Science and Faith: Enemies, or Allies?

Science and Faith

“The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.”

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

The story most people have absorbed is that science and religion have been at war for centuries, that the Church jailed Galileo for saying the earth moves, and that the war is now effectively over: as knowledge advances, God retreats into the shrinking gaps of what we cannot yet explain. It is a vivid story, and almost every part of it is wrong — not according to apologists, but according to the historians of science who study the period for a living.

That does not mean nothing happened. Galileo was condemned, and the condemnation was a genuine failure the Church has since acknowledged in so many words. Christians have argued badly about geology, and are arguing badly about biology still. Those episodes are real and are conceded below rather than explained away.

But the conflict thesis as a general account of the relationship is a specific piece of nineteenth-century polemic with two authors and a date, and it has been abandoned by the field it purported to describe. The deeper question is not who behaved badly in 1633. It is whether science and Christian belief are the kind of things that can conflict at all — whether they are rival answers to one question, or answers to two.

Let’s take the history first, and then the logic, and ask …

  • If God is invoked only to explain what science has not yet explained, what happens to Him as the explanations arrive?
  • And if that is not what Christians have ever meant by God, what is science standing on when it assumes the world is orderly and the mind can grasp it?

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Atheist/Skeptic View

The skeptic holds that religion and science are not merely different but opposed, because they are rival ways of settling the same question: what is actually the case. Science answers it by observation, testing and revision. Religion answers it by revelation and authority, and defends its answers afterward. Where the two have met, one has consistently given way, and it has not been science.

What They Affirm

Explanation has moved in one direction for four hundred years. Disease was demonic, and is bacterial. The diversity of species was created, and is evolved. The origin of the cosmos was a divine fiat, and is a subject of physics. Lightning, famine, madness and the motions of the planets have all made the same journey. No explanation has ever travelled the other way — nothing once understood naturally has later required a god.1

The God of the gaps is what is left. Since every closed gap is permanent, the divine role shrinks with each advance, and now survives mainly where science is incomplete: the origin of life, the fine-tuning of the constants, the first instant of the universe. But an appeal to God at those points explains nothing. It names the mystery rather than resolving it, and it has an unbroken record of being overtaken.

Galileo was not a misunderstanding. A man was tried by the Inquisition, made to abjure a true theory on his knees, and confined for the rest of his life; his book went on the Index, where it stayed for two centuries. Bruno was burned. Whatever the details, an institution that behaves this way toward inquiry is not a patron of it.2

The two have opposite habits of mind. Science is organized around the possibility of being shown wrong: it states what would refute it, and revises when refuted. Faith is organized around fidelity; doubt is a failing rather than a method, and the conclusion is fixed before the inquiry starts. These are not two paths to one summit. They are incompatible ways of deciding what to believe.3

And religion does make testable claims, which have failed. A young earth, a global flood, a fixed earth at the center of the heavens, the special creation of humanity apart from other animals — these were taught as revealed truth and are false. Where Scripture touches the observable world it has been corrected by observation, which is precisely what one would expect of a book written by people who did not know any better.

God is a scientific hypothesis, and a poor one. The claim that a mind created and sustains the universe is a claim about what exists, and claims about what exists are the business of science. It predicts nothing that naturalism does not predict, explains nothing that naturalism leaves unexplained, and adds an entity more complex than anything it was introduced to account for.4

Endnotes
  1. The argument from the historical direction of explanation is central to Jerry A. Coyne, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (Viking, 2015), and appears throughout Victor J. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis (Prometheus, 2007). ↩
  2. The classic statements are John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), and Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), from which the popular account of the Galileo affair chiefly descends. ↩
  3. Coyne, Faith Versus Fact, ch. 2, on the incompatibility of the two methods; see also Sam Harris, The End of Faith (Norton, 2004). ↩
  4. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006), ch. 2, arguing that the existence of a creator is “unequivocally a scientific question,” and ch. 4, on the improbability of a designer complex enough to design. ↩

Catholic View

The Catholic position is not that science has limits which faith fills in. It is that science and Christian belief are answering different questions, that the historical war between them is a documented invention rather than a record, and that the assumptions science cannot do without — that the world is ordered, and that our minds can reach it — are more at home in a created universe than in an accidental one.

What Is Granted

Several things, and they should be granted plainly. Galileo was condemned, and the condemnation was wrong; John Paul II said so publicly in 1992, and the case remains a genuine failure rather than a misunderstanding to be explained away. Christians did resist geology and then evolution, and some still teach a young earth, which is not the Catholic position and never has been. Where believers have treated Genesis as a scientific report, they have been corrected by the evidence, and deserved to be.

What does not follow is the general thesis. Particular churchmen behaving badly about particular findings is a fact about churchmen. The claim on offer is much larger — that the two enterprises are by nature at war — and that claim is not supported by the history.

The Warfare Thesis Has Two Authors and a Date

The idea that science and religion have been in perpetual conflict is not an observation handed down from the Middle Ages. It was manufactured in the late nineteenth century by two Americans: John William Draper, in History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), and Andrew Dickson White, in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). White was the first president of Cornell and had a practical motive: he was founding a university without religious affiliation and wanted a history that justified it.

Historians of science do not hold the thesis today. It is not that they have gone soft on religion; it is that the evidence went the other way as the period was actually studied. The flat-earth story, the suppression of dissection, the Church banning human anatomy, the burning of Bruno for Copernicanism — each is either false or seriously distorted, and the standard collection cataloguing them, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, is published by Harvard and written by twenty-five historians, most of them not Christians.

Galileo, With the Details Left In

The case is worth stating accurately because it is the one piece of evidence everybody has. Galileo was not an outsider persecuted by churchmen; he was a favorite of them, funded by cardinals, celebrated in Rome, and personally friendly with the pope who eventually tried him. Copernicus had been a canon, his book published with a preface dedicating it to the pope, and it circulated unmolested for seventy years.

The scientific difficulty was real: heliocentrism was not yet demonstrated. The obvious test — stellar parallax — could not be detected with available instruments, and would not be observed until 1838. Galileo’s own proposed proof, that the tides are caused by the earth’s motion, was simply wrong. Cardinal Bellarmine’s position was that in the absence of demonstration the theory should be taught as a hypothesis, and that if it were demonstrated, the interpretation of Scripture would have to be revised accordingly — which is the correct principle, stated by the man usually cast as the villain.

None of which excuses the outcome. The Church had no business settling an astronomical question by authority, the trial was a disgrace, and a bad theology of Scripture was doing the damage. But the popular version — a lone scientist tortured for the truth by an institution hostile to inquiry — is not what the documents show.

Who Actually Did the Science

If the Church were the enemy of inquiry, its record is inexplicable. The university is a medieval ecclesiastical invention, and it has no counterpart in any other civilization. Copernicus was a canon; Nicholas Steno, who founded stratigraphy, became a bishop; Gregor Mendel, whose experiments founded genetics, was an abbot. The calendar we all use was reformed by a pope working with Jesuit astronomers. Georges Lemaître, the priest who first proposed what became the Big Bang, was arguing for it against Einstein, who told him his physics was fine but his grasp of physics “abominable” — a disagreement between two scientists, not between science and religion.

Lemaître also supplies the best evidence against the charge of gap-filling. When Pius XII announced in 1951 that the expanding universe confirmed the creation of Genesis, it was Lemaître who objected and lobbied to have the claim dropped, on the ground that a physical theory is not a proof of a doctrine and that tying them together would damage both. He got his way. That is a priest defending the independence of science from a pope.

God Is Not a Gap

The god-of-the-gaps criticism is entirely justified against the thing it names, and Catholic theology has never held it. The idea that God is a cause among causes — one item in the chain, intervening where the natural mechanism runs out — is a distortion that grew up alongside early modern science and was attacked by theologians long before it was attacked by atheists.

The classical claim is different in kind. God is not the explanation of a particular event within the universe but the reason there is a universe with events in it — the cause of existence itself, operating through natural causes rather than in the gaps between them. On that account a complete physical account of the world is not a threat to be resisted but exactly what a rational creation ought to yield. When someone discovers the mechanism of a thing, he has found out how God did it. Aquinas made the distinction seven centuries ago, and it is the reason a Catholic can accept evolution without anxiety.

What Science Stands On

Science operates on assumptions it cannot itself establish, because any attempt to test them would have to use them. That the universe is orderly rather than chaotic; that its order holds tomorrow as it did today; that human minds, evolved for finding food and avoiding predators, are nevertheless capable of grasping the structure of reality at scales no ancestor encountered; that mathematics invented on paper turns out to describe the behavior of matter, a fact Eugene Wigner called an unreasonable effectiveness which we neither understand nor deserve.

None of these is a scientific finding. They are convictions about the kind of place the world is, and the founders of the discipline held them for theological reasons: an intelligible universe was expected because a rational God had made it, and it could be investigated because it was contingent, made freely rather than necessarily, so that its workings had to be discovered by looking rather than deduced from first principles. That is precisely the experimental attitude. It is not an accident of where science began.

The Reply in Brief

The war is a book, not a history — two of them, from the 1870s and 1890s, written with a purpose and abandoned since by the historians of the subject. Galileo was real and the condemnation was wrong, but he was the Church’s protege before he was its defendant, his own proof was mistaken, and the principle that demonstrated science must govern the reading of Scripture was stated at the time by his prosecutor.

And the god of the gaps was never the God of Christian theology. The question science asks is how this universe works; the question it does not ask, and has no instrument for, is why there is a universe that works at all, and why it should be the sort of thing a mind can follow. A believer expects the world to be intelligible and expects mechanisms to be found. He is not waiting anxiously for the next discovery. He has been told to expect one.

The full essay documents the making of the conflict thesis and its abandonment, works through the Galileo trial from the surviving record, sets out the medieval origins of the university and the experimental method, takes up fine-tuning and what it can and cannot be made to prove, examines Lemaître’s objection to Pius XII in detail, and treats the Catholic reception of evolution from Providentissimus Deus to the present.

Summary

Are science and faith at war? Particular Christians have certainly fought particular findings, and lost. But the general thesis — that the two are opposed by nature — is a piece of nineteenth-century polemic, and the historians of science have put it down.

The conflict thesis has two authors and a date. It was manufactured by John William Draper (1874) and Andrew Dickson White (1896), the latter founding a secular university and wanting a history to justify it. Historians of science no longer hold it, not out of deference to religion but because the evidence went the other way — the flat-earth story, the ban on dissection, and Bruno burned for Copernicanism are all false or badly distorted.

Galileo was condemned, and the condemnation was wrong. That is conceded, and John Paul II said as much in 1992. But he was the Church’s protege before he was its defendant, funded by cardinals and friendly with the pope who tried him; heliocentrism was genuinely undemonstrated, since stellar parallax was not observed until 1838; his own proof from the tides was simply wrong; and Bellarmine stated the correct principle — that a demonstrated science must govern the reading of Scripture.

The people doing the science were often the clergy. The university is a medieval ecclesiastical invention with no counterpart elsewhere. Copernicus was a canon, Steno a bishop, Mendel an abbot, Lemaître a priest. When Pius XII announced in 1951 that the expanding universe proved Genesis, it was Lemaître who objected and got the claim withdrawn — a priest defending the independence of science from a pope.

The god of the gaps is a real error, and not a Catholic one. A God invoked to plug what science has not yet explained does shrink with every advance, and deserves to. Classical theology says something else entirely: God is not a cause among causes but the reason there is a universe of causes at all, working through natural mechanisms rather than in the spaces between them. Finding the mechanism of a thing is finding out how it was done, not finding that nobody did it.

And science rests on convictions it cannot test. That nature is orderly; that the order holds tomorrow; that minds evolved for finding food can grasp reality at scales no ancestor met; that mathematics done on paper describes matter — what Eugene Wigner called an unreasonable effectiveness we neither understand nor deserve. These are not findings but beliefs about what sort of place the world is, and the founders of the discipline held them because they thought a rational God had made it freely, so that its workings had to be discovered by looking rather than deduced. That is the experimental attitude, and it is not an accident of geography.

In short: the war is a book rather than a history. Science asks how this universe works; it has no instrument for asking why there is a universe that works, or why it should be the kind of thing a mind can follow. The believer is not braced against the next discovery. He was told to expect one.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download Has Science Replaced God? (.docx)