world, while religion pertains largely to what is immaterial and
cannot be detected through the senses (if that description is even
true of anything). There was a time when philosophy, theology, and
natural science coexisted peacefully as equal partners in the quest
for understanding. In the eyes of many, that harmony has turned into
the strongest rivalry of our time. According to one very popular
conception of the relationship between science and religion, the two
are enemies locked in mortal combat. In this view, religious claims
rail against science, which in turn undermines the credibility of
religion. But not everyone sees the relationship in that light. For
example, those at the forefront of the Intelligent Design movement
think that theistic claims have only been bolstered by recent
developments in science. To them, science and religion can and do
support each other. Still others maintain that religion and science do
not affect each other at all; they are separate, isolated areas of
discourse with little or nothing to say to each other. There are also
those who doubt that religion is a field of inquiry at all. For them,
religion doesn't study things. It's not an area of knowledge on par
with established scientific fields. In what follows, we will look more
closely at these accounts of the relationship between science and
religion: that the two are enemies locked in mortal combat, or that
they support each other, or that they do not affect each other.
1. Defining Science
In order to carry on a discussion about the relationship between
science and religion, there needs to be a grasp on how the fields
differ. It is important to note that the bifurcation of areas of
knowledge into the myriad specialties one finds today is a relatively
new phenomenon. Until the modern period, science was not a separate
discipline from philosophy; scientists were known as natural
philosophers, or experimental philosophers. In those expressions, one
sees what it was that those men and women thought was distinctive
about their investigations: their methods, and conclusions, were, at
the risk of oversimplification, directed at empirical claims about the
natural world. Their primary mission was to gather data about
observable phenomena in nature, to categorize that data, and to
generalize from specific observations to more general ones. In this
vein, some scientists have described their work as being a quest to
discover the laws of nature. Divergent descriptions of natural laws
have been put forward, but there is a broad consensus that laws of
nature describe the regular behavior of physical objects and systems.
Newton's famous Laws of Motion are paradigm cases of such laws: they
posit, for example, that an object at rest will remain at rest unless
compelled by an external force. Other candidates for natural laws,
however, are probabilistic, rather than deterministic, in nature.
Radioactive decay rates are examples of probabilistic laws: they state
that half of a given quantity of some radioactive element will decay
within the time known as its half life. The chance of any specific
molecule of that sample decaying within the half life is thus fifty
percent.
Science aims at understanding the behavior of the natural world. Any
propositions that are about supernatural objects, or abstract
universals, or normative ethics, should not be considered scientific
since they do not pertain to the study of natural, empirical objects.
Even so, not every scientific claim is directly about empirical
objects. But those claims that are not (for example, the claim that
science ought to proceed by inductively-based generalizations, which
is itself a claim about the enterprise of science, not about any
empirical objects) are usually, at the very least, connected to or
supportive of the investigation of nature and natural objects. That,
however, is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one what
might be needed to complete the definition of science is still a
matter of considerable debate.
2. Defining Religion
Religion can be understood in terms of either its practice or its
propositional content. With respect to its practice, religious systems
generally prescribe certain behaviors, rituals, rites, and
celebrations that their adherents are, at least in some respect,
expected to observe. In following these practices, members of a
religion are united in a rhythm shared by all and only those who are
fellow practitioners. In that sense there is an outwardly recognizable
aspect to religion, and in that sense religion is clearly distinct
from science, which prescribes no such ritual behavior. But it is not
in the common celebrations and rites that science and religion are
seen to conflict: it is in their propositional content instead.
Religious propositional content is often easy to recognize, and easy
to distinguish from scientific propositions. Characterizing the
differences that allow us to make those distinctions between them, on
the other hand, is quite thorny. The first problem is that there is
very little resemblance between the propositional content of different
religions, making it difficult to say what the necessary and
sufficient conditions are for a proposition to count as a religious
proposition. For instance, not all religions agree about the existence
of God, for there are atheistic versions of Buddhism. Among those
religions that believe in the existence of God, there are widely
ranging descriptions of what God is like: there are monotheistic,
pantheistic, and polytheistic varieties of Hinduism, for example. Even
monotheists do not all agree about what God is like: the Christian
concept of the Trinity is fervently rejected by adherents of Islam and
Judaism, despite their common historical origins.
Perhaps one could try to define religious propositions as
metaphysical, and scientific propositions as empirical. To a certain
extent that would hold. Religious claims are often metaphysical,
whereas scientific claims are usually empirical. That distinction will
prove too general, however, since many metaphysical claims would not
be properly considered religious (for example, that propositions are
abstract objects, or that time and space are mind-dependent). In
addition, many metaphysical claims are thought of as scientific (for
example, that there is no absolute reference frame), and many
religious claims are empirical (for example, that Jesus' body was
taken from the earth).
Similar problems arise with attempting to define religious claims
solely in terms of their ethical content. That is, one cannot define
religious claims as ethical claims since there are claims that one
would classify as religious that are not ethical (for example, that
God exists), and ethical claims that are not religious (for example,
that countries are obliged to honor their treaties). It will also not
work to define religious propositions as those statements concerned
with diagnosing a universal problem, or prescribing a cure to that
problem. Freudianism and Marxism do that too, but they are not
generally thought to be religions. Nor can one simply say that
religious claims are all those claims that are not scientific. Surely
there are non-scientific claims that are also non-religious.
The difficulty of finding clear and distinct markers that identify a
given premise as either religious or scientific exacerbates the
tension between the two camps. Some claims are considered by both
religious practitioners and scientists to fall within their own proper
realm of authority, but they disagree about the truth of those claims
and about whether the other camp has any authority to pronounce on the
claim in question. In what follows, we will concentrate on the
relationship between the propositions that science and religion
affirm. That is, our focus will be on how the propositions endorsed by
science relate to the propositions embraced by religious
practitioners.
3. The Hostility Theory
The relationship between science and religion is frequently modeled as
being hostile, with each side making claims that the other side
denies. According to the hostility model, scientific claims are false
if religious claims are true, and religious claims are false if
scientific claims are true. The depiction usually goes beyond that,
however, to the claim that the opponent is not simply incorrect, but
operating under great and dangerous delusions. Consider this speech
given by the character Matthew Harrison Brady from Inherit the Wind,
the movie about the famed Scopes trial:
I have been to their cities and I have seen the altars upon which
they sacrifice the futures of their children to the gods of science.
And what are their rewards? Confusion and self-destruction. New ways
to kill each other in wars. I tell you, gentlemen, the way of science
is the way of darkness.
On the other end of the spectrum, Isaac Asimov made this statement in
the Canadian Atheists Newsletter in 1994:
Imagine the people who believe [that God exists] and who are not
ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds
through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these
ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most
unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders
of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us;
who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally
resent it bitterly….
Both sides, according to the hostility model, consider the other side
to be wrong even dangerously so. In what follows we will consider
three of the most historically important areas of purported conflict
between science and religion.
a. Copernicus, Galileo, and Heliocentrism
The conflict between the Catholic Church and empirical scientists over
heliocentrism is often treated as if the scientists, interested only
in the truth of the matter, were ruthlessly persecuted by the Church,
which was blinded to the facts by its narrow-minded dogmatism. But
that is almost certainly an exaggeration, if not an outright
mischaracterization, of the early debate.
At issue was the question of which body orbited which: did the earth
orbit the sun, or did the sun orbit the earth? The older view,
inherited from Ptolemy, was that the sun and all other heavenly bodies
were in orbit around the earth the fixed center of the universe.
Certainly the Church found justification for geocentrism in Christian
scripture: "You have established the earth on its foundations; it
cannot be moved,¨ says the psalmist. But it is not simply allegiance
to a literal interpretation of the Bible that led the Church and
Galileo into conflict.
To be sure, the Ptolemaic system, in an attempt to accommodate the
growing astronomical data being gathered by diligent observers of the
heavens, had become so elaborate and cumbersome by the time Nicolaus
Copernicus came on the scene that a simpler system that accommodated
the data would have been warmly welcomed.
In 1543, Copernicus published Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, in
which he laid out his model of heliocentrism. He had been working on
the observations that led to the publication for thirty years, and it
was only after considerable prompting that he published those findings
at all. In his mind, the work was still incomplete and inconclusive.
Contrary to the way it is often depicted, there was no clearly
compelling case made in Revolutions sufficient for toppling the
geocentric model favored by the Church. There was no new evidence
presented in his publication. Instead, he wrote his proposal because
he considered it more elegant and of greater explanatory power than
the Ptolemaic system.
After Copernicus passed from the stage, Galileo made his great
entrance. Aided by a newly invented means of magnification, the
telescope, Galileo chronicled several observable features of our solar
system that were in conflict with the claims of Ptolemy. For example,
he observed that Jupiter had four moons in its orbit, that Venus also
has phases like the earth's moon, and that the surface of the moon was
not smooth, as had been claimed by Aristotle, but full of peaks and
valleys. As Richard J. Blackwell points out,
As the generations passed, some new evidence slowly accumulated
that tended to make the new cosmic theory more likely to be true. In
Galileo's day, however, conclusive proof of Copernicanism still had
not been found, despite his own lifelong efforts to establish such a
proof. To understand the Galileo affair properly, it is essential to
keep in mind that no one, including Galileo himself, was yet able to
settle the scientific debate conclusively (Blackwell 109).
When Copernicus developed his heliocentric model, it fared no better
at fitting the data than did the older, but admittedly more
complicated, geocentrism based on Ptolemy. The early debate was not
between a system that fit the data (Copernicus's) and one that did not
(Ptolemy's). Instead, the two systems were in a dead heat in terms of
according with observations. The apparent advantage to heliocentrism
was not that it fit the empirical findings better than the geocentric
model; instead, the advantage was that it did so while employing fewer
brute facts.
One example of that is the different explanations offered of the
retrograde motion of Mars. Normally, the path of a planet is to travel
from west to east along with the rest of the stars. Sometimes,
however, the planet seems to backtrack, temporarily drifting from east
to west. Explaining this retrograde motion was a perennial problem for
astronomers, and the Ptolemaic explanation was that Mars moved in two
circles: there was a small circular path that Mars traversed, centered
on a path that traced a wider circle with the earth at its center. If
a person were to hold a (transparent) bicycle tire parallel to the
ground, with a colored dot painted on the outer part of the tire, and
were then to set the tire spinning counterclockwise while holding the
center of the tire in a fixed position, the dot would appear to that
person to travel from right to left, then from left to right, then
right to left, then left to right, and so on as it circumscribed the
hub. Suppose that the person then walked in a counterclockwise circle
around a tree with the tire still spinning. From an observer in the
tree, the colored dot on the tire would appear to travel generally
from right to left, with periods of traveling from left to right. This
system of postulating circles traveling around circles (known as
epicycles) is how the Ptolemaic system accounted for retrograde
motion.
The Copernican model is simpler. Retrograde motion results from the
fact that planets further from the sun move in slower cycles than
planets nearer to the sun. Retrograde motion results from the earth
passing Mars on the inside as the two planets journey around the sun.
Even though the Copernican model requires fewer cycles of motion it
was not obviously superior. There were still problems with fitting the
model to the data problems which resulted mostly from the assumption
(to be corrected later by Kepler) that all orbits had to be circular.
The Galilean controversy cannot be properly understood as long as it
is treated simply as a question of data fitting one model but not the
other. Some scholars have argued that there was strong reason to
resist the abrupt paradigm change being offered by heliocentrism that
went beyond the astronomical data itself. Aristotelian natural
philosophy, which served as the broad framework for the geocentric
model endorsed by medieval philosophers and Churchmen, had been
remarkably successful at providing scientific insight and explanation.
Though geocentrism and heliocentrism rated about the same when it came
to fitting astronomical data, there were other theoretical points to
consider, some of which gave geocentrism and Aristotelian natural
philosophy an apparent advantage. Scripture was most naturally read as
geocentric, as has been noted, and Aristotle's physical principles in
all areas of science had been so powerful and well-established that
there was a strong presumption in their favor. As one commentator
states, "The Aristotelian corpus offered a convincing framework and a
powerful methodology for thinking and writing about cosmology,
meteorology, psychology, matter theory, motion, light, sensation, and
biological phenomena of all kinds– Aristotelian philosophy was simply
too valuable to relinquish¨ (Lindberg 67). To frame the Galilean
controversy simply in terms of religion versus science is inaccurate
and unhelpful.
Faced with two equally able models, then, the Churchmen tried to
settle the dispute by saying that one model (geocentrism) more
naturally fit the claims of the Bible and was better suited to
Aristotle's highly successful broader scientific framework. Thus, both
astronomical models fit the data equally accurately (or equally
inaccurately); but one seemed to fit holy writ much more naturally,
and required a less radical retooling of the entire body of scientific
knowledge. It was those differences not empirical superiority that
inclined the Church toward the Ptolemaic system. Such was the stage of
the early debate.
b. Newton and Mechanism
In the seventeenth century, the brilliant work of Sir Isaac Newton
gave rise to another issue that would strain the relationship between
science and religion. Newton was able to model the behavior of
celestial bodies (including the earth, moon, and sun) through
mechanical means by positing that one force the force of gravity was
responsible for terrestrial phenomena, such as the falling of heavy
bodies to earth, as well as celestial phenomena, such as the earth's
orbit around the sun. Through his clever combination of observation
and mathematical modeling, he also formulated his three famous laws of
motion: (1) that a body at rest will stay at rest, and a body at
motion will continue in uniform motion, unless acted on by an external
force; (2) that a force of strength F applied to a body of mass m
results in an acceleration of a; and (3) that every action is paired
with an equal and opposite reaction.
The result of this comprehensive and powerful work was the ability to
account for nearly all natural phenomena from a few carefully stated
physical principles. Even though Newton frequently referred to the
activity of God in nature (for example., that God might be directly
responsible for gravitational attraction in the absence of a
materially mediated force, or that the smallest particles of matter
were made to be indestructible by God so that nature would have a
constant character through time), there was nothing in his system of
nature that required God, or any intelligent agent at all the
properties of matter in motion seemed sufficient to explain the
behavior of natural objects. His was an apparently complete system and
thoroughly naturalistic system.
Interestingly, this led to two diametrically opposed inferences. On
the one hand, many people saw the success of Newton (and many people
see the continued success of physics to the present day) as an
argument for atheism. If God is not needed to explain the behavior of
the world, and if the cosmos, like a giant clock, operates on
mechanical principles alone, then one has no reason to suppose that
God even exists. There are no explanatory gaps left for God to fill.
Newton himself would have rejected this. He considered God to have a
vital role in setting up the initial conditions for the universe. Not
all of his followers agreed. Napoleon Bonaparte invited the great
physicist and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace to give him a lesson
on the history and origin of the cosmos, the nebular hypothesis of the
origin of the planets and stars, and other current scientific
speculations. After explaining all these things in purely mechanistic
terms to Napoleon, Laplace was asked why he had made no mention of God
in his account. "Sir,¨ Laplace quipped, "I have no need of that
hypothesis.¨
Others saw the success of Newton's work, and the picture he gave of
the universe as an enormous machine, as a strong argument for theism.
This was Newton's own conclusion as well. It was just this image of
the cosmos as a well-constructed machine that prompted William Paley
to give his famous watch analogy. Paley argued that one would not
suppose that a fine watch found in the forest was the result of
chance, but would infer that there must have been a watchmaker. In the
same way, Paley said the existence of a finely crafted universe
compels us to believe that the universe must have been designed as
well. For Paley, the complexity of the world spoke in favor of God's
existence, not against it. The world could have been chaotic, but it
is not: it is lawlike, consistent in its behavior, and well-adjusted
to support the needs of life.
c. Darwin and Evolution
A third battle between science and religion developed over the
theories of Charles Darwin. Like the debates over heliocentrism and
mechanism, the debate over evolution can be understood in a less
rhetorically charged way than it is usually presented. One assumption
that drove the initial resistance to Darwinism is the belief that no
species can mutate into a different species. This doctrine, known as
the fixity of species, was based on uniform observations, and no
experimental or observational evidence was known to contradict it.
Instead, it had always been the believed that "like produces like.¨
That is, chickens, when they reproduce, make chickens, bats make bats,
and cucumbers make more cucumbers.
Scripture seemed to support this everyday observation. Genesis claims
that God decreed creatures to reproduce "after their kind.¨ It also
claims that species were created directly by God in the manner (more
or less) that they exist today. So, on a literal reading of Genesis, a
theological position, supported by uniform observation, provided
grounds to dissent from Darwin about the origin of species. It is true
that most theologians were not friendly to Darwin; it is untrue that
they had no rational reason for taking the position they did.
There have been noteworthy attacks on evolutionary theory from within
the scientific community itself rather than from outside in the
theological community. For example, Darwin suggested that the eye may
be too complex to arise through natural selection alone. After all,
what evolutionary advantage would there be to a half-eye that couldn't
work as an eye? Seizing on Darwin's idea that it is difficult to give
an evolutionary explanation of the eye, because it is apparently
irreducibly complex, a small number of scientists, such as the
biochemist Michael Behe, are convinced that the world is the product
of intelligent design. These complex systems, on Behe's account, could
not have arisen through slight, successive modifications, because they
completely cease to function if any of their parts is removed. In
response, evolutionists point out the discovery of an intermediate
species with a half-eye that could be used for some purpose other than
seeing, and success at doing this would help to make the species
better fit for survival.
Since the original furor over Darwinism, many religious thinkers have
re-examined their theological commitments and scriptural hermeneutical
frameworks. The result has been that they have found a way to affirm
the importance and accuracy of the historical narratives, while
situating them in an evolutionary framework. Similarly, many
biologists have happily carried on their work while, at the same time,
assenting to the authority of sacred texts. To many Christian
fundamentalists, on the other hand, Darwin's biology is unacceptable,
and the plain teaching of Genesis is that the world was created
directly by God in a six-day period a few thousand years ago, a view
known as "young earth creationism.¨ But not all Christians agree that
Genesis is to be understood that way. Seeking harmony, these
Christians have understood Genesis as being a polemic primarily
against the Sumerian creation myth known as the Enuma Elish; and they
have concluded that Genesis is not arguing for young earth
creationism, or any specific timeline of creation: instead, it may
have a completely different pedagogical agenda altogether, the agenda
of asserting simply that God alone is the creator; or that creation is
intentional and not accidental; or that there is nothing in existence
that God did not create.
Not everyone has been pleased by these new harmonizations. Court
records across the country reflect the tension that still infuses the
debate: state and federal courts have been involved in multiple states
where advocates of divine creationism have tried to have their
position represented in official public school textbooks and
curricula. Religious leaders are often at the forefront of these
contests, arguing that evolutionary naturalism is bad science if it is
science at all and that the activity of an intelligent designer is
evident in nature, and ought to be discussed when origin theories are
presented. Their proposals are met with stiff resistance from many
civil rights organizations, as well as a preponderance of the
scientific establishment. Activists from those camps allege that
creationism (or creation science, or intelligent design) can be
discussed at home or Sunday school, but it is nothing more than a
thinly veiled attempt at establishing a theocratic educational system
formulated by Christian fundamentalists. It is not, they say, a
scientific theory.
d. A Common Core
All these conflicts have a central issue: the explanation of data.
Frequently, the debate is not over what the data are, but what they
mean. It is often thought that scientific data do not require any
interpretation, but that position cannot withstand much scrutiny. The
importance of interpretation in understanding how science and religion
interact with data is brought into focus by the work of Pierre Duhem
and W.V.O. Quine, with what has come to be called the Duhem-Quine
thesis. According to this proposition, scientific hypotheses do not
come free-floating. They are always situated against a large array of
background hypotheses, which consist partly of other observations,
partly of other empirical hypotheses, and partly of metaphysical and
epistemological philosophical propositions. No single hypothesis,
therefore, can be isolated and either decisively refuted or confirmed
by experimental data. Suppose some scientific hypothesis h entails
that a certain result r will come from some experiment e. That is, h
implies r. When e is performed, however, suppose that the opposite of
the expected result obtains: e yields ~r instead of the anticipated
result r, apparently refuting h. But, caution Duhem and Quine, that
move is too hasty: the Duhem-Quine argument is that one never simply
has h and h alone as a driving hypothesis. Every hypothesis is coupled
with a set of background assumptions b such that the argument above
was represented without a key variable in place. A complete version
would have (h & b) imly r, so if ~r is the result, then this is
insufficient to determine whether the experiment shows ~h or instead
~b. That is, the result ~r might simply refute something within the
vast set of background assumptions. This leads to an insuperable
problem: the practical, and maybe theoretical, impossibility of
elucidating all of b means that there can be no complete and
conclusive refutation of any specific scientific hypothesis. Thus,
almost any set of observations can be retained in the face of
apparently disconfirming experimental data.
The Duhem-Quine thesis can be applied to another subject at the core
of the conflicts between religion and science: the interpretation of
sacred texts. Part of what the thesis highlights is the role of
interpretation in understanding the relationships between experiments,
hypotheses, confirmation, and explanation. In the same way, there is
always a set of background assumptions that a reader takes to the
interpretation of scripture no single interpretive statement stands in
isolation from the set of assumptions undergirding it. Certain
experimental results or empirical observations may seemingly serve to
disconfirm a scriptural claim (for instance, that the earth is fixed
and cannot be moved), but it can never be certain that the data
disconfirms that claim rather than one of the claims in the set of
background assumptions. For example, Galileo's observational data
might not disconfirm the Bible's claim that the earth is fixed and
does not move but instead disconfirm some background assumptions that
led Churchmen to suppose that the Bible did claim that the earth is
fixed and does not move. In this way, the Bible is saved from
disconfirmation, from refutation.
e. A Case Study
Since it is the most charged of the three cases discussed above, the
evolution issue will serve as a good application of the Duhem-Quine
thesis. Suppose that an evolutionist were strongly Darwinian; that is,
they took not only the general contours of Darwinism, but Darwin's own
specific claims as authoritative. One of the claims Darwin made about
his theory was that, after a sufficient amount of geological data had
been recovered from the earth, the fossil record would bear out his
theory by displaying a series of inter-specific life forms a series of
species connecting a current species its ancestor species, the
so-called "missing links¨ between the species and its ancestors.
Between humans and their earlier ancestors, a clear lineage would be
displayed to support the adaptation/natural selection model that
Darwin proposed.
Famously, the fossil record has been quite puzzling on this issue. On
the one hand, many new (previously unknown) species have been
discovered, and they have been placed in evolutionary chains that
precede the set of species that currently populate the planet. On the
other hand, the nature of the fossil record has been quite different
from what Darwin predicted. Instead of the smooth transition from
species to species, with the intermediary steps filled in by
transitional life forms that have since passed from the scene, one
sees nearly instantaneous proliferations of new species arising,
seemingly, out of nowhere.
Divine creationists and evolutionists have both seen this as
consistent with their beliefs. The evolutionist, not cowed by the
apparent counter-evidence to Darwinism, has reformulated evolutionary
theory to account for these abrupt changes. Stephen Jay Gould, for
instance, has argued that evolution took place through "punctuated
equilibrium¨: long, stable periods with no new species formation are
followed by rapid species multiplication that happens too fast to be
captured in the fossil record. Creationists have seen the nearly
instantaneous proliferations of new species as supportive of their
claim that God performed several discrete acts of creation,
introducing a limited set of species at a time with gaps between those
acts of direct creation.
Both sides are looking at the same data, but disagreeing over the
interpretation of that data. How can that be? The Duhem-Quine thesis
offers some insight here by pointing out that it will always be the
case that a given set of data fit into different interpretive
frameworks. Creationists see the fossil record as refuting Darwinism,
and thereby evolutionary theory. Evolutionists see it as refuting
Darwin's background assumption that evolution would take place slowly
and gradually. Evolutionists see the fossil record and the old age of
fossils, as well as other independent lines of evidence that point to
an ancient earth and an even more ancient cosmos, as a refutation of
creationism. Many who believe that God is the creator and designer of
the world see the same evidence as refuting a certain literal
interpretation of Genesis, but not refuting creationism more broadly
conceived (that is, creationism that is not young-earth creationism).
There is, and will always be, an impasse whenever two sides disagree
about data that can fit with contradictory sets of assumptions, and
new disagreements will arise over whether this fit is a reasonable fit
or instead a fit that is too ad hoc to be accepted as reasonable.
The creation-evolution debate serves as an excellent example of the
philosophical problems involved in explanations of data and
refutations of hypotheses, but it is by no means unique. The same kind
of gridlock appeared over the interpretation of the experiments that
led to quantum mechanics, and that debate still continues today at
stake is nothing less than the important question of whether the
universe is completely deterministic, or whether it is partly
indeterministic. For now, the indeterminists have the upper hand, with
their Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, but they have
triumphed because they have persuaded more people with their
metaphysical arguments, not because decisive experiments have settled
the matter in their favor.
4. The Harmony Theory
The above examples serve to illustrate a serious deficiency with a
confrontational theory of the interaction between science and
religion: it is at best an oversimplification of the relationship, and
at worst a complete mischaracterization. During the heyday of
scientific advancement in the modern period, countless thinkers have
found themselves adhering to religious commitments and adding to
scientific knowledge at the same time. People like Descartes, Newton,
Pascal, Boyle, Kepler, Gassendi, and many more have sought the
harmonization of science and religion. In his essay "Of Atheism,¨
Francis Bacon argued that recent advances in science (experimental
philosophy), which supplanted the scholastic approach to physics with
its four elements, provided a firm foundation for belief in God's
existence. He said,
God never wrought miracle to convince atheism, because His
ordinary works convince it. It is true that a little philosophy
inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth
men's minds about to religion: for while the mind of man looketh upon
second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no
farther; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and
linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. Nay, even
that school which is most accused of atheism doth most demonstrate
religion. For it is a thousand times more credible, that four mutable
elements, and one immutable fifth essence duly and eternally placed,
need no God; than that an army of infinite small portions, or seeds
unplaced, should have produced this order and beauty without a divine
Marshall (Bacon 66-7).
In a similar vein, the Reformer John Calvin encouraged Christians to
study nature through scientific investigation, because science was the
study of God's handiwork. As such, it both honored the Creator and
taught creatures about the one who made them.
Sentiments like Calvin's are still expressed by many experimental
researchers who hold to religious beliefs. To them, the study of
nature has led us to understand the world as being vastly more complex
and intricate than anyone ever knew before. Because they believe the
world is the direct result of God's creative activity, advances in
science have served, in William Paley's words, to "increase the
admiration of the contrivance¨ of nature's workings. Science has not
refuted their view of the world: it has confirmed and strengthened it.
5. The Indifference Theory
Still others argue that science and religion make declarations that
are completely unrelated to each other. On this theory, science and
religion are attending to disparate issues, and the answers they give
have no implications for the other discipline. Science pertains to the
classification of empirical observations; religion pertains to ethics,
ritual, and propositions (such as the assertion that a divine being
exists) that have no empirical entailments.
Unlike the conflict model, where religious claims and scientific
claims are seen to falsify each other, this description makes
scientific declarations exempt from religious scrutiny and vice versa.
One leading religious figure of the twentieth century, Karl Barth,
espoused this view. In a letter to his niece, Barth said,
Has no one explained to you in your seminar that one can as little
compare the biblical creation story and a scientific theory like that
of evolution as one can compare, shall we say, an organ and a
vacuum-cleaner–that there can be as little question of harmony between
as of contradiction? (Johnson 4)
Barth's claim is that a gulf separates science and religion. Their
deliberations can no more be compared than can an astronaut and the
number seven.
a. Fact versus Faith?
When it is advocated, this position frequently draws on the perceived
distinction between questions of fact and questions of faith. This
often touted difference is, despite its ubiquity, a murky one.
Typically, the characterization is that faith is a question of belief
without evidence, or even belief in the presence of what should
normally be taken as decisively refuting evidence. Fact, on the other
hand, is what is tangible and certain. Religious commitments are faith
commitments on this position; the claims of science are factual (even
if they are at least theoretically open for revision in the future).
But this depiction is rife with difficulties. First of all, it seems
that "F is a fact¨ simply means "F is true.¨ Therefore, if it is true
that God exists, for example, it is a fact that God exists. But
perhaps the connoted difference is better captured by defining facts
this way: F is a fact if and only if F is true and obvious. This will
not do either, however, for many things that are taken as facts are
far from obvious. That apparently solid bodies, like tables, consist
almost completely of empty space is thought to be a fact taught us by
atomic theory; but that this table consists mostly of empty space is
far from obvious from my own experience of it. Maybe, then, "F is a
fact¨ means "F is true and experts agree that F is true.¨ In that
case, though, if the term "experts¨ doesn't apply only to scientific
experts, the claims of religious experts could count as facts as well,
and if they claim that God exists, it would be a factual claim. It
cannot be countered here that "God exists¨ is not verified by the
layperson's everyday experience, for neither is the fact that tables
are mostly empty space.
If one continues to refine the definition of fact to preserve a
meaningful distinction between matters of fact and faith, one might be
tempted to try this revision: "F is a fact¨ means "F is true and
empirically verifiable.¨ Yet this approach has difficulties because
there is a controversy over what counts as being empirically
verifiable. Philosophers of science influenced by Karl Popper argue
that scientific claims are refutable but never verifiable. Other
philosophers of science argue that scientific claims are verifiable
but usually very indirectly. For example, that there were no humans on
earth three million years ago isn't something we can directly view
because we can't go back three million years ago and look. The
evidence for there being no humans is indirect, though empirical.
Still others would argue that the claim that there were no humans on
earth three million years ago is not empirically verifiable simply
because no one can now directly view the past. In light of these
problems, one might define a fact in a new way: "F is a fact¨ means "F
is true and is a scientific claim.¨ This, of course, is to give up the
game completely and succumb to a mere tautology because saying
"scientific claims are different from religious claims because
scientific claims are scientific¨ is hardly illuminating.
Coming from the other direction and supposing that "F is a fact¨ means
simply "F is true,¨ there is still the problem of defining faith. "F
is a matter of faith¨ cannot be understood as "F is true,¨ so there is
apparently a distinction between matters of faith and facts. But what
is the difference, and does it separate religion from science? Simply
stating that "F is a matter of faith¨ means "F is not a fact¨ will not
do; certainly matters of faith are at least possibly true, and if they
are possibly true they are possibly facts.
It seems that the distinction has to do with evidence: "F is a matter
of faith¨ means "F is unsupported by evidence.¨ If this is said of
religious beliefs, however, it is clearly false. For example, there is
the evidence of testimony in favor of the claim that Jesus rose from
the dead. One typically allows testimony to serve as evidence for a
belief (for example, Jones believes that his friend Smith is at the
store because Smith's wife told him so, and she is not known to lie
about such things). Or, consider the arguments offered in favor of
theism: the cosmological argument, teleological argument, ontological
argument, moral argument, and more are given in support of religious
belief. Thus, it would be false that there is no evidence for
religious claims. Perhaps we should retreat to saying "F is a matter
of faith¨ means "F is insufficiently unsupported by evidence.¨ But it
is very difficult to settle on a good definition of "insufficiently.¨
Furthermore, even if some religious claims are unsupported by
evidence, that does not put religion on shakier ground than science,
for science also makes claims unsupported by evidence, or so some
scholars have argued. That the senses generally report the truth about
the world is not a claim supported by evidence; any evidence that
would be cited as supportive of the claim would only be supportive if
the claim is already known to be true. The same is true of many
propositions assumed by scientists: that knowledge of the world is
possible, or that scientific explanations should only refer to natural
causes, or that all that exists is the material world. These
propositions are no more supported by empirical evidence than their
contraries, that knowledge of the world is impossible, or that
scientific explanations may invoke God as a cause, or that the
material world is not all that exists. Thus, it is argued, science
makes many claims unsupported by evidence, and perhaps unsupportable
by evidence.
In promoting the idea that science transcends the evidence, it has
been suggested that in the Galileo affair, for example, both the faith
claims and the scientific claims had much in common: the Church's
position was supported by evidence, even though their position would
be considered religious as well. For that matter, Galileo's own
position on heliocentrism was lacking sufficient evidence to count as
empirically well-established. Indeed, the whole history of natural
theology is an effort to harmonize religious belief with evidence and
rational argument. And like Galileo, Darwin also introduced an element
of faith into his scientific assessment when he said his theory would
be supported by the future work of geologists and paleontologists. His
gradualism turned out to be contradicted by the fossil record he put
so much hope in.
Presumably one can distinguish between claims that are generally
agreed upon for instance, that there are material objects and those
that are more controversial for instance, that the text Joseph Smith
translated from the golden plates he received is Holy Scripture. But
if the separation of fact from faith just amounts to separating less
widely accepted premises from more widely accepted ones, one could
carry that separation out in many ways with unexpected, and unwanted,
results. If we take a poll across our society, the result is that it
is few believe that particles can behave as waves, as quantum
mechanics implies, but many believe that God exists, but the first
claim is scientific fact whereas the second is religious. Wouldn't
reliance on the poll result make it a fact that God exists and make it
only a matter of faith that quantum mechanics is correct? That hardly
seems like the right result.
6. Conclusion
The relationship between science and religion is frequently commented
on, but rarely understood with clarity. Though very few people would
deny the importance of religion or of science, it is difficult to see
what their importance is to each other. On the hostility theory, they
make incompatible claims, and they pose grave risks to each other, and
to society. Which camp endangers society–religion or science–and which
camp helps it is the point of disagreement. But on another theory, the
two are not opposed at all. According to some commentators, religion
and science work together to present a fuller understanding of the
world by mutually enlightening each other. Still other people think
that science and religion pose no risks to each other, but they do not
support each other either; they are simply concerned with isolated
sets of questions. Since it is unlikely that either science or
religion will pass from the stage any time soon, it is, and will
continue to be, orth our time to reflect on their relationship.
7. References and Further Reading
* Asimov, Isaac. In The Canadian Atheist, Issue 1, Winter 1994.
* Bacon, Francis. Essays and New Atlantis. Roslyn, NY: Walter J.
Black Inc., 1969.
* Brooke, John Hedley, and Geoffrey Cantor. Reconstructing Nature:
The Engagement of Science and Religion. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998.
* Blackwell, Richard J. "Galileo Galilei.¨ In Science and
Religion: A Historical Introduction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002.
* Durant, John. Ed. Darwinism and Divinity: Essays on Evolution
and Religious Belief. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.
* Fantoli, Annibale. Galileo: For Copernicanism and for the
Church. Trans. George V. Coyne. 2nd ed. Vatican City: Vatican
Observatory, 1996.
* Ferngren, Gary B. Ed. The History of Science and Religion in the
Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 2000.
* Ferngren, Gary B. Ed. Science and Religion: A Historical
Introduction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
* Gilbert, James. Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age
of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
* Harrison, Peter. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of
Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
* Hooykaas, Reijer. Religion and the Rise of Modern Science. Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1972.
* Hooykaas, R. Religion and the Rise of Modern Science. Edinburgh:
Scottish Academic Press, 1972.
* Howell, Kenneth J. God's Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and
Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.
* Jammer, Max. Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Includes Christian
responses.
* Johnson, R.C. "The Legacy of Karl Barth," Reflection. New Haven,
CT: May 1969, Vol. 66.
* Livingstone, David N., D.G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll. Eds.
Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
* Lindberg, David C. The Beginnings of Western Science: The
European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and
Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992.
* Lindberg, David C. and Ronald L. Numbers. Eds. When Science and
Christianity Meet. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.
* McGrath, Alister E. Science and Religion: An Introduction.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 1999.
* Ospovat, Dov. The Development of Darwin's Theory: Natural
History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838-1859.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
* Ruse, Michael. Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
* Stenmark, Mikael. Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday
Life. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.
* Stenmark, Mikael. Science and Religion: Some Historical
Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
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