Religion and Science in Conflict?

Sociologist John H. Evans of the UC San Diego Division of Social Sciences writes an editorial in the LA Times in which he calls for greater understanding between people working in science and religion. Evans means well and offers some helpful advice, but some of what he says reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what the conflict is all about. Here are some examples:

There are, of course, a few fact claims in which conservative Protestant theology and science differ, such as the origins of humans and the universe. Here we find that typical conservative Protestants are likely to believe the teaching of their religion on the issue and not the scientific claim. < br />
We could complain that they are being inconsistent in believing the scientific method some of the time but not always. Yet social science research has long shown that people typically are not very consistent.

I don't think anyone "believes the scientific method" or disbelieves it. The scientific method, if there even is such a thing, is not something which one believes or not, as one does a proposition. Nor is there any significant disagreement over the empirical facts scientists have discovered.

What is at issue between many religious people and many people who work in the scientific disciplines is which metaphysical view of the world, naturalism or theism, best explains and interprets those facts. In other words, the conflict Evans writes about is not between science and religion but between two competing sets of philosophical assumptions.

This is evident in the next excerpt where Evans talks about unobservable abstractions.

Besides, conservative Protestants don't think of their own views as inconsistent, and they have a long-standing way, going back to at least the mid-19th century, of dividing the scientific findings they believe and don't believe. They tend to accept scientists' claims that are based on direct observation and common sense and to reject those based on what might be called unobservable abstractions. Since nobody was around for the Big Bang and for human evolution from lower primates, these unobservable claims are treated with more skepticism than measurements of the effect of airborne carbon on planetary temperature.

An unobservable abstraction is not something scientists should be dogmatic about. The unobservable may be heuristically useful, but if someone finds that it is incompatible with other metaphysical beliefs that they hold the scientist is ill-positioned to argue about it. Scientists can only argue about what can be empirically demonstrated and tested. Unobservable abstractions are usually neither of these.

Once scientists start talking about unobservables, unless they can devise a way to test the unobservable, they're no longer doing science they're doing metaphysics.

Understanding what concerns the "other side" would help. Those wishing to affect public policy on issues such as climate change, for example, need to make it clear to conservative Protestants that the science of global warming is based more on direct observations than on analytic abstractions, that it is more like determining the average body temperature of a human than where humans came from.

Again Evans seems to misunderstand. Those Protestants who are climate change skeptics are not skeptics for religious reasons. Religion, indeed, has nothing to do with it. They remain dubious because they're not convinced that the science supports the claims of those who believe climate change is going to be catastrophic, costly, and that it's man-made.

Conservative Protestants, in turn, should make distinctions between scientific areas where in which they are in moral conflict with science, such as embryonic stem cell research, and those areas where they are not.

But there are no areas where conservative Protestants are in moral conflict with science. There's no dispute about the science involved in stem cell research. The dispute is about whether human embryos should be killed in order to harvest their cells. That's a moral conflict between people who believe it's wrong to take the life of a human, potential or otherwise, and those who believe it's not wrong to take a human life in the early stages of development.

To move forward, we, as a country, need to lower the political conflict. Yes, the views found in fundamentalist churches are not exactly the same as those at the National Science Foundation. But we would see less of the polarizing "we real Americans" rhetoric from the religious right if its members were not ridiculed as know-nothings. Conservative Protestants are not fundamentally opposed to all science.

One can appreciate Professor Evan's intent here while nevertheless wincing at his claim that "Conservative Protestants are not fundamentally opposed to all science." The fact is that conservative Protestants are not fundamentally opposed to science at all. What they oppose is the insistence that only naturalistic, materialistic explanations be permitted to interpret the data collected in the course of scientific investigation. They see this rule as intellectually limiting and metaphysically prejudicial.

To put it differently, conservatives agree with the dictum of philosopher and psychologist William James who wrote that "Any rule of thinking that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if these kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."