Science and Religion
Jason Kuznicki on May 15th 2006
What would Positive Liberty be without the occasional rip-roaring good argument? My two bits on the latest below the fold.
there are basically two camps within the pro-science community: those who believe that evolution indicates a universe without a designer (Dawkins, Dennett, myself, et cetera—we’ll call these the incompatibilists) and those who think that one can have religion and evolution, too (Eugenie Scott, Ed Brayton, and others—we’ll call them the compatibilists).
The compatibilist attempt to avoid discussing the conflict between science and religion is not a pure intellectual position. It is a PR ploy—an attempt to avoid offending people who don’t know evolution well enough to have a position on it, but who have been frightened about it by the propaganda of religious authorities. If this were a serious intellectual dispute between compatibilists and incompatiblists about the relationship between religion and science, we would see an open and honest discussion about it. Instead, what we see is an attempt by one side—the compatibilists—to persuade everyone else to keep quiet about the potential conflicts, lest we frighten students away. And that is simply not honest intellectual disagreement.
I don’t care for the terms “compatibilist” and “incompatibilist” here, as they also refer to another philosophical question, namely the compatibility between free will and determinism. Confusingly, Daniel Dennett has examined both issues in depth.
Stephen Jay Gould’s “non-overlapping magesteria” (NOMA) is clunkier, but it will have to do, and in the rest of this post I will be discussing NOMA (the compatibilist position) and its detractors. Here is how Gould described what he viewed as the separate domains of science and religion:
We may, I think, adopt this word [magisterium, a domain of instruction] and concept to express the central point of this essay and the principled resolution of supposed “conflict” or “warfare” between science and religion. No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as NOMA, or “nonoverlapping magisteria”).
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.
Yet this is — uncomfortably — false. A look at the history of religion, and at certain contemporary religions in particular, will show quite clearly that much of the religious edifice is founded on empirically testable claims, and that evolution has deeply undermined at least one of these foundations.
For centuries, one of the most compelling proofs of God lay in the argument from design: Not only was there something in the universe rather than nothing (a strange phenomenon all by itself, to certain mindsets!), but moreover, that something had remarkable properties of order to it. Everywhere that one found living creatures, they seemed to have structures, and functions, and goals, successes and failures, pre-arranged relationships with one another, and natural tendencies or inclinations. There was something, rather than nothing — and order, rather than chaos.
The whole of living creation worked together so well that it called out for an explanation, and religion delivered: God created this order, said religious thinkers. Notably, Islam still favors this argument today, as does Christian creationism. God’s role as the creator of biological diversity was thus an empirical claim like any other.
Now, some may argue that because the claim “God created the diversity of species” is not a claim of morals or values, it is not, properly speaking, a religious claim. It may be discarded, then, without doing violence to religion. The magisteria don’t overlap, and faith has been saved from the evil clutches of Darwin. From start to finish, this is nonsense. Let me explain why.
First, it smacks of no-true-Scotsmanism, in which a definition is silently adjusted after the fact to make an argument seem true under radically changing circumstances. Compare the following:
Argument: “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
Reply: “But my uncle Angus likes sugar with his porridge.”
Rebuttal: “Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
and
Argument: “No religion opines on matters outside morals or ethics.”
Reply: “But Christianity opines on the origin of species.”
And the rebuttal is predictable enough. Insofar as Christianity opines on the origin of species, it is not acting as a true religion.
Now here’s where I may prove to be a moderate. Evolution indicates merely that no specific act of design went into the creation of life — while saying nothing in particular about whether the overall universe was designed at its creation. To say “evolution proves that there is no God” is a ridiculous overreach, a greedy reductionism, as Daniel Dennett might put it. Evolution only indicates that, if a Creator exists, then that Creator does not seem to have done anything different or special during the process of speciation.
Even accepting these constraints, does a Creator still exist? This, too, may be approached as an empirical question, but it is a far more difficult one to answer, owing to the scant evidence from the early universe and the doubtful nature of the theories surrounding it. (One may also approach this question from an non-empirical standpoint, and postulate that a Creator exists outside of all time and space, ontologically superior and requiring no evidence. At this point the claim ceases to be scientific — or even particularly interesting.)
The loss of the argument from speciation is a significant but sharply delineated loss for religion: Theists have many other arguments for God’s existence that do not rely on the proof from diversity of species; they may also continue to practice their morals and to have their introspective religious experiences. (That someone would find these threatened by a scientific theory may only indicate how fragile they were to begin with.)
Yet all the same, they’ve been deprived of something quite real, something that was, until recently, an integral part of the western religious synthesis. It is untenable to deny this as a loss for religion, or to suggest that it was never a “real” loss to begin with.
Distressingly for some, most of the remaining arguments for the existence of God are of a very different character. To begin with, there is the cosmological argument. Admittedly, the cosmological argument strikes me as a difficult hodgepodge (It was also the subject of an earlier Positive Liberty bull session). I don’t care to get back into that one, but suffice it to say that the cosmological argument isn’t founded on empirical observation; it relies far too heavily on metaphysical assumptions which may themselves be untrue, inconsistent, or both. Science has relatively little to say about it, and some may even argue that no evidence can be found to support it.
And then there is fideism, the idea that faith, not reason, should underpin all religious belief, and that reason may even be antithetical to faith:
Alvin Plantinga defines “fideism” as “the exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason and utilized especially in the pursuit of philosophical or religious truth.” The fideist therefore “urges reliance on faith rather than reason, in matters philosophical and religious,” and therefore may go on to disparage the claims of reason. The fideist seeks truth, above all[] and affirms that reason cannot achieve certain kinds of truth, which must instead be accepted only by faith. Plantinga’s definition might be revised to say that what the fideist objects to is… evidentialism: the notion that no belief should be held unless it is supported by evidence.
The fideist notes that religions that are founded on revelation call their faithful to believe in a transcendent deity even if believers cannot fully understand the object of their faith. Some fideists also observe that human rational faculties are themselves untrustworthy, because the entire human nature has been corrupted by sin, and as such the conclusions reached by human reason are therefore untrustworthy: the truths affirmed by divine revelation must be believed even if they find no support in human reason. Fideism, of a sort which has been called naive fideism, is one frequently found response to anti-religious arguments; the fideist resolves to hold to what has been revealed as true in his faith, in the face of contrary lines of reasoning.
A number of religions embrace this approach to God’s existence (eg, Mormonism, which lately has good reason to do so). Many religions, though, do not accept fideism. To me, it seems that Gould’s NOMA would define all religious claims as fideist claims, and that this is both empirically false and entirely naive.
Fideism also suffers in that it relies on special pleading to distinguish the one true religion among the multitude of false ones: If all religious systems are based on personal faith alone, then there is no a priori reason to pick Islam over Hinduism, or Christianity over Shintoism. If all are equally justified by fideism, then I just as well might invent the religion that I would find most agreeable — and resolve to have steadfast faith in it, all reasons to the contrary notwithstanding.
At this point, the religious believer may be tempted to make a point about the relative moral excellence of his own religion. If he did so, I would only ask him to look over his shoulder at the vast ground that has been conceded behind him, and to suggest that the argument has already been conceded: Why, then, all the fuss about evolution?
Filed in The Belfry, The Biosphere
much of the religious edifice is founded on empirically testable claims, and … evolution has deeply undermined at least one of these foundations
An interesting post, Jason. I’d be curious to see you spell out what you mean, though, when you say that “the religious edifice is founded” on a particular claim. Which claims count as foundational (such that their weakening undermines the edifice itself) and which count merely as superstructural claims that can be discarded without weakening the base?
The reason I ask is because, like Brandon over at Siris, I’m not convinced that a quick look at the history of Christianity reveals that God’s role in speciation has been foundational to the entire edifice (particularly since the idea of speciation itself is a relatively recent one). To be sure, the existence of a Creator god is foundational (although for some theologians including the author(s) of the gospel of John, even the role of God in creation arguably follows from certain claims about the divinity of Christ, rather than vice versa). But specific, empirically testable claims about how life came to be or about how it came to be so diverse seem to me to be ancillary to the foundational claims of much Christian thought.
That’s not to say such claims about the provenance of life have not been made. In the same way, some evolutionary psychologists have made what strike me as spurious and tendentious ethical claims. But I don’t think disagreeing with those ethical claims undermines evolutionary theory, because I don’t see evolutionary psychology as foundational to the edificie of evolutionary theory. Your post suggests that you think the relationship between some Christians’ claims about the origins of life and the “larger edifice” of Christianity are categorically different from the relationship between, say, some biologists’ claims about the origins of ethics and the “larger edifice” of evolutionary biology. Why?
One side of me: Yawn. Who can still call himself a Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist anyway? No rational person, certainly. What Jason says is true and should be accepted by everyone, right? Isn’t he knocking down a straw man at this point? Science is, by definition, incompatible with a belief structure founded on Bronze-age scriptures. They make dozens of claims about the world which have been falsified by science, and point to dozens of instances which science has shown impossible. Where claims made in the major religious texts are consistent which scientific theories only happen to be so by chance! No one subscribes to such nonsense. Questions of God are metaphysical questions outside the reach of science. Science does have legitimate limitations; one need look no further than Godel to see that. Why do strong atheists spend so much time stating the obvious while seemingly ignoring or not caring about the legitimate limits of science?
Another side of me: Well of course you consider it a straw man: you hold to the scientific method. Unfortunately, millions of people do not. All along, where you have differed with Jason and other strong atheists is that he has seemed to think that science and reason is sufficient to answer all questions, while you have held to the view that science has certain limitations. It is true that science has limits, but most strong atheists aren’t interested in questions outside the realm of science, while you are. Since you are working in science, you take it completely for granted: Jason, on the other hand, works in the world of history. History is full of numbskulls who committed all kinds of monstrous folly in the name of religion. You may have some interest in the questions outside the possibility of empirical examination, but people who spend most of their time recording the consequences of irrationality have little patience for questions outside the structure of reason. So cheer the atheists on, and know that your deism is a far removal from ordinary religion.
Caleb –
I have several reasons to think that the Genesis account of speciation is foundational to Christianity. I may be wrong in many particular instances (after all, there is no single “Christianity” to discuss), but I think that quite often the following points hold true:
1. The centrality of the Genesis story in the Christian narrative: Because Christians place such great weight on Original Sin (as opposed to Jews, who reject the concept), the first chapters of Genesis are far more important to Christians. They are the beginning of the Christian story, without which the Resurrection is merely a clever stunt. Undermining the Genesis account does more to problematize Christianity than it does to problematize Judaism — or even Islam, wherein the details of how God created the world are quite vague, and wherein the idea of Original Sin is also absent. (Interestingly, while Islam may often seem to us the most backward of the three big monotheisms, its simplified creation story, embrace of free will, and lack of Original Sin may in time make it the most tolerant and cosmopolitan of the three, something like liberal Judaism. We can only hope.)
2. The notion that humans are special to God, which is tied directly to the idea of a special creation of species: If we have been created through a natural process of trial and error that is by no means finished (and never will be!), then it is much less clear how we are also created in God’s image, which Christianity assures us: Without a special creation, we are not literally, physically made to look like God.
Catholics and others get around this difficulty by arguing that the faithful need only believe that at some special moment in natural history, God infused souls into mankind, and that this was the point at which we began to be made in God’s image. Not all Christian faiths have reached this conclusion, however.
(An interesting religious idea, albeit one not yet believed to my knowledge, would have us made in God’s image because God actually is an ongoing evolutionary process. God is a spontaneous order, and we, who are made in his image, are both pieces within a spontaneous order — evolution — and creators of spontaneous orders — societies, markets, the Internet — that is to say, creators of spontaneous orders just like he is. It’s a way out of this objection, but I don’t think it’s one that any Christian faith embraces.)
3. The history of heresy. As the article from the Catholic Encyclopedia states, fideism is considered heretical. Many branches of Christianity have already doctrinally rejected substantial alternatives to the special creation of species, and this leaves them in a difficult spot when that special creation is threatened.
Chuck –
I am often accused of living in the eighteenth century. I also plead guilty, every single time.
I’m a sincere NOMA-ist, as Jason would phrase it, or compatibilist as Timothy would put it. I object to Timothy’s claim that compatibilism is just a PR ploy. It’s true that the argument that “we should refrain from making claims of incompatibilism in order to avoid offending some religious believers” is a very bad argument for the validity of compatibilism as a belief. But it wouldn’t be the first invalid argument that’s been made for a perfectly good position. The fact that someone made a bad argument for it doesn’t mean compatibilism must be wrong, and it certainly doesn’t mean that anyone who claims to be a compatibilist is an insincere person motivated by PR concerns.
I believe in God because of personal, internal experiences I’ve had. My beliefs about God aren’t threatened by evolution or any other piece of scientific knowledge, because I believe in a transcendent God who may not have chosen to put scientific evidence of himself in the physical universe. Maybe God just wants us to experience him in a subjective, internal way.
Incompatibilism seems to often be accompanied by pompous-sounding (to me, at least), vague statements like, “Who can still call himself a Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist anyway? No rational person, certainly.” Whatever that is, it’s not a rational argument. And maybe I’ve missed something important, but I’ve never seen a valid rational argument that proves that all belief in God is incompatible with reason — in other words, a real disproof of God’s existence.
Certainly it’s possible to disprove various empirical claims made about God in various scriptures. But some of us sincerely believe in a God whose existence is probably impossible to disprove. That probably makes me a “cafeteria Muslim,” but I still call myself a Muslim. I may be in a small minority within Islam in that regard, but it seems to me that there are a hell of a lot of cafeteria Christians around whose beliefs about God have a lot in common with mine.
In any case, I think it’s just obnoxious when people like Sandefur, who are in no position to know, continue to impugn the sincerity of all compatibilists / NOMA-ists.
Tom,
Excuse my pomposity. However, I would rather say that the onus is on those who believe the truth claims of Bronze-age mystical screeds to present “rational arguments” in their defense. Besides which, had you actually read my comment, you would see that I am a compatibilist, of the Ed Brayton variety. I would say that to believe what has been falsified by experiment is self-blindness, but on things which no experiment or observation or logical deduction from empirical data can ever speak to, believe what your reason and conscience dictate. It is fine to believe in God, in my view. It does not follow that all religions are compatible with the findings of modern science.
[...] Thanks to Kuznicki for his mention of Gould’s “non-overlapping magesteria” theory. I’ve always thought this was a fine example of big, fine-sounding words covering up sheer nonsense. Of course the “magesteria” of religion and science overlap, and not just in the area of naturalistic claims about the phenomena of the universe. They overlap in the realm of epistemology, too. That is, science and religion as ways of knowing compete with each other—i.e., they overlap. Either you believe that things must be established as true based on reason and logical extrapolation from observed phenomena, or you think it’s okay to believe in things on the basis of no reason at all. Of course, as Eugenie Scott says, there are lots of people who profess both epistemological positions. But these people are simply bigamists of the intellect. [...]
Sandefur’s reply to this post brushes off the vast majority of people he calls compatibilists who believe in the application of reason in certain circumstances and faith in others as “simply bigamists of the intellect”; nothing more than a simple rephrasing of their position using unattractive terms.
Jason,
Actually, there is a school of theology — promulgated by so-called process theologians — that holds God to be mutable, and there are other groups of theologians who have called into question classical attributes of God, like his impassibility. You’re right, though, that these views are minority opinions within the world’s vast, variegated population of Christians.
I’m still confused about what you mean when you say a particular Christian belief is foundational. That it is historically prior to other beliefs? That it is “central to the Christian narrative,” that is, theologically foundational? That it is logically necessary as a warrant for other Christian beliefs? Because I’m confused by what you mean by foundational, I’m confused by what you mean when you claim that evolution has “weakened” a foundational belief. Do you mean that, historically speaking, Darwinian evolution has made Christians uncomfortable? (Okay, I’ll grant you that one.) That, logically or epistemologically, speaking, it has undercut warrants for other Christian beliefs? (Not as sure about that.) That pivotal theological concepts like original sin or the imago Dei are jeopardized by evolution? (Disagree entirely.) These are obviously very different lines of argument, and I’m trying to be clear about which one you are making.
As for the theological questions here: I’m still not sure of the evidence on which you base your claim that the first chapters of Genesis have been central to the “Christian narrative,” at least not if you mean “Christian narrative” to refer to the New Testament writings or the major credal statements. The idea of God as “maker of heaven and earth” is certainly stressed, but the significant doctrinal point seems to be that God’s act of creation was purposive, comprehensive (encompassing “all that is,” as one creed puts it), and ex nihilo. The stress in the creeds and the New Testament documents is emphatically not on the origins of species. I think, although I’m willing to be corrected, that you can count on one hand the number of times New Testament writers quote from the first chapters of Genesis, and even those times the quotation is usually invoked to make an ancillary point, not a “central” one.
The Christian narrative does insist on God’s creative role in bringing the universe and everything in it into existence, and it insists on a corollary distinction between the Creator and the creation (which is one reason why process theologians, who are often panentheists, are widely seen as heterodox), but it’s simply not true that the six-day account of creation is theologically or historically central to the Christian narrative. Although you argue that Christians have felt forced by the doctrines of Original Sin and the imago Dei to cling to the Genesis account of speciation, I’m curious to know what theologians or early Christian writers you are referring to. And if anything, I’m willing to bet that your speculation about the relative importance of Genesis to Jews and Christians is exactly the reverse: in rabbinic literature, the first chapters are extraordinarily important, not least because of the centrality of the Sabbath.
It is true that some of the patristics offered extended commentaries on the first chapters of Genesis, as did Augustine. But their priorities in these commentaries might startle you: very often they (following rabbinic interpretations) used the six-day sequence allegorically to make theological points having (seemingly) nothing to do with creation itself. Very often, the most important point they wanted to make was that God formed the universe in the beginning out of the formless void, in order to refute early heresies that pictured God as a kind of demiurge who simply manipulated some preexistent lump of Play-Doh into the form of matter.
That kind of cosmology was more threatening to them than accounts of biological change that diverged from the six-day sequence. In fact, Robert Louis Wilken argues in a recent book that “as understood by the church fathers Genesis describes the coming into being of a living system that has within itself the capacity for growth and development. God not only formed man out of the dust of the earth, says Augustine, but also ‘provides for the oridinary development of new creatures in appropriate periods of time.’” Augustine was no Darwinian to be sure, but statements like that make it hard to believe that evolutionary ideas would have brought the entire edifice of his theology crashing down around him. In fact, Wilken also argues that the church fathers recognized the problems with a sequential creation and a literal interpretation of Genesis; they saw the sequential narrative of the early chapters as a way of communicating the ecological interdependence of all created things, rather than as a way of conveying the actual course of events.
I have a feeling I’m going on a bit too long. But I wanted at least to register my dissent. I can’t imagine a single theologian in the history of Christianity, for instance, who would concede that without God’s special creation of species, the notion that humans are special to God would be severely undercut or endangered. Very few of the early Christian writers would even have started with the special creation of species to prove such a notion: they would most likely point you to stories about the cross and resurrection (now there are some things “central to the Christian narrative”). They may have gone on to infer from the “specialness” of human beings certain interpretations of the creation story, but they probably would have seen as a conclusion or implication what you are claiming to be their premise.
Sorry if I’ve hijacked the comments section (again). My defense is just that I find this stuff very interesting and I enjoy discussing them with you. Quit writing such interesting posts and I’ll stop writing such long-winded comments!
For what it’s worth, I would say that Caleb makes some good points. Christianity does have certain doctrines that appear reasonable from a scientific standpoint - it denies the “ghost-in-the-machine” variety of dualism, preaching eschatological resurrection as the route to the afterlife. If anything, evolutionary biology confirms the concept of original sin. However, while it may be a matter of taste to say so, these are just a few examples of a major religion happening to get something right. In the most central tenet of Christianity - the resurrection of Christ - the religion is founded on a most tricky proposition, from a scientific standpoint.
“If anything, evolutionary biology confirms the concept of original sin.”
What? You mean evolutionary biology teaches that because my ancestors sinned, I too am a sinner? That’s not evolutionary biology, that’s Lamarck and his giraffes.
Caleb –
I’ll reply to you in detail later.
Jason - point well taken. Still, the notion that we are ill suited for civilized life as a result of our heritage seems to be a truth from evolutionary biology that the authors of the doctrine of original sin may have anticipated. My whole point, though, is that while there are examples of religions stumbling on some concept that was later confirmed or at least not refuted by science, such correlations have happened only by chance.
Chuck — please excuse me for calling you pompous. I was just trying to use your words as an example of a dismissive attitude that a lot of people seem to express, not to say anything personal about you. I see that you were just expressing “one side” with those words. Anyhow…
Sandefur’s “bigamists of the intellect” thing is a bit insulting. As though my using something other than the scientific method to understand my internal spiritual experiences makes me somehow unfaithful and deceitful, like a bigamist. As though the scientific method is like a wife, and there’s something morally objectionable about ever being “unfaithful” to her/it.
To continue the metaphor, in what I think is a more benign direction: The scientific method is a good friend of mine. I talk about a lot of stuff with her/it. But there are some experiences I have whose meaning remains uncertain even after a long conversation with the scientific method. So I go talk to my other friends, like intuition and revelation, and sometimes they have things to say that I find valuable and interesting. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like or respect or understand the scientific method. I just don’t give her/it the last word about absolutely everything in my life.
Sandefur says that makes me a bigamist. I say it merely suggests that I’m capable of thinking from multiple perspectives.
[...] For example, in Jason Kuznicki’s prior essay he takes to task the Genesis creation account. He, it seems, feels that evolution and the science behind it means a “retreat” for religion specifically those religions based on Gensis, I’d imagine. Only, if you are of a paritcular subset of interpretation of that. As Karl Barth famously said, “I don’t care if the serpent spoke, what’s I’m interested in is what he said”. The Genesis 1 creation account is a recasting of (then) current/state-of-the-art Babylonian creation science to make a number of theological points, e.g., God is the Creator, God is not in or of Nature (for example not “the sun”), and there is a moral/ethical dstinction/heirarchy of those things within creation, and finally that creation is “good” (what that entails is way beyond the scope of this little essay). The point is that it would be a fairly straightforward exercise to recast a Darwinian/Inflationary cosmological/evolutionary telling of the “story” that science tells today as a morality tale which when read closely could tell the same underlying philosophical/theological points that the author of Genesis 1 was trying to teach and in doing so no science would be affronted … today. There are two reasons not to engage in this exercise. First, three millenia hence the science today will be as likely just as outdated and obviously flawed as our perception of “days” of creation are today. Secondly, the straightforwardness of this exercise is a little exaggerated. The author of Gensis was no shallow thinker, there are depths to plumb in those scant poetic verses. Writing works like that are inspired, and you make take that literally (inspired = Spirit filled) or not as your particular belief system requires, but genius should be given its due. To rewrite modern cosmology and evolution would require someone versed in science and particulary gifted at theological and philosophical writing (and a touch of the poet). That writer in this age of specialization is going to be a rare bird indeed. The salient point I’m trying to make here is that Genesis as originally written was not a fact claim on how God created the Universe, but that God created the universe and a moral tale about how it is ordered. There has been no “retreat” before an “advance” of science at least in this regard from a evolution of ideas point of view. [...]
[...] This is a serious blow to the credibility of the Bible as a perfect or fully complete truth. One may resolve this difficulty in a number of ways. The Catholic approach, for instance, is that Genesis teaches perfect spiritual truths while not being literal science. Yet while evolution isn’t necessarily fatal to all forms of God-belief, it does do some harm to some of the claims of some religions. The non-overlapping magisteria hypothesis is appealing, but not terribly accurate. [...]
[...] This is a serious blow to the credibility of the Bible as a perfect or fully complete truth. One may resolve this difficulty in a number of ways. The Catholic approach, for instance, is that Genesis teaches perfect spiritual truths while not being literal science. Yet while evolution isn’t necessarily fatal to all forms of God-belief, it does do some harm to some of the claims of some religions. The non-overlapping magisteria hypothesis is appealing, but not terribly accurate. [...]