“One cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time. That alleged synthesis requires that with one part of your brain you accept only those things that are tested and supported by agreed-upon evidence, logic, and reason, while with the other part of your brain you accept things that are unsupportable or even falsified. In other words, the price of philosophical harmony is cognitive dissonance.”
That’s a quote from “Seeing and Believing: The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail,” a superb essay by Professor Jerry A. Coyne of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago.
Coyne’s piece is actually built around a review of two books that attempt, futilely, to show that there need not be a fundamental disharmony between reason and God. It’s a popular point of view, as Coyne admits. But he does a magnificent job of dissecting that argument and showing its basic folly.
The full article is quite long, but very much worth reading in its entirety. I will excerpt a few short parts of it here, and then I hope you will read the whole thing.
Coyne begins by telling us that:
The National Academy of Sciences, America’s most prestigious scientific body, issued a pamphlet assuring us that we can have our faith and Darwin, too:
Science and religion address separate aspects of human experience. Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies of biological evolution have enhanced rather than lessened their religious faith. And many religious people and denominations accept the scientific evidence for evolution.
Would that it were that easy! True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers. ) It is also true that some of the tensions disappear when the literal reading of the Bible is renounced, as it is by all but the most primitive of Judeo-Christian sensibilities. But tension remains. The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic?
For many of us connected with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and presumably for many of our blog readers, the answer to both of those last two questions is a definite Yes. But for many people around the world, and especially here in the United States, where our organization is based, the answer is not so clear. Coyne reports:
It is a depressing fact that while 74 percent of Americans believe that angels exist, only 25 percent accept that we evolved from apelike ancestors. Just one in eight of us think that evolution should be taught in the biology classroom without including a creationist alternative. Among thirty-four Western countries surveyed for the acceptance of evolution, the United States ranked a dismal thirty-third, just above Turkey.
Americans in crowds at sporting events often like to chant, “We’re Number One!” Somehow, a chorus of “We’re Number 33” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
So, there is a conflict, especially acute in the USA, between those who espouse a firm religious faith and those who support and promote secular rationality. But is it there any significant overlap between the two? Could we find enough common ground to proclaim a lasting truce? Coyne doesn’t think so.
The most common way to harmonize science and religion is to contend that they are different but complementary ways of understanding the world. That is, there are different “truths” offered by science and by religion that, taken together, answer every question about ourselves and the universe. . .
What, then, is the nature of “religious truth” that supposedly complements “scientific truth”?
The first thing we should ask is whether, and in what sense, religious assertions are “truths.” Truth implies the possibility of falsity, so we should have a way of knowing whether religious truths are wrong. But unlike scientific truths, religious ones differ from person to person and sect to sect. And we all know of clear contradictions between the “truths” of different faiths. Christianity unambiguously claims the divinity of Jesus, and many assert that the road to salvation absolutely depends on accepting this claim, whereas the Koran states flatly that anyone accepting the divinity of Jesus will spend eternity in hell. These claims cannot both be “true,” at least in a way that does not require intellectual contortions. . .
Perhaps what we mean by “religious truths” are “moral truths,” such as “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” These rules are not subject to empirical testing, but they do comport with our reasoned sense of right and wrong. But for almost every “truth” such as this there is another one believed with equal sincerity, such as “Those who commit adultery should be stoned to death.” This dictum appears not only in Islamic religious law, but in the Old Testament as well. (It seems wrong, by the way, to call these truths religious. Beginning with Plato, philosophers have argued convincingly that our ethics come not from religion, but from a secular morality that develops in intelligent, socially interacting creatures, and is simply inserted into religion for convenient citation.)
This is a hugely important point, one that I hope and expect will become more widely understood and accepted in the coming years. Ethics and morality are not solely derived from religion. It may, in fact, be the other way around: religion may have developed, in part, to support and uphold innate human attitudes toward right and wrong.
In addition, as Coyne notes, there is a major difference in the definitions of ‘truth’:
In the end, then, there is a fundamental distinction between scientific truths and religious truths, however you construe them. The difference rests on how you answer one question: how would I know if I were wrong? Darwin’s colleague Thomas Huxley remarked that “science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.” As with any scientific theory, there are potentially many ugly facts that could kill Darwinism. Two of these would be the presence of human fossils and dinosaur fossils side by side, and the existence of adaptations in one species that benefit only a different species. Since no such facts have ever appeared, we continue to accept evolution as true. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are immune to ugly facts. Indeed, they are maintained in the face of ugly facts, such as the impotence of prayer.
There is no way to adjudicate between conflicting religious truths as we can between competing scientific explanations. Most scientists can tell you what observations would convince them of God’s existence, but I have never met a religious person who could tell me what would disprove it. And what could possibly convince people to abandon their belief that the deity is “good, loving, and just?” If the Holocaust cannot do it, then nothing will.
For me, that alone is enough. And I speak as a person who once believed in a Christian God. Through the process of growing up and learning much more about science, the universe, the nature of truth, and the history of humankind, I discarded my faith. This was not necessarily an easy process, but it seemed like the only clear choice if I was to be honest with myself.
For some people, the challenge of reconciling God and reason seems so fearful that they never attempt it. They try, many with apparent success, to live with two different, potentially warring, realms of belief inside their heads. How long that dissonance can last is another question.
One cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time. The price of philosophical harmony is cognitive dissonance. Accepting both science and conventional faith leaves you with a double standard: rational on the origin of blood clotting, irrational on the Resurrection; rational on dinosaurs, irrational on virgin births. . .
This disharmony is a dirty little secret in scientific circles. It is in our personal and professional interest to proclaim that science and religion are perfectly harmonious. After all, we want our grants funded by the government, and our schoolchildren exposed to real science instead of creationism. Liberal religious people have been important allies in our struggle against creationism, and it is not pleasant to alienate them by declaring how we feel. This is why, as a tactical matter, groups such as the National Academy of Sciences claim that religion and science do not conflict. But their main evidence—the existence of religious scientists—is wearing thin as scientists grow ever more vociferous about their lack of faith. . .
So the most important conflict is not between religion and science. It is between religion and secular reason. Secular reason includes science, but also embraces moral and political philosophy, mathematics, logic, history, journalism, and social science—every area that requires us to have good reasons for what we believe. Now I am not claiming that all faith is incompatible with science and secular reason—only those faiths whose claims about the nature of the universe flatly contradict scientific observations. Pantheism and some forms of Buddhism seem to pass the test. But the vast majority of the faithful—those 90 percent of Americans who believe in a personal God, most Muslims, Jews, and Hindus, and adherents to hundreds of other faiths—fall into the “incompatible” category.
Coyne concludes by noting that books like the two reviewed in his essay are not hard to find. Indeed, every year, apologists for the idea that reason and religion can live in harmony pour out volume after volume, unsuccessfully trying to make their case.
Attempts to reconcile God and evolution keep rolling off the intellectual assembly line. It never stops, because the reconciliation never works.
Only in recent years have we seen anything close to an equivalent level of argument coming from the other side—Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, etc.—from those who, like me, believe that no true reconciliation is possible, because we who pursue truth via secular reason have an altogether different definition of ‘truth’. It is as though we live in two separate worlds, where people look the same but where they think differently. And since we likely will never be able to unite those two worlds, we shall have to continue trying to convince them, through patient application of reason and verifiable truth.
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