Science and Religion

As a convenient segue from Elizabeth Anderson’s article, we can notice that we often have strong negative emotional responses when we are given bad news.  All of us are emotionally dependent on certain empirical facts, for example facts about the welfare of ourselves and our loved ones.  Because religions serves as the basis for many people’s beliefs about their ultimate welfare (i.e., there salvation) we should anticipate a strong negative reaction with respect to evidence against this view.   The emotional evidence in this case is no different than our reaction to evidence that something bad has happened to a love one.

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and probably the most famous critic of organized religion in the world.  He pisses people off almost every time he opens his mouth.  So, before getting into his argument, let’s look at a short video where he is not pissing people off particularly.  It will help you to understand where he is really coming from.

Dawkins Video on bizarre universe.

The Science of Religion, the Religion of Science.

In this article Dawkins is first concerned with the question of providing a scientific account of the origin and function of religion.   You should note from the beginning, that he is not concerned here with evidence for or against the truth of any particular religious outlook.   Rather, he is interested in provide some kind of explanatory account for the power of religion.  He begins from the observation that religion is a universal phenomenon, quoting Steven Pinker:  

In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints, fairies, angels, demons, cherubim, djinns, devils and gods.

To Pinker’s observation, Dawkins adds:

Though the details differ across cultures, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking, fecundity-forfeiting rituals of religion.  All this presents a major puzzle to anyone who thinks in a Darwinian way…. Why do we pray and indulge in constly practices that, in many infividual case, more or less totally consume our lives.

Of course, the basic form of the expected answer to this question would be that, despite Dawkins’ assertions concerning the harm of religion, it actually does some overarching good. 

Many people have suggested that religious belief makes people happier in some way, though scientific studies of happiness have not shown this to be the case so far.  However, even if this were true, the real Darwinian question is (again quoting Pinker):

… why a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plainly see are false.  A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm’ a person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit.

Group Selection vs. Individual Selection

Explanations of religions have been given at various levels within evolutionary theory.  One kind of explanation that Dawkins thinks is seriously misguided is the idea that evolution selects for properties of groups of individuals rather than the individuals themselves.  So, he writes for example:

A tribe with a stirringly belligerent “god of battles” wins wars against a tribe whose god urges peach and harmony, or a tribe with no god at al.  Warriors who believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to paradise fight bravely and willingly give up their lives.  So tribes with certain kinds of religion are more likely to survive in intertribal selection…

This sort of explanation sounds very plausible, but the problem (for reasons having to do with the prisoner’s dilemma) is that group selection is generally not a plausible evolutionary model.  According to Dawkins there has to be some benefit at the individual level, not just the group.  Otherwise, individuals just begin to defect and the character of the group is changed from within.

To provide the framework for a proper evolutionary account of religion Darwin returns us to a now familiar framework.  Is it not possible that religion once provided a great deal of survival value for the individual, even if now it may not?  

He uses the very suggestive analogy of moths that kill themselves by buzzing around lights.  We ask how they could have evolved to do something so obviously contrary to fitness.  We forget that artificial lights are a comparatively recent and still quite rare phenomenon from a moth perspective.  The reason they do this is because moths and other insects navigate using light from the stars, but this depends on the light being very far away.  So, the answer is that this behavior is actually quite adaptive in areas that aren’t artificially illuminated.

The basic model that Dawkins proposes is actually very simple:  Child’s brains have evolved to believe whatever parents and tribal leaders tell them.  The reason for this is that the vast majority of times the advice protects them from harm, and the harms associated with human existence are simply too complex to be known innately. 

The framework Dawkins is proposing here is that the ideas adults (sometimes these are called memes) are passed on to their children in much the same way that genes are passed on.  The ideas stick, and are passed on to succeeding generations just to the extent that they help, or at least do not hinder, the reproductive fitness of the child.  Dawkins says:

If fear of death is common, the idea of immortality might survive as a mind virus better than the idea that death scruffs us out like a light.  Conversely, the idea of posthumous punishment for sins might survive, not because children like the idea but because adults find it a useful way to control them.  

The Religion of Science

Dawkins does not actually believe that science is a religion, but in this section of the paper he explores the possibility that science can actually satisfy, and satisfy better some of the things that religion has satisfied until now.   He quotes the late Carl Sagan, admiringly though not altogether approvingly:

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought!  The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant”?  Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god and and I want him to stay that way.”  A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.  Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

He then quotes a famous passage from Darwin, touching on the same sentiments.

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production fo the higher animals, directly follows.  There is grandeur in this view of life, which its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one, and that, whilst this planet had gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Dawkins goes on in the rest of this article to show the sense in which science inspires a certain kind of religious feeling, which was expressed well be Einstein:

To sense that behind anything that can be experience there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.  In this sense I am religious.

Science and Faith in the Search for Truth
by Pope John Paul II

In this interesting piece Pope John Paul II provide the essential view of Catholicism with respect to the relation between science and religion.  

Many people are inclined to suppose, for example, that evolutionary theory is in direct conflict with religion.  This is obvious if you take a literal interpretation of the creation story in Genesis, but a literal interpretation doesn’t make any sense at all.  For example, anyone who claims that they believe that God literally made the heaven and earth and everything in it in 6 days doesn’t understand what a day is.

The Pope’s view is presented in this quote:

For there can be no fundamental conflict between a reason which, in conformity with its own nature which comes from God, is geared to truth and is qualified to know truth, and a faith, which refers to the same divine source of all truth. Faith confirms, in fact, the specific rights of natural reason.

What does this mean?  It means that there are basically two ways of knowing:  faith and reason.  God has given them both, and to whatever extent there appears to be a conflict between them, this is illusory.  

This was also the view of Immanuel Kant.  To return to an example discussed by both the Pope and Kant: We seem to know on the basis of faith than humans have free will.  We seem to know on the basis of science that they do not.  This is an apparent contradiction, but this does not mean that we must dispose of either faith or reason.  Rather, it means that we are dealing with the current limits of our minds.  Our goal must be to show how both the deliverances of science and the deliverances of faith are in harmony. 

In this paper the Pope expresses profound regret for the way in which the church has seen fit to interfere with scientific inquiry in the past, and acknowledge that it is due to scientific inquiry that faith has been “freed from the conditionings of time”.

That said, the Pope is very concerned about the pursuit of technology for its own sake.  Science, he claims, must not become simply the servant of an unquestioned commitment to technological achievement.  He says:

Science alone is not capable of answering the question of meanings, in fact it cannot even set it in the framework of its starting point. And yet this question of meanings cannot tolerate indefinite postponement of its answer. If widespread confidence in science is disappointed, then the state of mind easily changes into hostility to science. In this space that has remained empty, ideologies suddenly break in. They sometimes behave as if they were "scientific" but they owe their power of persuasion to the urgent need for an answer to the question of meanings and to interest in social and political change. Science that is purely functional, without values and alienated from truth, can enter the service of these ideologies; a reason that is only instrumental runs the risk of losing its freedom. Finally there are new manifestations of superstition, sectarianism, and the so- called "new religions," whose appearance is closely connected with the crisis of orientation of culture.

Pope John Paul uses the distinction between science and technology in order to affirm the importance of unfettered scientific inquiry, while requiring that any particular application of science be subject to questions that are not themselves of a scientific nature; i.e., Will the use of this technology actually benefit man in his search for meaning and the good life?

If we wanted to criticize the Pope here it would be easy enough to do so on the basis of previous considerations. 

For example, science provides quite a bit of evidence that current Catholic practices (e.g., the prohibition of contraception, prohibition of women as priests, celibacy as an inducement to pederasty, etc.) are harmful to society but this is not acknowledged within Catholicism, at least so far.

Nonoverlapping Magisteria 
by Stephen Jay Gould

In this essay Gould attempts to demonstrate that there is no real conflict between science, specifically evolutionary theory, and religion.  He recounts a couple of personal stories relating to this idea, one a conversation with a Harvard student who said:

"I am a devout Christian and have never had any reason to doubt evolution, an idea that seems both exciting and particularly well documented. But my roommate, a proselytizing Evangelical, has been insisting with enormous vigor that I cannot be both a real Christian and an evolutionist. So tell me, can a person believe both in God and evolution?" Again, I gulped hard, did my intellectual duty, and reassured him that evolution was both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief—a position I hold sincerely, but still an odd situation for a Jewish agnostic.
Gould’s view conflicts with the view of two groups.
(1)  Scientifically minded people who think that science somehow disproves the basic tenets of religion.
(2) Religious people who reject evolution, claiming that the Biblical story of creation is literally true.  Specifically, “scientific creationists” claim that the empirical evidence actually favors the creation story of the Bible rather than evolution.

Against creationism, Gould claims that:
Creationism does not raise any unsettled intellectual issues about the nature of biology or the history of life. Creationism is a local and parochial movement, powerful only in the United States among Western nations, and prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that choose to read the Bible as an inerrant document, literally true in every jot and tittle.

In this, you should note that Stephen Jay Gould and Pope John Paul II are basically in agreement.  In fact, Gould goes on to point out how amuzing it is that the Pope’s support of evolution is able to make headlines in the New York Times  (October 25, 1996)

"Pope Bolsters Church's Support for Scientific View of Evolution."
for  “The Catholic Church had never opposed evolution and had no reason to do so.”
Gould notes, for example, Pope Piux XII  pronouncement that “Catholics could believe whatever science determined about the evolution of the human body, so long as they accepted that, at some time of his choosing, God had infused the soul into such a creature.”
Gould articulates NOMA (nonoverlapping magisteria) as both his own view and the view of the Catholic Church.  The basic idea is just that religion and science have their own areas of teaching authority, and they basically are logically independent.  Gould says:
The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch cliches, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.
Well, if you are starting to process some of our early discussions, you can see that this is not an unproblematic point of view.  Specifically, we have already had reason to question the claim that morality and science are distinct.  That view, as Rachels and Singer remind us, leads to both a questionable form of relativism as well as a questionable view about the validity of moral judgments.
But Gould acknowledge that there are some serious problems.  For example, Christianity is committed to the doctrine of Original Sin as an explanation of why human beings have certain properties, for example why there is pain and suffering in the world.  Apparently, he, like others, are committed to a much more literal story of Genesis that Gould thinks they should be.  
So, it’s important to realize that if NOMA is correct, then there is a very hard line being drawn.  Specifically:

•	The Bible (or whatever) is not an acceptable basis for answering ANY empirical questions.
•	Science is not an acceptable basis for answering ANY moral or spiritual questions.
The problems become particularly intense when we aren’t really sure whether a question is empirical or spiritual.  For example, consider the question:  When does the soul enter the body?  Now, if the soul is defined as an immaterial object, then this is certainly not an empirical question.  But, then, what on earth does it mean for a soul to “enter the body”.  This sounds like a highly empirical relationship.
To emphasize the power of NOMA, John Paul poses a potential problem and a sound resolution: How can we reconcile science's claim for physical continuity in human evolution with Catholicism's insistence that the soul must enter at a moment of divine infusion.  Pope John Paul addressed the problem as follows:
With man, then, we find ourselves in the presence of an ontological difference, an ontological leap, one could say However, does not the posing of such ontological discontinuity run counter to that physical continuity which seems to be the main thread of research into evolution in the field of physics and chemistry? Consideration of the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seem irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation.
Gould thinks this is entirely correct, but you may notice that he does not, as a scientist, seem very concerned to scrutinize religious method.   What is it?  How does it work?  Do these magisterial correspond to completely different standards of rationality?  
This is why some have criticized Gould for intellectual dishonesty.  Gould realizes the religion is very important to many people, and he has no desire to denigrate it because this leads them to be hostile to science, and evolution in particular.  One can agree that these are unfortunate results, however, while rejecting the NOMA thesis.

When Religion Steps on Science’s Turf
by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins is one of those scientists who have little respect for NOMA.  Here he accuses Gould of a “cowardly flabbiness of the intellect” and is truly disgusted with Gould’s clam that 
"Science and religion are not in conflict, for their teachings occupy distinctly different domains ... I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat [my emphasis] ...." 

First, Dawkins denies that religion has any expertise in moral question, though he interestingly does not put it in the realm of science.  And the argument he makes actually goes back to Plato.  He says:

Unfortunately, the hope that religion might provide a bedrock, from which our otherwise sand-based morals can be derived, is a forlorn one. In practice, no civilized person uses Scripture as ultimate authority for moral reasoning. Instead, we pick and choose the nice bits of Scripture (like the Sermon on the Mount) and blithely ignore the nasty bits (like the obligation to stone adulteresses, execute apostates, and punish the grandchildren of offenders). The God of the Old Testament himself, with his pitilessly vengeful jealousy, his racism, sexism, and terrifying bloodlust, will not be adopted as a literal role model by anybody you or I would wish to know. Yes, of course it is unfair to judge the customs of an earlier era by the enlightened standards of our own. But that is precisely my point! Evidently, we have some alternative source of ultimate moral conviction that overrides Scripture when it suits us. 

Dawkins then goes on to brace a kind of consensus-based relativism.
That alternative source seems to be some kind of liberal consensus of decency and natural justice that changes over historical time, frequently under the influence of secular reformists. Admittedly, that doesn't sound like bedrock. But in practice we, including the religious among us, give it higher priority than Scripture. In practice we more or less ignore Scripture, quoting it when it supports our liberal consensus, quietly forgetting it when it doesn't. 
If you would like, at this point, to claim that Dawkins is showing a certain “flabbiness of intellect” you could do it here.  How?
The real problem that Dawkins wants to point out is that of reconciling scientific evidence with "revelation." 
Revelation teaches us that [man] was created in the image and likeness of God. ... if the human body takes its origin from pre-existent living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God ... Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter are incompatible with the truth about man. 
Dawkins point here is that NOMA essentially sanctions mind/body dualism, and therefore is essentially at odds with the claim that the mind is just the activity of a material object, the brain.  To accept NOMA is to accept that the workings of the mind are permanently beyond the understanding of science.
Beyond that, Dawkins is  concerned to point out that Gould seriously exaggerates the extent to which practicing Catholics practice NOMA.  He writes
The Virgin Birth, the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Resurrection of Jesus, the survival of our own souls after death: these are all claims of a clearly scientific nature. Either Jesus had a corporeal father or he didn't. This is not a question of "values" or "morals"; it is a question of sober fact. We may not have the evidence to answer it, but it is a scientific question, nevertheless. You may be sure that, if any evidence supporting the claim were discovered, the Vatican would not be reticent in promoting it. 
Dawkins video on God Delusion

Progress in Religion
by Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson is a physicist who describes himself as a Christian, however he begins this talk by saying that 
I am content to be one of the multitudes of Christians who do not care much about the doctrine of the Trinity or the historical truth of the gospels. Both as a scientist and as a religious person, I am accustomed to living with uncertainty. 
Dyson does not specifically address NOMA, but late in this article he repeats Gould’s view that both are worthy of respect.   Against Dawkins he clearly believes that the mind is something bigger than the human brain.  Specifically, he believes that 
The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. 
•	Elementary physical processes, as seen in the laboratory. 
•	Direct human experience of our own consciousness. 
•	The universe as a whole. 
The basic idea here is an old one, namely that the world is rationally ordered in a way that seems to require the existence of a rational mind to explain.  So, for Dyson, the word “God” is just a reference to the mental aspect of the universe that seems to be beyond our comprehension.
It is not entirely clear why Dyson calls himself a Christian.  Presumably it is because he embraces some of the basic moral teachings of Christ. He thinks that religion has progressed a great deal in practice in the sense, for example, that “we no longer burn heretics”.  This simply means that institutionalized Christianity, which atheists and agnostics love to criticize, is actually much more in accordance today with the teachings of Christ’s than it has been in past years. 
Dyson is particularly concerned that this progress may start to become undermined by recent technological and economic developments, specifically that which is developing around the human genome.  He notes:
In the time of Jesus and for many centuries afterwards, there was a free market in human bodies. The institution of slavery was based on the legal right of slave-owners to buy and sell their property in a free market. Only in the nineteenth century did the abolitionist movement, with Quakers and other religious believers in the lead, succeed in establishing the principle that the free market does not extend to human bodies. The human body is God's temple and not a commercial commodity. And now in the twenty-first century, for the sake of equity and human brotherhood, we must maintain the principle that the free market does not extend to human genes. Let us hope that we can reach a consensus on this question without fighting another civil war. Scientists and religious believers and physicians and lawyers must come together with mutual respect, to achieve a consensus and to decide where the line at the door of the temple should be drawn. 
Although he does not develop a clear argument for his position, Dyson clearly believes that science does not itself provide the basis for understanding either the sanctity of life, or for providing an understanding of why human beings and their souls (for Dyson, the soul is the genome) should not be treated in the same way as other material object.