Truth
Science is mightier than the Word
Abstract
Resolving disagreements about the possible nature of things comes from empirical discoveries about the actual nature of those things.Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 18 March 2003
Science is mightier than the Word
So says Peter Atkins, a creative chemist at Oxford in the 60s who gave up research to write a lucratively successful textbook of physical chemistry. Atkins is uncompromising about the conflict of religion and science. In an article in Chemistry and Industry, he boldly states that religion should and surely will atrophy and die.
- It requires deference to authority and acceptance of fixed ideas, whereas science requires authority to be continually overthrown in favour of better ideas.
- It obfuscates whereas science reveals.
- It is essentially closed and resists questioning whereas science is open and demands public examination.
Science can illuminate all the relevant questions of existence while using, and respecting human intellect. Religion is the antithesis of science. They have little in common so reconciliation is neither possible nor needed.
Scientists know how difficult it is to trace the deep, simple ideas of science into the world of phenomena, for the complexity of the world is the outcome of huge numbers of simple but sometimes conflicting events. Those antagonistic to, or simply ignorant of, scientific procedures mistake this for impotence.
Extraordinarily Complicated
The complexity of the world is the outcome of huge numbers of sometimes conflicting simple events, often difficult to trace into the world of phenomena. The principles of the biochemistry of organisms are well known, or can be determined and expressed in terms familiar to chemists. Only the blackest of pessimists would not extend that view to the workings of our brains. Yet even the simplest organism is so extraordinarily complicated that unravelling its biochemistry is immensely difficult. But difficulty is not defeat and, despite the difficulties, science has gone much further in helping us understand the world than dogma ever did. We should be proud that human intellect has gone so far in understanding in such a short time.
The challenge of elucidating living processes—including consciousness and all that we call “the human spirit”—is an example of hard scientific work paying off and showing we do not need the false explanations of religions. No case has science grinding to a halt, or coming up against a barrier to further explanation. Nothing suggests science is circumscribed and that beyond a boundary the only recourse to comprehension is to God.
There are two types of abstract question. Some critics think science cannot give a full account of being human. They claim science, with its reliance on public examination of evidence and desire to measure, categorise and sequence, cannot touch emotional and abstract aspects of consciousness like joy, misery, aesthetic appreciation, love, death, and a sense of cosmic purpose. One could add negatives like hatred and bestiality to this list and even gullibility, which should interest those accepting unsubstantiated beliefs. These transcendent spiritual aspects of existence, they say, will always be beyond science’s reach.
They are wrong. Atkins disagrees with this pessimistic vision. Science can handle these questions. They are within its bounds. Can science elucidate such qualities as love and aesthetic appreciation? Why not? Spiritual questions like joy pertain to physical states of the brain and physiological states of the body such as our endocrine systems and are certainly not outside the boundaries of scientific inquiry. Love is a complex emotion, involving genetically controlled responses, hormonal excretions, and intellectual reflections and considerations. Mysterious and complex love may be, but it holds open the prospect of elucidation. Aesthetics, too, is not inconceivably comprehensible. Acts of valor, heroism, creativity, grandeur, and criminality all lie within the domain of psychology, and psychology is on the fringe of science.
But investigating the nature of love or joy will still spoil it, the critics cry in desperation. Just the opposite. It adds greater meaning to delightful acts and feelings without intruding into them. How does understanding a rainbow forming detract from its beauty? To understand passion, iniquity and what it means to be human adds to our wonder at the amazing but explainable world. Knowledge adds comprehension to aesthetic, adding to our delight.
Cosmic Questions
A second group of deep questions that many would wish to protect from science’s gaze are the more cosmic of those beloved by religion, including the purpose of our existence, the role of evil, free will and the prospect of life eternal. Such questions are fallacious, and offer no real challenges for us to solve.
Most of the questions that so exercise the religious are of the latter, false kind. The grandiose questions beloved by the religious—including the purpose of our existence, the role of evil, free will and the prospect of eternal life—appear profound but are not challenging problems to science. It may seem to be a perfectly legitimate question to ask, “What is the purpose of this universe?” but it is a question from everyday life asked outside of its limits of applicability. That is why it is false. It assumes the universe has a purpose. It need not have, and believing it does have does not make it true. Science is based upon careful observation and experimentation. Scientific observation might even be inspired initially by anecdotal evidence, but no evidence of any kind reveals that the universe has a purpose. Nor is there any evidence of life after death that cannot be better explained by human physiology or psychology. Not a scrap of testable evidence exists for cosmic purpose or life after death, and it is inescapable that neither exists. The conclusion must be that they are illusions.
The question for science is to explain the psychology of brains that maintain these questions as actualities, the psychology that perpetuates them. The reason why people feel the need for a cosmic purpose and everlasting life is easily understood. These are psychological questions arising out of human mortality. They are posed by those unable to comprehend or accept the reality of the human situation or those determined to exploit the incomprehension of others.
“Where did it all come from?” is the big but valid scientific question that treads on the toes of religion. Religion adopts the lazy assertion pretending to be an answer. For reasons that will forever remain inscrutable, God made it! Religious people find this answer satisfactory. Science, in contrast, is steadily and strenuously working toward a comprehensible explanation.
Witness the extraordinary progress that has been made since the development of general relativity at the beginning of the twentieth century. Though difficult, and still incomplete, the great problem of how the universe came into being, and what it is, will be solved, and the solution ought to be comprehensible to human minds. Moreover, that understanding will be achieved this side of the grave. Whereas religion scorns the power of human comprehension, science, the nobler pursuit, respects it.
Many regard God as an explanation of everything, and regard science as incomplete or ponderous. They do not understand the scientific method. To believe that God is an explanation of anything, let alone everything, is simple-mindedness. It accepts ignorance is an explanation, and even shrouds it in deceit.
Different Criteria
Reconciliation in the conflict of religion and science is impossible because the techniques and criteria of religion and science are so different. Only those of science are valid.
- Science seeks simplicity publicly and encourages the overthrow of authority. Religion accepts complexity privately and encourages deference to authority.
- Science reveals. Religion conceals.
- Science gives us the prospect of full understanding, for no aspect of the world is closed to its scrutiny and explanation. Religion avers that human brains are too puny to comprehend the world.
- Science respects the power of the human intellect. Religion belittles it.
- Science is progressively advancing toward complete knowledge. Religion is directionless and ignorant.
- Science is hard work, but its answers are reliable. Religion is easy and its answers empty speculation suitable for lazy thinkers.
- Science draws on countless experimenters and theoreticians to make sense of the data. Religion indulges in wild but useless speculation, never put to the test even after death because death is the ultimate loss of all thought.
- Science searches for the underlying simplicity from which springs the complexity that surrounds and delights us. Ultimate truth will be simple. Religion searches for the all-embracing complexity—God—that inscrutably accounts for the world. All that remains then is to explain God. That is too hard for the religious.
- Science discusses points democratically, and builds up a network of interdependent ideas and theories that constitute the corpus of science. Religion is not democratic but authoritarian, asserting its authority by coercion, terror, and warfare, and reduces the clash of ideas through advocating creeds and unquestioned beliefs that conceal ignorance.
- Science respects the power of the human intellect. Religion denies it.
- Science respects humanity. Religion despises it.
Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that “God did it” is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation. Science, with its publicly accessible corpus of information and its open, scrutable arguments, can lead the wondering to an understanding of the entire world.
Conclusion
It is deplorable that the clergy should ration pleasure and regulate personal behaviour on the basis of private faith and institutionalised prejudice. Ethics spring from evolution, pragmatism and thoughtfulness about consequences. How much more admirable it is to base society’s constraints on behaviour on a knowledge of our evolution and ability to think through consequences than on religious fiats based on faith. Religion, with its kindly mask, thwarts the aspirations of humanity.
The crux of the conflict of religion and science is not wholly the superiority of science as a mode of understanding the physical world. It includes whether the physical world is the entire world, and whether any aspect of existence lies outside of science. If there is, then science cannot yield global understanding, but then, nor can anything else. If there is not, then science is capable of providing complete understanding of all there is.
Atkins declares his conclusion as stark and uncompromising. Religion is the antithesis of science. Science is competent to illuminate all the deep questions of existence, and does so in a manner that makes full use of, and respects the human intellect. Religion is the institutionalisation of prejudice. The secular society is a humane society. Reason furnishes the foundations of hope for the future and rids the world of false hope and false imperatives. Atkins sees neither need nor sign of any future reconciliation.
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