Perspectives

Lies We Must Live With

By Daniel Sarewitz

The idea of “total truth” held by some Evangelical Christians (as discussed in Frank Laird’s piece in this space last month assaults any conceivable commitment to intellectual openness and political pluralism.  Presumably some people find comfort in slavish, uncritical belief, and it’s easy to see why science, and especially such explicit assaults on metaphysics as evolution and cosmology, are so upsetting to these true believers. 

In this light, I find efforts to reconcile science and Judeo-Christian religion rather bizarre, despite many well-meaning efforts (such as the recent book The Language of God:  A Scientist Presents Evidence of Belief, by NIH National Human Genome Research Institute director Francis Collins).  After all, religion cannot exist without ultimate meaning, and science cannot exist with it.  It would be a strange God who laid reality out as a mystery for scientists’ continual amusement, and a strange science whose job was simply to reveal the mechanics behind God’s mysterious ways.  But wait a minute, that’s what Copernicus, Kepler, and other titans of early Western science thought they were doing.   Kepler, for example, saw in science a gift to humans that allowed them “to some extent taste the satisfaction of God the Workman with his own works,” and he viewed celestial mechanics as “this music which imitates God.”   Sounds a little too close to Intelligent Design for comfort, doesn’t it?

On second thought, it is not particularly problematic for science to trace evolution or celestial mechanics back to an ultimate origin in God’s work, since ultimate origins don’t really make any difference one way or the other to the validity of the science.  The authority of an evolutionary biologist is in no way threatened by the notion that it all started through supernatural intervention, since you can push “it all started” as far back into pre-history as you like, say, 15 billion years.  Where you get into trouble, though, is when you try to explain phenomena like moral reasoning or religious belief in terms of, say, neurological activity or the evolution of the brain, which of course is just the sort of thing that researchers in fields such as cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology try to do.  This type of trouble was acknowledged with rare candor by Columbia University biologist Robert Pollack in his book The Faith of Biology & The Biology of Faith, who writes that “evolution through natural selection explains certain facts of life that touch on matters of meaning and purpose . . . [T]he vision of the natural world these explanations produce is simply too terrifying and depressing to me to be borne without the emotional buffer of my own religion.”

Serious science has no room for such weakness.  Some physicists like to talk about a “theory of everything,” by which they appear to mean a theory that explains the origins, existence, and behavior of the universe, but says nothing about consciousness or the human condition, which are nothing more than trivially contingent oddities.  If we are to take science really seriously, then we must take our own existence as inherently meaningless.  Whatever meaning we do struggle to derive is simply a product of our biochemical and sociocultural evolution, as is the fact that we choose to engage this struggle.  Religion and philosophy both become ridiculous; neither faith, nor reason, can provide an ultimate explanation of morals, only biochemistry (underlain by physics; conditioned by biological and cultural evolution) can.

So imagine that everyone gave up their silly religious beliefs or philosophical convictions and accepted that moral reasoning derives from neurological functioning conditioned by bio-cultural evolution and whatever other mechanical explanations you care to come up with.  How would this help humans grapple with the profound dilemmas that have faced them through history and continue to face them, dilemmas rooted in the impossibility of reconciling the many conflicting values and interests that arise in the course of human affairs?   It would be impossible to make any claim of moral authority, because morals would be an emergent phenomenon of biochemical and bio-cultural evolution, and people would understand that.  There would, then, be no basis for preferring one moral framework over any other beyond claims that were themselves arbitrary, even if apparently sensible, and sensibleness itself would of course merely be a condition determined by biochemistry and culture, etc. etc. all down the line. 

There would, as moral philosophers have long complained, be no foundation upon which to ground any argument about how people should behave in the world.  The apparent scientific answer to this complaint is:  “exactly so, and, once liberated from this illusion, we can get past the superstition that has vexed humanity since its earliest history and approach things rationally.” As physicist Stephen Weinberg wrote:  “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”[1]

Now the most serious conflicts among humans are all, at root, conflicts about how to balance a variety of moral concerns such as justice, equality, and liberty. So, when scientists argue that the world would be better off without religion, then they are also arguing that humans would be better able to solve their deepest and most vexing problems in the absence of religion. A slightly different way to make the scientific claim is this:   Moral discourse among those who don’t believe in ultimate meaning will yield more satisfactory results for society than if such discourse also includes believers. 

But what difference does it make if you trace your morals and values to a non-existent supernatural authority, or if you trace them to biochemically and culturally determined cognitive processes?  There may be a psychological difference—the difference between delusion and realism—but neither position, according to the scientific perspective, can make a claim to moral authority; both are irrational in the scientific sense.  So the key point here cannot be the fact that believers are delusional about the source of their beliefs, rather it must be that, in being delusional, believers’ beliefs are less good than nonbelievers’ beliefs.

Why, then, should scientists expect that the world would be a better place if moral discourse was dominated by people who don’t believe in god than if it was dominated by believers? The answer is obvious:  because the scientists making this argument are people who don’t believe in god!   So of course they think that if they made all the important choices the world would be better!!  They’d be making the choices!!!  In other words, this is a political claim, not an a priori statement about rationality.  This must be the case because there is, from the serious scientific perspective, no authoritatively rational solution to moral dilemmas, there are only political solutions.  Put somewhat differently, science’s claim to ultimate knowledge is precisely what robs it of any legitimate claim to special privilege in public, and moral, discourse.[2] 

Perhaps an empirical question lurks here:  What is the evidence that the moral perspectives offered by godless, arbitrary, and contingent views of “what’s right” would be better than perspectives that included a diversity of supernatural, superstitious, and mystical views? The answer to the question is far from self-evident.  Freeman Dyson, a voice of moderation in this matter despite the fact that he’s a physicist, says:  “My own prejudice, looking at religion from the inside, leads me to conclude that the good [done by religion] vastly outweighs the evil.  In many places in the United States . . . churches and synagogues are almost the only institutions that bind people together into communities . . . by all accounts the mosques in Islamic countries, and to some extent in America too, play a similar role in holding communities together.”[3]  Physicists like Weinberg take a contrary position.  If this were a National Research Council report, I would conclude by saying:  more research on the subject is needed.

As is so often the case when we frame a problem as bimodal, however, we get the problem itself wrong.  The alleged debate between science and religion is an incoherent distraction from the real issue, which is how to most satisfactorily reduce the conflict, injustice, inequity, and suffering that seems so intimately a part of humanity itself.  If the 20th century taught us anything (and the first decade of the 21st may be suggesting that it didn’t), it’s that appeals to hegemony in moral discourse a) usually come concealed in utopian garb; b) are always authoritarian underneath; and c) can be rooted either in claims to scientific rationality or in claims to religious authority.

The challenge here to scientism is as profound as the challenge to fundamentalism.  From a scientific perspective, views rooted in supernatural explanations are views rooted in lies.  This may be factually correct, but the rigors of pluralistic discourse demand that these lies have a seat at the table, right along side the neurologically and evolutionarily contingent preferences of the highly rational.  This is not a matter of principle but of logic tempered by experience.  There is no reason to believe that good moral reasoning derives from the scientific rigor of one’s views of ultimate causation.   There are some lies that society cannot do without.

The antidote to irrationality is not its contrary, but its plural.  It’s about inclusiveness, pluralism, democracy, not about rationality versus irrationality.  The problem with fundamentalists is not God but fundamentalism. Conflating fundamentalism with all of religion is like conflating particle physics with all of science.  Fundamentalists and physicists might like to claim that they alone occupy the solid ground of ultimate authority, but the rest of us know differently.  A world run by like-thinking scientists is as horrific to contemplate as one run by like-thinking evangelicals.

The author, an atheist trained in the geosciences, directs the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes.

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