God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion Read Free Page A

the teaching of religion. Religion prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific co-operation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment. It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.
    —Bertrand Russell 1
     
    F aith is belief in the absence of supportive evidence and even in the light of contrary evidence. No one disputes that religion is based on faith. Some theologians, Christian apologists, and even a few secular scholars claim that science is also based on faith. They argue that science takes it on faith that the world is rational and that Nature can be ordered in an intelligible way.
    However, science makes no such assumption on faith. It analyzes observations by applying certain methodological rules and formulates models to describe those observations. It justifies that process by its practical success, not by any logical deduction derived from dubious metaphysical assumptions. We must distinguish faith from trust . Science has earned our trust by its proven success. Religion has destroyed our trust by its repeated failure.
    Using the empirical method, science has eliminated smallpox, flown men to the moon, and discovered DNA. If science did not work, we wouldn't do it. Relying on faith, religion has brought us inquisitions, holy wars, and intolerance. Religion does not work, but we still do it.
    Science and religion are fundamentally incompatible because of their unequivocally opposed epistemologies—the separate assumptions they make concerning what we can know about the world. Every human alive is aware of a world that seems to exist outside the body, the world of sensory experience we call the natural . Science is the systematic study of the observations made of the natural world with our senses and scientific instruments, and the application to human needs of the knowledge obtained.
    By contrast, all major religions teach that humans possess an additional “inner” sense that allows us to access a realm lying beyond the visible world—a divine, transcendent reality we call the supernatural . If it does not involve the transcendent, it is not religion. Religion is a set of practices intended to communicate with that invisible world so that we can either cause forces from it to affect things here or at least apply insights gained from it to human needs.
    The working hypothesis of science is that careful observation is our only reliable source of knowledge about the world. Natural theology accepts empirical science and views it as a means to learn about God's creation. But religion in general goes much further than science in giving credence to additional sources of knowledge such as scriptures, revelation, and spiritual experiences.
    No doubt science has its limits. It is hard to imagine using science to distinguish between what expert critics decide is good or bad art, poetry, or music, although computers can do a credible job of producing works that the expert judges often can't distinguish from the “real thing.”
    However, the fact that science is limited doesn't mean that religion or any alternative system of thought can or does provide insight into what lies beyond those limits. For example, science cannot yet show precisely how the universe and life originated naturally, although many plausible scenarios exist. But the fact that science does not at present have a definitive answer to this question does not mean that ancient creation myths such as those in Genesis have any substance, any chance of eventually being verified.
    The scientific community in general goes along with the notion that science has nothing to say about the supernatural because the methods of science as they are currently practiced exclude supernatural causes.