Atheism is in trouble…

Atheism is in trouble. This may seem an odd claim. We're more used to lamenting the decline of Christianity — the empty pews, the aging clerics, the dark and shuttered churches.

But atheism — by which I mean a commitment to the view that there is no God, and no transcendent or supernatural realities — has not made corresponding gains. Christian faith is not being supplanted by atheism, so much as by secular indifference, by a blend of materialism and superstition, and by a wave of interest in eastern, synchretic or simply newly-invented religious traditions.

Nor is the decline of Christian practice universal. In much of the Americas, in parts of Asia and above all in Africa, Christianity is thriving. There is nowhere on the planet where this can be said of atheism.

This is not how it was supposed to be. For a hundred and fifty years or so, there has been a strongly-held view that religion depends on ignorance, particularly scientific ignorance; that as communities and nations become more educated, and arrive at a better understanding of the world they live in, the "need" for God will disappear. Science will provide better answers to life's great questions — answers which not only are true, but can be shown to be true. Science, in short, is destined to supplant religion.

Yet this clearly isn't happening. So where does the idea that it should happen come from?

The conflict of science and religion…

Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Justus Sustermans

The idea that science and religion are fundamentally opposed is a relatively recent one, dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. Proponents like to point to the church's treatment of Galileo as evidence of the incompatibility, but this example suffers from one glaring flaw; Galileo himself lived and died a devout Catholic. The greatest scientist of his age, with every reason to be conscious of the obscurantism that religion can engender, who is supposed to embody the inherent opposition of science and religion, saw no conflict. Galileo may have had a beef with the church, but with religion, not at all.

"Science" is a broad concept; it includes not only the natural sciences like physics and biology, but also the social sciences like economics and anthropology. And "religion" is similarly wide; it includes the monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), polytheism, religions such as Buddhism which do not propose a personal god or gods at all, pantheism, nature-worship, and religion-like philosophies such as Confucianism.

Where is the conflict? Mostly, it is not to be found in places such as this: Judaism and economics, for example, are clearly not in conflict. Daoism is not opposed to archaeology, and Satanists do not condemn chemistry. The supposed conflict between science and religion, whenever examined, mostly comes down to a much more limited tension between a particular flavour of Christianity, and a particular scientific understanding of the origins of life. We'll look at that particular conflict in more detail next week. For now, we'll just note how silly it is to generalise from that issue to the whole of science, and the whole of religion.

Three views of the relationship between religion and science…

Once we dispose of the myth that science and religion are actively opposed to one another, we can ask what the true relationship between them is. Broadly speaking, there are three views on this:

"Science and religion are incompatible"

Some see science and religion as competing for the same territory, so to speak — i.e. they see religions as offering "explanations" of the material world analogous to scientific explanations, and science seeking to provide "meaning" to people's lives, or to the universe. So one of them has to give way to the other.

This is naïve and fundamentalist. It assumes that reality is simple and there is only one kind of knowledge. But the world is much too diverse and complex for there to be just one discipline, whether it be science, religion or anything else, providing just one kind of knowledge. This, indeed, is precisely why science subdivides itself into many different fields of enquiry, each dealing with its own "world" or dimension of reality. Reality is multi-layered. So is knowledge.

When a religious person asserts that the theory of evolution must be wrong because it does not fit scriptural accounts, or when a scientist asserts that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God, each is making this error.

Scientists, it goes without saying, are as entitled to their own views on religious questions as anyone else. But they are mistaken if they think that science gives any more support for atheism than it does for theism. The most that can be said with honesty and accuracy is that science makes no use of the hypothesis that there is a god. But it is either intellectually lazy or intellectually dishonest to translate this into evidence for the non-existence of God.

This doesn't, of course, refute atheism. It is quite in order to want to hold that there is no God, no transcendent significance to existence, etc. But those who do so cannot hide behind science, and say that science establishes this. Atheism, like theism, can only be held as a matter of faith.

"Science and religion are independent"

The "independence" view basically holds that religious faith is irrelevant to science; it does not affect it at all. What scientists do — observing the material world, forming hypotheses, testing, revising hypotheses, etc, has no connection with any religious (or atheist) view about the meaning of life. Likewise, what goes on in the ritual and practice of any religion has no connection of any significance to what goes on in science.

This view has a lot going for it. Even within science, the different disciplines tend to be independent of one another. What goes on in physics has little impact on what goes on in economics or anthropology; even though they all study the same universe, they are separate fields of enquiry.

The "independence" view has a large measure of truth, but it is not a complete account. Most religious standpoints have ethical dimensions, views about what is right and wrong in human behaviour. So, for example, religion intersects with the practice of science, if not with the validity of the scientific method or the truth of scientific knowledge, if we object to human cloning on religious grounds. (Non-religious ethical systems intersect with science in exactly the same way, of course.)

"Science and religion are complementary"

The key is to understand the different goals of science and religion. Science seeks to explain the physical, social and human worlds, in terms of how they work, and why they work as they do. Religion seeks to explain them by offering meaning, purpose and significance. At the risk of oversimplification, science tells us how the earth orbits the sun, and explains the mechanism by which this happens. But religion offers insights into why the earth orbits the sun; why there should be any mechanism at all at work here.

And, while these are different goals, they can complement one another. A few examples of complementarity :

• Historically, religious views have helped to create the intellectual "space" in which scientific enquiry is undertaken. The church taught that:
• the physical world is not an illusion, so there is something to study;
• the world is not evil, so investigating it does not contaminate us;
• the world is not divine, so investigating it is not blasphemous;
• the world is the product of a rational mind, which supports and reinforces the belief of scientists that the world is intelligible and that there are scientific truths to be found in studying it.
• Conversely, the belief of the monotheist faiths in a creator God whose creation is rational and intelligible are reinforced by the progress of science, which shows that the world is indeed intelligible.
• Religion helps the sciences by highlighting that there are areas of knowledge that fall outside science. This gives scientists a clearer self-understanding, and discourages science from taking on a task that it cannot complete, that of providing meaning to life, or moral rules.
• Christianity in particular, with the doctrine of the Trinity (three persons, one nature) and the Incarnation (one person, two natures) has accustomed the western world to the idea that there is a personal dimension to human life which transcends the biological. This in turn has created a climate in which the human sciences — anthropology, economics, psychology, etc — have developed.
• Science affirms that a quest for objective truth is possible and meaningful, and thus is congruent with those religions (including Christianity) which affirm the same thing, in opposition to the post-modern notion that there is no objective truth.

The reader who has stuck with me this far will realise that I am sympathetic to the "complementary" view. Nevertheless, while there is no inherent conflict, specific points of conflict between the scientist and the religious person do arise from time to time. Next week I want to look at one of those in more detail: Intelligent Design.

What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum.

Peregrinus can be contacted at: Peregrinus <peregrinus@catholica.com.au>

©2007 Peregrinus

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