The End of Christianity (36 page)

SCIENCE

Science requires the most vigorous and uncompromising skepticism, because the vast majority of ideas are simply wrong, and the only way to winnow the wheat from the chaff is by critical experiment and analysis.

—Carl Sagan

The second frequently unexamined component of the religion-science compatibility question is the “science.” Probably as much has been said and written about the nature of science as about the nature of religion, but seldom is an adequate sense of science brought to the discussion of the relationship between science and religion. Let us begin in much the same way as we began in the case of religion above: by noting the diversity and complexity of the term
science.
One of the first things to emphasize is that, while there are many different religions with wildly (and often incompatibly) different doctrines and beliefs from each other, there are not different “sciences.” There are, to be sure, multiple scientific specializations—physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, sociology, psychology, and so on—but these are not different, let alone competing or conflicting, “sciences.” Rather, they are “science” applied to various topics, and of course these topics will require different techniques (you do not use test tubes to study societies or minds), will develop different concepts (“mass” and “velocity” are relevant to physics but not to anthropology), and will produce different knowledge. But these disparate scientific specializations do not contradict each other in the ways that each religion contradicts all other religions.

Second, we should distinguish between “science” and “technology.” This is not a simple task, but it is a vital one, since virtually no one asks if religion and
technology
are compatible: even the most extreme fundamentalists still gladly use cell phones, satellite dishes, and the Internet—and certainly fire and the wheel—to do their religious business. While science and technology are most assuredly intimately related, they are not the same thing. There has been technology since the day when humans first bashed two rocks together to make a stone tool; this was long before anything we can call “science” existed. The distinction is sometimes expressed in terms of the ancient Greek concepts of
techne
and
episteme
, which give us the English words
technology
and
epistemology
, respectively.
Episteme
is generally construed as “knowledge,” especially “theoretical” or even “disinterested” knowledge—knowledge for the pure sake of knowledge;
techne
originally meant something closer to art, craftsmanship, or know-how. Scientific knowledge indisputably can lead to technological advancements (like cell phones) and also depends on technological advancements (like microscopes), but there is a real, if contested, difference between the two. Interestingly, while we cannot substitute “technology” for “science” in the question of religion versus science, and while most religionists take technology as much for granted as any atheist, there often are frictions between particular religions and particular technologies—say, Christianity and cloning technology or stem-cell technology.

Third, science is not the same thing as “experimentation” or any other specific method. An experiment is a particularly effective way of collecting a certain kind of information, but not all efforts at accurate and systematic knowledge can conduct experiments (they are highly difficult in astronomy and largely unethical in anthropology), but these fields are no less scientific for that reason. Experiments are, in a word, valuable but not essential components of science. Likewise, science should not be conflated with any particular set of instruments (like test tubes or Bunsen burners) or any particular theoretical stance (like quantum theory or string theory): Einstein rejected quantum theory but was not less of a scientist for it. But some “instruments” and “theories” are clearly not scientific (like dowsing rods and intelligent design)—and not actually instruments or theories at all.

Fourth (and finally, for the moment), science is not to be understood as any particular body of data or knowledge. Laypeople often think of science as “what we know today,” but the knowledge of the day is only the results and findings of science
so far.
Naturally, people who take this attitude often end up scoffing at science for changing its conclusions and refuting its previous claims. However, to be fair and accurate, the state of scientific knowledge at any moment is the consequence of the questions that have been asked and the facts that have been collected. Tomorrow's questions and data will lead to new claims and conclusions, often debunking earlier ones.

What, then, is the “science” in the religion-science controversy, and how does a proper understanding of science help us settle the issue? If I may be incredibly terse, I think the essence of science lies in two premises, just as the essence of religion lies in its “supernatural” premise. The crucial premises for science are
detectability
and
doubt
, and it is these that separate it from just any old explanatory system or manual procedure. Detectability means that science will only consider that which it, and we as scientists, can detect in some fashion, because it
can
only consider what we can detect in some fashion. The premise of detectability departs importantly from the oft-mentioned criteria of observability or of “naturalism” or “materialism.” Some critics of science try to use the notion of observability against it, as if science will only count what is available to the eyes or the senses in general; this is a trivial complaint, since there are many phenomena that are not available to the naked eye or the unenhanced senses, from microscopic life-forms to distant galaxies. But there must be some way in practice to detect a phenomenon, including indirect ways, like the trace or reaction that an invisible neutrino makes. Further—and this is decisive—we must be able to detect some evidence
convincingly as evidence of some phenomenon and not any other.
That is, people will often argue that recovering from an illness or winning the lottery or simply the beauty or the very existence of the universe is detectable evidence for their god, but although these things are detectable, they could (and almost certainly should) be interpreted as other than the actions of a god. In other words, if there is no compelling reason to take the detectable facts as evidence for some particular thing—especially when some other explanation works better—then we are not allowed to use it as evidence for that thing.

The matter of naturalism or materialism is more complicated, partly because it comes in two flavors—
methodological naturalism
and
philosophical
or
metaphysical naturalism.
According to the former, science has allegedly made a strategic choice to consider only natural/material processes; it has merely “left out”
supernatural
or immaterial entities. According to the latter, science asserts that nature or matter are the only actually existing things in the universe, thereby excluding the supernatural or the immaterial on principle. Eugenie Scott has gone so far as to insist that philosophical naturalism/materialism is not part of science itself, which is true but not in the way she thinks it is: science has neither made a strategic nor a philosophical decision to limit its inquiries to the natural/material realm. Rather, science is led to naturalism/materialism by its commitment to detectability, since the natural/material realm is so far
the only realm that is reliably detectable
, especially detectable as evidence for anything in particular. Finally, based on the commitment to detectability, there is no evidence that there is any realm other than the natural/material realm; any supernatural or immaterial reality is so far, in principle and in practice, undetectable, and therefore we have no scientific reason to claim that it even exists.

Thus, science is naturalistic and materialistic as a consequence of a more basic premise. This connects to the second premise of science; namely: doubt. René Descartes was one of the first thinkers to make this principle explicit: our senses are easily fooled, and we are subjected to a lot of patent nonsense from our past and present society and traditions. How can we be sure we are not in error? His solution (as a mental exercise) was radical and total doubt: let us doubt everything that is not imminently certain. Of course, he goes completely off the rails from that point, but the idea is that there are many claims on our attention, even on our credulity, and we must apply some stringent standards to determine which ones are worthy of further consideration. Scientists do not, and Descartes did not, doubt everything, but the truth of the matter is that science is
ready to doubt anything whatsoever
, including its own findings and theories at any given moment. Science thus raises a bar—and a fairly high bar—of factuality, of detectability, and of logical analysis before it admits any claim as “knowledge.”

These two most fundamental premises—detectability and doubt—lead inexorably to a number of other practices or commitments for science. These include

• Neutrality: Scientists must not let their—or anyone else's—preferences, personality, opinions, values, tastes, or traditions influence what they detect or how they analyze what they detect, nor what they will doubt or accept.

• Regularity: Scientists have reason to doubt that which is exceptional or statistically insignificant since they cannot interpret it as reliable evidence of anything in particular. Science instead looks for the regular, the patterned, the “lawful” (that is, that which can be described by “laws” or statements, ideally mathematical statements, of consistent relations and dependencies). A corollary of the commitment to regularity is the importance of reproducible results: if a phenomenon occurs under certain conditions, it should
always
occur under those conditions, and the findings of any scientist should be reproducible by other scientists.

• Equality: Consequently, no scientist has any special powers of discernment unavailable to other scientists. Some individuals may be more talented or skilled than others, but no one has unique insight into reality; there are no scientific “seers” or “prophets” or “oracles.” A corollary of equality is openness, the willingness and responsibility to share scientific findings with colleagues—including techniques and raw data—so that anyone may reproduce your methods and try to replicate your results and use those methods and results in their own work. There should be, in a word, no scientific “secrets.”

• Causation: Scientists search for explanations in the form of
causes
, a cause being the antecedent (prior in time) conditions that lead to or produce an effect. Experiments are useful for establishing cause-and-effect relationships; they ideally hold all variables constant except one so that changes in the manipulated variable ought to be the “cause” of any detected effect.

• Tentativeness: Scientists understand that their findings and theories are only as good as the knowledge they already hold and the techniques they employ. The claims of science are always provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. Science must be—and when it works well, it is—open to modification even of its most fundamental notions like the composition of matter or the nature of time. Indeed, science is inherently self-critical: scientists are
eager
to challenge established and inherited truths and are continuously testing and questioning received knowledge. The greatest thing—some like Karl Popper insist the only thing—that a scientist can do is
falsify
prevailing data and theories, including his/her own. Nothing is off-limits to science, no fact or claim or theory shielded from inspection and potential rejection.

COMPATIBILITY

That this scientific cosmology retires traditional ones with their six days of creation and the like goes without saying. Who can possibly question that when the scientific cosmology has landed people on the moon?

—Huston Smith

Despite what we have just said, or perhaps because what we have just said is not usually said clearly before, “debates” over religion and science begin. There are many differing and even contradictory positions on whether religion and science differ or contradict. Michael Shermer, for example, has identified three basic approaches or models of the religion-science relationship, which he dubs the
same worlds, separate worlds
, and
conflicting worlds
models. In the “same worlds” model, science and religion are seen as accomplishing pretty much the same goals, or at least asking pretty much the same questions; therefore, while they may disagree on details, they are essentially reconcilable. From the “separate worlds” perspective, religion and science are determined to be pursuing different goals and answering questions that either complement or ignore each other. And, predictably, if they occupy “conflicting worlds,” then they are locked in a struggle that only one can win, a competition for truth in which the success of one is the failure of the other; this is the so-called war between religion and science.
¹⁸

There are two curious things to note about this three-mode typology. First, there is no simple relationship between whether a person is a scientist or a religionist and any particular stance on the models: some scientists are adamant “conflicting worlds” advocates, while others support the same or separate worlds view, and this is equally true of religionists. Second, the three modes as proposed do not quite get the job done: religion and science might occupy the same world and yet clash profoundly. In fact, in a certain sense, they would only clash
if they occupied the same world.
So “conflict” is less a distinct model and more a subset of same-world residence, the other major subset being “harmony.” So the real division is between one model with two forms—
same world in conflict
and
same world in harmony
—and a second model,
separate worlds
, which, if Gould is correct, ought never come in conflict, because they never come in contact. But religion and science
do
come in contact, so the separate-worlds position is indefensible. And there
is
only one world in the end, so religion and science must inevitably share the one world, the real world. The only question is whether they can share it peacefully or whether there is unavoidable tension.