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发帖数: 40861 | 1 By Jerry A. Coyne
Religion in America is on the defensive.
Atheist books such as The God Delusion and The End of Faith have, by
exposing the dangers of faith and the lack of evidence for the God of
Abraham, become best-sellers. Science nibbles at religion from the other end
, relentlessly consuming divine explanations and replacing them with
material ones. Evolution took a huge bite a while back, and recent work on
the brain has shown no evidence for souls, spirits, or any part of our
personality or behavior distinct from the lump of jelly in our head. We now
know that the universe did not require a creator. Science is even studying
the origin of morality. So religious claims retreat into the ever-shrinking
gaps not yet filled by science. And, although to be an atheist in America is
still to be an outcast, America's fastest-growing brand of belief is non-
belief.
But faith will not go gentle. For each book by a "New Atheist," there are
many others attacking the "movement" and demonizing atheists as arrogant,
theologically ignorant, and strident. The biggest area of religious push-
back involves science. Rather than being enemies, or even competitors, the
argument goes, science and religion are completely compatible friends, each
devoted to finding its own species of truth while yearning for a mutually
improving dialogue.
As a scientist and a former believer, I see this as bunk. Science and faith
are fundamentally incompatible, and for precisely the same reason that
irrationality and rationality are incompatible. They are different forms of
inquiry, with only one, science, equipped to find real truth. And while they
may have a dialogue, it's not a constructive one. Science helps religion
only by disproving its claims, while religion has nothing to add to science.
Irreconcilable
"But surely," you might argue, "science and religion must be compatible.
After all, some scientists are religious." One is Francis Collins, head of
the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian. But the
existence of religious scientists, or religious people who accept science,
doesn't prove that the two areas are compatible. It shows only that people
can hold two conflicting notions in their heads at the same time. If that
meant compatibility, we could make a good case, based on the commonness of
marital infidelity, that monogamy and adultery are perfectly compatible. No,
the incompatibility between science and faith is more fundamental: Their
ways of understanding the universe are irreconcilable.
Science operates by using evidence and reason. Doubt is prized, authority
rejected. No finding is deemed "true" — a notion that's always provisional
— unless it's repeated and verified by others. We scientists are always
asking ourselves, "How can I find out whether I'm wrong?" I can think of
dozens of potential observations, for instance — one is a billion-year-old
ape fossil — that would convince me that evolution didn't happen.
Physicist Richard Feynman observed that the methods of science help us
distinguish real truth from what we only want to be true: "The first
principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person
to fool."
Science can, of course, be wrong. Continental drift, for example, was
laughed off for years. But in the end the method is justified by its success
. Without science, we'd all live short, miserable and disease-ridden lives,
without the amenities of medicine or technology. As Stephen Hawking
proclaimed, science wins because it works.
Does religion work? It brings some of us solace, impels some to do good (and
others to fly planes into buildings), and buttresses the same moral truths
embraced by atheists, but does it help us better understand our world or our
universe? Hardly. Note that almost all religions make specific claims about
the world involving matters such as the existence of miracles, answered
prayers wonder-working saints and divine cures, virgin births, annunciations
and resurrections. These factual claims, whose truth is a bedrock of belief
, bring religion within the realm of scientific study. But rather than
relying on reason and evidence to support them, faith relies on revelation,
dogma and authority. Hebrews 11:1 states, with complete accuracy, "Now faith
is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
Indeed, a doubting-Thomas demand for evidence is often considered rude.
And this leads to the biggest problem with religious "truth": There's no way
of knowing whether it's true. I've never met a Christian, for instance, who
has been able to tell me what observations about the universe would make
him abandon his beliefs in God and Jesus. (I would have thought that the
Holocaust could do it, but apparently not.) There is no horror, no amount of
evil in the world, that a true believer can't rationalize as consistent
with a loving God. It's the ultimate way of fooling yourself. But how can
you be sure you're right if you can't tell whether you're wrong?
The religious approach to understanding inevitably results in different
faiths holding incompatible "truths" about the world. Many Christians
believe that if you don't accept Jesus as savior, you'll burn in hell for
eternity. Muslims hold the exact opposite: Those who see Jesus as God's son
are the ones who will roast. Jews see Jesus as a prophet, but not the
messiah. Which belief, if any, is right? Because there's no way to decide,
religions have duked it out for centuries, spawning humanity's miserable
history of religious warfare and persecution.
In contrast, scientists don't kill each other over matters such as
continental drift. We have better ways to settle our differences. There is
no Catholic science, no Hindu science, no Muslim science — just science, a
multicultural search for truth. The difference between science and faith,
then, can be summed up simply: In religion faith is a virtue; in science it'
s a vice.
But don't just take my word for the incompatibility of science and faith —
it's amply demonstrated by the high rate of atheism among scientists. While
only 6% of Americans are atheists or agnostics, the figure for American
scientists is 64%, according to Rice professor Elaine Howard Ecklund's book,
Science vs. Religion. Further proof: Among countries of the world, there is
a strong negative relationship between their religiosity and their
acceptance of evolution. Countries like Denmark and Sweden, with low belief
in God, have high acceptance of evolution, while religious countries are
evolution-intolerant. Out of 34 countries surveyed in a study published in
Science magazine, the U.S., among the most religious, is at the bottom in
accepting Darwinism: We're No. 33, with only Turkey below us. Finally, in a
2006 Time poll a staggering 64% of Americans declared that if science
disproved one of their religious beliefs, they'd reject that science in
favor of their faith.
'Venerable superstition'
In the end, science is no more compatible with religion than with other
superstitions, such as leprechauns. Yet we don't talk about reconciling
science with leprechauns. We worry about religion simply because it's the
most venerable superstition — and the most politically and financially
powerful.
Why does this matter? Because pretending that faith and science are equally
valid ways of finding truth not only weakens our concept of truth, it also
gives religion an undeserved authority that does the world no good. For it
is faith's certainty that it has a grasp on truth, combined with its
inability to actually find it, that produces things such as the oppression
of women and gays, opposition to stem cell research and euthanasia, attacks
on science, denial of contraception for birth control and AIDS prevention,
sexual repression, and of course all those wars, suicide bombings and
religious persecutions.
And any progress — not just scientific progress — is easier when we're not
yoked to religious dogma. Of course, using reason and evidence won't
magically make us all agree, but how much clearer our spectacles would be
without the fog of superstition!
Jerry A. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at
The University of Chicago. His latest book is Why Evolution is True, and his
website is www.whyevolutionistrue.com. |
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