Slate is a much more science-friendly venue than Salon, thanks largely to Slate’s rational editors and its avoidance of Salon-style clickbait. But its science section did publish an accommodationist piece in late October, “Do science and religion conflict?”, by Rachel Gross, that I think needs a bit of critique. I’ve sat on this for a while due to the press of work.
The piece’s main problem is that it sees science and religion as non-conflicting because most religious people (actually, only about half) feel that science and religion don’t conflict, though nonbelievers do see more conflict. In other words, Gross mistakes perceptions for reality. If you’ve read Faith Versus Fact (available in fine bookstores everywhere), you’ll know that my concern is less with perception than with reality. Does faith lead religious people to perceive as “true” some things that would be rejected or doubted by the application of a scientific approach?
In my view, the real conflict acts on three levels. First, the methods used to judge propositions as true differs radically and irreconcilably between science and religion. The former uses scripture, revelation, and dogma; the latter all the armamentarium of science: empirical observation, prediction, testing, doubt, peer review, blinded methods, statistics, etc.
Second, the outcomes of religious versus scientific approaches to understanding differ: the “truths” arrived at by religion (and I’m talking here about factual truths, like the Resurrection, Muhammed’s reception of the Qur’an from God, the existence of an afterlife, and so on) are not accepted scientifically, though most believers (see below) see them as factual. The inability of religious people to find genuine truth is amply shown by the conflicting factual claims of different faiths (one example: if you’re a Christian, you probably think that the only way to heaven is through accepting Jesus as Savior, while Muslims feel that such a belief will send you straight to Hell).
Finally, the inability of religion to give convincing evidence for its claims leads to a philosophical incompatibility: since empirical study of the universe has historically advanced our understanding by completely ignoring the divine and supernatural, we see, like Laplace, no need for that hypothesis. In other words, the practice of science is explicitly atheistic, leading, if you’re consistent, to a philosophical view that there’s no evidence for gods.
But, looking at a Pew study published in October, Gross finds comity between science and faith, using the data shown below. Several other places have also trumpeted these results as showing a harmony between the two “magisteria”:
Note that the top figure shows that nearly 60% of all Americans see science and religion as often in conflict although, as one might expect from an elementary knowledge of psychology, a lot more people don’t think that science conflicts with their own beliefs. That’s no surprise. And the less religious you are, at least judged by church attendance, the more conflict you see.
But here’s Gross’s take on the data:
After all, don’t religion and science represent two opposing worldviews, as fundamentally incompatible as oil and water? Isn’t it true that the more committed you are to the one, the more likely you are to reject the other?
Well, no. And if you believe that, you’re probably not religious. That’s the takeaway of a newly released Pew Research Center survey on religion and science, which asked more than 2,000 respondents whether they believed that science and religion were in conflict. Those who subscribe to the idea that science and religion exist in tense, perpetual opposition are largely those without a religion themselves, the survey found.
Gross, however, argues that the negative correlation between faith and perception of conflict simply means that nonbelievers don’t understand the views of the religious:
You’d think the religious would know what contradicts their own beliefs, right? In fact, the findings say more about the assumptions of nonreligious Americans than they do about religious ones, says Robert P. Jones, a religion scholar and CEO of the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute.
“The people who are farther away from religion themselves tend to see stronger conflict, because they’re not as close to actual religious people,” says Jones. “They aren’t seeing all those people who don’t have a conflict.” Instead, what they see of the religious community is generally what’s depicted in the media: all-out warfare. The media tends to focus on those rare flashpoints of controversy, such as fights over evolution and the content of science textbooks, and to highlight the most outspoken conservative fundamentalists. For the nonreligious, these strong voices become the faces of religion, and these flashpoints become evidence that religion and science are in conflict.
Well, no, I’m not willing to buy that religious people, as opposed to nonbelievers—many of whom are former believers—know best what contradicts their own beliefs. Because most Americans are supportive of science in general, it’s only natural that their desire to avoid cognitive dissonance makes them feel that their own religious beliefs don’t conflict with science.
Many of these accommodatiions, for instance, subscribe to some version Steve Gould’s misguided notion of “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” (NOMA), whereby science’s domain is finding out truth about the cosmos, and religion’s bailiwick is that of meaning, morals, and values. That’s bogus because many believers actually see their religion as asserting factual truths about the cosmos (see the many testimonies to that effect in FvF), while, on the other side plenty of secularists base their philosophies, ethics, and values, on purely secular considerations (viz., Kant, Hume, Mill, Spinoza, Singer, Rawls, Grayling, ad infinitum). In fact, the biggest opponents of the NOMA solution aren’t nonbelievers but believers and theologians! Here are two; the first is by Christian physicist Ian Hutchinson:
But the religion [Gould] is making room for is empty of any claims to historical or scientific fact, doctrinal authority, and supernatural experience. Such a religion, whatever be its attractions to the liberal scientistic mind, could never be Christianity, or for that matter, Judaism or Islam.
And this by Catholic theologian John Haught, one of his faith’s more liberal thinkers:
A closer look at Gould’s writings about science and religion will show that he could reconcile them only by understanding religion in a way that most religious people themselves cannot countenance. Contrary to the nearly universal religious sense that religion puts us in touch with the true depths of the real, Gould denied by implication that religion can ever give us anything like reliable knowledge of what is. at is the job of science alone. . . . Still, Gould could not espouse the idea that religion in any sense gives us truth.
I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing some of the text from FvF below as an “e-appendix”, so you can see some of the claims about reality made by the faithful. It is those and related claims supposedly giving “reliable knowledge of what is” that raised the hackles of Hutchinson and Haught.
Near the end, Gross reprises her claim that the main lesson from the Pew data is that nonbelievers don’t have an accurate idea of how many religious people see no conflict; ergo there is no conflict. As she notes:
That’s not to say conflict doesn’t exist; it does. But most religious people don’t view science in general as the enemy. Instead, they bristle at a few specific issues: Of those who said science conflicted with their own personal beliefs, most cited the specific example of Darwinian evolution, followed by abortion and the Big Bang.
. . . All this is to say that we may know less than we think about those who are different than us.
I wish Gross had considered this proposition: “Believers tend to see less conflict between science and religion because they want to feel that they can be down with science but keep their faith.” It’s a way of avoiding mental conflict. What’s manifestly true is that nearly all believers make some claims about reality that do conflict with science. For liberal Christians, it’s usually the divinity and resurrection of Jesus: the “non-negotiable” of Christianity. And those claims, no matter what their adherents assert, are in palpable conflict with science.
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Appendix: From Faith versus Fact (text from the book indented):
The most recent survey of Americans, a Harris poll of representative citizens taken in 2013, shows a surprisingly large number of people who accept supernatural claims. Besides the 54 percent who are “absolutely certain there is a God” (an additional 14 percent are “somewhat certain”), belief in things like the divinity of Jesus, miracles, the existence of heaven, hell, Satan, angels, and the survival of the soul after death, are all above 56 percent. In contrast, only 47 percent believed in Darwin’s theory of evolution (we scientists prefer to use “accept” rather than “believe” when we speak of scientific theories). Further, 39 percent of American conceive of God as male, but only 1 percent as female (38 percent see God as “neither”), supporting the idea that if people see God as a bodiless person, it often has genitalia. As for the veracity of scripture, 33 percent accepted the Old Testament as being “completely the Word of God,” while 31 percent gave the same answer for the New Testament. Remember, these statistics were from a sample of all Americans, not just believers. Scriptural literalism is certainly widespread in the United States—in fact, depending on the claim, it’s often a majority view.
I then describe a poll that atheist Julian Baggini did—granted, not a systematic poll—of English churchgoers, expecting to find that they went to church for the social amenities and communality rather than to buttress specific beliefs. But that’s not quite what he found:
. . . Baggini was astonished at the literalism of those who answered. Asked why they went to church, for instance, 66 percent responded that they did so “to worship God,” while only 20 percent went for the “feeling of community” (so much for claims that the social aspects of religion far outweigh its dogma!). There was also widespread agreement that the stories in Genesis, such as Adam and Eve, really happened (29 percent), that Jesus performed miracles such as that of the loaves and fishes (76 percent), that Jesus’s death on the cross was necessary for forgiveness of human sin (75 percent), that Jesus was bodily resurrected (81 percent), and that eternal life required accepting Jesus as lord and savior (44 percent). Chastened, Baggini retracted his previous views:
“So what is the headline finding? It is that whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral insight of mythos than the factual claims of logos, the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value. . . . it is, I think, a firm riposte to those who dismiss atheists, especially the “new” variety, as being fixated on the literal beliefs associated with religion rather than ethos or practice. It suggests that they are not attacking straw men when they criticise religion for promoting superstitious and supernatural beliefs.”
My text goes on, discussing the widespread Qur’anic literalism of Muslims (among the world’s strongest deniers of evolution), as well as the religious dogma of Christians in the rest of the world, but you get the point.
