A while back, I wrote a critique of a project proposed by Tommaso Todesca and his colleagues: a comic book (or “graphic novel” if you will) designed to make the point that science and religion are fully compatible. (I found a description of the project on PuffHo.) Todesca a Catholic of Italian extraction and a wealthy banker in Los Angeles, proposed to spread a message of accommodationism he read in an Italian book called Scienze e fede (“Science and faith”). The purpose of the comic-book project?:

The “hook of the project,” Todesca said, is the message that “science and faith are not in conflict with each other.”

“Through the patience of dialogue, science and faith can and should complement each other, and make each other stronger,” he told The Huffington Post.

. . . The graphic novel will feature Savagnone and Briguglia — a philosopher and a physicist, respectively — as comic book characters who go on a journey that takes them from Rome to Florence to Toulouse, meeting with great scientists and thinkers of the past and the present, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Thomas Aquinas. [JAC: The Kickstarter video also mentions that Savagnone and Briuglia will meet Richard Dawkins, but that meeting is pointedly omitted by PuffHo; possibly because potential funders see Dawkins as Satan incarnate.]

Their dialogue draws from the original book, which Todesca said “makes a compelling case for faith as a type of knowledge that can find its ground in rationality.”

To fund the comic, Todesca set up a Kickstarter site, asking for $10,000. (Why a a wealthy banker would need $10,000 to get this project off the ground eludes me.) You can see some of the tedious and tendentious graphics at that site, or in my previous post on the project, “Oy! An accommodationist comic book.”

Unfortunately for Todesca, the appeal for funds failed: here’s the outcome:

I guess Science and Faith is not to be.

My critique of the project was largely along the lines of Faith Versus Fact, attacking several dubious claims made in the proposal for Science and Faith. These include the claim that religion isn’t concerned with empirical realities about the cosmos; that “faith” is far more than “belief without evidence”, and is in fact a “way of knowing”; and that, to Todesca, religion, was perfectly compatible with science. So often, as in Todesca’s case, the last claim is merely a version of the “no true Scotsman” argument: “Well, MY religion is compatible with science, and so ALL religion is compatible with science.” And those religions that prove incompatible with science, like the faiths of more than 40% of Americans, can be written off as “not true religions.”

Apparently, Todesca found out about my criticism and posted a comment on my piece, a comment that I decided to put above the fold. Todesca’s entire comment is indented below, but my commentary on it is flush left.

A few days ago a friend told me: “Take a look, someone wrote a nasty piece on your comic book project. He sounded really angry, you must have pissed him off big time!”.

So I read this article, and oy! my friend was right, it is pretty nasty indeed.

I wondered: “How did my project offend this person so much?”

Dr Coyne, exactly what kind of war are you fighting? Initially I thought it might be a cultural war, as a hero against ignorance. That would be a worthy cause, but in that case you should specify that you are addressing literalism, fundamentalism, and superstition, as those are the common names of ignorant faith.

The title of your blog would suggest that is your mission…. but that’s not the case. You seem to attack “faith” and “religion” in the broader possible sense.

That means your war is being waged against 85% of the world population. That is a lot of anger.

So I understood. That’s what I did to offend you: by being catholic and by talking about my faith in a book (a book that has the utmost respect for science), I offended you.

Here Todesca’s playing the “anger” card in lieu of addressing my arguments. In fact, I wasn’t angry at all, though I was a tad offended that someone with brains could be so misguided about faith and its relationship to science. But I didn’t write the piece to let off steam; I wrote it, as you’ll see if you read it, to go after Todesca’s claims. And I don’t give a rat’s patootie if 85% of the world’s population is religious and that makes them a majority. None of them—not one person—has convincing evidence that their religious beliefs are true, or that a divine being exists.

Todesca goes on:

Just like Dawkins, Hitchens, etc., by stating that faith wants to say something about the natural world, you completely miss the point of religion, and you demonstrate a deep confusion about christian theology.

Catholic faith holds science in deep respect, and catholic theology is very aware that the Bible has nothing to teach us about biology.

In two words, when it comes to evolution, geology and every single statement that pertains to science, we agree. We couldn’t agree more!

Todesca is apparently unaware of three things. First of all, lots of theologians, including Sophisticated Ones™, argue that faith really does say something about the natural world, and that Steve Gould’s NOMA claim that it doesn’t is simply wrong. In Faith Versus Fact I give a many quotes by theologians about this issue. So Todesca is wrong on this point.

Second, Todesca apparently thinks that his own conception of faith is the one that everyone holds. As I show in my book, he’s wrong. And if he thinks his own conception of faith is the right conception of faith, well, he’s wrong there, too. There is no “right” way to delimit the realm of faith.

Third, Catholic theology certainly does make assertions about biology. Here’s one: humans, uniquely among animals, have a soul, and it’s immortal. Somewhere in the evolutionary pathway from ancestral primates, God gave us that soul. Here’s another: as Pope Pius XII affirmed in 1950, all humans all literally descended from Adam and Eve as our sole progenitors.  Because of that claim, and the genetic disproof based on historical estimates of H. sapiens’ population size, Catholic theologians are tying themselves into knots.

Todesca goes on:

What you don’t seem to realize or acknowledge is that you and the catholic theologians are actually talking about two completely different things when it comes to words like universe, beginning, and “God”.

In the words of David Bentley-Hart: “If one is content merely to devise images of God that are self-evidently nonsensical, and then proceed triumphantly to demonstrate just how infuriatingly nonsensical they are, one if not going to accomplish anything interesting”. “The most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God is the habit of conceiving God as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power and duration, but not ontologically, and is related to the world like a craftsman is related to his artifact”.

Earth to Todesca: David Bentley Hart (no hyphen) is not only not Catholic (he’s Eastern Orthodox), but he’s also not the world’s expert on what God is like. (See my posts on him here and here.) In fact, nobody is the world’s expert on what God is like, because there are thousands of different conceptions of God, many at odds with each other. And the whole enterprise fails anyway because there’s no convincing evidence for God. Hart’s conception is on the apophatic side, but of course many people believe in God as a Celestial Person, with feelings and desires. See Faith Versus Fact for the documentation.

Todesca goes on:

Of course, as you say, scientific knowledge is only one. There aren’t different types or flavors of scientific truths.

But faith is most definitely a form of knowledge: a knowledge that does not relate to protons, neutrons and the stars, but to the human experience. Whether Hindu, Catholic, or whatever else, faith is about our human reality, our traditions, and how to make the best out of our limited life.

Well, Mr. Todesca, can you tell us one definitive piece of knowledge that faith has given us? I’m a bit confused here.

I am also appalled by the preposterous statements of Earth Creationists, Evangelicals who take the Bible in a literal sense, or even Hindu nationalists who insist that Rama’s bridge was actually built by Hanuman’s monkeys.

Of course, just like you, I find these ideas ridiculous. I pity the people who support them, and I’m sorry that they clearly did not receive an adequate education.

So, again, we certainly agree.

Well, 40% of Americans, and about a quarter of American Catholics—Todesca’s coreligionists—are young-earth creationists, and so see an incompatibility between the facts of science and their religious belief.  Todesca’s form of faith, and what it teaches us, is far from universal.

But while my approach is – in a very limited way through my comic book project – to encourage an open dialogue and to try to popularize the ideas of two professors who have been studying theology, philosophy and science for most of their lives, your approach seems to be a full-on attack on all religions based on the statements of those who get catholic theology completely wrong (fundamentalists and literalists). And you even wrote a book on faith, when your credentials in the area of theology are weak at the very least.

There’s the credential card! But I think I know something about Catholic theology, and I suspect it’s at least as much as Todesca knows about science. But let’s put credentials aside because, like playing the “you’re angry” card, it’s just a way to avoid the substantive issue: faith can’t tell us anything about the cosmos, or even limn a way of life that most people agree on. And speaking of Catholic theology, Mr. Todesca, could you enlighten us about how that theology regards homosexual acts, divorce, what happens during Communion, and whether there’s an afterlife? Do we all misunderstand those things, too?

He goes on:

It is such a shame to see brilliant scientists like yourself and R. Dawkins spend so much of your time speaking and writing about things that go beyond your area of expertise, and that don’t really do much aside from making ignorant people even angrier and firmer on their creationist (etc.) positions. You will never change their minds.

My suggestion? Leave it. Relax. Focus on your scientific publications, projects, and use your intelligence for constructive activities.

This is the only part that gets my bile up: the you-don’t-understand-religion-because-you’re-an-atheist claim. Seriously, theology is not rocket science, and you can learn a great deal about it (granted, with much mental pain) by reading for two years, as I did. I deny that religion, or Catholic theology is beyond my expertise. If they are, then they’re certainly also beyond the expertise of the average Catholic, who hasn’t read nearly as much as I have about Catholic theology.

In fact, Todesca doesn’t seem to grasp that his brand of Catholicism isn’t universally shared, and that, at least in America, far more people are young-Earth creationists than are Catholics.

Why do religious people assume that theology is so hard to grasp? After all, it’s just making stuff up about a being for which we know nothing. Theology is, as Dan Barker says, “a subject without an object.” Further, as I often say, while some believers are literalists about nearly everything, nearly every believer is a fundamentalist about something. For Catholics, the literalism involves the divinity of Jesus, his death and resurrection, and the claim that accepting Jesus as saviour will grant us eternal life. That must surely be part of the “knowledge” vouchsafed by Todesca’s Sophisticated Faith.

But I’ve gone on too long in response to someone who is just raising the same old arguments. So, Mr. Todesca, so long, thanks for all the bromides, and good luck with your comic book. When you have some real evidence for God, we’ll talk.