Truth
The Conflict of Science and Religion 2
Abstract
“Self-evident verities” expire in the oxygen of factually based theories. What seems obvious can change as the science changes.Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, February 14, 2001
The Bible on Science
What, though, does religion teach? Religion? How many religions are there? And, in any one sect, there are hundreds of shades of belief. Religious beliefs from Pantheism to Popeless Catholicism exist in many modern Protestant churches, uneasily combined with the specific teachings of their ordained ministers. No major Church now insists on a literal acceptance of all its formulae. Some churches openly state that no belief at all is imposed as a condition of membership, yet they still register as a “religion”.
Fundamentalist doctrines blatantly conflict with established science. The doctrines of God and the soul, which are common to all religions that demand any specific belief at all, are less openly, but seriously, discredited, by the teaching of science. Christians are fond of telling us that there are questions that science cannot answer—and never will be able to! “Has the universe a purpose?” is an example. The implication is that religion, specifically Christianity, can answer questions like this. Where do we find the answers to questions like this, then? In the bible, of course. What then is the purpose of the universe? Er…
Even ultra-liberal religions which dispense with a personal God, or even an impersonal one, and leave open the question of immortality, still lie in the path of advancing science. Any belief or statement, as distinct from sentiment, which calls itself religious, is in conflict with the teaching of science.
Evolution is scientific. No writer quoted in Fundamentalist literature as opposed to evolution is an authority on the subject. Some are scientists but usually in a different field from biology or evolution and invariably they misunderstand or misrepresent the scientific position. A recent example is Michael Poole, in the book mentioned above, who objects to “chance” being personified when evolution is being described. Michael Poole is, astonishingly, a lecturer in science education in King’s College, London, a decision of the university authorities, one might think, like inviting Hannibal Lecter to teach vegetarianism.
This man, professing to be an authority on science, declares that to treat science as a secular substitute for God is “idolatry”. That the author states it in this shock-horror way suggests that he sees “idolatry” that way himself. Doubtless this would evoke gasps of horror from Christians but any scientist would just look bemused. Elsewhere he tells us “God is always working in the world, moment by moment”. In his discussion of Darwin’s theory he insists “’nature’ is not a person who ’selects’”. The truth is Poole is essentially a Christian Fundamentalist opposed to scientific naturalism, which he sees as the enemy of God, quite rightly, but still pretends there is no conflict between science and religion.
Poole does not like Richard Dawkins saying that chance “causes” mutations, and that chance and natural selection “cause” miracles like dinosaurs and human beings, or even a microbe, one might add. The reason, this great exponent of the history of science declares, is that chance gets treated as a secular substitute for God. Oh dear! Dawkins has stepped on God’s toes and upset one of His kneebenders.
Avoiding personification of such concepts is neither economic with words or necessary. In the same book Poole quotes his favourite, C S Lewis approvingly when he said: “If we are going to talk about things not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically”. Two definitions of “chance” are “the unforeseen and undesigned occurrence of events”, and “the imaginary or unknown agency supposed to be the cause of some unexplained events”. To substitute the words of either definition each time he wanted to say “chance” is likely to be painful to Dawkins’ readers, and understanding the word by the second definition is what put God’s bulldog, Mr Poole, at Dawkins’ throat.
All that Dawkins is saying is that mutations occur randomly (”by chance”) and that a great many of such chance mutations selected by the effects of Nature on the ability of the creature thus mutated to reproduce causes evolution. It requires no mystery and no divine intervention. Yet, Poole as uncomprehending as a slug writes:
”Chance” processes in evolution do not rule out divine purpose.
Using chance as an adjective and putting it in inverted commas for added protection, Poole avoids his own criticism, but the alert reader will note that the first definition above states that “chance” is “undesigned”. How can something that happens without design serve a purpose?
Poole thinks that chance simply means without an identifiable cause, implying that there is nevertheless a cause, though we do not know what it is, yet even the second definition above warns the reader that the cause might only be “supposed”. Poole wants it to be certain, and be God’s finger. Yet, far from being without an identifiable cause, often the cause of a chance event is plain to see. Cosmic rays are one cause of mutations. What is “unforeseen and undesigned” is which gene will be hit.
Poole proves his utter incomprehension by writing:
Far from being an unlikely outcome of chance processes, one biologist, Manfred Eigen, has argued: “The evolution of life… must be considered an inevitable process despite its indeterminate course… it is not only inevitable in principle but also sufficiently probable within a realistic span of time”.
Poole seems to think that because Eigen says the evolution of life is “probable within a realistic span of time” that it is not a chance process. He wants it to be a law of God even though such a law denies God his normal role of Creator. He no longer creates, Poole is telling us, He simply creates the laws of creation. See! Note that Eigen’s “realistic” is rather like the lawyers’ “reasonable”. It does not actually tell you anything. Note also that Eigen himself is clear that the course of the evolution is “indeterminate”. That means it progresses by chance! Eigen is making the important point that life is more probable than anyone previously thought, but he is not saying how much more probable. Given an infinite span of time any event with a small but non-zero probability will happen. He is saying that the chances of it happening are large enough—though still small—for it to happen sooner than anyone expected.
Poole is reverting, as simple genuflectors often do when more sophisticated ones look on embarrassed, to the God of the gaps. He is not willing to accept that something can be random, preferring to hope that God is invisibly present deciding what events would happen all the time, making things appear random to us, but God—clever chap—knows! “We are not in a position to deny the evidence of a plan until we have all the facts”, he says, and presumably “all the facts” includes the fact that we have them all. He wants us to be God to see God—a typical Christian dishonesty.
Genesis is completely irreconcilable with science on a score of points apart from evolution, and Genesis, as we have it, was certainly not written until a thousand years after the alleged time of Moses, and so could not have been written by him on two counts. It is a fraudulent compilation if it claims otherwise. The legends which are found in the first few chapters of Genesis were taken from the Babylonians. Christians warn us, in case we should err, that there are passages in the bible that should not be read like a scientific journal. What they will not tell us is which should be so read and which should not. At the time of Galileo, they did not make such a distinction but now they do. Why is that? Because science has in the last 300 years shown that much of the bible is false. The passages that science has shown to be wrong therefore were only literary or poetic truths not literally true. Christians are fond of shifting the goalposts to make sure skeptics cannot score.
Fundamentalists ought to try exercising their reason. On the one hand are their own professors of divinity who refuse to use even their common sense, and their preachers who have none. On the other hand are most learned theologians of the world and the united and unanimous experts in astronomy, biology, physiology, zoology, geology, psychology, anthropology and archeology. Fundamentalist literature deceives Fundamentalist punters into thinking that scientists are themselves not agreed about evolution. They are unanimous! Science is not opinion. All of those, who have tested the theory of evolution against the evidence, accept it. That some people cannot understand the theory, or the evidence, is not a refutation of evolution but of their qualifications to comment on it. These people are the ones the Fundamentalist editors quote.
If evolution were the only point at issue with the Fundamentalists, one could suspend judgment, but it is not the only point. While a large set of experts proves evolution, another set proves by its internal evidence that the Pentateuch was not written until about 500 BC. Another set derives from the ruins of Babylonia and Assyria legends of creation, Eden, fall, and deluge so closely corresponding to the Jewish legends that no one can doubt their identity. Another set shows that the history of the Jews has been different from the story of the Jewish scriptures. And so on. Against this mass of evidence accumulated by independent bodies of the most highly trained students in the world, the Fundamentalists can only put… what? The word of God? Most of them could not tell you why they believe the Jewish scriptures are the word of God.
Fundamentalist leaders plead that they are not opposed to “true science”, meaning “false science”—science that supports their unscientific views. This will fool their followers who think the concept of true science sounds reasonable, not realising that no “science” can exist that will support Christianity. They are like little boys who point their toy guns and say, “Bang, you’re dead”, and, in their imaginations, it is so. Christians have no idea how they have been utterly deceived by the literature put in their hands and by the mendacity of their leaders who are incompetent to deal with such important questions. They are being fooled by confidence tricksters for no other reason than to extract a regular stream of dollar bills from them. How many TV evangelists are poor?
Liberal Christianity
The story assailed by science in its beginning in Genesis is equally assailed in its culmination in the New Testament. The science of comparative religion shows us in the older Pagan religions the origin of the explanations of Christ’s miraculous birth, atoning death, and resurrection. The position of any Christian who holds the Church doctrines of the creation and fall of man, and the miraculous birth, atoning death, and resurrection of Christ, is in flat contradiction with science. Comparative religion is properly studied as a science as truly as biology is. It is nonsense to say “science” has no bearing on the virgin-birth and the resurrection. The science of comparative religion reveals equivalent stories centuries older than Christianity.
Modernism in Christianity is the candid admission that the bible is wrong—that there was no revelation, no fall of man, and no atoning death—but there is a God, who has put in the breast of men a hope of immortality which he may be expected to fulfill, and that Christ and Christianity are the supreme guardians and exponents of the moral law. Their battle cry is, “Do not bother about theology. Stick to ethics! Christianity is the Sermon on the Mount!” This frank repainting of Christianity ends the conflict with science by ending Christianity.
Believers who put new interpretations—or none—on the old doctrines of creation, original sin, atonement, resurrection, have abandoned Christian doctrine. The former manager of the English association football team, Glenn Hoddle, claimed to be a born again Christian, but after putting a faith healing lady friend on the English national payroll failed to ensure the team won, admiring spiritualism and then declaring his belief in reincarnation by asserting that congenitally disabled people were being punished for being wicked in a previous life, he was sacked. It is hard to figure out what Mr Hoddle’s religion was, but it was not Christianity.
The fundamental and essential Christian doctrine is based upon the fall of man, upon a mythical version of man’s early history. The evolution of man should hardly need considering in refutation of this. Only the utterly ignorant could make this the main question in the conflict between science and Genesis. A geological accident, the formation of flint, led to the recording in every age of our technical level. Flint implements faithfully reflect our intelligence. They are immortal and unalterable. Millions can be found beginning about two million years ago. Ten thousand years ago the human race was still in the Stone Age—stone weapons, skin clothing, elementary agriculture and pottery.
The scientific record of slow human development is fatal to the truth of Eden and the fall, necessary for the Christian doctrine of atonement. Paul, on whom theology is based rather than on the gospels, was wrong. The primeval curse is a myth discredited by what science knows about early man, and a divine redeemer of the race is superfluous.
Christians retreating from Fundamentalism to extremely liberal Christianity take up every possible position between, and some, like Mr Hoddle, that have not yet been thought of. None of these positions are logical or defendable. The “Sermon on the Mount” taken out of context is no more than a set of simple rules that are less complete and so less convincing than, say, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Indeed, because the Christian ethic was so lacking, early Christians took much of Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics as their own. Modernist Christians who take this postion are really modern Stoics, and ought to admit it. These liberal Christians should remember that they reject the theory and practice of Christianity, except insofar as it is Stoic, and so should not airily say that science does not conflict with religion because it does not conflict with theirs.
Rogue Scientists
Some scientists still profess an active Christianity. Either they have squared the circle, or they are pandering to Christian pressure from people ignorant of the facts but led by professional rabble rousers mainly with personal gain in mind. Instead of appealing to the public for support, and sending these primitives away with a flea in their ear, they seek conciliation by saying science is consistent with religion.
In the last century, McCabe tells us Sir E Ray Lankester, a zoologist, was an agnostic with no religious sentiment. When he said that science was consistent with religion he meant with the ethical teaching of Christianity. Even of this he knew little, and on one occasion was turned down by the editor of an annual to which he had made a contribution. The case is typical of one type of scientific apologist for Christianity. In the absence of any explicit confession of Christian belief in the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection, by “religion” they mean an ethical idealism or a belief in some kind of supreme entity, even if it has withdrawn into its transcendency after making the universe. So, when anyone says there is no conflict between science and religion, do what any philosopher would do in any case except one likely to belittle Christianity—ask what they mean by religion!
Professor Millikan, whose famous oil drop experiment is still taught in schools was gushing: “I have never known a thinking man who did not believe in God. Men who have the stuff in them which makes heroes all believe in God”. Now chaplains have reported that nine-tenths of American soldiers would have nothing to do with God. So we have a method here of picking out only the very best, the most thoughtful and bravest of soldiers, and saving the nation 90 percent of its army payroll bill, and reducing the nation’s superstitious inclinations.
Conflict between science and religion is impossible, he says, because the business of science is to accumulate knowledge and the business of religion is “to develop the consciences, the ideals and the aspirations of mankind”. If this development of consciences and ideals is religion, its sufficient motive is in this present life not in the wishes of an absolute nonentity. If there is a danger of human extinction through misuse of science, which is looking more and more likely unless our ideals are developed, we really have some incentive to developing them. No need here to invoke anything supernatural.
If Millikan’s theism is open to conflict with science, his own pretentious arguments are as clear as mud. He writes:
The more we investigate, the more we see how far we are from any real comprehension of it all, and the clearer we see that in the admission of our ignorance and finiteness we recognize the existence of a Something, a Power, a Being in whom and because of whom we live and move and have our being—a Creator by whatever name we call Him.
In English, Millikan is saying a Creator exists because we are ignorant. Here is a man with a permanent name in science wading in waters too deep for him. He wants to say something like:
Despite our scientific searches, we are still ignorant about how or why we exist. Yet, if the complexity of Nature can defeat the powers of comprehension of our best brains like me, there must be a cleverer Power or Being responsible for Nature, and it is God.
The work that Professor Millikan has done in physics came after only a century of accumulated research. If God is the Ancient of Days, He has had a much longer time than mankind to get clever. That Millikan should imagine that human scientists would know everything in only about 100 years of enquiry, is symptomatic of some form of megalomania. What will science know about the “powers” of the universe in ten centuries time? What will it know a million years from now? Millikan wants to have a clear reason why we exist, and because he has not, he sees existence as a mystery. He is begging the question. If we have evolved, then there is no question of a creation, yet because he will not consider that we have evolved, a creator becomes necessary for him. Millikan allows his own concept of the “Something” to evolve into a “Being” in five words, and having found himself with a being he refers to it as “Whom” and “Him”. He created God in his own head a lot quicker than God created the world.
Millikan is again calling on the “God of the Gaps”. He is trying to do what theologians have done since science started to tread on their corns. Whatever science cannot explain must be due to God. Millikan seems to see too much complexity for him to understand and so God must be behind it. Every advance the scientist makes dislodges the theologian from a patch of “ignorance”. Conflict is impossible, he says, because the business of science is to develop knowledge, and the business of religion is to develop ideals, and forthwith he makes his religion a business of getting knowledge in parts of the universe which science has not yet illumined! Every lamp lit in a dark chamber displaces fear of ghosts. The conflict is continuous, essential, and to the death.
He goes on to say materialism is “altogether absurd and utterly irrational”, because “love, duty, and beauty” are spiritual things, and tracing these back to his “Power behind Nature”, he concludes that this Power is spiritual and personal. Who says they are spiritual? He does, but psychologists say love is an emotion. Duty is an abstract word for a sense of obligation. Beauty is an abstract word for aspects of material things that please us. Christians and other rogues of the mind use the abstractness of these concepts to suggest that they must exist in another world—that of the spirit. Simple people can easily be fooled that, because abstract concepts cannot be touched, they must be spiritual, but intellectuals should not be, and, if they seem to have been, then they are not intelligent after all, or they are trying to gull others and so are dishonest.
A manual on the protozoa by Professor Calkins had, on the title-page:
Read this book and learn from it how great God is even in small things.
Professor Calkins’ book describes the life and activities of the protozoa, including their responsibility for disease and death, and we are asked to see the finger of God in it. Such men, who use empty and discredited pulpit arguments, are sad but deserve no sympathy, for they still get away with it and their churches extract megabucks from the bereavement of widows no less than they have always done. Ingersoll, who was called a “superficial” man by people such as these, was asked by a young lady hoping to make a point: “Colonel, who made these beautiful flowers?” He replied: “The same, my dear young lady, that made the poison of the ivy and the asp”. Why should a “spiritual power” make flowers and birds of paradise? Why indeed should a spiritual power and the Power of Love put scorpions, poisoned thorns, ebola virus in the path of the children they love.
Social Progress
The vaguest, and therefore most valuable, of the claims of the religious apologist is that religion, the Christian religion in particular, is the progressive principle of modern civilization, that the bible is the source of England’s (or America’s or Germany’s) greatness. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century Chinese civilization was probably superior to the Christian, and the Christian only began to make rapid progress and surpass China at the time when they began to discard their Christianity.
Historically it is absurd to couple together the words Christianity and progress, and if you seek for elements in primitive Christianity that make for social progress, or might do, you see at once how incongruous the claim is. The general argument is based crudely on two facts: the material or economic progress of Christian nations since the fifteenth century which quite obviously has nothing to do with any religion, and the social, moral, and intellectual progress of the last sixty or seventy years, which coincides with, not a revival, but a decay, of religion.
In connexion with all historical claims of the beneficent action of the Christian religion or any religion, keep in mind four periods of history—Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, Rome in the first and second (and even fourth) centuries of the present era, Arabian and Moorish civilization from the tenth to the fifteenth century, and the modern period from about 1850 onward. These non-Christian periods were brilliant and progressive. In comparison with these essentially irreligious periods, the record of Christendom is ugly and barren. It was these other idealisms, of Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Moors, that counteracted the benumbing influence of Christ’s teaching in Europe and led the world back to the paths of progress.
The advance of science is the chief factor, both in its immense multiplication of our resources and in its stimulation of the imagination, and religion has had nothing whatever to do with it. Education is the second factor, and it was initiated chiefly by non-Christians, largely opposed by the Churches, and only successful when the secular states undertook it. Not even in our moral and social progress, our new idealisms and philanthropies, is it possible to trace religious influence. Humanitarianism was the impulse, and the roots of this go back through the French Revolution and the Deists to the Renaissance and the Moors.
Christian critics say that a social theory of morals may, when it is properly embodied in education, make people just, honest, truthful, and so on, but that there are finer shades or graces of character which religion alone will sustain. The social theory of morals means that characteristics and behavior that are desirable and promote pleasantness and mutual welfare are worth cultivating. Our “graces” and refinements of character are either not desirable or we will retain them because we like them. With proper education of the young, these are the easiest things for public opinion to enforce.
The art of living is to be one of the great lessons of the Adelphiasophists: how to obtain as much happiness as one can during our few decades of sunshine, consistently with the happiness of others—how to find, as the Greeks and Moors found, the just balance of intellectual, emotional, and sensual life. The world has never known such a volume of unselfish service of the less fortunate, not least in the USA. Not out of the decaying creeds have educational, philanthropic, helpful organizations emerged, but out of a feeling of sisterhood and brotherhood, of sympathy, of humanitarianism—of kinunity.
