The quick answer is, yes, science and religion oppose each other. I suppose I differ from some of my colleagues and a lot of scientists who continuously say that religion and science are not opposing, especially to those in the intelligent design crowd. As if this clever ploy is going to continue to work on the religious, the greater whole of which consists of relatively intelligent people who have a basic understanding about science and in particular evolution. These people will figure it out sooner or later and this bumper sticker argument isn’t going to cut it. The one thing I agree with when it comes to creationists (take note, this does not happen often) is the explanatory power of science: indeed, some creationists do find science to be a danger to their faith and I at least recognize the consistency in this viewpoint.
The real problem is consistency. Science and religion oppose each other on a deep epistemic basis. Science is a methodology and not a body of knowledge, as most people misunderstand. It is a process of critical thinking that uses evidence to induce claims while trying to disprove them deductively through testing. We use science all the time in our daily lives. Suppose your desk lamp does not turn on. Maybe the switch is sticky so you flick it on and off a couple of times. Does it turn on now? No? Then the claim was wrong. Perhaps it isn’t plugged in. Is it plugged in? If it is, the claim was wrong. Maybe the lamp is broken or something isn’t connecting right. Get another bulb that you know works (like a fresh unused one) and see if it works then. Does it turn on? Etc. This is how science operates. It begins with a question or a problem. We hypothesize claims that seem plausible; claims that we tend to have previous evidence.
Religion, in general, does not work in this way. It isn’t open to rigorous testing. The claims have already been made and there is no process of hypothesizing. Science is tentative, constantly checking claims building on those checked claims, reanalyzing, reformulating, using new instruments and new methods: it is a self-correcting process. Religion is absolute, working in certainty, with no error bars or probabilities. Scientific arguments must be won through robust evidence and systematic testing while religious arguments tend to consist mainly of faith, personal anecdotes, and emotional justifications. Scientific claims are democratic and are open to anybody who wants to do the tests while religious claims are only open to the person claiming them and are often aristocratic, open to a select few of devoted “believers”.
This is not to caricature religion, as different religions have different levels of acceptances to evidence and to new advances in science and what not. Of course, it would seem rather strange to call science itself a religion simply because it seems to be lacking some very important component that religion has (which is some sort of acceptance towards faith). If one’s belief system consisted of beliefs that are grounded in lots of evidence, it wouldn’t be called a religion, just as it would be ridiculous to call science a religion.
Useful science has to begin by ruling out religious claims (non-evidential faith based claims) because, other then the fact that there isn’t any evidence, there are just too many non-evidential claims. Maybe a little invisible gnome is preventing the light bulb to work. Maybe a magical unicorn is preventing the circuit from completing. Maybe God is answering someone’s prayers and preventing my lamp from working. Einstein couldn’t have even begun contemplating relativity if he had to systematically rule out all the possible non-evidential claims. Not all beliefs or claims are equal: some are better than others and the way we distinguish the beliefs is through the level of evidence or justification.
I always find it fascinating when scientists are able to do great work in geology but still believe in Genesis or spend their life’s work on Evolution and still believe in a talking snake. The term is “compartmentalization” where people compartmentalize their belief systems so in different scenarios (often between work and home or Sundays and weekdays). They create separate compartments between scientific, evidential thought processes and faith based non-evidential belief system where religious beliefs are sort of immune to evidential beliefs. In science, we take it as a sort of premise that the world is a predictable place. If we repeat tests under the same conditions, we will get the same results (within errors of course). If one were to truly believe in things like miracles, one could never be sure that the data they held was something predictable. People like to say that abstinence is the only 100% but the Virgin Mary proves otherwise.
The biggest tragedy is that in our public schools, since we constantly have to tiptoe around people’s religious beliefs under the guise of respect, science education has become less robust. After all of the court cases of creationism, creation science, and intelligent design being taught in public schools, a lot of textbooks have been reluctant to put a robust explanation of the theory of evolution. Not to mention, many public schools have tried not to teach evolution in order to prevent controversy. Most public schools just do not have the money to afford being sued. The irony is that many parents now send their children to different religious private schools so that they can have a more robust science education, presumably since private schools do not need to teach under the same definition of “respect”. Go figure.
Ken Ueda is a senior math, physics and philosophy triple major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
