Conversations on Science, Religion, and Spirituality
COTI Conversation on Science and Religion
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Union Theological Seminary, Room 207, 7:30-9:30pm
1. Why do you think scientists are less religious than non-scientists? (see polling data below)
2. Why do a third of Americans reject evolution and only a third agree that humans evolved by natural selection? Is there something like a religious fear of science? (see polling data below)
3. Which voices (see quotations below) best express how you relate science and religion? Do you see them as distinct but compatible approaches to reality or as competitive, rival approaches to reality?
Polling Data (Pew Research Center Report on Science, esp. Sections 4 and 5)
The United States is a highly religious nation, especially by comparison with most Western industrialized democracies. Most Americans profess a belief in God (83%), and 82% are affiliated with a religious tradition. Scientists are different. Just a third (33%) say they believe in God, while 18% say they believe in a universal spirit or higher power and 41% say they don’t believe in either.
A majority of the public (61%) says that human and other living things have evolved over time, though when probed only about a third (32%) say this evolution is “due to natural processes such as natural selection” while 22% say “a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today.” Another 31% reject evolution and say that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”
Nearly all scientists (97%) say humans and other living things have evolved over time – 87% say evolution is due to natural processes, such as natural selection. The dominant position among scientists – that living things have evolved due to natural processes – is shared by only about third (32%) of the public.
Framing Science and Religion as Competitors
“Sciences respond to a felt need to understand the world, and religions respond to a felt need for the world to have meaning. From these different starting points, one issue emerges at the junction of any science and any religion: are these felt needs commensurate? That is, is the universe a moral place, so that the natural order is relevant to human lives and human values; do faith and family, love and charity mirror any larger meaning than the meanings we give to them? Today, to a first approximation, the answer to these questions from any religion is Yes, and the answer from any science is No.” (From the Center for the Study of Science & Religion, Earth Institute, Columbia University).
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Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995)
A song from Dennett’s religious childhood:
Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me why the sky’s so blue.
Then I will tell you just why I love you.
Because God made the stars to shine,
Because God made the ivy twine,
Because God made the sky so blue.
Because God made you, that’s why I love you.
“The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us (all creatures great and small) and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight - that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether” (18). “My admiration for Darwin’s magnificent idea is unbounded, but I, too, cherish many of the ideas and ideals that it seems to challenge, and want to protect them. For instance, I want to protect the campfire song, and what is beautiful and true in it, for my little grandson and his friends, and for their children when they grow up. There are many more magnificent ideas that are also jeopardized, it seems, by Darwin’s idea, and they, too, may need protection. The only good way to do this - the only way that has a chance in the long run - is to cut through the smokescreens and look at the idea as unflinchingly, as dispassionately, as possible” (21-22).
“I began this book with a song which I myself cherish, and hope will survive ‘forever.’ I hope my grandson learns it and passes it on to his grandson, but at the same time I do not myself believe, and do not really want my grandson to believe, the doctrines that are so movingly expressed in that song. They are too simple. They are, in a word, wrong - just as wrong as the ancient Greeks’ doctrines about the gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus. Do you believe, literally, in an anthropomorphic God? If not, then you must agree with me that the song is a beautiful, comforting falsehood. . . . It is a modest but beautiful part of our heritage, a treasure to be preserved. But we must face the fact that, just as there were times when tigers would not have been viable, times are coming when they will no longer be viable, except in zoos and other preserves, and the same is true of many of the treasures in our cultural heritage” (514).
“Is this Tree of Life [evolution] a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm’s ‘Being greater than which nothing can be conceived,’ it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred” (520).
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Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape (2010)
“Both [secular liberals and religious conservatives] believe that reason is powerless to answer the most important questions in human life. . . . Religious conservatives tend to believe that there are right answers to questions of meaning and morality, but only because the God of Abraham deems it so. They concede that ordinary facts can be discovered through rational inquiry, but they believe that values must come from a voice in a whirlwind. Scriptural literalism, intolerance of diversity, mistrust of science, disregard for the real causes of human and animal suffering - too often, this is how the division between facts and values expresses itself on the religious right.
Secular liberals, on the other hand, tend to imagine that no objective answers to moral questions exist. While John Stuart MIll might conform to our cultural ideal of goodness better than Osama bin Laden does, most secularists suspect that Mill’s ideas about right and wrong reach no closer to the Truth. Multiculturalism, moral relativism, political correctness, tolerance even of intolerance - these are the familiar consequences of separating facts and values on the left” (4-5).
“Even the journal Nature, the most influential scientific publication on earth, has been unable to reliably police the boundary between reasoned discourse and pious fiction. . . . Nature’s editors have generally accepted Stephen J. Gould’s doomed notion of ‘nonoverlapping magisteria’ - the idea that science and religion, properly construed, cannot be in conflict because they constitute different domains of expertise. . . . The underlying claim is that while science is the best authority on the workings of the physical universe, religion is the best authority on meaning, values, morality, and the good life. I hope to persuade you that this is not only untrue, it could not possibly be true. Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures - and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident” (6).
“My goal is to convince you that human knowledge and human values can no longer be kept apart. The world of measurement and the world of meaning must eventually be reconciled. And science and religion - being antithetical ways of thinking about the same reality - will never come to terms. As with all matters of fact, differences of opinion on moral questions merely reveal the incompleteness of our knowledge; they do not oblige us to respect a diversity of views indefinitely” (10).
“Religion and science are in a zero-sum conflict with respect to facts. Here, I have begun to argue that the division between facts and values is intellectually unsustainable, especially from the perspective of neuroscience. . . . Here is our situation: if the basic claims of religion are true, the scientific worldview is so blinkered and susceptible to supernatural modification as to be rendered nearly ridiculous; if the basic claims of religion are false, most people are profoundly confused about the nature of reality, confounded by irrational hopes and fears, and tending to waste precious time and attention - often with tragic results” (24-25).
What gets Harris most agitated is the claim that some respectable scientists remain religious. Here Francis Collins, John Polkinghorne, the journal Nature, and the Templeton Foundation are frequent targets of scorn.
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E.O. Wilson, Consilience (1998)
“I saw science, by which I meant (and in my heart I still mean) the study of ants, frogs, and snakes, as a wonderful way to stay outdoors” (3). He spent his teenage years enthralled with the Linnaean system of biological classification. After telling his biology professor about his “lofty goal of classifying all the ants of Alabama,” Wilson was given a book on Darwinian theory and genetics. “Then I discovered evolution . . . A tumbler fell somewhere in my mind, and a door opened to a new world. I was enthralled, couldn’t stop thinking about the implications evolution has for classification and for the rest of biology. And for philosophy. And for just about everything. Static pattern slid into fluid process” (4).
“. . . I found it a wonderful feeling not just to taste the unification metaphysics but also to be released from the confinement of fundamentalist religion. I had been raised a Southern Baptist, laid backward under the water on the sturdy arm of a pastor, been born again. I knew the healing power of redemption. Faith, hope, and charity were in my bones, and with millions of others I knew that my savior Jesus Christ would grant me eternal life. More pious than the average teenager, I read the Bible cover to cover, twice. But now at college . . . I found it hard to accept that our deepest beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago. . . . But most of all, Baptist theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?” (6).
“We have learned a great deal about ourselves as a species. We now better understand where humanity came from, and what it is. Homo sapiens, like the rest of life, was self-assembled. So here we are, no one having guided us to this condition, no one looking over our shoulder, our future entirely up to us. Human autonomy having thus been recognized, we should now feel more disposed to reflect on where we wish to go. . . . We are not errant children who occasionally sin by disobeying instructions from outside our species. We are adults who have discovered which covenants are necessary for survival, and we have accepted the necessity of securing them by sacred oath” (325-6).
Framing Science and Religion as Compatible
Krista Tippett, Einstein’s God (2010):
“The science-religion ‘debate’ is unwinnable, and it has led us astray. To insist that science and religion speak the same language, or draw the same conclusions, is to miss the point of both of these pursuits of cohesive knowledge and underlying truth. To create a competition between them, in terms of relevance or rightness, is self-defeating. Both science and religion are set to animate the twenty-first century with new vigor. This will happen whether their practitioners are in dialogue or not. But the dialogue that is possible . . . is mutually illuminating and lush with promise” (1).
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Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages (1999):
“I write this little book to present a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to an issue so laden with emotion and the burden of history that a clear path usually becomes overgrown by a tangle of contention and confusion. I speak of the supposed conflict between science and religion, a debate that exists only in people’s minds and social practices, not in the logic or proper utility of these entirely different, and equally vital, subjects. I present nothing original in stating the basic thesis . . . for my argument follows a strong consensus accepted for decades by leading scientific and religious thinkers alike” (3).
“I do not see how science and religion could be unified, or even synthesized, under any common scheme of explanation of analysis; but I also do not understand why the two enterprises should experience any conflict. Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values - subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve. . . . I propose that we encapsulate this central principle of respectful noninterference - accompanied by intense dialogue between the two distinct subjects, each covering a central facet of human existence - by enunciating the Principle of NOMA, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria. . . . To summarize, the net, or magisterium, of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap . . .” (5-6).
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Francis Collins, The Language of God (2006)
“On a warm summer day just six months into the new millennium, humankind crossed a bridge into a momentous new era. An announcement beamed around the world, highlighted in virtually all major newspapers, trumpeted that the first draft of the human genome, our own instruction book, had been assembled.
The human genome consists of all the DNA of our species, the hereditary code of life. This newly revealed text was 3 billion letters long, and written in a strange and cryptographic four-letter code. Such is the amazing complexity of the information carried within each cell of the human body, that a live reading of that code at a rate of one letter per second would take thirty-one years, even if reading continued day and night. Printing these letters out in regular font size on normal bond paper and binding them all together would result in a tower the height of the Washington Monument. For the first time on that summer morning this amazing script, carrying within it all of the instructions for building a human being, was available to the world.
As the leader of the international Human Genome Project, which had labored mightily over more than a decade to reveal this DNA sequence, I stood beside President Bill Clinton in the East Room of the White House, along with Craig Venter, the leader of a competing private sector enterprise. . . . Clinton’s speech began by comparing this human sequence map to the map that Meriwether Lewis had unfolded in front of President Thomas Jefferson in that very room nearly two hundred years earlier. Clinton said, ‘Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.’ But the part of his speech that most attracted public attention jumped from the scientific perspective to the spiritual. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.’
Was I, a rigorously trained scientist, taken aback at such a blatantly religious reference by the leader of the free world at a moment such as this? Was I tempted to scowl or look at the floor in embarassment? No, not at all. . . . When it came time for me to add a few words of my own, I echoed this sentiment: ‘It’s a happy day for the world. It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.’
What was going on here? Why would a president and a scientist, charged with announcing a milestone in biology and medicine, fell compelled to invoke a connection with God? Aren’t the scientific and spiritual worldviews antithetical, or shouldn’t they at least avoid appearing int he East Room together? What were the reasons for invoking God in these two speeches? Was this poetry? Hypocrisy? A cynical attempt to curry favor from believers, or to disarm those who might criticize this study of the human genome as reducing humankind to machinery? No. Not for me. Quite the contrary, for me the experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship” (1-3).
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