Science and Religion

I have just returned from a brilliant day conference looking at Science and Religion which is by common consent a challenging part of the AS course to teach. I think there are a number of reasons why this summer students scored significantly lower on the irreducible complexity question at OCR – not least our own lack of confidence on the science part. For this reason I am revamping the Science and Religion section of the site. Please go to the new weblinks page to see where I’ve got so far! Here are two possible reasons for those low summer scores.

Reason 1: We need to spend more time developing a view of science which is true to what scientist are doing. Alister McGrath (Science and Religion) reminds us that “science” as an idea is difficult to define as it has so many branches and disciplines. However I would argue that the scientific view must include a view of falsification – that which cannot be falsified cannot be scientific. Notice, however, that this is falsification in principle, not necessarily instant falsification in practice.

Take the big bang theory. Clearly we can’t apply a direct observational test to this cosmic moment, but we can work backwards from traces of the event present in observations of the universe – for example, patterns of temperature difference. It may be that when the giant supertelescope Lord Rees mentioned is built, with its 45 foot diameter lens, we will be able to make observations which shed further light on these origins. If so, perhaps the theory might have to be modified as new data falsifies elements of the old theory.

Science proceeds, in other words by a process of theory – evidence – prediction – evidence – modification – new theory. The concept of theory in science is not a static one – nor is it claiming to be “complete”.

In religion we don’t use “theory” in this way. As Flew and others have pointed out in their parables (click here for the gardener parable), when religious believers encounter “facts” they change the God concept or the dogma to accommodate this. So the Creation of the world in Genesis has moved from six literal days to six epochs of time to a much broader theological metaphor for divine intention and power. The theory here is simply an untestable belief or an unfalsifiable explanation. This doesn't mean it's unreasonable as an explanation for wonder and mystery of a Camargue sunset!

My conclusion: you cannot teach this subject area without first establishing the meaning of scientific theory through understanding falsification. Failure to do so leads to confusion and nonsense. But, and I’m grateful to someone for pointing this out yesterday: falsification is an A2 concept and Science ad Religion is taught at AS. Wherever it is in the syllabus, I think we should teach it first. Click below to read more….

Reason 2: Richard Dawkins is parodying the key questions and we’ve swallowed this unreflective parody uncritically. Rereading some of his interviews, he makes strange and unwarranted assertions. Religious belief is irrational, religious belief is a form of fiction, religious belief is for unintelligent people. All of these are so ill-explained that they read as prejudgments from his own scientific worldview. Probe deeper and we find beliefs and faith creeping in. One day science will be able to explain everything, he asserts. That is a belief which I personally don’t share. Science can explain morality, he continues, (a view shared by Sam Harris), but having read Dawkins’ theory of reciprocal altruism, I don’t find it very convincing. He seems to argue that our genes developed reciprocal helping strategies as the best survival strategy for the selfish gene. Paradoxically, altruism is a selfish gene strategy in the brutal dog eats dog survival game. This is at best an interesting hypothesis, because it faces the potentially fatal falsification objection: now that we don’t need it any more, as we have laws that protect us anyway whether we’re altrusitic or not, why do I still jump into a storm surge in the east coast and pluck to safety a stranger on the verge of being swept away?

We are back to Flew’s parables here. We save the stranger, says Dawkins, because our genes are misfiring. They make the mistake that they act as if the altruism will be reciprocated – but of course it never is, at least not by that particular stranger who we never meet again. Notice, as in Flew’s parable of the gardener, an inconvenient truth gets explained away by adding a qualification to it. What is a more plausible theory?

Simply that I empathise with strangers in distress because I have moral imagination, and I reason, even if very rapidly, that when I find myself in similar distress I want the stranger to universalise my behaviour by leaping in. It’s our ability to universalise because of our complex brain structure that creates morality, not the mystic (and so far unidentified) selfish gene.

Comments would be welcome, just add one on DISQUS below!

Image: Camargue Sunset I took on holiday this summer