Truth
The Conflict of Science and Religion 1
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 Conflict of Science and Religion
Science has always conflicted with religion, apart from early instances of scientific discovery which were in the hands of priests for their own purposes—the astronomical observations of the Chaldæan priests were to allow them to keep a calendar. Science began in the Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor. These Greeks learned the rudiments of practical science from Phœnicians and Egyptians, but what inspired them to new heights was the cosmogony of the Persians, whose Zoroastrian religion provided new insights into the nature of things. From these foundations, the Greeks saw that reason and senses could be used to acquire knowledge.
What little remains of the speculations of these early pioneers of science shows they were not popular with their religious compatriots. The more outspoken of them were chased from city to city for blaspheming the gods. Religious prejudice against science in Athens was much worse. Anaxagoras, who tried to found a scientific school there, had to flee for his life. The Athenian philosophers found it advisable for the integrity of their lives to despise science and to devote themselves to “spiritual realities”, though even this did not save Socrates from enforced suicide on the charge of impiety.
A few centuries later the work of science centred in the Greek city of Alexandria founded by Alexander in Egypt. Science made progress but a new religion, Christianity, got political power, murdered the last brilliant representative of Greek thought, Hypatia, and extinguished scientific research. So, the first thousand years of science, from Thales to Hypatia, were marked by conflict with religion, and, of all the religions, Christianity was the most deadly. It snuffed out learning for a thousand years.
Science began again in Europe. The ideas of the Greeks lingered in Greek literature, but mainly not in the Christian Greek Empire where no one could read them, except for a few monks who believed reading was to allow them to know devotional works only. Greek literature and science were mainly deliberately destroyed or left to decay. Skepticism however reappeared in the Baghdad and Damascus of the Arab empire, and science revived. The ideas of the Greeks were taken out of their tomb in Greek literature, and commerce with China brought new scientific ideas to Persia and Syria via the silk road.
This culture of science was carried across northern Africa to Spain, and the Moors of Cordoba developed it with a brilliance that reminds us of the ancient Athenians. Jews and a few Christian wandering scholars took translations of Arab works to Italy, France, and England, and, as the Moslems had settled also in Sicily and the south of Italy, a similar stream poured northward from there. Christian Europe began to cultivate science, in spite of the Fathers. Naïve modern Christians, for whom truth is Jesus and not the facts of history, clap their hands and say, “Praise God for our Roger Bacon, our Albert the Great, our Gerbert, our Mendel”, and whatever other monks they can find that can be said to have contributed to the renaissance of science.
From Bacon to Copernicus they did little more than repeat what Greeks or Moors had told them, but the moment they did, the conflict between science and religion began again. As Joseph McCabe points out:
Bacon spent nearly half his adult life in his monastic prison, Albert was extinguished with a mitre, Gerbert with a tiara, Copernicus dreaded to publish his conviction that Pythagoras was right until he was beyond the reach of the Inquisition, Arnold of Villeneuve was hounded from land to land, friar Jean de Roquetaillade died in prison, Cecco d’Ascoli and Giordano Bruno were burned, Galileo was smitten on the mouth by the Inquisition, Vesalius narrowly escaped its holy wrath.
Christendom was weakened by the great schism, and the world became sufficiently enlightened to see that one need not be burned at the stake for studying chemistry, physics, astronomy or anatomy, though such work was held to be damnable. Erasmus warned the church that it was identifying learning with heresy in such a way as to make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance. This was not new, it was what Christianity had always done, but to say so was daring. Galileo was not simply inviting the clerics to see planets but to take an utterly new view on knowledge and life. Visible existence was just a shadow on a cave wall, according to Plato, the view that suited the Christian bishops because they offered themselves to the ignorant as shamans that understood hidden things. Galileo stood for science, and that threatened the very raison d’etre of religion as the revealer of mysteries.
With the nineteenth century a new phase opened. Deists criticized the crudities and inconsistencies of the Jewish scriptures, and scientific men now began to reconstruct the real history of the earth and of man on lines which were different from those of Genesis. As Huxley said, they often came across Christian pickets with notices saying: “Thus far shalt though go and no further. By order of Moses”. What was the origin of the stars, the plants, the animals, man, language, religion, the moral sense, civilization? How old was the earth? Had the rocks been gradually formed by deposits in water? How old was man? No entry! The answer was in the Jewish scriptures.
Admirers of Religion
Influential men promote the fiction that all religions do good, and some religion is necessary. Presidents and Prime Ministers tell us, in tones vibrant with sincerity and a tear in their eye, that we rely upon our devoted clergy for our spiritual sustenance. It is votes, not religion that concerns them—the clergy can secure, or remove, votes for a candidate that mean victory or defeat. Media moguls are fervent that religion will keep our behaviour good, and financiers that it will justify their wealth as a gift of God. Judges command their gravest gravity when they speak of it. Educators cannot conceive of teaching without it. Professors and literati are superior to creeds, but they never disturb the allegiance of the millions to religion.
Only ignorant half-wits, social terrorists and nihilists unable and unwilling to appreciate the truth and value of religion—as do politicians, policemen, preachers, editors—ever challenge the vital importance to us of religion. Criticising religion is still unpopular. Without an awe-stricken veneration for religion in the mass of the people, some people and classes of people begin to get uneasy, and even murderous.
A politician who rains promises on the the just and the unjust alike to garner their votes, will say it does not matter which religion we cherish as long as we have some religion. That is the common attitude on this question, though often nowadays people will say “spirituality” meaning the same thing. It is nonsense. Half of Americans go to church and half do not. Is there any difference between them? In Chicago, many of the population are Roman Catholics. In London, proportionately hardly any. Yet the incidence of crime has always been higher in Chicago than in London. Half a century ago, many countries that were openly fascist were Roman Catholic, and the Pope warmly supported their dictators, or declined to criticise them. That might have been good practical sense in the face of such madmen, but it was not noble or principled.
When the clergy divided the community between them they reviled each other’s creed. Between them they proved that both the Catholic and the Protestant creeds inspired saintliness and promoted wickedness at the same time. When most people concluded that neither seemed to be necessary, they united to say that some religion is a vital need, and that at all costs we must preserve a prejudice against unbelief. Clergymen have a sound vested interest. Religion is their living. We can therefore ignore their opinions on this subject.
A famous journalist, who wrote graceful expositions of Christian faith to be read by millions, was actually a skeptic. Challenged about the dishonesty of this, his airy reply was, “People like that sort of thing”. Journalists and editors, let there be no doubt, are mainly as unprincipled as this. They are like gulls at a sewage outlet squabbling over shit—rivals for a lowest common denominator of readers. The clergy see to it that their congregations know what lines editors are taking in the newspapers and journals. Catholics were warned by the Catholic priesthood not to go see the movie “Angela’s Ashes” or read Frank McCourt’s book. Editors are not bothered about skeptical readers because they do not have any organization behind them, and can only show their disgust by writing internet pages that no one reads.
Others are afraid of the clergy. Their sinecures are threatened, or their freedom to teach science is threatened, or their comfort is threatened. Silence about religion is prudent, but a word in its favour might be profitable.
Because of this one-sidedness, two hundred million people in the United States agree with the editors and politicians about the influence of religion on society. For all that, over a half of them pay more attention to the model of their car. The religious half have little common ground. Some say religion is only valuable in a sacerdotal and sacramental form, without which you are sure to fail—only ministers or priests can communicate this magic. Others spit contempt on the service of religion, because the saving part of religion is to believe that Christ died for your sins, and the Old Testament is the Word of God. Yet others rule those out and say that religion is to believe in the love of a personal God, and worship him. A separate group, that of the intellectuals, if they dared to give a view, would mostly say the idea of a personal God verges on lunacy.
The Psychology of Religion
Religion is also maintained by the momentum of the tradition of churchgoing, social considerations, and the activity of organizers or leaders. But there are profound psychological reasons. There is a vanity of virtue in it, like the vanity of cosmetics, fashion and lifestyle. Some feel it helps them to be virtuous to listen to a man talking to them about God and goodness for an hour every Sunday, and to stand in rows and sing a hymn about it. It is an evolutionary relic of the pecking order. We used to roll on our backs, expose our vulnerable parts and whine ingratiatingly when a dominant animal came near us. When the dominant animals in our society tell us it is not necessary, we find ourselves maladapted, miss our cringing habit and have to go to church to be able to satisfy our evolutionary urges.
Freud diagnosed religion as “the universal neurosis of humanity”. The truth about Freud’s description of religion as a life of neurosis and illusion, is that when people try to order their lives by reference to hidden realities beyond experience that allow them to slot into some pre-ordained righteous pattern of things, they are avoiding facing real experience in the real world. They prefer the obsession of a paranoid fantasy to taking the responsibility of creatively addressing the problems that we ourselves are causing in the world.
Paranoia can be a sense of persecution or a sense of excessive worth. Christians suffer from both, and both prevent them from seeing the world we inhabit as being what they should value above all. Freud saw that religion made the matter of escape respectable by allowing victims to share their delusions with a whole society of fellow maniacs and therefore feel sane. The lonely timid person feeling overwhelmed by reality could accept a highly articulated mythology and doctrine approved by God and thereby gain a courage they did not know they had.
It was all right for the individual sufferer, but not for the real world they lived in or for others who did not need this fantasy therapy. The world was treated as a temporary abode of no worth and others were themselves treated as if they were the insane ones, and forced to join the asylum, often on pain of death. The old horror movie, the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari illustrates it.
Alexander Osipov, who was a Russian Orthodox priest and editor of the Patriarchal bible, openly declared that many mentally ill people went mad or developed nervous illnesses for religious reasons—and often it had a sexual aspect. The adoration of shepherds was the adoration of young or popular preachers by women who were hysterical or verging on hysteria—the “shepherds” in Judaism were priests, as they are in Christianity. The adoration is not religious but the seething of unsatisfied passion, condemned and suppressed by religion itself.
Personal religion is often neurotic. Obsessional people like the ritual. Depressed people think they are worthless and wicked and seek to be penitents through confession or submission. Unaddressed fear of natural sexuality leads to chaste denial then frustrated brutality and unkind sternness in nuns and priests. Simplistic wish-fulfilment can lead people to clappy triteness and over-evangelism, while real problems are pushed aside as “this-worldly”. In these examples, religion, if not neurotic itself, is where neurotic personalities go for acceptance. C F D Moule said:
A concern for Jesus is a sign of neurotic obsession. If this is so then let the psychiatrist heal us of our Christian sickness.
Doubtless Moule will have written his request with a smile hoping it would be read as a reductio ad absurdum that would rebound on those who thought it so. It is so.
Passive dependency on a God the Father is found in many adults, and though God is not merely a projection of their own father, He can be when practical religion is no more than infantile “saying prayers” and comforting bedtime stories. Christianity means a degrading submissiveness, that it is hard to believe any sane God could condone, let alone desire. Moule thought it quite natural for us to be as God was, taking Christ to be God in the form of the Son—submissive. And the Son…
…clearly thought of God as Creator and as Father. If so, how can it be a violation of a creature’s self to conform to such a Creator’s design?
This is the clever theologian adding more mythological justifications to the knee bending habits required by this particular Christian paranoia. The restriction of human creativity to the observation of set rituals in church on the ground that this is the will of God, is avoiding real responsibility just as much as individual neurotics who cannot live without the obsessive completion of their private handwashing or sock counting rituals. “Belief” applied in this way, in practice does not safeguard our true nature—it inhibits it. A non-paranoid religion ought not to hold up supposed supernatural patterns of existence as the norm for human behaviour to be judged. Today we have to be judged in relation to the needs of the world that we have hitherto been taught was valueless, if not wicked, but which offers us the only life we know. A preoccupation with the supernatural can only detract from our proper occupation—the natural. As long as so many people remain entranced by the apologists of otherworldly religion, there is no hope of us ever saving the world we live in.
Yet, many people are deeply uneasy at the loss of the fear of the supernatural and the cosmic order of God. These people are not neurotic in the sense that they should fear nothing at all. The proper fear now is the use to which politicians, generals and businessmen put the results of science. The huge increase of power humanity has gained through science emphasises more than ever the need for a correct view of the world and what we should do in it. We need a more compelling vision of the value of the world than we ever did. It is essential that we face up to reality.
Science
Science shows that the earth had been formed gradually during billions of years, that man was millions of years old, that languages had evolved, that living things had been on this earth for hundreds of millions of years, and that there never had been an interruption of life by a great deluge—though there had by the ice ages that God did not mention. Religion taught the opposite—it was all done in instants. To talk of a few combative theologians sparring with a few combative scientists about these matters is utter historical untruth.
In the years since Galileo, the correctness of the experimental method has been vindicated beyond question. Science is a method of enquiry and the body of results that emerge from it. Observational science succeeds by finding truth in experience, in action in the material world. Emphatically it is a method not a revelation of the absolute. Its hypotheses are models of existence, not recreations of it, but they take us by degrees towards the truth.
An underlying assumption of scientific method, but one which is verified by its success, is that Nature is not capricious but stable and orderly in its basic laws. We have this from Michael Poole, in the Lion Manual called a Guide to Science and Belief, which seeks to indoctrinate children aged about fourteen into believing Chrsitian religion is the equal of science. “Science and Belief” is a misnomer. Its very content demonstrates the conflict betwwen science and religion while it pretends there is none. It has nothing to do with science which it denigrates none too subtly. It is entirely about belief. It is intended to fool young people into thinking that science is inadequate and they must believe in God. The book is worthless, misleading and dishonest, but illustrates many points we are making and we shall meet it again.
Poole is fond of giving quotations of scientists who verify religion. One such quotation is by Albert Einstein. Einstein was from a Jewish family and was brought up in a Catholic school, so himself suffered indoctrination as a child. Poole quotes him as a scientist having “some religious belief:”
To the sphere of religion belongs the faith that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that it is comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith.
Einstein here is simply asserting that Nature is rational, the working assumption of all science. A working assumption is eventually verified or disproved by practice—whether it actually works. Over a long period of time now, science has shown that it does work—Nature is rational and can be known. It is therefore no longer a matter of faith for a scientist, and no religion—if it is to be equated with this faith—is needed.
Scientific results are not arbitrary. They have to emerge from the method, and the method demands that they are in concordance with reality. That is ensured by the publication of the results, and the particulars of the method whereby they were reached, so that others can verify them. Only when others skilled in the same field agree they are true do the results join the body of knowledge called science. If someone disagrees, they must publish their own work showing their evidence, and it must be accepted as sound before any revision of current knowledge will be considered. If authorities are divided, then no scientific fact has been established. All this is at the pinnacle of some branch of science, but further back, there is increasing confidence in the soundness of established knowledge because later knowledge is built upon it, and eventually if one of these bricks does not fit properly, the edifice will lose strength and have to be rethought and rebuilt. Sometimes this happens, and is called a “shift of scientific paradigm”.
Nothing can be unequivocally proved by experiment because no experiment can take into account every possible circumstance. What is possible is that a hypothesis proposed to account for some experimental or observational findings can be disproved. The philosopher, Karl Popper, claimed that any scientific hypothesis must be disprovable. Popper came to admit that some scientific ideas could be disproved by circumstantial evidence. Historical reconstructions and evolution fall into this category.
That is science. Science is not a question of opinion. Understand that science is not addressing whatever Christians or Jews might think of as “fact” because it is in their holy scriptures. Both theologians and some scientists deceive their readers over this, and are to that extent as crooked as the politician who takes a bribe. The question is not whether science sets out to deny religious statements but whether what science teaches conflicts with what religion teaches.
Christians Deny any Conflict
The scientific method depends upon scepticism, unrestricted questioning and irreverence, while the church depends on belief, acceptance and respect for authority.
Belief cannot be said to be wrong in itself, but but to hold a belief or beliefs on no basis at all or on some basis other than truth or likelihood is morally wrong. Christianity urges people just to believe—to have faith. That is morally wrong. From this Christian preaching, millions have expunged proper elements of doubt from their minds in whole swathes of their life for fear of seeming weak before God, and have conditioned themselves through a form of Couéism into a way of life of dubious benefit to themselves, though it benefits others. The bible has no place for honest doubt—doubt is sinful, unbelieving minds having been blinded by the Devil (2 Cor 4:4). Christians teach belief because it suits the ruling powers of the world. To Believe is to Obey. Religion is about obedience.
Piaget looked into the cognitive development of children finding that children under five could not understand rules at all. From five to nine, children have the idea of rules and take them seriously when adults or older children lay them down, and they accept the rule that they will be punished for breaking a rule. They are however, not bothered about the reason for the rules. Over the age of ten, they come to realise that the rules are mutually agreed and can be questioned and changed. Canon Ronald Preston of Manchester, a university lecturer in Christian ethics, observed:
From this work of Piaget’s, Christian ethics is appropriate to the mental ages of five to nine, but it tends to fix the believer in an immature attitude, a reluctance to grow up and to pass from independence to freedom and maturity, and hence to responsibility.
John Elsom similarly charged that the moral authoritarianism of Christianity hampers the growth of moral awareness by encouraging stock moral reactions to particular circumstances, and prevents learning from experience. So the growth of personal morality is blocked and Christians are left unable to deal with unfamiliar moral dilemmas. The vast body of truth called “science”, mostly conflicts head on with religion because it was discovered by continual reference to experience.
Christians say there never was a conflict between religion and science, only skirmishes caused by misunderstanding. This is dishonest. What every Church said about geology and evolution was opposed to what science said.
Religious people who dismiss all this with the assurance that their grandparents were unfortunately mistaken as to what religion really implied, are also untruthful. The plain words of the introduction to the bible say clearly what they mean and those who would interpret them to suit science are desperately trying to refashion a sow’s ear into a silk purse. The early chapters of Genesis are accurately translated on the whole. Only when the authors mention “loins” and “thighs”, do the shocked Christian translators happily and without compunction change God’s original meaning. The bible writers, whoever they were, meant what they said, and the Jews have so understood them for twenty-five hundred years. Putting a new interpretation on their words “in the light of science” is not “interpreting” at all, it is re-writing. It is interpretation to mean precisely the opposite.
The modern stage is for liberal Christians to ignore “interpretation” and accept that the bible contains no revelation, or that there is no religious obligation to consider it in regard to science or history. Yet, if anyone thinks that they can escape conflict of science and religion in this way, they do not understand the basis of their Christianity. Is the biblical fall of man a truth of religion expressing a truthful statement about prehistoric life? Or is it a religious metaphor that can be ignored in the light of science? The former puts Christianity in conflict with science. Science opposes it. The latter—the Christian is not compelled to believe it—destroys the foundation of Christianity. If some Christians say they do not accept original sin and an atonement for it, then they cannot be Christian—it is the supposed reason why God had to appear as a man to be tortured for Adam’s sins in the Garden of Eden.
Liberal believers say God knows everything and takes a special interest in religion, truth, and Churches, yet they accept that the great religious institutions of the Jews and Christians taught a lot of nonsense. Humanity gets no help from Gods even in religious matters! They say religion changes and grows just like science, but the difference is that science grows more confident in its method, if not in its application by politicians and businessmen, while religion grows less confident because it is superstition, and, through education, people increasingly see that they can do without it. Science reaches unanimity because it has to match the reality of the world as we experience or observe it, while religion has lost unanimity about everything, even about God, because ultimately it is personal prejudice.
