Elaine Ecklund’s incessant discussion of the compatibility of science and religion (funded, of course, by the John Templeton Foundation), and her frequent spinning of the data to emphasize that comity—even when the data don’t really show it—are getting very tiresome. I’ve posted about this often before, but the distortions just keeps on coming. That’s because the Templeton money also keeps on coming.

There’s yet another article in Huffington Post describing the results of Ecklund’s latest research project: “New survey suggests science & religion are compatible, but scientists have their doubts.” Note that this is the third article in HuffPo on the very same survey (the other articles, which don’t differ materially, are here and here, from February. 16 and February 19). The trumpet-tooting never ends. Ecklund’s study was also done in collaboration with the U.S.’s most important science organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), to its eternal shame. You can see here a fulsome video from the recent AAAS meeting in Chicago, showing Ecklund and an evangelical Christian answering softball questions from AAAS employees about her survey.

In brief, her study canvassed 10,241 Americans: a mixture of scientists, “regular” Americans, and evangelical Christians.  Ecklund’s message, conveyed in the latest HuffPo piece is, as always, hopeful, and congenial to Templeton’s aims: science and religion are friends!

But the piece starts off with something that doesn’t look good for that friendship:

Are science and religion incompatible? That seems like a rational conclusion, especially in the wake of last month’s combative evolution-vs.-creationism debate, which pitted “Science Guy” Bill Nye against evangelist Ken Ham.

And indeed, the latest Gallup poll shows that 46% of Americans think humans were created ex nihilo by God within the last 10,000 years. Another 32% believe that God guided the evolutionary process (“theistic evolution”), and only 15% accept the scientific view of unguided and purely naturalistic evolution.  Doesn’t this show that, when the rubber meets the road (that is, when science and faith conflict), that science loses out? That’s supported by an 1996 Time Magazine poll showing that if science conflicted with one’s religious beliefs, 64% of Americans—nearly two-thirds—would reject the science and hold onto their false dogma.

But Ecklund has Good News: her survey shows that Americans don’t see much conflict!

But a new survey of more than 10,000 Americans (including scientists and evangelical Protestants) suggests that there may be more common ground between science and religion than is commonly believed.

The “Religious Understandings Of Science” survey showed that only 27 percent of Americans feel that science and religion are in conflict. In addition, it showed that nearly half of scientists and evangelicals believe that “science and religion can work together and support one another,” Dr. Elaine Howard Ecklund, the Rice University sociologist who conducted the survey, said in a written statement.

“This is a hopeful message for science policymakers and educators, because the two groups don’t have to approach religion with an attitude of combat,” Ecklund said in the statement.

I criticized the results of that study here, and pointed out that other data, including some of Ecklund’s own, that aren’t so hopeful. They include these facts, taken from my earlier post:

• A 2009 Pew poll showed that 55% of the U.S. public answered “yes” to the question “Are science and religion often in conflict?”As expected, the perception of general conflict was higher among people who weren’t affiliated with a church (68%). Why the big differences between Ecklund’s survey and the Pew survey? Have American attitudes changed that much in four years? Or was there a difference in how the questions were asked, or in the composition of the survey sample?

• Surveying American scientists as a whole, regardless of status, a 2009 Pew poll showed 33% who admitted belief in God, with 41% of them atheists or agnostics. (The rest either didn’t answer, didn’t know, or believed in a “universal spirit or a higher power.”)  Among the general public, on the other hand, belief in God ran at 83% and nonbelief at 4%. In other words, the average scientist is ten times as likely to be an atheist or an agnostic than is the average American.

• The degree of scientists’ nonbelief goes up with their professional status. Ecklund’s own earlier work found that 62% of scientists working at “elite” universities were atheists or agnostics, with only 33% professing belief in God. And, considering members of America’s most elite scientific body, the National Academy of Sciences, we see that only 7% believe in a personal God and 93% are atheists or agnostics about a personal God. (In contrast, 68% of Americans—nearly ten times the percentage of scientists—believe in a personal God.)  These figures, and the correlation of nonbelief with professional achievement, are well known. They may mean either that science turns people into nonbelievers, or that nonbelievers are attracted to science. Both factors are probably at work, but there’s some evidence that science does help dispel religious belief. Regardless, these data aren’t compelling evidence that science and religion are mutually supportive.

• Finally, a 2011 survey by the Barna Group, a religious polling organization, found that, among the six major reasons young Christians leave the church, an important one is that they perceive their churches as unfriendly to science:

“Reason #3 – Churches come across as antagonistic to science.
One of the reasons young adults feel disconnected from church or from faith is the tension they feel between Christianity and science. The most common of the perceptions in this arena is “Christians are too confident they know all the answers” (35%). Three out of ten young adults with a Christian background feel that “churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in” (29%). Another one-quarter embrace the perception that “Christianity is anti-science” (25%). And nearly the same proportion (23%) said they have “been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate.” Furthermore, the research shows that many science-minded young Christians are struggling to find ways of staying faithful to their beliefs and to their professional calling in science-related industries.”

Finally, these data, from Ecklund’s own survey, put the lie to her claim that science and religion are compatible:

Nearly 60 percent of evangelical Protestants and 38 percent of all people surveyed believe “scientists should be open to considering miracles in their theories or explanations.”

What? Miracles? Well, we used to consider them, but that never worked. As Laplace supposedly said when asked by Napoleon why there was no mention of God in one of Laplace’s works on astronomy, “Sir, I had no need of that hypothesis.” This story may be apocryphal, but it makes a valid point: science has never needed the hypothesis of miracles, for we’ve been able to explain things adequately without invoking supernatural intervention.  Never have we encountered a phenomenon that demands the miraculous intervention of a deity. Indeed, tests of whether miracles occur (studies of the efficacy of intercessory prayer, investigations of supposed miracles like the Shroud of Turin, and so on) have always shown that God didn’t show up. But he could have: all he would have to do is, one night, to rearrange the stars in a pattern that spelled out “I am who I am” in Hebrew. Science would have a tough time explaining that one! There are innumerable phenomena that would, if verified, convince scientists that a god would exist. Sadly, none have occurred.

Because of this, we scientists have simply discarded the idea of considering the supernatural in our work. This is not simply our a priori conclusion that we won’t have anything to do with the supernatural, for, after all, God could have shown up. Petitionary prayer or religious healing might have worked, and other paranormal phenomena like ESP or remote viewing might have been found in laboratory studies. But they haven’t been seen. Science has therefore provisionally jettisoned miracles as something we should consider in our work. Until we find some, there’s every reason to ignore them, just as we ignore the possibility of ESP and UFOs.

The HuffPo piece does quote two scientists who disagree with Eckund’s conclusions, including Jason Rosenhouse. Jason pulls no punches, and agrees with me on the ludicrous idea of being “open to miracles”:

“Whether or not science and religion are in conflict depends on what you consider essential to religious faith,” Dr. Jason Rosenhouse, a mathematician at James Madison University and the author of “Among the Creationists: Dispatches From the Anti-Evolutionist Front Line,” told The Huffington Post in an email. “Science challenges religion both by refuting cherished dogmas, and by dismissing revelation and religious experience as legitimate sources of knowledge.” . . . [Rosenhouse] told HuffPost Science that the idea that evangelical ideas should be incorporated into scientific enquiry was “absurd,” adding that “religious beliefs ought to play no role at all in scientific practice.”

Physicist Lawrence Krauss also waved away the idea that science and religion are compatible:

 In an email to The Huffington Post, [Krauss] called the survey’s findings “irrelevant,” adding that “science itself is incompatible with the scriptures and doctrines of all the world’s religions… It is all well and good to say that scientists and evangelicals can work together toward common goals, like preserving the planet etc., but ultimately those goals will in the end illuminate a universe that has nothing to do with the revelations of the Bible, and should rationally lead to a world where religious myths disappear.”

Yes, there can be a “conversation” between science and religion, but it won’t be a constructive dialogue. It will be a destructive monologue, with science dispelling the truth claims of religion, and with religion having, as Krauss and Rosenhouse noted, nothing to contribute to science.

Indeed, the results of Ecklund’s survey are totally irrelevant, and for an important reason: you can’t settle the question of science/religion compatibility, which is really a methodological and philosophical question, by taking polls. What Ecklund means by “compatibility” is simply whether someone can hold in their head at the same time two completely disparate ways of thinking One is science, based on reason and evidence; the other is religion, based on revelation, faith (belief in the absence of convincing evidence) and dogma. These disparities were summed up by science writer Natalie Angier in her wonderful essay,”My God Problem”:

I admit I’m surprised whenever I encounter a religious scientist. How can a bench-hazed Ph. D., who might in an afternoon deftly purée a colleague’s PowerPoint presentation on the nematode genome into so much fish chow, then go home, read in a two-thousand-year-old chronicle, riddled with internal contradictions, of a meta-Nobel discovery like “Resurrection from the Dead,” and say, gee, that sounds convincing? Doesn’t the good doctor wonder what the control group looked like?

If you hold Ecklund’s definition of compatibility, then all sorts of bizarre bedmates become compatible. Indeed, if you took a poll of Americans 250 years ago, you’d find many people claiming that Christianity and slavery were compatible. Does that prove that they are? No: it proves that people who call themselves Christians could at the same time hold in their heads messages profoundly inimical to the principles of Christianity.

The real reason that science and religion are incompatible is threefold:

1. They both make truth claims about the universe, but only science has a way to settle those claims.  Except for deistic religions, or “religions” without Gods, like Taoism or some forms of Buddhism, most religions make existence claims about gods, the nature of those gods, and how their deities want us to live. Christiantity, for instance, argues that there is a single God (often tripartite with Jesus and the Holy Ghost), that he sent his son, born of a virgin, down to be murdered to atone for an original sin that imbues all humans, that Jesus came back to life three days after he was killed, and that he will return some day, judging all of us and giving us either eternal life or the flames of hell. Those are empirical claims: they are either true or false. But the problem is that they conflict with the “truth claims” of other faiths.  If you believe in Christ’s divinity as a Muslim, for instance, you’re doomed to hell. Hinduism has many Gods, and Jews don’t believe in an afterlife. Unitarians don’t accept the Trinity.  Almost all religious schisms, which have given rise to more than 10,000 Christian sects, are based on irresolvable claims about what is true.

Religion has no way to settle this panoply of conflicting existence claims, but science does, for science is a toolkit: a way of thinking and doing that actually helps us understand the universe. There are thousands of religions, but there is only one science. Scientists of all faiths and ethnicities use the same methodology, and agree on the same set of truths.  Think of how far the unanimity of scientific understanding has progressed since 1500! Now think how far theology has progressed since 1500, at least in terms of understanding the true nature of the divine. It hasn’t budged an inch. We can’t even settle the issue of how many gods there are, much less if there are any. That’s what happens when you rely on faith rather than reason, when you discern truth by listening to clerics or your own thoughts rather than by examining what actually exists in nature.

2. Science and religious “investigation” produce different outcomes. Religion’s search for “truth” could have resulted in the same things that science has discovered, but it never has.  The Bible, or God, could have revealed to people that washing your hands might help curbe epidemics, or that life wasn’t created de novo, but evolved from very simple precursors.  It didn’t do that, and science has repeatedly been forced to correct the false conclusions of religious revelations.

In response, theolgians say, “The Bible is not a textbook of science,” but what they really mean when they say that is “The Bible isn’t wholly true.” This then gives them license to pick which parts of the Bible are true (conveniently, it is the ones that science hasn’t yet disproven, and which comport with modern morality) and which are false (the approbation of stoning for adultery and death for homosexuality).  The disparity in outcomes is a result in the disparity of methods. Religion begins with conclusions that are comforting, and then picks and chooses evidence that supports those conclusions, ignoring the pesky counterevidence or fobbing it off as “metaphor.” In contrast science is designed to prevent you from that kind of confirmation bias—it’s a method, as Richard Feynman noted, that keeps you from fooling yourself, and discovering what you want instead of what’s true.

3. Science and religion have different philosophical bases. From centuries of experience, science has discarded the idea of God because it’s never been useful in explaining anything. Most religions still cling to the idea of deities, even in the absence of evidence, for a bad reason: faith.  Although theologians weave their web of obscurantist verbiage around the word “faith,” it all comes down to believing something without good reasons. How can you possibly find out what’s true if you base your search for truth on confirmation bias and on suppositions that lack any evidence? How can you want base your life based on such suppositions?  And, if you’re religious, how can you be sure that your religion is the right one, and that, say, the tenets of Islam are simply wrong? You can never know. Each religion is at odds with every other religion, and it will always be so.

In the end, the true conflict between science and religion cannot be effaced by polls answered by people who don’t want there to be a conflict. After all, most religionists pride themselves on modernity, and don’t want to be seen as unfriendly to a science that has improved their lives immeasurably. The real conflict—the one that will remain so long as religion pretends to find truth—is between rationality and superstition. It is a conflict between using faith to discern what is real as opposed to using reason and observation of the universe. Ecklund can take polls until she’s blue in the face, but she’ll never turn religion into a way to find truth or to help science find truth. And so the incompatibility remains.