God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (5 page)

The John Templeton Foundation is behind much of the current effort to reconcile science and faith. Financier John Templeton's legacy provides $70 million a year in grants to support research on “subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will.”
²⁰
The foundation also provided support for another scholar, William Grassie, who has argued for the essential harmony of science and religion. I will also refer frequently to his 2010 book,
The New Sciences of Religion
.
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Barbour, Grassie, and others have interpreted historical events as evidence for, though not in complete harmony with, a positive relationship between science and religion where each has contributed constructively to the other. They have argued, for example, that Puritanism in England contributed significantly
to the scientific revolution with its revolution against authority. So, they say, did Calvinist theology, in which people serve God not by shutting themselves away in a monastery or convent but by doing useful work. This is called the
Protestant ethic.
²²

Science flourished in England after the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was chartered by King Charles II in 1660, the year he was restored to the throne. The society was formed from a group of royalists called the Oxford Circle, the members of which holed up in Oxford during the English Civil War. Spending their time dissecting human and animal cadavers, they established many anatomical facts, most notably that the brain is the primary organ of thought and that the heart is a pump that operates under the control of signals from the brain. The group, led by physician Thomas Willis (died 1675), included the great architect Christopher Wren (died 1723), the great chemist Robert Boyle (died 1691), and the great physicist Robert Hooke (died 1703). Willis was pretty great himself.
²³

The Puritans believed that God was revealed in the study of nature, and they gave strong encouragement to scientific work. However, most English scientists, such as those in the Oxford Circle, were actually Anglicans who saw in natural laws an analogy with the rule of law in society. Furthermore, everyone began to realize how technology was a source of control over nature with the resulting enhancement of economic and political power.
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There can be no dispute that the scientific revolution occurred in an atmosphere in which religious and scientific ideas were deeply intertwined. But religion still held the upper hand. In a lengthy essay titled “Puritanism, Separatism, and Science,” historian Charles Webster concludes, “No direction or energy toward science was undertaken without the assurance of Christian conscience, and no conceptual move was risked without confidence in its consistency with the Protestant idea of providence.”
²⁵

It is difficult to extract precise causes of the scientific revolution from the complex history of seventeenth-century Europe except to say that it happened there and no place else. China had made significant advances in technology but failed to develop science. And while science and learning flourished for a time in the Islamic world, there, too, a culture of scientific development failed to endure.

Barbour argues that the decline in science in the Islamic world was the result of the tight control of higher education by religious authorities. Although Barbour doesn't admit it, the same can be said of Christendom until the Reformation. Similarly, government authorities controlled education in China. From this perspective, it was the new openness in Europe that made science possible.
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However, Europe would not have been closed to independent thinking in the first place if it weren't for the Catholic Church. Science had flourished in pagan Greece and Rome, and, as we have seen, in medieval Islam. Now, I am not claiming that the Roman Empire declined because of the growth of Christianity. It declined because of the depravity of its leaders and people and from invasions from outside. Church-based leaders and social institutions were there to pick up the pieces, producing an authoritarian society that brutally suppressed the slightest traces of freethinking.

I will say more about Islam later.

The totality of evidence indicates that, on the whole, over the millennia the Christian religion was more of a hindrance than a help to the development of science. Surely it is no coincidence that the onset of the Dark Ages coincided with the rise of Christianity. It was only with the revolts against established ecclesiastic authorities in the Renaissance and Reformation that new avenues of thought were finally opened up, allowing science to flourish.

And these new avenues of thought are what we really need to explore. My position is that artistic and social activities with no significant political ramifications are far less important when considering the compatibility of science and religion than are intellectual matters. Scientific thinking is not dissonant with church art, music, and charitable work, or with the church's function of providing a structure where people can meet to enjoy one another's company and help one another. However, as Harris says, “Science and religion—being antithetical ways of thinking about the same reality—will never come to terms.”
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So long as religious people do not attempt to force their beliefs on others, they are mostly only harming themselves by the folly of their faith. But when religious notions dominate the political scene, as they do in Muslim countries and to some extent in America today, the world is in big trouble.

Barbour lists examples where he claims religion, and Christianity in particular, has had a positive influence on science:
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1. The conviction that nature is intelligible contributed to the rational component of science. Monotheism combined the Greek view of orderliness and regularity with the biblical view of God as lawgiver.
   
2. The Greeks had claimed that everything could be derived from first principles. Theists believe that God created the universe by an act of his own will. He didn't have to. So the facts of nature cannot be derived from first principles but must be learned by observation and experiment.
   
3. The Bible provides an affirmative view of nature. Creation implies the basic goodness of the world, or else God would not have made it.
   

None of these claims are very convincing, however. Without Christian monotheism the Greek (and Roman) view would not have been suppressed for a thousand years. And it's really stretching things to attribute empiricism to a belief in the Creation. Furthermore, monotheists were hardly the first people to imagine a created universe or to have an affirmative view of nature.

In honesty, Barbour must ask why the development of science in the Middle Ages, prior to the scientific revolution, was so meager—given that Greek ideas were prevalent in Europe by that time. He attributes this lack of progress to the dominance of the Catholic Church. Again, it is surely no coincidence that the scientific revolution occurred just after the Renaissance and Reformation challenged Church dominance. Still, Barbour concludes, “Many historians of science [not most?] have acknowledged the importance of the Western religious tradition in molding assumptions about nature that were congenial to the scientific enterprise.”
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I will begin my narrative in the
next chapter
by going back to the very origins of science and religion as best we know them and tracing their history through the Greeks, Romans, and early Christianity. I will describe how in the Middle Ages much of Greek and Roman science and philosophy was lost in Europe but preserved and developed to new heights in the Islamic empire. We will see how this knowledge gradually crept back into Europe as theologians such as Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas developed rational theologies that incorporated the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and translated texts became available.

When the Roman Catholic Church founded the first universities in Europe, Aristotle became the prime authority. Scholars used his logic as well as his science and philosophy to forge an amalgam of Greek and Christian thought that became known as Aristotelian
Scholasticism
. While the value of reason and observation was recognized, these were generally viewed as inferior to revelation since they were the products of imperfect human activity, whereas revelation came directly from God. The Renaissance and Reformation defied the authority of the Church, and a new science blossomed in which revelation and authority were replaced as final arbiters of truth by observation and measurement. Significantly, the scientific revolution occurred
outside
the church-dominated universities, which remained steeped in Scholasticism. Today, our secular universities lead the way in science while students at many church-connected universities and colleges are being taught creationism and other pseudosciences, along with mind-numbing biblical apologetics.

Nevertheless, a clean break between science and religion did not take place immediately at the start of the scientific revolution. All of the great pioneers of science—Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton—were believers, although they hardly had a choice in the matter. Open nonbelief was nonexistent in the West at that time. Except for Galileo, these extraordinary figures incorporated their beliefs into their science. Galileo was the only one of the great founders of the new science who tried to separate science from religion.

In the brief period in the eighteenth century called the Enlightenment, thinkers in Europe and America began to distinguish science and philosophy from theology. Deism flourished and atheism became intellectually respectable, at least in France, as we will see.

The great bulk of humanity did not go along with atheism, however. Christianity found a way to incorporate science within its own system with the notion of
natural theology
. In natural theology, human scientific observations and theories are seen as a way to learn more about the majesty of the Creator who had made the natural world and its laws in the first place.

This was quite a reasonable position at the time. After all, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, science had no natural explanation for the complexity we see around us, especially in living things. When geologists showed that Earth was much older than implied in the Bible, and Darwin provided both
the evidence and the theory for how life evolved without the need for God, the foundations of religious belief began to crumble.

This resulted in a very specific conflict between science and religion that has lasted to the current day, with the most recent battles being over the intelligent design brand of creationism. While the Catholic Church and moderate Christians have claimed to have no problem with evolution, their own words demonstrate that they do not accept unguided Darwinian evolution. Instead, they subscribe to a form of God-guided evolution that is just another form of intelligent design. We will have more to say about this in
chapter 4
.

The new physics of the twentieth century—relativity, quantum mechanics, and relativistic quantum field theory—have not struck many nerves with everyday religious believers since they are comprehended by only a tiny fraction of the public. In fact, these theories and the data that support them are monumentally misunderstood, misrepresented, and misused by many who naively write on these subjects without the years of study necessary to have any depth of knowledge.

This is especially the case with quantum mechanics, which has been made to look mysterious and weird, even by physicists who know better but think they can spark student and public interest, and sell their popular-level books, with overblown rhetoric.

While not technically theistic, modern quantum spiritualists and pseudoscientists should be included as part of the antiscience movement that is associated with religions and the transcendental worldview. Many members of this community assert that quantum mechanics tells us we can make our own reality just by thinking we can, and that it puts our minds in tune with a cosmic consciousness that pervades the universe. This claim results from a total misunderstanding of the wave-particle duality in which an object has the properties of a particle when you measure particle properties and the properties of a wave when you measure wave properties. Well,
duh
. Do you expect an object to have a particle property when you measure a wave property and a wave property when you measure a particle property? Physical objects have both properties, and no act of human consciousness has anything to say about it.

The other, more forgivable misuse of quantum mechanics is that made by theologians who look for a way for God to act in the universe without
violating the laws of physics. They think they can do this by appealing to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics that puts limits on what you can measure with precision. They imagine God poking his finger in to make particles change their motion without any physicist noticing. Sure, God can do that, but he would then be breaking a law of physics, which theologians say they are trying to avoid.

Theists and quantum spiritualists also claim that modern physics has eliminated the reductionism—the breaking down of the whole into parts—that has marked physics and indeed all of science from the time of Democritus. In fact, the opposite is true. After flirting for a while with holism in the crazy sixties, when even I had hair almost down to my shoulders, by the late seventies physics had returned to an even deeper reductionism than before with the standard model of particles and forces. The whole is still equal to the sum of its parts, just as the Greek atomists said. We will see that this is another place where science and religion profoundly disagree.

Once again, some scientists and science writers who should know better have been roped into joining with theologians to announce a grand new scientific principle called
emergence.
They point to the fact that nature has a hierarchy of levels of complexity ranging from elementary particles to human society. At each level we find a new scientific discipline—physics, chemistry, biology, and so on up to sociology and political science. The scholars at each level do not derive their models from particle physics but develop models for each discipline by applying their own unique methods. The principles they uncover “emerge” from the level below by what is called “bottom-up causality.”