Science and Religion

There has been a lot written lately - at least on the blogs I frequent - about the tension between science and religion. We get scientists apparently converting to creationism, scientists denouncing all forms of religion as insanity, and scientists doing just about everything in between. The golden mean, the position a lot of people argue for - Stephen Jay Gould's Non-Overlapping Magisteria position (and see the link for Rob Knopp's meditation on the problem which prompted this) - is that science and religion try to answer different questions, and that as long as religion doesn't claim real-world effects and science doesn't claim to prove god's non-existence, they should be able to get along just fine.

Is this true? Probably - oh, definitely - as it stands. (Therein, of course, lies the rub; more on that later.) If scientists don't talk about proving god, if the religious don't claim they can prove god answers their prayers or that the Bible is 100% true (or even 50%, for that matter), then they can rub along together very well. I've seen it happen all my life. In fact, if you are able to keep them separate, you can be a religious scientist. I don't think you can be a scientific religious person - note that "scientist" is a noun, but there is no corresponding noun from "religious" - and applying to science to religion usually leads to losing it, while it seems quite easy to be a scientist who applies some religious teachings to his life and work.

In fact, as a kid I never doubted you could be both. After all, I grew up in a church that had a physicist as priest emeritus - Dr William Grosvenor Pollard. He was a fine and fairly prolific writer (here's a source for his books, including Man on a Spaceship and Physicist and Christian). In Oct 13 1961 issue of Time, the latter was reviewed:

Few physicists would hazard a location for heaven, but one who does is exceptionally well qualified. He is William Grosvenor Pollard, 50, executive director of the Institute of Nuclear Studies at Oak Ridge, Tenn. He is also the Rev. William Grosvenor Pollard, associate rector of Oak Ridge's St. Stephen's Episcopal Church.

...

"The key to this approach," he writes, "lies in conceiving the whole space-time continuum of our human intuition as being immersed in a space of higher dimensions." The reality of a higher dimension than the three of space and one of time may seem somewhat elusive to ordinary human beings, but modern scientific minds can see it as mathematically just as sound.

A higher dimension is the result of a lower one moved perpendicular to itself. Writes Pollard: "Heaven, instead of being above us in ordinary space, is perpendicular to ordinary space, and the eternal is perpendicular to the temporal dimension. The transcendent and the supernatural, instead of being pushed farther and farther away from us with each new advance in astronomy, are again everywhere in immediate contact with us, just as the dimension perpendicular to a plane surface is everywhere in contact with it, though transcendent to it."

Dimensional Status Seeking. If space as man experiences it is only a limited field in a space of higher dimension, the supernatural is just a question of one's dimensional status. For a two-dimensional body, a three-dimensional one would be supernatural, and the same logic applies to steps into the fourth, fifth and any other dimensions. In this context, says Pollard, "even the supernatural domains of heaven and hell, which have been so universally acknowledged in human experience, have as much claim on reality as does the restricted spaciotemporal domain which constitutes nature. The only difference is that the boundary between the natural and the supernatural is then rather differently drawn, and in a manner much more agreeable to modern views of the natural universe."

Dr Pollard was my model for the scientist who can be religious. But he falls far short of the sort of religiosity is the great threat of today. He did not believe the Bible should be taken literally, as inerrant fact in all of its verses. He wrote a pair of books called "The Hebrew Iliad" and "The Hebrew Odyssey" which, essentially, argued that the great formative story of Israel - Moses and the journey through the wilderness - was a myth, meaning the word in the sense of a great moral story which illuminates our understanding. No, Dr Pollard was no literalist.

Nor, as far as I can tell, are any scientists who actually work at science. How could they be? The Bible is problematic from the first chapter for anyone who works with facts, and it doesn't get much better. The only way to reconcile them is to posit a god who actively attempts to lie and deceive - creating the fossil record and the apparent age of the universe to trick us into choosing the evidence we can see and comprehend instead of the revealed word which contradicts - flatly and even violently - that evidence. That god, I think, is a piece of work, but I must admit he fits nicely into the Bible.

But it's perfectly possible to reject the factual claims of the Bible - which are easily disproved - and still think that there is a god; that he created the universe and set its laws; that he is interested in us, even loves us; even that he sent (whatever you mean by that word) Jesus, to teach us how to treat each other. It's even possible to believe in something called a soul, which exists in some dimension beyond our own, interacting with this world only in the nebulous realm of thought and emotion. Many people do that every day.

The problem, as I see it, is that those people are not the problem. It's their co-religionists whose concept of their religion is antithetical to that common-sense mysticism, if I may so call it. (Let me dispose of the objection that "they aren't real Christians (or whatever)" - whoever says it. I don't care if you both are Christians, or if one set of you should pick a different name. You both call yourselves Christians, whatever you call each other.)

These people do in fact make real-world claims about their god. They say he created the world some 6000 years ago. They say the waters of the Flood covered the entire world and destroyed everything living that was not on a single boat. They say the earth did in fact stand still for an hour. They say their god intervenes to answer prayers and create miracles, and that angels roam the world today breaking the laws of physics right and left. And they say that any science which says otherwise is a lie, designed by Satan to destroy their faith and damn them to hell.

They cannot live peacefully with science, no matter how peacefully scientists offer to avoid talking about Whys and Reasons and Souls. And if science doesn't fight back, these people will drag us all back to a time when only religion - this kind of relentless, literal, actively anti-knowledge religion - could tell us what to think.

It may be that the other religious will feel themselves under attack if scientists fight these believers. But those people need to take a long hard look at the believers, because the two groups don't really mesh all that well. And "Christians" who believe the Bible is errant will fare no better than scientists who believe the Bible is fiction, once the final conflict arrives.

Can religion and science coexist? I suppose it depends on how you define "religion". And that forces me, just now, to say that no, they can't. Because "religion" is currently determined to destroy science before science destroys it. It's futile for scientists to argue, as Gould did, that they have no interest in trespassing upon religion's sacred ground (so to speak) as long as religion refuses to define that ground in the same way.

While religion makes claims that venture out of the numinous into the disprovable science cannot keep silent. The world is not 6000 years old, and all the good will in the world cannot let science pretend otherwise. And if your religion insists that it is, you can muster no good will for silence, either.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the lines are drawn. And as long as the other side insists on forcing their counter-factual religious claims on the rest of us, we cannot coexist in peace.