God on the Brain (eBook)

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Science and Christianity (1)

The Conflict Thesis

During a summer cookout at a friend’s house, I pulled up a chair next to my old friend Mike. We have known each other for over thirty years now, and eventually our conversation wound its way to talking about God. Mike is an atheist, and he and I have talked about God many times over the years. A bright man with a background in technology and engineering, he was working as a computer systems analyst for a major corporation. He is always open to talking about God and curious to peer into the mind of someone with religious beliefs, which—despite our history—still seem so foreign to him. At some point in the conversation, he said what I have heard so many people say before: “I think we need to give up on the God question. The only way to really know anything is through science, and science has made belief in God pretty hard to swallow.” What could I say in response to this? Was he right? Has science made God unnecessary and belief in God obsolete? Is religious belief in conflict with modern science?

It is not uncommon to hear sentiments like Mike’s, from casual coffee shop conversations to sophisticated academic discussions. Even more succinctly, people have said to me, “I don’t believe in God—I believe in science.” Some portray science as a slowly advancing glacier, crushing everything in its path and grinding it to dust. On this account, as science has learned more and more, and the body of scientific knowledge has grown—slowly at first and at an astonishing rate in the last century or so—the old beliefs rooted in religion or intuition or something like “common sense” have been discredited. Religion, it is often asserted, was an effort to explain and account for the unknown and the mysterious. But the sphere of inexplicable things has been shrinking, thanks to the careful tools of investigation we now have at our disposal. As we exponentially increase the wealth of data we have at our fingertips, religion has been displaced, and its explanations of the world shown to be misguided.

Three Purported Conflicts

Before commenting on this characterization, let us turn to three of the most often cited examples of supposed conflict between science and religion. The facts about these conflicts are often skewed, so looking more carefully at the history of how things actually unfolded will correct a lot of misconceptions and better frame our subsequent discussions.

Copernicus, Galileo, and Heliocentrism

In the history of the relationship between science and religion, one event towers over all others as an example of the deep-seated tension sometimes seen to exist. The conflict between the Catholic Church and astronomers over heliocentrism is often portrayed as an argument between scientists, interested only in the truth of the matter, and the church, which was indifferent to the facts because of its dogmatism. But that does not capture all the nuances involved and, in some important ways, is even inaccurate. In reality, many different elements contributed to the eventual clash between the Catholic Church and the new cosmology. The disputes are more subtle and interesting than they are often presented to be.

At issue was the question of which body orbited which: did the earth orbit the sun, or did the sun orbit the earth? Throughout the Middle Ages, astronomy was based on a cosmological model very common in the ancient world. In this picture of the cosmos, the earth was at the center, and the sun, moon, planets, and stars all revolved around the earth. This model was articulated convincingly by Aristotle in fourth-century-BC classical Greece, and later presented in sophisticated detail by Ptolemy in Roman Egypt during the second century AD. Their work provided the framework for astronomy that lasted throughout the medieval period. Problems emerged for the church, however, because it also claimed justification for geocentrism in Christian Scripture, citing Psalm 102:25:

Of old you laid the foundation of the earth,

and the heavens are the work of your hands.

The example of Joshua ordering the sun to stand still seemed to provide another argument for geocentrism (Josh. 10). The biblical account clearly states that it was the sun that stood still while the Israelites fought; but the implication from that must be that the sun is normally moving and was prevented from moving only by a miracle.

But it was more than allegiance to a literal interpretation of the Bible that led the church and Galileo into conflict. In addition to apparent biblical teaching, many commonsense arguments favored geocentrism. Our everyday observations plausibly indicate that we are stable and unmoving. When an object is dropped, for example, it moves down in a straight line, not curving backward as if the earth is rotating underneath it. There is also variation in the strength and direction of the wind, but if we were hurtling through space, we might expect a constant headwind, always from the same direction, as we plow forward. These and similar arguments underscore the powerful feeling that we have: the earth is stationary. But those commonsense prejudices, apparently reinforced by the Bible, were soon to clash with the evidence—not in a dramatic defeat resulting from a sudden onslaught of proofs, but rather in a long, protracted war of attrition.

In 1543, Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, in which he laid out his model of heliocentrism, was published just before his death. He had been working on the observations that led to the publication for thirty years, and it was only after considerable prompting that he published those findings at all (interestingly enough, in a work dedicated to the pope). In his mind, the work was still incomplete and inconclusive. Contrary to the way it is often depicted, there was no clearly compelling case made in Revolutions sufficient for toppling the geocentric model favored by the church. Essentially no new empirical, observational evidence appeared in his publication. His purpose was to alter the model, not trot out an army of data.

When Copernicus developed his heliocentric model, it fared no better at fitting the data than did the older geocentrism based on Ptolemy. Thus, the early debate was not between a system that fit the data (Copernicus’s) and one that did not (Ptolemy’s), as it is so often rendered. Instead, the two systems were roughly equal in terms of according with observations.

Not until the early 1600s was another gifted astronomer, the Italian Galileo Galilei, able to demonstrate that the sun-centered system was not just another model; its truth could be shown by observation. Aided by a newly invented means of magnification, the telescope, Galileo chronicled several observable features of our solar system that were in conflict with the claims of Aristotle and Ptolemy. For example, he observed that Jupiter had four moons in its orbit, that Venus also had phases like the earth’s moon, and that the surface of the moon was not smooth, as had been claimed by Aristotle, but full of peaks and valleys. Richard J. Blackwell points out:

As the generations passed, some new evidence slowly accumulated that tended to make the new cosmic theory more likely to be true. In Galileo’s day, however, conclusive proof of Copernicanism still had not been found, despite his own lifelong efforts to establish such a proof. To understand the Galileo affair properly, it is essential to keep in mind that no one, including Galileo himself, was yet able to settle the scientific debate conclusively.1

Note the qualifiers used in Blackwell’s description: evidence “slowly accumulated” that “tended” to make the new theory “more likely.” That hardly fits the depiction of overwhelming proof being rejected out of religious prejudice that accounts of these events often give. The Galilean controversy cannot be properly understood as long as it is treated simply as a question of science versus religion. In fact, there was another important alternative, one that tried to combine both geocentrism and a modified heliocentrism. The late sixteenth-century work of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe attempted to do just that by making the earth the center of the solar system and having the sun orbit around it, but making the sun the center of the other planets’ orbits while it traveled around the earth. Thus did Brahe try to combine features of both models to fit the observations and attain other goals for the cosmological models. Galileo’s observations were consistent with Brahe’s model as well as with Copernicus’s, even if they were inconsistent with Aristotelian science and Ptolemaism. Theory choice was not to be decided then by simply taking note of the data and letting it compel one single, clearly preferable conclusion.

In addition, some scholars have argued that there was strong reason to resist the abrupt paradigm change offered by heliocentrism that went beyond the astronomical data itself. Aristotelian natural philosophy, which served as the broad framework for the geocentric model endorsed by medieval philosophers and church officials, had been remarkably successful at providing scientific insight and explanation. Though geocentrism and heliocentrism rated about the same when it came to fitting astronomical data, there were other theoretical points to consider. For example, Aristotle’s theories of natural place and natural motion, crucial components of the Ptolemaic system, are...