Religion in an Age of Science

The Gifford Lectures, Volume One

Ian G. Barbour

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780062287243
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Part One

RELIGION AND THE METHODS OF SCIENCE

CHAPTER 1

Ways of Relating Science and Religion

The first major challenge to religion in an age of science is the success of the methods of science. Science seems to provide the only reliable path to knowledge. Many people view science as objective, universal, rational, and based on solid observational evidence. Religion, by contrast, seems to be subjective, parochial, emotional, and based on traditions or authorities that disagree with each other. The methods of inquiry used in science, apart from any particular scientific discoveries or theories, are the topic of part 1. Chapter 1 gives a broad description of contemporary views of the relationship between the methods of science and those of religion. Chapters 2 and 3 explore similarities and differences between the two fields and develop my own conclusions concerning the status of religious beliefs in an age of science.

In order to give a systematic overview of the main options today, I have grouped them in this chapter under four headings: Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, and Integration. Particular authors may not fall neatly under any one heading; a person may agree with adherents of a given position on some issues but not on others. However, a broad sketch of alternatives will help us in making comparisons in later chapters. After surveying these four broad patterns, I will suggest reasons for supporting Dialogue and, with some qualifications, certain versions of Integration.

Any view of the relationship of science and religion reflects philosophical assumptions. Our discussion must therefore draw from three disciplines, not just two: science (the empirical study of the order of nature), theology (critical reflection on the life and thought of the religious community), and philosophy, especially epistemology (analysis of the characteristics of inquiry and knowledge) and metaphysics (analysis of the most general characteristics of reality). Theology deals primarily with religious beliefs, which must always be seen against the wider background of religious traditions that includes formative scriptures, communal rituals, individual experiences, and ethical norms. I will be particularly concerned with the epistemological assumptions of recent Western authors writing about the relationship between science and religious beliefs.

I. CONFLICT

Scientific materialism is at the opposite end of the theological spectrum from biblical literalism. But they share several characteristics that lead me to discuss them together. Both believe that there are serious conflicts between contemporary science and classical religious beliefs. Both seek knowledge with a sure foundation—that of logic and sense data, in the one case, that of infallible scripture, in the other. They both claim that science and theology make rival literal statements about the same domain, the history of nature, so that one must choose between them.

I will suggest that each represents a misuse of science. Both positions fail to observe the proper boundaries of science. The scientific materialist starts from science but ends by making broad philosophical claims. The biblical literalist moves from theology to make claims about scientific matters. In both schools of thought, the differences between the two disciplines are not adequately respected.

In a fight between a boa constrictor and a wart-hog, the victor, whichever it is, swallows the vanquished. In scientific materialism, science swallows religion. In biblical literalism, religion swallows science. The fight can be avoided if they occupy separate territories or if, as I will suggest, they each pursue more appropriate diets.¹

1. SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM

Scientific materialism makes two assertions: (1) the scientific method is the only reliable path to knowledge; (2) matter (or matter and energy) is the fundamental reality in the universe.

The first is an epistemological assertion about the characteristics of inquiry and knowledge. The second is a metaphysical or ontological assertion about the characteristics of reality. The two assertions are linked by the assumption that only the entities and causes with which science deals are real; only science can progressively disclose the nature of the real.

In addition, many forms of materialism express reductionism. Epistemological reductionism claims that the laws and theories of all the sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry. Metaphysical reductionism claims that the component parts of any system constitute its most fundamental reality. The materialist believes that all phenomena will eventually be explained in terms of the actions of material components, which are the only effective causes in the world. Analysis of the parts of any system has, of course, been immensely useful in science, but I will suggest that the study of higher organizational levels in larger wholes is also valuable. Evolutionary naturalism sometimes avoids reductionism and holds that distinctive phenomena have emerged at higher levels of organization, but it shares the conviction that the scientific method is the only acceptable mode of inquiry.

Let us consider the assertion that the scientific method is the only reliable form of understanding. Science starts from reproducible public data. Theories are formulated and their implications are tested against experimental observations. Additional criteria of coherence, comprehensiveness, and fruitfulness influence choice among theories. Religious beliefs are not acceptable, in this view, because religion lacks such public data, such experimental testing, and such criteria of evaluation. Science alone is objective, open-minded, universal, cumulative, and progressive. Religious traditions, by contrast, are said to be subjective, closed-minded, parochial, uncritical, and resistant to change. We will see that historians and philosophers of science have questioned this idealized portrayal of science, but many scientists accept it and think it undermines the credibility of religious beliefs.

Among philosophers, logical positivism from the 1920s to the 1940s asserted that scientific discourse provides the norm for all meaningful language. It was said that the only meaningful statements (apart from abstract logical relations) are empirical propositions verifiable by sense data. Statements in ethics, metaphysics, and religion were said to be neither true nor false, but meaningless pseudo-statements, expressions of emotion or preference devoid of cognitive significance. Whole areas of human language and experience were thus eliminated from serious discussion because they were not subject to the verification that science was said to provide. But critics replied that sense data do not provide an indubitable starting point in science, for they are already conceptually organized and theory-laden. The interaction of observation and theory is more complex than the positivists had assumed. Moreover, the positivists had dismissed metaphysical questions but had often assumed a materialist metaphysics. Since Wittgenstein’s later writings, the linguistic analysts argued that science cannot be the norm for all meaningful discourse because language has many differing uses and functions.

Most of Carl Sagan’s TV series and book, Cosmos, is devoted to a fascinating presentation of the discoveries of modern astronomy, but at intervals he interjects his own philosophical commentary, for example, “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”² He says that the universe is eternal or else its source is simply unknowable. Sagan attacks Christian ideas of God at a number of points, arguing that mystical and authoritarian claims threaten the ultimacy of the scientific method, which he says is “universally applicable.” Nature (which he capitalizes) replaces God as the object of reverence. He expresses great awe at the beauty, vastness, and interrelatedness of the cosmos. Sitting at the instrument panel from which he shows us the wonders of the universe, he is a new kind of high priest, not only revealing the mysteries to us but telling us how we should live. We can indeed admire Sagan’s great ethical sensitivity and his deep concern for nuclear survival and environmental preservation. But perhaps we should question his unlimited confidence in the scientific method, on which he says we should rely to bring in the age of peace and justice.

The success of molecular biology in accounting for many of the basic mechanisms of genetics and biological activity has often been taken as a vindication of the reductionist approach. Thus Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, wrote, “The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.”³ I will argue in chapter 6 that there is in the biological world a hierarchy of levels of organization. This would lead us to accept the importance of DNA and the role of molecular structures in all living phenomena, but it would also allow us to recognize the distinctiveness of higher-level activities and their influence on molecular components.

Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity gives a lucid account of molecular biology, interspersed with a defense of scientific materialism. He claims that biology has proved that there is no purpose in nature. “Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.”⁴ “Chance alone is the source of all novelty, all creation, in the biosphere.” Chance is “blind” and “absolute” because random mutations are unrelated to the needs of the organism; the causes of individual variations are completely independent of the environmental forces of natural selection. Monod espouses a thoroughgoing reductionism: “Anything can be reduced to simple, obvious mechanical interactions. The cell is a machine. The animal is a machine. Man is a machine.”⁵ Consciousness is an epiphenomenon that will eventually be explained biochemically.

Monod asserts that human behavior is genetically determined; he says little about the role of language, thought, or culture in human life. Value judgments are completely subjective and arbitrary. Humanity alone is the creator of values; the assumption of almost all previous philosophies that values are grounded in the nature of reality is undermined by science. But Monod urges us to make the free axiomatic choice that knowledge itself will be our supreme value. He advocates “an ethics of knowledge,” but he does not show what this might entail apart from the support of science,

I submit that Monod’s reductionism is inadequate as an account of purposive behavior and consciousness in animals and human beings. There are alternative interpretations in which the interaction of chance and law is seen to be more complex than Monod’s portrayal and not incompatible with some forms of theism. The biochemist and theologian Arthur Peacocke gives chance a positive role in the exploration of potentialities inherent in the created order, which would be consistent with the idea of divine purpose (though not with the idea of a precise predetermined plan).⁶ At the moment, however, we are interested in Monod’s attempt to rely exclusively on the methods of science (plus an arbitrary choice of ethical axioms). He says that science proves that there is no purpose in the cosmos. Surely it would be more accurate to say that science does not deal with divine purpose; it is not a fruitful concept in the development of scientific theories.

As a last example, consider the explicit defense of scientific materialism by the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson. His writings trace the genetic and evolutionary origins of social behavior in insects, animals, and humans. He asks how self-sacrificial behavior could arise and persist among social insects, such as ants, if their reproductive ability is thereby sacrificed. Wilson shows that such “altruistic” behavior enhances the survival of close relatives with similar genes (in an ant colony, for example); selective pressures would encourage such self-sacrifice. He believes that all human behavior can be reduced to and explained by its biological origins and present genetic structure. “It may not be too much to say that sociology and the other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of biology to be included in the Modern Synthesis.”⁷ The mind will be explained as “an epiphenomenon of the neural machinery of the brain.”

Wilson holds that religious practices were a useful survival mechanism in humanity’s earlier history because they contributed to group cohesion. But he says that the power of religion will be gone forever when religion is explained as a product of evolution; it will be replaced by a philosophy of “scientific materialism.”⁸ (If he were consistent, would not Wilson have to say that the power of science will also be undermined when it is explained as a product of evolution? Do evolutionary origins really have anything to do with the legitimacy of either field?) He maintains that morality is the result of deep impulses encoded in the genes and that “the only demonstrable function of morality is to keep the genes intact.”

Wilson’s writing has received criticism from several quarters. For example, anthropologists have replied that most systems of human kinship are not organized in accord with coefficients of genetic similarity and that Wilson does not even consider cultural explanations for human behavior.⁹ In the present context, I would prefer to say that he has described an important area of biology suggesting some of the constraints within which human behavior occurs, but he has overgeneralized and extended it as an all-encompassing explanation, leaving no room for the causal efficacy of other facets of human life and experience. We will consider his views further in chapter 7.

Each of these authors seems to have assumed that there is only one acceptable type of explanation, so that explanation in terms of astronomical origins or biochemical mechanisms or evolutionary development excludes any other kind of explanation. Particular scientific concepts have been extended and extrapolated beyond their scientific use; they have been inflated into comprehensive naturalistic philosophies. Scientific concepts and theories have been taken to provide an exhaustive description of reality, and the abstractive and selective character of science has been ignored. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead calls this “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” It can also be described as “making a metaphysics out of a method.” But because scientific materialism starts from scientific ideas, it carries considerable influence in an age that respects science.

2. BIBLICAL LITERALISM

A variety of views of scripture and its relation to science have appeared throughout the history of Christian thought. Augustine held that when there appears to be a conflict between demonstrated scientific knowledge and a literal reading of the Bible, the latter should be interpreted metaphorically, as in the case of the first chapter of Genesis. Scripture is not concerned about “the form and shape of the heavens”; the Holy Spirit “did not wish to teach men things of no relevance to their salvation.”¹⁰ Medieval writers acknowledged diverse literary forms and levels of truth in scripture, and they gave figurative and allegorical interpretations to many problematic passages. Luther and the Anglicans continued this tradition, though some later Lutherans and Calvinists were more literalistic.

Biblical interpretation did play a part in the condemnation of Galileo. He himself held that God is revealed in both “the book of nature” and “the book of scripture”; the two books could not conflict, he said, since they both came from God. He maintained that writers of the Bible were only interested in matters essential to our salvation, and in their writing they had to “accommodate themselves to the capacity of the common people” and the mode of speech of the times. But Galileo’s theories did conflict with a literal interpretation of some scriptural passages, and they called into question the Aristotelian system that the church had adopted in the Thomistic synthesis. At the 350th anniversary of the publication of the Dialogues, Pope John Paul II said that since then there has been “a more accurate appreciation of the methods proper to the different orders of knowledge.” The church, he said, “is made up of individuals who are limited and who are closely bound up with the culture of the time they live in. . . . It is only through humble and assiduous study that she learns to dissociate the essentials of faith from the scientific systems of a given age, especially when a culturally influenced reading of the Bible seemed to be linked to an obligatory cosmology.”¹¹ In 1984, a Vatican commission acknowledged that “church officials had erred in condemning Galileo.”¹²

In Darwin’s day, evolution was taken mainly as a challenge to design in nature and as a challenge to human dignity (assuming that no sharp line separates human and animal forms), but it was also taken by some groups as a challenge to scripture. Some defended biblical inerrancy and tota...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part One: Religion and the Methods of Science
• Part Two: Religion and the Theories of Science
• Part Three: Philosophical and Theological Reflections
• Notes
• Index of Names
• Copyright
• About the Publisher