Nov. 5, 2006

Religion and Science

By Harry T. Cook

Essays appearing on this website from time to time have excoriated the Religious Right, and in particular its rejection of science in the making of public policy. The purpose of this essay is to account for its history and why it must be confronted in defense of science.

As New England emptied out in the 1830s and 1840s and Americans began to migrate into the new Northwest Territories and the land associated with the Louisiana Purchase, people left behind their cultural and religious institutions and ended up in a “Little House on the Prairie” kind of situation. Their one-room schools were staffed by the unmarried daughters of area farmers, who had themselves been educated in the same kinds of schools by other unmarried daughters in the rudimentary RRRs.

The other stimulus that interrupted the spirit-crushing routine of crop farming and animal husbandry was twice-a-Sunday attendance at the little church on the prairie, the minister of which was likely to be some uneducated opportunist whose only book was a Bible. The results were predictable.

The farming families heard the “old, old story” with minimal variation every Sunday, and the kids learned the three R’s. But when the railroad arrived bringing culture, and when secondary education became more the norm, adolescents began to study Latin and even Greek and to read history and literature. Land-grant universities and church-sponsored four-year colleges sprang up, and some of those who finished the high-school course went on to them. When they came home for the holidays, they had plenty to tell their hard-working parents about how out of date their preachers were, and about the wider world of knowledge to which they were being exposed.

When the kids began to rebel against the repetitive hell-fire-and-damnation preaching, their under-educated parents went into a defensive crouch and decided that the “old, old story” or that Ole Time Religion was good enough for them, and therewith entrenched fundamentalism dug in.

Fundamentalism found a willing partner in populist prairie politics which pitted the hard-scrabble farmer against the railroad and other inroads of modernism. The religion and the politics fed off one another.

It was one thing for the prairie farmer to hold science at bay when his water was pumped out of his well by a wind-mill and when his nighttime illumination was a kerosene lamp and when he was not dependent on a physician or dentist for health care – when, in other words, he was (or thought he was) self-sufficient. But as society became more urbanized and modern hygiene and medicine began to conquer the spread of disease, welcoming science and its works became more attractive.

That at some level entailed the acceptance of Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection (evolution) and all that flowed from it. Meanwhile, the prairie preacher was still immured in Genesis and pronounced science and scientists the enemies of God and good. That presented the farmer – even the partly urbanized one – with the awful choice of embracing science and denying his religion, or resisting science and continuing to embrace his religion. The Scopes trial in 1925 and all the fuss around it graphically illustrated that dilemma. So more or less has it gone since then.

The resistance to teaching real science (as in evolution) in public schools, which obtains in all too many places to this day, poses a danger not only to the intellectual capital of this nation but to its economic well-being. In a global economy, investment capital will go to those venues in which excellence in education is prized.

Science (the word comes from the Latin for “knowledge”) is the intellectual discipline of exploring the natural order for information about how it works and why. The scientist looks out upon what ever portion of the natural order which interests him or her, and then begins to gather and examine relevant pieces of information from it, tries to see how they make sense together. The scientist sets forth a hypothesis (the idea that such-and-such a thing may be true) and then, with the information in hand, goes on to gather even more information. S/he contrives experiments to test the hypothesis, not in order to prove it but to disprove it.

If the hypothesis holds up after exhaustive testing, and if the results of the experiments have grown thereby more self-evident, the scientist has produced a “theory.” A “theory” becomes the best available explanation as to why something or another seems to be true. Other research and development is based upon that “theory,” often resulting in its refinement, improvement or even in its discarding for another theory.

Science is as close to objective pursuit of truth as one can get. The true scientist tries never to assume something is true without going through the process accounted for in the preceding paragraph. There is nothing a scientist loves better than to be able to falsify or disprove his own (or preferably another scientist’s) hypothesis. Science is competitive in a way similar to the free market. The guy who works hard to build the best mousetrap for the best price sells more mousetraps. The scientist who labors in the laboratory to discover the truth about a thing is the one who wins the grant to do even more research. In either case, the consumer is the winner.

There can be no substitute for science in the modern world. That is why it must be defended against those forces that would de-value and debase it. Neither creationism nor intelligent design qualifies as science because both begin with an abstract religious doctrine and then cherry-pick and arrange data to “prove” its validity. Those who oppose stem-cell research on the basis that it violates religious law can neither be taken seriously nor be allowed to interfere with scientists engaged in such research for the purpose of improving human health and the prolonging of useful and enjoyable life.

 © Copyright 2006, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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Shalom! Rowland Croucher

‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so’ (Mark Twain)

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