Excuse me; I should have said “graphic novel” in the title, but I can barely bring myself to describe this venture as having the gravitas of real graphic novels like Maus or The Rabbi’s Cat. The bad news is that the science-and-faith-are-friends juggernaut is rolling on. The good news is that this project may not reach fruition.
In Faith versus Fact, I argue that science and religion are incompatible if you believe that religion makes “truth statements” about the real world, which then brings religion into the realm of the empirical—and in principle the realm of the testable. I won’t amplify that thesis here, as all loyal readers should have either bought the book or read a library version. (I will add that I give provide ample documentation that religion is indeed grounded on statements about what’s true in the universe, and that that notion is explicitly confirmed by many theologians.)
One of the reasons I wrote that book was to counteract the spate of other books—in fact, the vast majority of books on science and religion—that argue for the compatibility of science and faith on specious grounds, e.g., the existence of religious scientists.
And now we have the first accommodationist graphic novel. As described in at article at PuffHo, the comic was financed by Tommaso Todesca, a wealthy Los Angeles banker and a Catholic of Italian extraction.
Todesca got the idea for this travesty from reading an Italian accommodationist book called Scienze e fede (“Science and faith”) written by two Italian professors. After initially wanting to translate the book into English, Todesca decided that a graphic novel would be a better venue for his misguided thesis:
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.
As I say in FvF, science can certainly change religion, but by rejecting religious dogma that’s scientifically testable (Genesis and its creationism, Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, the Exodus, the census of Caesar Augustus, the efficacy of prayer, and so on). Whether this makes religion stronger is questionable. I’d argue that as religious scripture becomes increasingly falsified by empiricism, religion becomes weaker. But certainly faith does nothing to make science stronger, for science utterly rejects faith. Science is an atheistic enterprise. As Laplace supposedly said, we don’t need a god hypothesis.
The comic book, apparently also called Science and Faith, has a Kickstarter page with a goal of $10,000 (I won’t link to it, though the PuffHo page does). Judging by the data so far, the idea isn’t selling like hotcakes:
And the plot? Lame.
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.”
The fact that Todesca claims that faith is a “type of knowledge” based on rationality will be the comic book’s fatal flaw, for faith, whatever it may be, is certainly not a type of knowledge, but rather belief in the absence of convincing evidence. And it’s grounded not in rationality but irrationality—the desire to confirm what you want to be true. That makes faith the very antithesis of science. But I digress. .
PuffHo gives some panels from the novel’s beginning. The use of the book’s text as dialogue seems to be a fatal flaw. Have a gander. I’m not impressed, but of course I’m biased!
Note that they mention Father Coyne, which of course isn’t me, but Father George V. Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory and a vociferous accommodationist.
(Note: They should fix “biforcations” in the first panel.):
Zzzzzzzzz. . . .
Well, if Pope Benedict said it, it must be true, right? Pity about those 40% of Americans who reject what he said, seeing a clear conflict between their view of creation and “the version offered by empirical science.”
They should also fix the misspelling in the first panel here:
I have no bloody idea what’s happening in the last panel, but it looks like a miracle: the resurrection of that old charlatan Teilhard de Chardin—out of a book bag. (If you want something really entertaining, read Peter Medwar’s review of Teilhard’s famous The Phenomenon of Man. Both Dawkins and I think it’s the best bad book review ever written.)
If all this comic book does is illustrate tedious bromides from the accommodationist movement, as the panels above suggest, it will be not only a snoozer but a loser. Can you imaging a curious kid—or anyone with two neurons to rub together—wanting to read it?
Oh, and have a look at the comments. Most of them aren’t exactly supportive.
I’m heartened, as these sorts of comments would have been unthinkable fifty years ago.
