The War of the Jesus and Darwin Fishes

Religion and Science in the Postmodern World

John C. Caiazza, Mitchell Geoffrey Bard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138517127
• eBook ISBN: 9781351321464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

This volume's title stems from an observable and seemingly amusing phenomenon--the placement of fish symbols on the rear of automobiles. There are two kinds: one a fish outline with a cross, exhibited by Christians; the other a fish outline filled with the word "evolution," with little legs attached underneath. These symbols manifest the cultural war between religion and science, a clash that draws from nineteenth-century conflicts over evolution roots in the Enlightenment.

Today's cultural environment is a result of the internationalization of communication, labor, money, and commerce. This global culture emphasizes tolerance and acceptance of all peoples and traditions, but it also demands a moral and intellectual relativism that rejects "master narratives," including religious tradition as well as scientific theory. In some respects, the postmodern environment is caused by science itself, by the development of postmodern science, its nineteenth-century adversarial stance toward religion now somewhat softened. Among new developments are the historical understanding of science, renewed appreciation of the troubled careers of scientists, and "God" talk among physicists and psychologists. Both science and religion are being overwhelmed by new levels of technology, which is becoming the premier element of contemporary culture.

The conflict between science and religion is being resolved in the form of a dynamic. Religion and science are both ways of giving moral and intellectual order to the universe, enabling mankind to cope with a chaotic universe and live well. Both religious critics and scientific researchers have attacked and analyzed pornography, which has become a prominent characteristic of our culture. Both share contemporary sensitivity to individual opinions and protection of the individual from social control. Both science and religion share a sense that postmodern culture lacks structure. Caiazza shows how renewed attention to religious and scientific insights can resolve longstanding conflicts, providing postmodern society with a vision of tolerable order.

Part II

Shifting Grounds of the “War” between Religion and Science

3

The Fog of War

The war between religion and science began in the nineteenth century. It did not begin in the seventeenth century with the rise of the “new physics,” when mathematical descriptions replaced qualitative descriptions of motion, nor does it exist in the same manner today as in the nineteenth century since the rise of the “new” new physics of relativity and quantum. The grounds for the persistence of this war, despite doubts about its ultimate reality, were presented in the previous chapter. While the “war” between religion and science is a metaphor, it is a war in the sense that certain social authorities, received traditions, ancient philosophies, and mere bigotry are said to be aligned in a systematic way against modern science, which includes determinism, materialism, and atheism—the inevitable consequences of hubristic science. This double stereotype continues to exist in many people’s minds, but if the apparent war was not the result of implacably aligned intellectual forces on either side, then the war is more of a perceptual effect or, as the postmodernists put it, a social construct that does not reflect basic reality. The constructors of this war were nineteenth-century intellectuals including the first President of Cornell University, Andrew White, whos influential book, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, presented a progressive view of the advance of science overcoming challenges posed by orthodoxy. As a “Whig history,” it characterized the path of science as a series of triumphs of “science” to the detriment of “theology.” To quote White:

In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may been, has resulted in the direst evil, both to religion and to science … on the other hand, all untrammeled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion and of science.¹

Stephen J. Gould pointed out that, like himself, White was concerned with true religion, which he did not wish to see injured, and which both White and Gould agree can never be overcome by science. For them, true religion is to be distinguished from “theology” which makes declarations about such subjects as the creation of the universe, the origin of life forms, and certain “miraculous” events that science has discredited. Once theology is distinguished from true religion, the so-called war between religion and science can be called off. This is Gould making his point while letting his mask of avuncular friendliness slip:

Many religious intellectuals have always been happy to cede inappropriate territory to the legitimate domain of science, but others, particularly in positions of leadership, chose not to yield an inch, and then played the old hand of dichotomy to brand the developing magisterium of science as a sinister bunch of usurpers under the devil’s command – hence the actual and frequent warfare of science, not with religion in the full sense but with particular embodiments better characterized as dogmatic theology, and contrary to most people’s concept of religion …²

The view that White and Gould hold of true religion is rather toothless, not much more than a form of moral uplift and encouragement to social reform. As one of Gould’s critics pointed out, his notion of religion did not include the belief in God. Certainly it is true that in their version there should be no war because science has already won all the important points, and there is nothing left for the proponents of revealed religion to do but, like Caesar’s conquered Gauls, accept the reality of foreign imposed rule and lay down their intellectual arms. In any case, Gould concedes that in an historical sense there has been, and continues to be, a “war” between science and religion and the remaining question is not whether it exists but what manner of war it is.

The war can be analyzed as taking place in two arenas at once: on the intellectual level, where statements and assertions by religious authorities directly contradict those of scientific authorities and vice versa, and also on the social level, where the forces institutional religion and secular society have contended with one another. On the intellectual level, the war should not exist because there are coherent and plausible philosophies, theologies, and intellectual structures that can encompass both, and, therefore, it is largely a war of competing social identities. The fact is not often enough appreciated that the early giants of science, such as Kepler, Newton, and Galileo, were religious believers who readily accepted the basic doctrines of the Christian religion. It seems that for them there was no conflict intellectually between revealed religion and the new mechanical physics, which was opening the door to an exact description of the physical universe in terms of mathematical laws and close empirical research. It would be contemptuously condescending and ahistorical to impute ignorance to these men as if to say they lacked the critical reasoning to see or perceive the inherent intellectual conflict or decided to repress it because of lack of intellectual courage. Newton was so convicted of his Puritan beliefs that he wrote theology more often than he wrote mechanics, and Galileo entered fully into the theological controversy about the proper use of sacred scripture in scientific research (see “Galileo’s Enduring Career,” chapter 6).

For seventeenth-century scientists such as Galileo and Newton, who founded the new mechanics and astronomy, and for later scientists including Faraday and Maxwell, who founded the modern theory of light and electromagnetism, there was no intellectual conflict between revealed religious doctrines and the facts and theories of modern science since, for them, the God revealed in the Bible and Christian tradition was God the Father, the Creator. For these early giants, doing science was a way of discovering the immutable laws on which God had made the universe, a process of discovery that was a form of praise, therefore, of the Creator. That it was the job of science to discover immutable laws of physical creation is reflected in Einstein’s remark that he was trying to discover if God had any choice in the way he had created the universe. Einstein, however, was not a believer in revealed religion having rejected the Torah and teaching of Moses in his youth as irrational contrasted to the truths revealed by science. Einstein along with Darwin, who also rejected biblical faith, have become the symbolic representatives of modern science’s apparent rejection of revealed religion. However, it was not so in the beginning and professional agnosticism did not become the badge of scientific identity until late in the nineteenth century. Both Einstein and Darwin were influenced by family attitudes in their rejection of revealed religion. Einstein’s family, while Jewish, was not observant, and Darwin’s father and brother were both nonbelievers. It is not difficult to believe, also, that both Darwin and Einstein were heavily influenced by the ambient culture of nineteenth-century Europe. It elevated scientific rationalism above religion, which was seen as a phase—as it were of humanity’s childhood that the human race had outgrown—according to the influential account of August Comte, the French inventor of sociology and positivist philosopher of science.

What was typical of nineteenth-century science in its cultural context was its determinism–for science had compassed seemingly the entire world not only abstractly, with advancing theories, but practically, in terms of industrial applications. While Newton had written his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica as a philosophy of nature just as specified in the title, later generations extended and refined his intellectual edifice to make it more true to scientific fact but void of its philosophical aspect. Pierre Simon de Laplace, one of Newton’s successors, early in the nineteenth century gave the new vision the name The System of the World, and corrected Newton’s synthesis of astronomy, mathematics, and mechanics by, among other things, explaining why the planets did not exactly follow an elliptical orbit as predicted by Kepler’s Laws. Laplace also made explicit the thesis of determinism, saying that if an observer could have knowledge of the position and velocity of every particle in the universe, that the state of the universe at any later time could be predicted.

Let us imagine an Intelligence who would know at a given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of all things of which the world consists; let us assume further that this Intelligence would be capable of subjecting all these data to mathematical analysis. Then it could derive a result which would embrace in one and the same formula the motions of the largest bodies in the universe and of the slightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence. The past and the future would be present to its eyes.³

The subtext of Laplace’s thought is that physics can apply the deterministic equations of Newton’s differential calculus to individual atoms, which are assumed to be extremely small, slightly elastic particles, whose nature is not essentially different from that of common matter that makes up trees, rocks, flesh, butter, dirt, houses, and baseballs. In this way it was theoretically possible for scientists to know all things in the universe’s past, present, and future. Thus Laplace stated by encompassing all the mathematical laws that determined the paths of atoms and all larger bodies into one comprehensive formula–the ultimate vision of deterministic science. This too was an idea implicit in Newton’s Principia, but what Laplace left undetermined was the nature of that “Intelligence” whose name he capitalized. Was the Intelligence the infinite mind of God? The answer was “no.” For Laplace, in response to a question from Napoleon, stated in reference to God that he “had no need of that hypothesis,” thus reducing the notion of God from creator to an extraneous extension of physical theory. Newton had claimed that the intervention of God was necessary to fix abnormalities in the orbits of the planets, an effect called “perturbation.” which Laplace neatly explained as the mutual attraction of the planets–so that Jupiter, for example, which is the largest of the planets, pulled Mars slightly from its elliptical orbit. Laplacean determinism in physical theory eliminated the agency of the revealed God completely, along with human free will, and the intervention of any other nonphysical agents in the course of the ongoing actions of the universe. This was, however, a methodological assumption which was also a reflection of the overestimation of the power of the human intellect and the desire for complete mastery typical of scientific philosophers.

Throughout the nineteenth century the hubris of scientific philosophers and many scientists made it seem possible that the precise contours of a self-dependent universe were being discovered, and, as the scientific account was being filled out in detail, it indeed competed with the account given in the Bible and would displace it. Like sixteenth-century nobles taking over monastery lands, scientists in the heady days of nineteenth-century colonial expansion were taking over the explanatory territory formerly occupied by revealed truth. But the nineteenth-century deterministic view, which characterized the physical universe by machine-like properties amenable to science’s virtually infinite ability to understand physical reality, was to undergo radical revision in the twentieth century. The development of quantum physics and relativity theory rendered a picture of the universe which was indeterminate on the micro level, i.e., in its atomic structure and chaotic on the macro level, as a flood of possible geometries of space-time, alternate universes, and the Big Bang. Choice of theoretical options became the main feature of how physicists now understand the physical universe.

Theoretical physicists in the twentieth century, reading Laplace’s account of an “Intelligence,” would be skeptical of the Intelligence’s extraordinary, indeed, infinite ability to know the position and motion of individual atoms—a problem of real importance in twentieth-century atomic physics. Unless Laplace’s Intelligence was in fact God, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it could not know both the position and momentum (a property which includes velocity) with absolute precision. As it was defined in mathematical terms by Heisenberg, the more data you had about position, the less you had about momentum and vice versa. This conundrum was only one aspect, however, of the contradictions to Newtonian mechanics and common sense that emerged from research conducted from the very end of the nineteenth century until present day about atomic behavior. Position and momentum were complementary properties according to the new quantum physics, which notoriously placed probability at the heart of physical reality, i.e., within the internal structure of the atom itself. The elemental and homogenous atoms of Newton and Laplace were dissolved by a series of intricate laboratory experiments and new theories into a conceptual “zoo” of particles and forces so complex and intertwined that their relationships and behavior defy deterministic understanding. Modern, classical physics has now ended and a new postmodern physics has succeeded it. The problem of the “observer,” which classical physics ignored, is central to modern physics, which must take account of the observer in its equations, much like the social sciences in fact.

In a famous experiment done at a Westinghouse factory in the 1940’s that was meant to determine if giving workers such amenities as snacks, rest periods, and bathroom breaks would increase productivity, the researchers discovered that it made no difference. There was an increase in productivity and an improvement in attitude both for the group that was offered these amenities and the control group, which was denied them. The increases in productivity came about not because of the availability of amenities but because researchers had spent time advising and questioning the men about their reactions. The workers then became convinced that someone was interested enough in them to analyze their work and ask their opinions which was the factor that motivated them to a more productive attitude. In short, it was the presence of the sociological observer, not the snack period, which determined the outcome of the experiment. This so-called “Westinghouse Effect” is present in the physical sciences as well. The presence of the observer in the experimental setting must be accounted for in quantum physics and also in relativity.

Relativity theory is not concerned about the observer who must detect an atom but rather the observer who must define an entire astronomical universe. Twentieth-century physics dismissed Newton’s assertions of absolutes in time and space, which meant that, lacking a universal frame of reference by which to describe physical experiments, definition devolved to the single observer who had to utilize his own position as the point from which to describe the universe. Oddly, this meant that in relativistic terms, the Ptolemaic astronomer has as much a “right” to his account of the relative motion of the Sun and planets as the Copernican astronomer. This is not to say that all is subjectivity and chaos however, for Einstein had declared that the speed of light was constant in all frames of reference. Also, he maintained, that there were equivalences that could be systematically made between frames of reference, i.e., between the space-time systems of different observers, for example, the equivalence between mass and energy. Even in quantum mechanics, while the mathematics and perhaps the ontology are probabilistic, the scientific relationships are precise; otherwise, they could not be used for prediction—not to mention in the design of computer chips. Relativity might make the controversy between the Ptolemeans and the Copernicans moot, according to the late astronomer royal, Fred Hoyle, but only because one system could be transformed into the other with mathematical precision. However, the very equations of basic physical theory must now encapsulate the existence of the observer—as quantum phenomena are said to “collapse” upon observation and relativistic equations describing length, mass, and velocity must take into account the speed of the observer in reference to the speed of light.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the physicist’s universe is less like a machine than an organism, i.e., an entity that has a beginning in time, which has undergone expansion, growth, and increase in complexity; it is currently in middle age and will eventually die. Furthermore, all the physical events in this new universe reflect not the necessity and optimism of the nineteenth-century picture of the universe but rather the anxieties and contingencies of the twentieth. The place of the individual physical observer is no longer an assured one in which the actions of the universe pass before him, as in a play according to a script, which can be observed from out beyond the proscenium by the scientist. In the postmodern era, the physical observer becomes part of a Pirandello play, interacting with the characters and unsure of what response to make, a condition that now extends beyond even theoretical considerations of quantum observation or relativistic time constancy as the cultural, ethical, political, and religious contexts have entered the heart of the scientific enterprise.

With the role of the observer and indeterminism now a part of science’s view of the physical universe, contingency and anxiety become central aspects of this same universe, and thus the place of religion, vis à vis the physical universe, necessarily undergoes alteration. If scientific determinism and materialism in the nineteenth century can be associated with rationalism and social progress, then indeterminism and the role of the observer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The War of the Jesus and Darwin Fishes
• I. Religion and Science in the Postmodern World
• II. Shifting Grounds of the “War” between Religion and Science
• III. The Dynamic Relation between Religion and Science
• Bibliography
• Index