Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf, Part One: How to Find Things Out

Much has been written, even by myself, about the compatibility of science and religion. Certainly they can be made compatible, but I will begin a series of short essays about how science and religion (I will use Christianity, the religion I know the most about) are almost totally different in the way they understand the world.

There are some similarities, also. For example, if Jesus of Nazareth had studied evolutionary psychology, he could not have had wiser or more accurate things to say about altruism than he said. But in nearly every other way, the religious worldview (especially in the minds of the people who wrote the Bible) could not be more different from reality as revealed by science.

My first example comes from the scientific method itself. How does one learn new things about the world? Science uses induction and deduction: look for patterns in the world, form a hypothesis, then test the hypothesis. Science forces itself to be open to new theories, even if the process takes awhile.

In contrast, religion starts with statements of authority and requires you to fit all observations into that authoritative framework. The framework may or may not come from the Bible. In many or even most cases, the framework is one that a church or religious leader has made up. For example, the idea that the Bible is a single, coherent book is an assumption. Actually the Bible is 66 books, which often contradict one another. Also, the trinity is a concept not found in the Bible. Also, the idea that everything that happens in the world is part of the plan of an omnipotent God is not found in all parts of the Bible. It certainly is absent from Ecclesiastes. In some cases, a cult religion has a framework that cannot be shared by other cults or religions. For example, at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, the foundational assumption, the fundamental framework, is that God spoke to Oral Roberts, and one time a 900-foot-tall Jesus appeared to Roberts, who therefore could not be wrong when he said “build this university” or “build this hospital.”

After receiving the framework, and only then, can you read the Bible, according to most churches. You must, according to most Christian sects, read the Bible and force all of it to fit into your framework. When Qoheleth (the author of Ecclesiastes) says that people die just like animals, you are supposed to believe that the author meant something different. When the Song of Solomon uses explicitly sexual imagery, you are supposed to believe that this describes the love of Jesus for his church (a rather disturbing concept if explored in detail). What you must never never do is to just read the Bible just to see what it says.

A few Bible scholars have suggested an “inductive” approach to reading the Bible, in which you test theological hypotheses by searching for confirmation in the Bible. While this is an improvement over the “deductive” approach in which a church simply proclaims its overarching doctrines and then deduces individual beliefs from them, it hasn’t really worked. The main reason is that churches search for scriptures that can be forced to confirm their doctrines. One example is that many churches have proclaimed global warming to not be occurring, and they cite Genesis 8:22 to confirm this, even though Genesis 8:22 says nothing of the kind.

Procrustes would be proud of most Christians. He was the innkeeper in Greek mythology who said that his beds fit everyone. If they were too tall, he cut their legs off; if they were too short, he beat them into a thin sheet. Most churches chop and beat the scriptures to make them fit their theology.

I can tell you from personal experience that my religious views changed dramatically when I started just reading the Bible without (as far as possible) any preconceived notions. I read the Bible as a scientist reads the world. What I found was something very different from what you will hear in most churches. The scientific method is dangerous to those who insist upon a particular theory, whether scientific or theological.

A Science and Religion Discussion at an AAAS Divisional Meeting

The 2012 meeting of the Southwest and Rocky Mountain Section (SWARM) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the University of Tulsa has just finished. There were altogether about 500 registrants, although each session had few attendees. I was happy to participate in many aspects of this meeting, as symposium organizer (Endangered Species of Oklahoma), symposium participant (Science and Religion), and judge. The meeting was a success due to the tremendous amount of effort shown by the SWARM Executive Director David Nash, University of Tulsa Graduate Dean Janet Haggerty, Graduate School Coordinator Hope Geiger, and David’s sister Heidi who helps every year with registration. Their dedication was outstanding.

A summary of the Science and Religion session has been posted on the AAAS website by AAAS staff writer Ed Lempinen. (In the photos, you can see that I dressed as Charles Darwin, something I have done many times before). Ed’s lengthy and fair summary is very good and I will not repeat any of it. It accurately reflected the intention of the organizer, biologist Aaron Place of Northwestern Oklahoma State University, to find common ground of dialogue between science and religion. The general consensus that seemed to be reached by the end of the symposium, as I see it, is that both science and religion are about asking questions and seeking answers. Neither science nor religion should accept fiat statements of authority as final or even as evidence. For example, it would be unscientific for me to say, “Evolution occurs because Darwin said so,” or “God told Darwin that everyone needs to believe in evolution.”

This was not the case, however, with Dominic Halsmer, the Dean of Science and Engineering at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. Whenever a science-religion session is organized, one expects a diversity of viewpoints. Nobody should have been surprised that Halsmer presented an Intelligent Design viewpoint. This would have been inappropriate for a scientific session, but was only to be expected for this one. However, I believe that Halsmer went far, far beyond the scope of the symposium when he spent considerable time declaring to us, as incontrovertible fact, that God told Oral Roberts to build a university. This is a cult viewpoint and should not have been a part of any science-related symposium. This is as inappropriate as a Mormon scientist (there are many good ones) proclaiming at a scientific meeting that Joseph Smith saw God or a Heaven’s Gate proponent claiming at a scientific meeting that the Hale-Bopp comet had come to take them to heaven. It is Halsmer’s cult preaching, rather than his intelligent design, to which I object.

In all fairness, neither the organizer Aaron Place nor the SWARM Executive Director David Nash, with whom Place consulted before accepting Halsmer’s participation, had any idea that Halsmer would inject this cult teaching into his presentation. Halsmer made no such statement in his abstract. It is for this reason that I am going to make the following proposal to scientific organizations with which I am involved (AAAS-SWARM, Oklahoma Academy of Sciences, etc.).

Guidelines for presenters: All participants, including those from religious institutions, should understand that (1) their scientific papers should not include religious assertions, and that (2) any papers submitted for religion-science sessions should not include any cult assertions, that is, assertions not generally shared among religious believers. The meeting organizers shall be empowered to decide whether this guideline has been infringed.

I believe this is both fair and necessary for presenters at scientific meetings to be apprised of this guideline in advance. Many meetings of the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences include papers presented by students from Oral Roberts University, and they stick to the science. We do not want to discourage this sort of participation from students or faculty of Oral Roberts. But we cannot extend the recognition of the scientific community to cult preaching by allowing it to occur at meetings sponsored by scientific societies. Such a guideline would have made it clear in advance that Halsmer should have made no such statement, and would have been the basis of a formal complaint to his sponsoring institution.

A couple of days after the symposium, a bill promoting the teaching of alternatives to evolution and global warming failed to emerge from the Education Committee of the Oklahoma State Senate. This bill clearly had the objective of injecting fundamentalist doctrine into science classrooms. The next day, however, the wording of the bill came back to life as an amendment stuck to an unrelated bill. It is clear that state lawmakers are on a crusade to claim scientific validity for any and all of their religious and political viewpoints. You can read all about the ongoing events at the website for Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education. This is the background against which the SWARM meetings were occurring this week.

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Parasites on altruism

Surely one of the most important developments in human evolution has been altruism, which is animals being nice to other animals of the same species. I do not believe it is too much to say that humans are the most altruistic animal species to have ever existed, and that altruism has been one of the most important factors in human evolution.

Individuals in many species have “kin selection” altruism—being nice to other animals that share many of their genes. Some scientists even claim to see it in bacteria, which form altruistic multicellular structures known as biofilms (or slime). And you will find direct reciprocity in many intelligent animal species—one individual helping another, with the expectation of receiving help in return. This type of altruism requires enough intelligence to remember which other animals are reliable altruists and which are cheaters, allowing the cheaters to be marginalized. But it is probably only humans that practice indirect reciprocity, the type of altruism where an individual gets social status for doing nice things to other individuals who will never be able to repay. Natural selection has not only favored indirect reciprocity in humans, but also the emotions that accompany it. That is, in humans, the normal condition is that it feels good to be good, at least to others in your tribe. Throughout recent human history, we have been expanding the horizons of altruism, so that now it feels good to help people who are far away.

Recently, when my wife and I were out walking, we ran across a perfect example of altruism in action. A church youth group was painting over gang graffiti. They were clearly enjoying the work and the knowledge that it was appreciated by the neighborhood. The leaders were particularly happy that they had painted over the graffiti within 24 hours of its origin. They also enjoyed the thought that they were serving God by doing this.

The group was associated with the ministries of Oral Roberts, the preacher who is famous for having sweet-talked thousands of people (including my wife’s paternal grandmother) out of millions of dollars. The Oral Roberts dynasty revels in its wealth, which includes a private jet. For awhile, the privileges included access to the resources of their university, back before Oral Roberts’ son Richard was forced from the presidency of that institution. (I was recently told by a reliable source, but who must remain anonymous, that the jet that Richard Roberts used had marijuana and pornography on it. This information came from a relative of a security officer at Oral Roberts University.)

Here we see loving altruists helping the neighborhood, and helping young people at the same time, but they are also giving money to big-time parasites. It creates in my mind an image of Jesus hauling his cross to the hill while a big fat pope sits on his shoulders.

Have you seen other examples? Of course, from the realm of religion, there are almost more examples than you can count. Perhaps examples from the business world? I can certainly think of examples from my profession (education).