How Religion "Advances"

Today it is relatively rare to find racist Christianity. As indicated in the previous essay, there is still plenty of it. But nowadays, fundamentalist megachurches proclaim that members of any race are equally invited to donate money to their coffers. But it wasn’t so long ago that many white fundamentalist Christian groups did not want to associate with members of other races.

It is even rarer to find Christians who insist that the Earth is the center of the universe. The only example of which I know is the Fixed Earth website. But it was not very far in the past that churches all insisted on geocentrism as a fundamental belief.

In these and in many other cases, the advances in belief—advances toward racial harmony and a scientific understanding of the universe—were the result of forces and processes that were not inherently religious. After slavery was abolished, people began to gradually realize that people of other races were fully human and deserved the same rights as one’s own race. Partly this was due to the utter failure of supremacists to find scientific verification for their beliefs, but mainly, I believe, because more and more people became acquainted with members of other races and discovered, usually pleasantly, that people they might once have disdained were actually nice, ordinary people. In many cases it was devout people who led the push toward racial harmony—and there is hardly a better example than Martin Luther King Jr.—but it was not religion itself that led these advances. None of the leaders, or followers, of racial integration re-read their Bibles and discovered, “Holy Moley! Right there is a verse that we’ve been overlooking for two thousand years.” The Bible did not change. There were, or so the fundamentalists claim, no new revelations from God. The advances in racial harmony, inside and outside of churches, came from accumulated experience which most religious groups have now acknowledged. Reason and experience led the way; religion followed.

It is clear that the conversion of religious people to heliocentrism occurred because science advanced, and religion followed.

Science, experience, and reason are the head of the animal of society; religion is the tail, sometimes wagging, sometimes dragging.

What is Hell Like? Come to Church and Find Out, or Not

I think this is the third time I have posted photos on this blog from the marquee of the church down the street from where I live. In the first photo, the marquee indicated, “Big Bang Theory: You’ve Got to be Kidding—God.” Interesting that God should actually provide a direct quotation to this particular church without providing it to other churches. I kind of thought they believed the Bible was God’s word, but apparently God sends them direct quotes. I used this photo in my 2012 book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged,Stressed-Out World. At first I thought God was ridiculing cosmology, but I have gradually come to realize that what really disturbed God was the television series by that name. Apparently God really hates TV shows with geeks in them. In the second photo, the marquee announced, “Evolution: The Science of Calling God a Liar.” I made a YouTube video of this sign, and it got copied around the FaceBookosphere.

Note of caution: There is a website that makes fake church marquee images. They are funny but don’t take them seriously. For example, the church sign that said, “God to President Bush: Those little voices are not from me. Check your meds,” was funny but not genuine. And that joke about the church marquee that said, “What is Hell? Come to church and find out” is likewise apocryphal.

But in this third example the marquee looks, at first, not too different from other church marquees. It is not outrageous, but subtly misleading in a way that I think is interesting enough to discuss at this point. There is a website called “ExploreGod.” In their videos, being shown at this church, they ask important questions, such as Does God exist? or (as in this photo) Why does God allow pain and suffering? These are good questions. But how a church approaches them and how scientists might approach them reveal a fundamental difference between religion and science.

First note that science itself cannot answer either question. But scientists as people frequently wonder about such questions and come up with personal answers to them.

When a church asks, Does God exist?, there is only one possible answer. And everything that leads up to their conclusion is forced into lockstep march toward that conclusion: the answer of Yes. But when scientists ask, Does God exist?, you get a whole range of answers. Science does not force its arguments into a lockstep march toward the answer of No. Many scientists answer Yes, many answer No. But many scientists, myself included, cannot answer this question. Instead we ask, what do you mean by God? If you mean a supreme being who controls all the details of the universe, the answer is clearly No. But if you mean a spiritual essence of love, the presence whereof can never be tested but which many of us would really, really like to believe in, the answer is a resounding I hope so for those of us in the middle. Scientists are always questioning our assumptions and biases. The churches answer the question like an army; scientists answer it like a herd of cats.

Similarly, when churches ask the question in the photo, you know that they will reach some kind of answer or other that leaves God both merciful and all-powerful. They might answer it (especially this church), “God allows suffering because there are Democrats in the world.” Others might answer it, “Because God is testing and strengthening us.” But both of these answers fail to match the evidence, because (in response to the first) even Republicans suffer now and again—there are some forms of pain from which even assault weapons cannot protect them—and (in response to the second) because pain and suffering is way, way, prodigiously, lugubriously, supercalifragalisticexpialadociously, abominably greater than is necessary for strengthening a person’s character. We all expect life to be challenging, to find thorns in a rose garden, but for many people (so far, not for me) suffering has been overwhelming. A little Palestinian kid getting killed by an Israeli mortar, or getting killed because she was used as a human shield by an Islamist terrorist, does not promote that kid’s spiritual development. (See, here is common ground between Israel and Hamas: they both believe that Palestinian civilians are expendable.)

The one answer a church will not permit is to say, “Shit happens and God doesn’t stop it.” There may be a God-essence that wants us to overcome struggles to the extent that we can, and this can be considered a potential Christian answer, but no church would say this, because then people would stop coming and bringing their money. That is, if you can’t get God to alleviate your suffering, then what is the point of prayer and church involvement?

But scientists as people are open to a range of responses to such a question.

As Bart Ehrman has pointed out in his book God’s Problem, the Bible offers about four different answers to the question of why God permits suffering, depending on which part of the Bible you read. The answers all contradict one another. Scientists, as people, would note this range of Biblical answers without trying to force everyone to believe just one of them, without screwing the scriptures that say otherwise into confirming the belief decided in advance.

And of course there are lots of religious answers outside of Christianity. Christian Scientists (who are not Christian scientists) claim that suffering is an illusion.

Conservative religion says, “We have the answer, and we will force all evidence, even scriptural evidence, into confirming it.” Scientists as people say, “There are different possible answers, and we may just have to accept the fact that we cannot know which if any are correct.”

In closing, I point out that this photo was taken on September 22, 2014. Notice that the sign is still advertising a God-loves-guns-and-wants-you-to-have-assault-weapons seminar they sponsored the previous May. The seminar is over enough already and you should take the sign down. But they don’t, because this sign—apparently a permanent fixture now—expresses that they think the Gospel is really about: not Jesus, not God, but guns.

A Statement of Respect

This morning, my colleague from graduate school, Art Zangerl, died after a long battle with cancer. I posted a scientific statement of respect for Art on my evolution blog. In it I mentioned that Art personified what it means to be a dedicated scientist. He had a zeal for using science to understand not just his own area of study (coevolution of insects and herbivores) but the whole human experience of the world.

Art’s wife posted his final message online right after his passing. One of the things that he regretted seeing in our society today was the large number of people who attack science general and evolution in particular in the name of religion. He wrote, “Evolution is like a magic key. Once you understand it, really understand it, so much becomes clear.” He said that evolution helps us understand the darker side of human nature, but also what he called the social side, such as altruism. Although evolution has made us a species capable of hatred, we are also a species that can fight against hatred and oppression. Art particularly admired the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Art also expressed some of his feelings about science and religion. He was not afraid to face death. He wrote, “Please do not mourn me.” And he was dissatisfied with the type of religion, such as the Catholicism in which he was raised, that required beliefs without proof. All humans have beliefs; but science requires you to give up beliefs if it fails to match the evidence. “That’s not easy, even for scientists.” But science as a way of understanding the world has proven, he said, phenomenally successful.

This is the same day that Christopher Hitchens died. But I never heard Art lash out against people who hold religious beliefs, in the way that Hitchens was famous for doing. Art was more interested in intellectual honesty than in attacking religion. I ally myself with Art Zangerl rather than Christopher Hitchens.

I hope that I can leave behind as good a legacy of honest intellectual inquiry and genuine human warmth as Art Zangerl.

What Christianity Needs Is another Daniel

Many Christian churches encourage their members to just accept what the preacher says and to not ask inconvenient questions. This is not, however, the attitude that is praised by some parts of the Bible. There are parts of the Bible that encourage critical thinking and an experimental approach.

The best example is from a portion of the Bible that is no longer part of the Protestant canon (although it was included in the original King James Bible of 1611). The Catholic Bible usually includes it as a separate fragment, Bel and the Dragon. With a name like that, how could you not want to read it? Part of this fragment is the story of Bel.

Daniel is one of a few Hebrews in the court of a pagan king, and the king is not pleased by the fact that Daniel refuses to believe in pagan gods. Daniel tells the king that the great god Bel is nothing more than bronze and clay. Rather than simply to condemn Daniel for disagreeing with him, the king cites evidence for the divinity of Bel. He points out that Bel eats twelve measures of flour, forty sheep, and six vessels of wine every day. How could a mere statue do this? Furthermore, the king agrees to put the divinity of Bel to an experimental test. (Note: if you do not want your religious beliefs put in danger of being discredited, you had better not agree to such a thing.)

The hypothesis was that if Bel is a god, then he is capable of eating food, as his priests claim. The king had his servants place a day’s food in Bel’s temple, and then shut it, to make sure that Bel, and only Bel, was inside. The king sealed the temple shut with his own ring. He also placed a high standard of compliance: if Bel does not consume the offerings, the priests were to die, but if Bel did consume the offerings, Daniel was to die.

After the priests had left but before the temple was sealed shut, Daniel scattered ashes on the floor. He was convinced that there was a secret door, through which the priests entered and carried off the food for themselves and their families. This was his alternative hypothesis.

The next morning, the food was gone, and the priests claimed that they had been vindicated. Then Daniel pointed out the footprints on the floor. Daniel had done what four teenagers and a big dog in a van would have done. The king had the priests arrested. They confessed what they had done and showed the king the secret passage that they had used. The king put the priests and their families to death, and allowed Daniel to destroy the temple.

Numerous studies of the Near Death Experience and of intercessory prayer have shown that there is no clear evidence for miracles or an afterlife (more on this later). This is not an intrusion of science into a place where it is not welcome. Scientific hypothesis testing of a spiritual claim was, at least in this fragment of a Biblical book, praised.

Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think

This is the title of a book just published (2010) by Oxford University Press USA, written by Elaine Howard Ecklund. The author had apparently received financial support to conduct an extensive survey of scientists (over 1600) at top American universities and to interview many of them (about 250) in order to find out how they viewed religion. The book based on the results is mostly the personal stories from the interviews. The book is therefore valuable for two main reasons. First, it demonstrates clearly something that many people, particularly in the conservative churches, do not seem to know: many scientists (roughly half) are spiritual or religious. Yet all of these scientists—even the most religious—agree that the major scientific theories (notably evolution) are completely confirmed by data from the natural world. The scientific community, therefore, does not reject creationism and ID as a result of a monolithic anti-spiritual bias. Second, this book lets us get to know these scientists (even though their identities are hidden unless they have published on the subject) as real people, many of whom think carefully about spirituality and religion. The readers will probably know these scientists better than do some of their own colleagues down the hall.

However, I found the title of the book misleading. It is not just about what scientists think. The author clearly has her own agenda—that scientists (apparently all of us) should actively involve ourselves in a creative interaction of religion and science. She presents the results of the interviews, honestly conveying what each scientist said; but the trajectory of the book clearly moves from anti-religious scientists whose view the author considers unhelpful, to the “boundary pioneers” who find a way to incorporate religion and spirituality into their work and whom the author considers to be the best scientists. She indicates that scientists who simply ignore religion, or who consider it to be a bad thing, are depriving science and science education of important elements. They follow what she calls the “suppression” model, a term that sounds negative even if it was intended to be neutral. For example, many students are religious, and we should not ignore this important part of their lives. She indicates that anti-religious scientists are depriving themselves of the benefits that spirituality and religion can provide to science itself, including an appreciation of the ethical dimensions of scientific research and even a source of hypotheses to investigate. For example, we should “foster [religious] dialogue on campus for the good of science.” I got the impression that the author wanted us to believe that scientists who ignore religion are just not as good at being scientists as those who embrace religion. There would be no problem with this, except that the title of the book should have been something like Why Scientists Should Embrace Spirituality and Religion. I say this even though it appears, from Ecklund’s definition, that I am one of those “boundary pioneers” who actively incorporate religious insights into my teaching and writing. In particular, I point out the Biblical prophetic tradition that defends the poor and the land that they live on against the oppression of the rich. I may personally share the author’s bias—but it is a bias.

Scientists who ignore religion in their research and teaching have good reasons for doing so, which Ecklund does not emphasize. It is just not our job. I do not teach Biblical doctrines in my classes, but I am pushing the limits of what I can do in the science classroom by quoting Bible passages that express the beauty of the natural world and the importance of protecting it. In some universities, many students would not want spiritual concepts mixed in with science. Where I teach, at a rural university in Oklahoma, many students do not want a science professor to mention spiritual concepts that fall short of a complete confirmation of fundamentalism. But my job, per contract, consists of teaching science, doing science-related scholarly activity, and service. My contract does not authorize (or forbid) me to do what Ecklund implies that all scientists should do. Scientists who are spiritual or religious, but who ignore religion in their work, are just doing the job that they are authorized to do.

Ecklund makes a useful distinction between religion and spirituality. Religion includes doctrine which is accepted by faith in the authority of religious traditions, documents, and leaders. Scientists, understandably, are uncomfortable with having dogma handed to them. Spirituality consists of an awareness of the connectedness of everything in the cosmos, and of its immensity, along with a firm belief in transcendental values. However, most or perhaps all of the scientists Ecklund interviewed believe in transcendental values. I doubt any of them would say that love and hatred are equally good, and our human preference for what we call good is merely an evolutionary accident. On what basis, then, does the author dismiss the spirituality of non-religious scientists as “thin” and the spirituality of religious scientists as substantial? She did have a point that some scientists, the ones with “thin” spirituality, have not given as much thought to spirituality as have others. The author suggested that spiritual scientists are more likely to look outside of themselves, to the larger society and universe, than scientists who are not spiritual. But I suspect she has switched cause and effect here: perhaps those scientists who have a psychological tendency to look outside of their own work are more likely to be spiritual.

At one point in the book, the author presented the same data set twice, making it look as though there were more data than there actually were. Figure 3.1 has the same numbers as Table 2.1. She also focuses preferentially on small bits of data. She admitted that fewer than eight percent of religiously-inclined scientists reported that they had experienced prejudice from their peers, but she then begins to discuss it as if it were a major problem to be solved.

Many of the non-spiritual scientists in Ecklund’s survey did not appear to have a problem with spirituality or even some forms of religion, but were reacting strongly against the attacks on science by creationists. This is what bothered many of them. This is not the scientists’ fault, however.

Ecklund’s data confronts us with an uncomfortable truth, the implications might have been beyond the scope of this book. According to Table 2.2, 34 percent of the scientists surveyed indicated that they did not believe in God—in contrast to just two percent of the general American population. Can this entire difference be attributed simply to scientific prejudice? Or could it be that scientists know that science can fully explain the universe, and most people do not know this? I refer not only to the cosmological and evolutionary history of the universe but to the way the brain works, and that the soul, if there is one, appears to just be a duplicate—a probably unnecessary one—of the brain. Scientists study things more closely than does the general population. The fact that so many scientists are atheists makes me think that they may be on to something, despite my own persistent spirituality.

There is clearly a problem here to be solved: fundamentalist attacks on science not only damage science but also damage religious credibility. But it is not scientific prejudice that keeps the problem from being solved. Most scientists are not hostile toward religion, according to Ecklund’s data. The AAAS has a DoSER (Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion) program. Scientists can help solve the problem, but we did not cause it. The chapter titled “What scientists are doing wrong that they could be doing right” therefore misattributes the blame.

I appreciate Ecklund’s work and, for what it is worth, I agree with it. But it is not the objective overview of “what scientists really think” that the title implies.

This essay also appears on my evolution blog.