distinct ways in which science and religion may stand in relation to each other:
1. Conflict—the conviction that science and religion are fundamentally irreconcilable;
2. Contrast—the claim that there can be no possibility of genuine conflict since religion and science are each responding to radically different questions;
3. Contact—an approach that goes beyond the standoff, in which science and religion simply agree not to be enemies, seeking a positive and fruitful correspondence between them;
4. Confirmation—a seldom articulated position that shows the ways in which, at a very deep level, religion supports and nourishes the entire scientific enterprise.
A grasp of these four approaches should help us make our way through the thicket of issues that make up the subject matter of this book. Let us now examine each of them more closely.
I. Conflict
Many scientific thinkers are quite certain that religion can never be reconciled with science. If you are a scientist, they say, it is hard to imagine how you could honestly also be religious, at least in the sense of believing in God. Their main reason for drawing this conclusion is that religion apparently cannot demonstrate the truth of its ideas in a straightforward way, whereas science can. Religion tries to sneak by without providing any concrete evidence of God’s existence. Science, on the other hand, is willing to test all of its hypotheses and theories against “experience.” Religion cannot do this in a way that is satisfying to an impartial witness. Thus, there is a “conflict” between the scientific and the religious ways of understanding.
Both historical and philosophical factors seem to substantiate such a grim verdict. Historically, we need only to recall the obvious examples: the Church’s persecution of Galileo in the seventeenth century and the widespread religious aversion to Darwin’s evolutionary theory in the nineteenth and twentieth. The slow pace by which religious thought comes to terms with science, and the fact that many theists still have a distaste for it, suggest that religion will never get along with science. Since so many believers in God have resisted the findings of astronomy, physics, and biology, is it any wonder that religion comes across as inherently hostile to science?
More important than these historical considerations, however, are the imposing philosophical (specifically epistemological) obstacles that religion and theology present to scientific skeptics. The main problem here is that religious ideas seem to be experientially untestable. That is, they exempt themselves from the rigors of public examination, whereas science always submits its ideas to open experimentation. If empirical scrutiny shows a scientific hypothesis to be mistaken, then science willingly discards it and tries out alternatives, subjecting these also to the same rigorous process of inspection.
But can you do the same with religious teachings? Don’t they dodge all attempts to demonstrate their truth observationally? Don’t theists, for example, go on believing in God no matter what they observe in the world, including enormous suffering and evil? Doesn’t Judaism, for example, say of its Lord: “Even though He slay me, yet shall I trust in Him”? Isn’t the “religious hypothesis,” if we may use this expression, completely impervious to, and fundamentally unaffected by, the things we actually experience?
Putting this another way, it seems to skeptics that religious teachings are “unfalsifiable.” After all, the renowned philosopher Karl Popper argued that genuine science strives to come up with evidence that will show its ideas to be wrong. That is, science has the fortitude to risk the “falsification” of its own claims.71 For example, since relativity theory predicts that light waves will always bend in the presence of gravitational fields, then scientists should look for possible instances in which this prediction might not be true. Then, if they cannot find any evidence to the contrary, this means that relativity is a pretty strong theory for weathering all attempts at falsification. Falsifiability is the mark of a theory’s scientific status. A willingness to allow its ideas to be falsified purifies science and shows it to be a truly open and honest way of learning about the nature of things.
But can religion display a comparable openness? Scientific skeptics (i.e. those who reject religion in the name of science) think that religion lacks the robust probity of science. The God-hypothesis, for example, seems to be completely beyond falsification, so it cannot pass muster before the courts of science. Religion is based, skeptics claim, on a priori assumptions, or “faith,” whereas science takes nothing for granted. In addition, religion relies too heavily on the imagination, whereas science sticks to observable facts. Religion is highly emotional, passionate, and subjective, whereas science strives to remain disinterested, dispassionate, and objective. These antitheses seem to add up to nothing less than an insuperable mutual hostility between science and religion.
Whenever scientific ideas do not correspond with the letter of the Bible (which is quite often), biblical literalists argue that science must be wrong and religion right. This is especially the case regarding evolution, but also with miracles, the creation of the universe, the origin of life, and other issues. Many Christians in the USA and elsewhere maintain that the Bible teaches the “true” science and that secular science should be rejected if it does not correspond with the letter of Scripture.
In addition to biblical literalists, there are other critics who think that science is the enemy of religion. They argue that it was the coming of science that produced the emptiness and meaninglessness of modern experience. When science separated the experience of “facts” from our human need for eternal “values,” they argue, it emptied the cosmos of any real meaning. And since the main business of religion is to teach us the meaning of things, it cannot be reconciled with science. We would have been better off if the scientific revolution had never occurred.
In a controversial new book, for example, the British journalist Bryan Appleyard passionately argues that science is “spiritually corrosive, burning away ancient authorities and traditions.”72 Science, he insists, is inherently incapable of coexisting with religion. It is not a neutral way of knowing at all, but a subversive and demonic force that has evacuated our culture of its spiritual substance. It is impossible, he goes on to say, for anyone to be both religious and scientific in any honest, straightforward way.
Appleyard’s contention that science is “absolutely not compatible with religion” is confirmed from the other side by scientific skeptics, although, for them, science brings about the liberation rather than the emptying of culture. While they are certainly aware that many religious believers see no conflict between religion and science today, and that many theists are admittedly good scientists, skeptics claim that both the logic and the spirit of science are nevertheless fundamentally incompatible with any form of theistic religion. As the Cornell historian of science William Provine puts it, we have to “check our brains at the church house door” if we are to be both scientist and believer.73 More specific reasons for this judgment will be offered in each succeeding chapter.
II. Contrast
Many other scientists and theologians, on the other hand, find no such opposition between religion and science. Each is valid, they argue, though only in its own, clearly defined sphere of inquiry. Religion cannot be judged by the standards of science, nor vice-versa, because the questions each asks are so completely disparate and the content
