Putting this another way, it seems to skeptics that religious teachings are “unfalsifiable.” After all, the renowned philosopher Karl Popper argued that genuine science strives to come up with evidence that will show its ideas to be wrong. That is, science has the fortitude to risk the “falsification” of its own claims.71 For example, since relativity theory predicts that light waves will always bend in the presence of gravitational fields, then scientists should look for possible instances in which this prediction might not be true. Then, if they cannot find any evidence to the contrary, this means that relativity is a pretty strong theory for weathering all attempts at falsification. Falsifiability is the mark of a theory’s scientific status. A willingness to allow its ideas to be falsified purifies science and shows it to be a truly open and honest way of learning about the nature of things.
But can religion display a comparable openness? Scientific skeptics (i.e. those who reject religion in the name of science) think that religion lacks the robust probity of science. The God-hypothesis, for example, seems to be completely beyond falsification, so it cannot pass muster before the courts of science. Religion is based, skeptics claim, on a priori assumptions, or “faith,” whereas science takes nothing for granted. In addition, religion relies too heavily on the imagination, whereas science sticks to observable facts. Religion is highly emotional, passionate, and subjective, whereas science strives to remain disinterested, dispassionate, and objective. These antitheses seem to add up to nothing less than an insuperable mutual hostility between science and religion.
Whenever scientific ideas do not correspond with the letter of the Bible (which is quite often), biblical literalists argue that science must be wrong and religion right. This is especially the case regarding evolution, but also with miracles, the creation of the universe, the origin of life, and other issues. Many Christians in the USA and elsewhere maintain that the Bible teaches the “true” science and that secular science should be rejected if it does not correspond with the letter of Scripture.
In addition to biblical literalists, there are other critics who think that science is the enemy of religion. They argue that it was the coming of science that produced the emptiness and meaninglessness of modern experience. When science separated the experience of “facts” from our human need for eternal “values,” they argue, it emptied the cosmos of any real meaning. And since the main business of religion is to teach us the meaning of things, it cannot be reconciled with science. We would have been better off if the scientific revolution had never occurred.
In a controversial new book, for example, the British journalist Bryan Appleyard passionately argues that science is “spiritually corrosive, burning away ancient authorities and traditions.”72 Science, he insists, is inherently incapable of coexisting with religion. It is not a neutral way of knowing at all, but a subversive and demonic force that has evacuated our culture of its spiritual substance. It is impossible, he goes on to say, for anyone to be both religious and scientific in any honest, straightforward way.
Appleyard’s contention that science is “absolutely not compatible with religion” is confirmed from the other side by scientific skeptics, although, for them, science brings about the liberation rather than the emptying of culture. While they are certainly aware that many religious believers see no conflict between religion and science today, and that many theists are admittedly good scientists, skeptics claim that both the logic and the spirit of science are nevertheless fundamentally incompatible with any form of theistic religion. As the Cornell historian of science William Provine puts it, we have to “check our brains at the church house door” if we are to be both scientist and believer.73 More specific reasons for this judgment will be offered in each succeeding chapter.
II. Contrast
Many other scientists and theologians, on the other hand, find no such opposition between religion and science. Each is valid, they argue, though only in its own, clearly defined sphere of inquiry. Religion cannot be judged by the standards of science, nor vice-versa, because the questions each asks are so completely disparate and the content of their answers so distinct that it makes no sense to compare them with each other. If religion and science were both trying to do the same job, then they might be incompatible. But as they have radically dissimilar tasks, if we just keep them in their separate jurisdictions, preventing them from invading each other’s territory, there can never be any real “problem” of science and religion.
According to this “contrast” approach, the impression that religion conflicts with science is almost always rooted in a previous confusion or “conflation” of science with religion or some other belief system. To avoid conflict, then, we must first avoid any mindless melding of science and belief into an undifferentiated smudge. It was, after all, the inability of medieval theology to distinguish religion’s role clearly from that of science that made Galileo’s ideas seem so hostile to believers in the sixteenth century.
In fact, it is nearly always a prior conflation of science with religion that leads eventually to the sense that there is a conflict between them. The uncritical mixing of science with religion before the scientific era is what led to the lamentable condemnation of Galileo by the Church and to the hostility that many scientists still feel toward religion. Now, however, we should know better: religion and science have no business meddling in each other’s affairs in the first place. To avoid conflict, therefore, our second approach claims that we should carefully contrast science with religion. They are such completely independent ways of understanding reality that it is meaningless to place them in opposition to each other.
Conflation, in this view, is an unsatisfactory attempt to avoid conflict by carelessly commingling science with belief. Instead of respecting the sharp differences between science and religion, conflation weaves them into a single fabric where they fade into each other, becoming indistinguishable. Today, for instance, some conservative Christians argue that the biblical stories of creation give us the best scientific information about the beginnings of the universe and life. They call their fusion of science and belief “creation science,” an amalgamation that renounces the Darwinian theory of evolution in favor of a literalist interpretation of the biblical accounts of the world’s creation. It insists that the biblical stories are “scientific” and that they should be taught in public schools as the best alternative to evolutionary biology.
Another common brand of conflation is “concordism.” Rather than rejecting modern science outright, concordism forces the biblical text to correspond, at least in a loose way, with the patterns of modern science. In order to salvage the literal truth of the biblical book of Genesis, for example, some religious scientists match the six days of creation with what they consider to be six corresponding epochs in the scientific account of cosmic evolution. Religion, in this interpretation, must be made to look scientific at all costs if it is to be intellectually respectable today. In his book Genesis and The Big Bang, physicist Gerald Schroeder, for example, argues that relativity theory, with its challenge to the common sense notion of absolute simultaneity, once again allows us to take literally the six-day sequence of creation as depicted in the Bible. He attempts to show that what from one frame of reference appears as a single day may be billions of years from another. So the Bible agrees with science after all and physicists can now embrace religion!74
This conflation of science and religion is born out of a very human craving for unity in our understanding of the world. Because it seems to harmonize science and religion so neatly, it appeals to millions of people. At first sight, its blending of religion with science would seem to be a credible way of avoiding conflict. However, history shows that eventually the incommensurate strands of science and religion will begin to unravel, and a sense of conflict will take the place of superficial agreement. New developments in science, such as in evolutionary biology, geology, or astrophysics, put an end to easy alliances of the Bible and scientific interpretations of nature. Avoiding conflict by ignoring the vast differences between science and religious scriptures leads inevitably to fruitless confrontations. Unfortunately, these are what the mass media focus on, giving many people the impression that science and religion are perpetual enemies. The “contrast” approach proposes a very simple way of heading off any such appearance of conflict.
III. Contact
The method