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SCIENCE AND RELIGION IIWHO GOES THERE: FRIEND OR FOE?KENNETH W. PHIFER OCTOBER 15, 2006MAUMEE VALLEY UU CONGREGATION20189 NORTH DIXIE HIGHWAYBOWLING GREEN, OHIO 43402-9253

Science and religion are the two master narratives of the modern western world, andincreasingly of the entire globe. One is a narrative of curiosity and adventure dealing withthe material world. The other is a narrative of ethics and inspiration, giving us a reason tolive and guidelines for how to do so.Science and religion have enormous powers of creativity and destruction. Science hasmade our lives healthier, more comfortable, and more interesting, but it has also madeour lives vastly more dangerous. Religion has inspired us to great deeds and kept us fromdespair, but it has also motivated us to hate and to kill.How these influential and volatile forces relate to each other is of great importance. Arelationship of mutual respect and cooperation could move the world in the direction of beauty and goodness. A relationship of contempt and hostility could ruin the planet andall human communities. Ken Wilber may well be right to say that “the relationship between science and religion…is the most critical issue facing global societies today.”There are a growing number of people who see the importance of this relationship. TheAmerican Academy for the Advancement of Science has an office on the dialogue between religion and science. There are well over 1,000 courses on science and religiontaught in our colleges and universities. Several medical schools offer courses inspirituality and medicine. Oxford University has an endowed chair in science andreligion, and Cambridge a professorship in theology and natural science.There is a new and growing awareness of the importance of what science and religion sayabout and to each other. At the moment, the conversation between these forces ischaracterized by three broad categories of understanding of how science and religion do,can, and should relate to one another.Hostility is one of these. Science and religion each have advocates who hold the other endeavor and those who practice it in contempt. One observer describes this antagonism“as a series of guerilla wars between an egocentricChristianity and an arrogant secular science, neither of which is prepared to concede tothe other, neither of which can achieve an absolute and unambiguous victory, and neither of which is prepared to take any prisoners.” The truth underneath that hyperbole is that asegment of both religion and science maintains a fighting stance toward the other.Page 1

The warfare began no later than 1543, when Copernicus posthumously published histheory of a heliocentric universe. The Catholic Church scorned the idea. As this ideagained strength in both evidence and supporters, the Church brought pressure to bear onscientists holding such views to abjure them. Giordano Bruno lost his life to this pressure.Galileo recanted his views. Others were afraid to speak.Two centuries later, Darwin delayed publishing his findings and theories partly out of aconcern at the likely reaction to them in the religious community.Religion in the west held power over science for centuries. It relinquished that power only under the force of overwhelming evidence that much theology was simply wrong inits doctrines of nature.Some still cannot admit this. Adherents of what was called “creation science”—truly anoxymoron as American courts and almost every scientist recognized—and the later namefor the same religious doctrine, “intelligent design,” base their theories ultimately on aliteral reading of the Bible. For them, the Bible is the only true epistemological authority.Anything that runs counter to what they call “The Word of God” is wrong, no matter theevidence amassed to support it.This is why efforts have be made to cast out the teaching of evolution from our schools,and, failing that, to have so-called “intelligent design” taught side-by-side with it inscience classes. I am proud of the State of Michigan Board of Education who votedunanimously a few days ago to teach evolution in science classes and to keep “intelligentdesign” out of science classes. The latter doctrine can be taught in religion, philosophy,or sociology classes.Some religious people think science is the work of the devil. This derives in part from themyth of the Garden of Eden, which some Christians think is history. The two humans placed there violated the prohibition against eating of the tree of the knowledge of goodand evil, lured to do so by the serpent, Satan.This notion of their being limits of knowledge beyond which we should not go is alsofound in the Faust legend, first written down in 1587 by Johann Spiess. Faust gave hissoul to the devil in order to “learn me magic and fulfill my desires in all things.”Part of our moral inheritance as a culture is a sense of the danger of forbiddenknowledge, a lesson that science ignores. To do so, say some of those made nervous byscience, can only bring about disaster.Religion can be hostile to science.Some scientists demonstrate an equal hostility to religion.Page 2

A century ago, T.H. Huxley wrote that “the cradle of science is surrounded by deadtheologians as that of Hercules was with strangled serpents.” Even science as an infant isstrong enough to destroy religion’s claims.In our own times, Richard Dawkins joins this chorus of those who despise religion. Hehas called religion “a virus” that infects human beings, replicates, and spreads. Herenounces scientists who profess a belief in God because, in his view, atheism is the onlyrational choice for an intelligent person. “What,” he once wrote, “has theology ever saidthat is of the smallest use to anybody?”A survey several years ago revealed that 90% of the members of the National Academyof Sciences, the most elite group of scientists in this country, describe themselves asatheists. Few of them have anything good to say about religion. Cosmologist RockyKolb, for example, urges that science and religion be kept apart because religion is theantithesis of science.Murray Gelll-Mann called his brilliant system of particle classificationThe Eight-fold Way, not as a tribute to Buddhism but as a joke pointing outthe silliness of religion in the face of scientific evidence. Francis Crick wrote a whole book to disprove the existence of a soul, stating bluntly on the first page that human beings are “nothing but a pack of neurons.”One can hardly blame scientists for their mistrust of religion. Consider that Ptolemydivided the earth into latitude and longitude and wrote eight volumes still being used bymodern cartographers. His work enabled later explorations of the globe. He also arguedthat lands lay beyond the waters that seemed to encircle Europe and Africa.For more than 1,000 years his work was suppressed by the Christian Church. In its placewere produced maps that reflected orthodox Christian dogma about the shape of the earth —a circular dish divided by water beyond which was an ocean that was the boundary for the whole earth.The priority of doctrine over knowledge has too often been the religious way. Scienceand scientists and all humanity have been damaged by that attitude. The hostility of science to religion is, if not desirable, at least understandable.Hostility is one of the ways that science and religion have related to each other and relateto each other today. Hostility is rarely a fruitful mode of communication, and it certainlyhas not been in this case.A better way is the path chosen by those who define religion and science as dealing withdifferent areas of knowledge by different methods. They have no reason to be hostile toone another. They really have nothing to say to each other.Alfred North Whitehead wrote in the early years of the 20

century that “the dogmas of religion are the attempts to formulate in precise terms the truths disclosed in the religiousPage 3