God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (14 page)

Kant's and Gould's division of labor has been viewed favorably by the minority of scientists who are believers (see
chapter 12
). I know many personally and find that, as I have mentioned, they are able to compartmentalize their own thinking, leaving their science at the church door on Sunday and leaving God at home when they return to work on Monday morning. These individuals are sincere and able to perform their tasks just as competently as any atheist colleague. They simply avoid applying the same critical thinking tools they use on the job to their faith, and avoid letting their faith intrude on their science.

However, as science and religion are actually practiced, they overlap considerably.
Religion often intrudes on science's recognized turf in asserting that the universe was divinely created. Science intrudes on religion's self-claimed turf by subjecting human morality to observational analysis. But even if science and religion were independent, that would not make them compatible.

DID CHRISTIANITY BEGET SCIENCE?

As I have alluded to previously, a number of contemporary authors have asserted that Christianity provided a unique intellectual framework that led to the scientific revolution.
⁵⁸
For example, in
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible
, self-styled “beach philosopher” Robert Hutchinson writes:

It was the rational theology of both the Catholic Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation—inspired by the explicit and implicit truths revealed in the Jewish Bible—that led to the discoveries of modern science.
⁵⁹

In a similar vein, sociologist Alvin Schmidt wrote in his book
How Christianity Changed the World
:

Belief in the rationality of God not only led to the inductive method but also led to the conclusion that the universe is governed rationally by discoverable laws.
⁶⁰

Historian Richard Carrier has vigorously disputed these claims in an essay titled “Christianity Was Not Responsible for Modern Science.”
⁶¹
From the evidence he infers that “Christianity fully dominated the whole of the Western world from the fifth to the fifteenth century, and yet in all those thousand years there was no Scientific Revolution.”
⁶²

As Carrier points out, the notion that the universe is rational was already highly developed in pagan antiquity. He concludes, “Had Christianity not interrupted the intellectual advance of mankind and put the progress of science on hold for a thousand years, the Scientific Revolution might have occurred a thousand years ago, and our technology today would be a thousand years more advanced.”
⁶³

There is simple grandeur in this view of life…that from so simple an origin, through the selection of infinitesimal varieties, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved.

—Charles Darwin
¹

What is Darwinism? It is atheism.

—Charles Hodgea
²

NATURAL THEOLOGY

A
s we have noted, the new science of Galileo and Newton was not immediately regarded as being inconsistent with religion. Certainly the two giants didn't think so. Or, if they did, they never said so. At their particular moment in history, the study of nature was viewed as a way to learn more about God, since God, in their view, after all, is the author of nature. By making observations and describing them in terms of “laws,” scientists were reading another one of God's law books alongside the Bible. This was called
natural theology
. Indeed, the deists of the eighteenth century saw more magnificence in a God who created a world ruled by the beauty of natural law and who didn't have to step in, the way John Calvin had conceived, to grow every blade of grass and guide very falling leaf to the ground.

Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature
was the title of a highly influential book published in 1802 by the Archdeacon of Carlisle, William Paley (died 1805).
³
Using the analogy of a watch, which is clearly an artifact, Paley compared it with the human eye and other complex biological systems and argued that they also exhibited incontrovertible proof of intelligent design. These systems all showed evidence of purpose not found in inanimate objects such as rocks. Humans stood at the top of this ladder of complexity, the pinnacle of creation. The argument seemed unassailable to many, and it remains convincing to many today, despite having been refuted by philosopher David Hume decades before Paley. How could all this beauty and functionality have happened without an intelligent creator? However, this was another God-of-the-gaps argument awaiting an original thinker to fill the gap. And that thinker was Charles Darwin.

NATURAL SELECTION

When Charles Darwin (died 1882) read Paley at Cambridge, he was greatly impressed. But after serving as a naturalist aboard HMS
Beagle
during a round-the-world survey expedition lasting from December 27, 1831, until October 2, 1836, and analyzing the vast wealth of data he had collected for another twenty-three years, Darwin produced a revolution in human thought that matched, and in many ways exceeded, even Newton's.

Newton's theories did not directly challenge the best arguments for the existence of God; Darwin's did. In Darwin's books, beginning with
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life
, published November 24, 1859, Darwin proposed the alternative to intelligent design that, while fully accepted by science, is still bitterly fought over today on the political front in the war between science and religion.
⁴
The Bible teaches that living species, or “kinds” as they are referred to therein, were created exactly as they now exist by God at a time estimated at about six thousand years ago. Darwin provided an alternative that agreed much better with the scientific facts.

British geologist Charles Lyell (died 1875) had suggested that Earth was far older than implied in Genesis. Darwin took volume 1 of Lyell's masterwork,
The Principles of Geology
,
⁵
with him on the
Beagle
, and he received
volume 2 in South America. His observations in the months spent on land were not limited to studying plant and animal life but also included studies of rock formations, the structure of atolls, and other phenomena that tended to confirm Lyell's ideas.

In
Origin of Species
, Darwin presented the theory that populations change over long periods of time as small changes are selected out in the struggle for existence. While others, including Darwin's own grandfather Erasmus Darwin, had earlier considered the notion that life evolves, Charles provided the mechanism.

Perhaps the most important of the pre-Darwinian evolutionists was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (died 1829). Although Lamarck was not widely recognized during his lifetime, Darwin acknowledged him for proposing that changes in both the organic and inorganic worlds were the result of natural law and not of direct divine intervention.

Lamarck's proposed mechanism for evolution was “the inheritance of acquired traits.” In the theory known as
Lamarckism
, environmental changes result in individuals finding greater need for some organs and lesser need for others, causing the first to develop stronger and the second to wither away. These changes were then inherited in the next and future generations. Erasmus Darwin had similar ideas. For a while Lamarckian inheritance provided an alternative to Charles Darwin's mechanism for evolution. However, it was eventually shown that the characteristics that an individual acquires naturally during his lifetime are not inherited.

The innovation made by Darwin was the process of natural selection. Naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had independently arrived at the same idea and communicated with Darwin in a friendly, collegial fashion.
⁶
Each praised and supported the other's work, and Darwin was finally stirred into action after having sat on his ideas for years without making them public. On July 1, 1858, Darwin and Wallace presented joint papers to the Linnean Society announcing their findings.

Although Wallace deserves recognition, the huge mass of data Darwin gathered and the thorough analysis he performed over decades rightly justifies his place as the primary discoverer of evolution by natural selection. While the two men announced their results simultaneously, Darwin had the idea a good
twenty years before Wallace, and only Darwin's innate conservatism kept him from coming out sooner.

Evolution by natural selection is a remarkably slow process, at least for organisms with appreciable lifetimes. Artificial selection, or breeding, which humans have been carrying out with animals and plants for thousands of years, is far more rapid because it is planned rather than accidental. We are now beginning to modify genes themselves to produce more desirable organisms, a technique whose value and ethical implications continue to be hotly debated. Here we do have a Lamarckian process in which acquired traits are passed to the next generation because the changes are made directly to the gene, the agent of inheritance.

In 1871, Darwin followed
Origin of Species
with
The Descent of Man
, which showed how humans were also part of the evolutionary process and not the separate creation described in the Bible.
⁷
This, of course, became the source of the greatest controversy in the Darwinian scheme. It was one thing for ants and tulips to have evolved, but humans have always regarded themselves as special. Just look at the huge gap in intelligence between humans and every other species of life.

DISSENT AND DISPUTE

While most, but not all, churchmen objected to the notion that humans were just intelligent apes, some prominent contemporary scientists also expressed doubts about Darwin's theory. Lyell thought Darwin had overemphasized the role of selection. The biologist and paleontologist Richard Owen (died 1892) accepted evolution but also strongly opposed natural selection. Geologist Adam Sedgwick (died 1873), one of the young Darwin's mentors, was scathing in his opposition, saying that
Origin
was “utterly false.” He wrote to a correspondent, “It repudiates all reasoning from final causes; and seems to shut the door on any view (however feeble) of the God of Nature as manifested in His works. From first to last it is a dish of rank materialism cleverly cooked and served up.”
⁸

It will be important to keep in mind as we go forward that the term
evolution
does not automatically include natural selection. As we will see, many religious people will say they believe in evolution, but evolution guided by God. Darwinian evolution by natural selection, as the overwhelming majority of biologists now view it, is unguided. Although even some evolutionary biologists still use the term “design” in the context of natural selection, it is confusing. It is non-design, purely and simply.

To my physicist mind, the strongest argument against Darwinian evolution at the time, and one that Darwin himself worried considerably about, was made by one of the greatest physicists of the day, William Thomson, who later became Lord Kelvin. Thomson had pioneered the science of thermodynamics, introducing its first and second laws. Using thermodynamics, he calculated that the sun could not possibly have lasted long enough for Darwin's scheme to work. He also made various estimates of Earth's age, which ranged from 20 million to 40 million years. A devout believer, Thomson did not clearly separate his faith from science, and he concluded that evolution, which he did not question, must be speeded up by God.

As the story goes, in 1903, another great physicist, Ernest Rutherford, gave a lecture with the now Lord Kelvin in the audience and argued that the newly discovered nuclear energy could provide a longer lasting source of energy than the sun. Rutherford reported, “The old guy beamed.” The actual tale is more complicated.
⁹
But make no mistake about it; evolution was inconsistent with the known physics of the nineteenth century. If nuclear energy or something equivalent did not exist, evolution would be impossible and thereby falsified.

In 1907, the age of Earth was estimated by radioactive dating. The best value of the Earth's age today is 4.55 billion years with about a 1 percent uncertainty. Also, it is now well established that the sun is powered by
nuclear fusion
, in which light nuclei, especially hydrogen, fuse into heavier nuclei with the release of energy. I am proud to have been involved in an underground experiment in Japan that in the late 1990s provided direct proof by taking “pictures” of the sun in neutrinos produced by the fusion reaction. The sun should last about another 5 billion years before its nuclear fuel burns out.

Darwin also had strong supporters, notably the biologist Thomas Huxley (died 1895), who became known as “Darwin's Bulldog” for the fervor of his
advocacy of evolution. Huxley wrote: “Distinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched if not slain.”
¹⁰

Huxley gained everlasting fame from his exchange with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (died 1873) at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford in 1860.

Legend has it that Wilberforce asked Huxley if he was descended from an ape on his mother's side or his father's side. Huxley reportedly replied something to the effect that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his great talents to ridicule a grave scientific discussion.
¹¹

Also present at the Oxford meeting was Robert FitzRoy, the captain of the
Beagle
during Darwin's adventure. The tragic story of Captain FitzRoy is beautifully told by Peter Nichols in
Evolution's Captain: The Dark Fate of the Man Who Sailed Charles Darwin around the World
.
¹²
FitzRoy's surveying work during two missions on the
Beagle
was justly celebrated on his return and proved critical, particularly his charts of the southern tip of South America, which made that route a practical way to reach the Orient.

However, FitzRoy's outstanding accomplishments were far overshadowed by those of Darwin, whose own account of the voyage, finished in 1837, became a bestseller, while FitzRoy's detailed reports were only of interest to a small group of experts. Although the two had worked well together for the duration of the voyage, sharing the same quarters, FitzRoy reacted furiously to Darwin's book for the lack of credit given to him and his crew, for which Darwin quickly apologized and corrected. More important, FitzRoy could not abide the theological implications that, while still far from explicit in Darwin's words, were evident to the intelligent but devoutly blinkered captain.

Darwin and FitzRoy increasingly grew apart. When
Origin
was finally published in 1859, FitzRoy came unhinged and told of the “acute pain” he felt for his role in making Darwin's discoveries and insights possible. He wrote Darwin, “I, at least,
cannot
find anything ‘ennobling’ in the thought of being descended from even the
most
ancient ape.”
¹³