God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (13 page)

Laplace and others elucidated the view that became known as the previously mentioned clockwork universe, or Newtonian world machine. In this model, nature is a complete mechanical system determined by the laws of physics. The present state of the universe is the effect of its previous state and the cause of its following state.

Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and the physicists who followed were explicitly
reductionist.
They divided matter into independent bodies that moved around subject to certain mathematical principles. The movements of such independent bodies were affected by colliding with other bodies.

Reductionism provided support for the ancient atomic model of Leucippus and Democritus. While the technology of Newton's day was far from providing the tools needed to uncover the nature of atoms, the general picture of a world composed of fundamental particles finally would be established in the 1970s with the standard model of particles and forces.

The notion that everything is composed of matter and nothing more did not take hold immediately after Newton; however, it was waiting in the
wings. Richard C. Vitzthum has provided a very useful in-depth review of the literature on materialism from ancient Greece to the present day.
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THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The scientific revolution helped trigger what is called the Enlightenment. The story is a complex one. Let us follow and expand upon Barbour's summary of the three ideas that affect the interaction of science and religion.
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1. Nature As a Deterministic Mechanism

We have just seen how Laplace and others interpreted Newton's laws to imply that the natural universe is a vast machine in which everything that happens is determined by what happened before. We found in the discussion of Descartes that humans were exempted from this scheme: They were special creations of God, having souls that enabled them to decide, with God's guidance, on their own actions.

During the eighteenth century, this notion was challenged. In 1746, French physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie (died 1759) published
Histoire naturelle d'lâme
(
A Natural History of the Soul
), in which he argued that since a physical phenomenon such as a fever affected mental activity, our minds are simply extensions of our bodies. Thus there was no soul or afterlife. The book was condemned and burned by court order and La Mettrie fled France for the Netherlands.
⁴⁵

In 1748, La Mettrie published
L'homme Machine
(
Man Machine
), which rejected the dualism of matter and mind and argued that the human body is a purely material machine.
⁴⁶
This got him kicked out of the Netherlands.
⁴⁷
He became court physician to Frederick II of Prussia and died in Potsdam in 1751.

France became the center of this unprecedented atheistic philosophy. Denis Diderot (died 1784) edited the thirty-five volume
Encyclopédie
, which contained a history of everything that was known at the time and included contributions from Americans Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush along with thousands of Diderot's own essays and those of
dozens of European scholars. Diderot disregarded all dogma, religious and secular. Both state and church were threatened, but
Encyclopédie
proved too popular to suppress.

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, whom I quoted in the epigraph of
chapter 2
, sponsored Diderot and his encyclopedia and wrote hundreds of its entries. Multilingual, d'Holbach translated many enlightenment works into French. His best-known work,
The System of Nature; or, Laws of the Moral and Physical World
, was published anonymously, as were all his works. Uncompromisingly atheistic, it was smuggled into Holland for printing and then smuggled back into France, where authorities attempted, though not too successfully, to suppress it.
⁴⁸

D'Holbach hosted one of the salons for which the Paris of the day was famous. He held dinners on Sundays and Thursdays in his townhouse on the rue Royale Saint-Roch, today known as the rue des Moulins, a short walk from the Louvre. His guest list included all the most prominent political and intellectual figures in Europe. The discussions were open and friendly with disagreements kept on an intellectual plane. Many of the arguments are still heard today with little recognition of the far-reaching thoughts that were generated at these historic gatherings. Historian Philipp Blom has made d'Holbach's salon come alive again in
A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
.
⁴⁹

The basic thrust of the Enlightenment, championed by La Mettrie, Diderot, and d'Holbach, was that reason could be applied to every aspect of human life. For example, social engineering was anticipated to accompany mechanical engineering, thus enabling the perfection of humanity, which was being retarded by existing institutions.

Barbour is quick to reject this notion, however, quoting historian William Cecil Dampier as saying that assuming mechanics was capable of giving an exhaustive account of events was “a natural exaggeration of the power of the new knowledge which had impressed the minds of men with its range and scope, before they realized its necessary limits.”
⁵⁰
Today science has a better understanding of it limits, but all attempts to find evidence for a nonmaterial component in human body or mind have so far failed. Mechanics, updated to include the prefix “quantum,” remains consistent with all available data.

2. The God of Deism

Barbour sees three states in the development of Enlightenment deism in the eighteenth century. First, reason was used to develop a
rational
religion
that was simply an alternate route to the same basic truths. In the second stage, natural theology was seen as a substitute for revelation. Then, in the third stage, deism fell out of favor because the notion of a cosmic designer who did not act in the universe was viewed as too impersonal, too remote. Eventually this led to the reaction known as
romanticism
, in which Nature was viewed “not as an impersonal machine but as a living companion, a source of warmth, vitality, and joy, of healing and restoring power.”
⁵¹

A religious revival took place in England with John Wesley (died 1791), whose Methodism carried a message of “spiritual rebirth.” Wesley wrote a five-volume work called
Survey of the Wisdom of God in Creation
that supported Copernican astronomy but was less enthusiastic about Newtonianism because it was used to justify deism.

In America, the early nineteenth century saw the Enlightenment deism of the major founding fathers, and much of the new science, fade from view as itinerant preachers traveled the country calling on sinners to repent and to accept Christ as their personal savior. This continues to this day, with the well-financed efforts of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians to undermine science. They agree with me that science and religion are incompatible. However, since they “know” the truth, they conclude that wherever science disagrees with that truth, science must be wrong.

THREE PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also saw significant developments in philosophy that supplemented the new science and gave new insights into theology by asking the usual philosopher's question: What does it all really mean? I will just mention three philosophers, whose views most directly address the science-religion interface: John Locke (died 1704), David Hume (died 1776), and Immanuel Kant. We have already briefly discussed Kant and the nebular hypothesis for the origin of the solar system.

John Locke

Locke came earlier than the other two and his influence was primarily political. He is regarded as the founder of liberalism and had a profound effect on the American Revolution. However, his ideas relating to science and religion are important to mention. Locke's classic work is
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
, which he wrote over a twenty-year period starting in 1671.
⁵²

Locke rejected the doctrine of innate ideas and principles that at the time were believed to be necessary to gain knowledge of religious truths, morality, and natural law. Such truths were to be obtained by reason. According to Locke, ideas occur in the mind as the result of reflection and sensation. Contradicting Descartes, Locke accepted what is called the
empiricist's axiom
: that there is nothing in the intellect that was not previously obtained by the senses. He also disagreed with Descartes—and Aristotle—by promoting the atomist view that the world is composed of atoms and the void. Aristotle had reasoned that a void was impossible.

Locke objected to authority of any kind, sacred or secular, and promoted reason over superstition. Still, he believed life had a divine purpose. He had little use for Aristotle and was one of the founders of the English Royal Society. The society provided the institutional structure that enabled the new anti-Aristotelian science to blossom in England outside the church-controlled (Anglican, in this case) universities.

David Hume

The philosophy of David Hume comes closer to representing the sense of modern science than that of any thinker before him. Hume's major works are
A Treatise of Human Nature
(1739–1740), the
Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding
(1748), and
Concerning the Principles of Morals
(1751), as well as the posthumously published
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
(1779).

Hume argued forcefully against metaphysics and the existence of innate ideas, following Locke in saying that human knowledge is obtained from experience. The laws of nature, according to Hume, are not built into the universe; they are human expectations based on observations. In this he challenged the
Enlightenment belief that reason can be used to obtain truth and questioned that science can ever obtain certain knowledge. He also challenged the argument from design and was accused of skepticism and atheism, although he was more of an agnostic, saying that God's existence cannot be proved or disproved. Here he was willing to reserve judgment, awaiting the evidence.
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Hume's most important insight relating to the theme of this book is his rejection of our ability to infer causation from the observation of a series of events. Just because one event follows another, Hume reasoned, this does not mean that the event was determined by the previous event.

Here Hume makes a clear break from the caveman logic discussed in
chapter 2
. As we have seen, this is a major area of incompatibility between science and religion. Religion uses caveman logic to see divine agency, that is, causality, behind everything that happens in the universe. Biology, physics, and cosmology, on the other hand, have shown that observed phenomena occur without cause. Chance, under no control—human or divine—is not simply a minor player deciding the outcome of events; it is the major player.

Barbour finds Hume's criticism of religion less cogent today, claiming that religious belief is “not based on rational argument but on historical revelation or on moral and religious experience.”
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This hardly agrees with the fact that when believers are asked to provide a reason for their belief, most typically point to the world around them and say, “How can all of this be an accident?” That is, they use the argument from design.
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And many theologians continue to provide what they regard as reasonable arguments for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity.
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Immanuel Kant

When Kant read Hume's critique of causality, he said it awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber.” This wakening motivated him to find a way other than observation and reason to arrive at knowledge of the world. He came up with the notion that the human mind is not the
tabula rasa
, the blank slate, that Locke and Hume proposed. Rather, it possesses certain
a priori
knowledge by which it organizes the data sent to it by the senses.

Kant gives the examples of space and time and, in particular, Euclidean
geometry. Although not directly observed, we express all our observations in terms of space and time. He saw no alternative. Furthermore, Euclid was able to deduce the theorems of geometry from a few simple axioms that could be seen to apply to the observable universe.

However, one of the principles of Euclidean geometry, that parallel lines never meet, turned out to be simply a definition. By relaxing that rule, other geometries are possible. The simplest example is the geometry of the surface of a sphere, where parallel line of longitude meet at the poles. Non-Euclidean geometry was used by Einstein in his general theory of relativity.

Furthermore, space and time are human inventions, defined operationally by what one measures with a meter stick and a clock. Space and time are used in our mathematical models, but those models can all be rewritten by means of what is known as a
Fourier transform
(see
chapter 6
) so that the independent variables are momentum and energy or wavelength and frequency.

Kant also introduced what Barbour calls the
independence hypothesis
in the competition between science and religion. Each has its own realm. Science occupies the realm of the senses, and religion does not have to keep defending itself by seeking gaps in scientific explanations or arguments from design. The realm of religion is the moral life and its relation to ultimate reality.

As we saw in
chapter 1
, the separated compartmentalization of science and religion was reintroduced in 1999 by the famed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in
Rocks of Ages
.
⁵⁷
Gould defined science and religion as “two non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA). Religion was to concern itself just with matters of morals and ultimate meanings, while science would deal solely with the world of the senses.