Science and religion are both small words with big meanings. Many disciplines with as many methodologies bear the name of science. Some - physics, chemistry, biology - are uncontroversial. These were present when science crystallised out of natural philosophy. Others, such as social science or economics, are more controversial. These are felt to lack the rigour and testability associated with the natural sciences. In this essay my focus will be the natural sciences. This does not eliminate the diversity in outlook, subject matter, or techniques - the only language a string theorist and a botanist are likely to share is English. I will draw most of my examples from physics. This is partly because physics is the most fundamental science, but principally because I am by vocation a physicist and I prefer to write about my areas of least ignorance.
If science is the United Nations, religion is Babel. While the number of scientific disciplines is in the hundreds, the number of religious communities is much greater, and according to a recent estimate ( World Christian Encyclopedia ) includes no less than 34,000 different Christian denominations. The creeds of this smorgasbord of sinners vary considerably and are in many cases exactly contradictory, with any attempt at producing a consilience of opinion on matters of doctrine being Sisyphean. That a religion is more than just the sum of its dogmas only makes the situation worse. In the Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - the revelation of the ways of God to man has been accomplished through historical events. At specific places, at specific times and to specific people, God has made himself known. Jews follow the Law given to Moses on Mount Sinai. For Christians, the final revelation of God to man occurred through his Son, Jesus, a Galilean carpenter during the reign of the Emperor Augustus. In Islam, Allah has spoken through his prophet Mohammed. This emphasis on direct divine action in history is greatly removed from the traditions of the East. 'Religion' is not a simple word; there is no unique religious philosophy just as there is no unique scientific method. For reasons of personal familiarity, this essay will mainly concern itself with Christianity and draw most of its examples from Catholicism.
Epistemology describes how our knowledge goes from nothing to something. Hence, any account of reality requires an account of epistemology. The principal claim of this essay is that, at the level of the individual, science and religion are epistemologically similar. I shall consider the content of a scientific education and will argue that it is an education into a tradition. I shall demonstrate that authority is the justification for much of what is taught and that the role of experiments is not demonstrative but illustrative. I argue that the individual's scientific knowledge depends on a web of trust permeating the scientific community. I shall then consider religious education and belief and argue for its similar nature. Arguing that the community and not the individual is in each case the natural unit of knowledge, I conclude by considering the differences and examining the question of how and why we believe what we do.
Science has great influence and prestige in contemporary society. This penetration into popular culture is evidenced through 'whiter-than-white' detergent commercials, where the new powder's cathartic properties are declared 'scientifically proven'. However, it is not Nobel laureates or distinguished professors who supply this influence. They are few in number, and for the considerable majority of the population scientific education ends before the age of eighteen. Freeman Dyson wrote of Richard Feynman that "He refused to take anybody's word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics." However, not everyone has Feynman's abilities and the noise level science is permitted in the hubbub of public discourse is determined by those whose formal education in the subject ended at school. Thus, when considering scientific knowledge in general, the most important kind of science is school science.
Much of what the seedling of a scientist is taught at school is taught simply as fact. It is a tribute to universal education that very few people do not know that the planets move round the sun. However, this is perfectly consistent, and in most cases coincides, with being unable to point out any of the planets in the night sky. It is entirely possible that this holds for those teaching this Copernican insight; it is almost certain that these teachers would be entirely unable to turn the observed planetary wanderings into Kepler's orbits. They would not be alone; this last statement would also hold for most professional scientists. Fact from on high is not restricted to physics. The fundamental importance of DNA in biology is well known; fewer can say what it is and whence its importance comes. The existence of atoms is central to chemistry and taught to children, but the quantum mechanics required to understand their structure and interactions appears much later. It is not necessary to have looked through a telescope to know that numerous galaxies exist throughout the cosmos. And everyone, but everyone, knows that E = mc2.
The point of these examples is not that they are mere social constructs, or that there are not sound pedagogical reasons for introducing concepts before they can be fully articulated. Rather, if knowledge is justified true belief, then the justification for the student's claim to scientific knowledge is little more than 'because the teacher said so' - which is an appeal to authority. The natural objection to this is to point to the numerous experiments carried out as part of the school curriculum. By formulating hypotheses and testing them experimentally, the student may not verify the Big Bang, but can check simpler theories. From these, he can understand how in principle more advanced theories can be tested. There are two problems with this rejoinder. The first one lies in the words 'in principle'. However many times Hooke's law is checked does not affect the fact that the Big Bang has to be taken on faith. The second problem is best illustrated practically. Hooke's law states that the force on a spring is proportional to its extension. This can be tested by suspending weights from a spring and measuring its extension for different weights. This is a simple experiment carried out relatively early in school science curricula. The subtlety is that lurking in the background is the extremely non-trivial concept of force. For many hundreds of years, the motion of bodies was seen as a teleological attempt to reach a natural place, with motion being classed as either natural or violent. Modern notions of force and inertia being responsible for all motions were not developed until the seventeenth century. In the language of Thomas Kuhn, education is within a paradigm.
This down-playing of the role of experiment may seem strange. The traditional view of experiment is as the bulwark and guard of science, protecting the citadel of Knowledge from mere speculation. Certainly it is foundational in the generation of scientific knowledge. However, experimentation in schools is qualitatively different to that in a research laboratory. The purpose of a school experiment is not the discovery of knowledge, but rather the teaching of laboratory and manipulative skills. School experiments have a right answer, and the failure to achieve that answer reflects not on nature but on the competence of the experimenter. A common experiment is the measurement of the gravitational acceleration g. Pupils regularly obtain results that are inconsistent and irreconcilable with accepted values. If taken seriously, such results would overturn the accepted foundations of science. In practice, such results are attributed to the relative incompetence of school students compared to professional scientists and ignored. This illustrates the teaching, rather than normative, role of school experiments in science. In an exact reversal of the mythological account, the value of g the pupil learns and remembers is not the one he has measured empirically; rather, it is the book value justified by authority.
It is my contention that this situation is only marginally altered at university level. Experiments remain teaching experiments; they teach laboratory skills and illustrate, not establish, the accepted results of the subject. The difference between establishing a result and illustrating it can be seen by comparing the time Newton spent establishing the heterogeneous nature of white light and the total time spent on all of optics today. Newton spent years experimenting and thinking devising his new theory of light. He had to overcome the objections of those who thought his results invalid without a philosophical basis, and he had to explain why his experiments were more accurate than those of others which disagreed with his results. What Newton spent months or years on, a modern student covers in hours. The student illustrates, not demonstrates, Newton's results. He does not engage with alternative theories and he does not carry out the exhaustive experimentation required to master, rather than merely observe, the phenomenon. Furthermore, there are many results which the student can learn only on trust. Particle physics experiments are carried out on a vast scale and are beyond the reach of one university, let alone one student. CERN, the European centre for experimental particle physics in Geneva, employs 2500 people and uses an accelerator whose diameter is nine kilometres. These accelerators are used to measure the properties of fundamental particles, providing precise experimental foundations for the Standard Model of particle physics. The results can be learnt, not only without having repeated, but also without having understood, the experiment that produced them. This should not be controversial. Such experiments are behemoths which rely on advanced computing, engineering and mathematical techniques, and their full comprehension is a grace granted to few. The point of these examples is that the formation of the student in the scientific tradition does not depend on the student establishing, or even having direct contact with, the experimental facts he learns. They are presented not in a historical progression of discovery or understanding, but rather in the most appropriate pedagogical order. Experimental facts they may be, but the justification the student has for these facts is the authority of his teachers.
It is not just students who learn this way. There is an anecdote about the Pauli effect, named after the great German physicist Wolfgang Pauli. This referred to the tendency of apparatus that had previously performed reliably to suddenly fail in his presence, resulting in Pauli being banned from the laboratory. On one occasion, the mere presence of Pauli on a nearby train was sufficient for the effect to manifest itself. This story is not intended as evidence for a mysterious force that causes equipment failure in the presence of theorists, but instead to emphasise that most scientists have not directly participated in the production of most of the results they use. Instead, they learn them through seminars, talks, journal articles and books. The most cited paper in physics is the annual Review of Particle Properties, a consensual collation of experimental results, cited in preference to wading through the original experimental papers. The sceptical reader may suspect that I am sneaking towards the sly conclusion that all of the people get all of their knowledge from someone else. No - this is absurd. However, I do claim that most of the people get most of their knowledge from someone else. This is particularly so for the vast penumbra of knowledge outside a scientist's immediate research interests.
It is often claimed with some pride that a scientific training cultivates a sceptical frame of mind. This is only partially true. The vast majority of scientists indeed scoff at UFOs, ghosts and telepathic spoon-bending. However, physicists are confident asserting the evolution of life over billions of years and biologists do not shy away from the belief that subatomic particles exist. To say the least, neither of these claims are intuitively obvious. How can they be so assured in these claims? 'Because of the overwhelming evidence' seems difficult to sustain. Biologists may believe in evolution because of overwhelming evidence, and physicists in subatomic particles on overwhelming evidence, but the evidence which overwhelms the biologist may drown the physicist, and vice-versa. It is rather the case that scientists display a considerable lack of scepticism for well-accepted theories outside their area of expertise. Honesty is held to be a fundamental constituent of the scientific enterprise, and scientists trust other scientists to be truthful. The ubiquity of this trust can be seen in the palpable sense of shock when a worker at Bell Labs was recently found to have falsified his data.
Scepticism consists more of a check for consistency than a check for truth. Ideas are rejected not so much on grounds of lack of evidence, but rather on grounds of inconsistency. Faced with perpetual motion machines, philosophers' stones, or telepathic spoon-bending, it is clearly not the case that most scientists rush to examine the phenomenon before rejecting 'way-out' ideas. There is simply not time, and fraudulent or mistaken ideas have plagued science since its beginning. Already in the eighteenth century, the number of circle-squarers was large enough for the Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences to refuse to consider any more purported solutions, and it is a safe assumption that since then the number of scientific cranks has grown at the same exponential rate as the number of scientists. Rejected ideas are rejected as incompatible with the accepted body of scientific knowledge. Chemists accept the word of geologists that a six-thousand year old earth is impossible, and zoologists do not rush to take courses on thermodynamics before spurning perpetual motion machines.
I have so far emphasised how reliant the individual is on others in his education. This does not mean that science is a stagnant subject. Scientific knowledge has clearly advanced, but it has advanced in community. An individual making a discovery does not do so in isolation, but as part of a group. His instruments were pre-supplied by the manufacturer and then calibrated according to the results of Dr. Smith. Samples are prepared by a technician and the analysis of the data is done in collaboration with a coworker. The line of research pursued was in pursuit of an idea of Professor Bloggs. The validity of the resulting breakthrough is to a greater or lesser extent reliant on all of the above. It depends on the calibration being correct, on the samples being pure and on the statistical analysis being accurate. If there are faults in any of these, the conclusions become questionable. 'Scientific knowledge' cannot sensibly be located to one person. The knowledge depends on a web of relationships, acceptances and trust, for implicit in one person's claim to scientific knowledge is an appeal to knowledge stored in someone else. Scientific advances are communitarian advances, and a scientific epistemology must be a communitarian epistemology. It is not the case that at the level of a community science relies on trusting others. The scientific community, as a whole, is self-sufficient in the production, analysis and testing of ideas. However, there is no Dr. Scientific Community to talk to. Instead, we are individuals and we interact and learn as individuals. Science does not advance as an impersonal entity. 'Science' advances because the thousands of men and women who make up 'Science' all individually know a little bit more. However, this augmentation of individual knowledge relies on a willingness to accept the validity of knowledge stored in other people.
I have argued that the scientific development of individuals requires a trust in the scientific community. This is particularly so in the case of the public audience of science, those whose studies terminated at school or in university. The claim of the individual to knowledge includes a reliance on the trustworthiness of others. This trust cannot be put aside even in research activities, particularly if involved with 'Big Science'. In all cases, the natural unit of science is the community and not the individual. It is now time to consider religious knowledge and belief.
One characteristic of religion is the way a child's religion can be decided at birth. Richard Dawkins has observed this apparent incongruity of calling a new-born child a Catholic, a Hindu, a Protestant, a Muslim. How can a squawling infant be said to hold an opinion on the hypostatic union or nature of the Trinity? Clearly this is impossible. What he does not say, but what is equally true, is the apparent incongruity of calling the vast majority of the religous population Catholic or Hindu or Protestant or Muslim. The distinction between Donatism and Arianism is not of interest to the majority of the church-going population. This is and always has been religious reality. This lack of knowledge extends to areas of apologetics. It is possible to know what is believed without knowing why it is believed. This is not necessarily a catechetical failure. It is quite rightly the case that religious belief is not restricted to those holding advanced degrees in the taxonomy of fourth century heresies.
It is clear that an individual believer may know his faith only partially. However, this inadequacy of individual knowledge does not imply an inadequacy of communal knowledge. Religion is a communal activity and the individual believer is almost a contradiction in terms. To say the Nicene Creed, it is not necessary to understand exactly what it means for the Son to be consubstantial with the Father. What is necessary is that there are people who do so understand, and theologians and seminaries exist to ensure that such knowledge can be handed on. Potentially more problematic are historical dogmas. Every major religion makes factual claims about the past that are no longer subject to direct verification, and no number of theologians can provide witness for what they have not seen. For example, it is a fundamental tenet of Christianity that there was an actual, physical resurrection. These problems are resolved by the temporal nature of religious community. That religious communities are extended through time is evident in many ways. It can be seen in the reading of the bede-roll in mediaeval parishes, as the parishioners prayed for their dead benefactors. It can be seen in the extraordinary care that has always been taken to faithfully transmit the scriptures from one generation to another. It can be seen in the halakhic tradition, where rabbinical decisions are made not in isolation but in the context of thousands of years of reflection and commentary on Torah. Historical claims are not rootless dogma-lets in an abstract space of `things to be believed'. Rather, they are claims of the community, attested to by members of the community, whose status as members is unaffected by their status as skeletons. The locus of religious knowledge is not the individual, but rather the temporally extended community.
If religious knowledge is not localised, what does it mean to believe something? Belief is at the heart of religion, and credal statements anchor religious practice. It might appear that belief should consist in considering a proposition, weighing up its merits, and deciding whether or not it is likely to be true. This may suffice in simple cases. If I am asked whether Mrs Jones would make a good teacher, I can consider her character and make a decision. However, for concepts that are not easy to grasp or are at considerable historical remove this may not be possible. It has been argued above that religious knowledge is communitarian knowledge, and the same is true of religious belief. It is an inescapable part of religion that people not only believe in propositions they do not fully understand, but also in propositions they do not know exist. Angus Gilbey, the late Catholic chaplain to the University of Cambridge, had it right when he wrote
"People often think that becoming a Catholic entails the acceptance of,
let us say, 25 successive propositions. No, becoming a Catholic
entails the acceptance of only one: namely, that the Catholic
Church is God's revelation. With that acceptance comes the consequent
acceptance of the whole of the Church's teaching in one single act.
The act of acceptance is the same for a philosopher as for a peasant."
Belief is first and foremost a belief in a source of authority that will provide reliable teaching about that which one does not have the energy, opportunity or possibility to verify oneself. This authority is inevitably incarnate in some fashion. As an illustration, consider a belief in the supreme authority of scripture. It may seem that there is no room for human contributions. However, the text is probably a translation. In making this translation, there will have been a decision as to which manuscripts to use and which readings to accept. There is also the crucial question of which books are canonical. The knowledge obtained by the reader depends on the good judgment of the translators and those who determined the scriptural canon.
I have tried to emphasise throughout that the individual is not a self-sufficient unit for either scientific or religious knowledge. The individual is embedded in a community, and the origin and justification of much of this knowledge lies with other members of the community. Education within a tradition entails acceptance of a source of authority. 'Tradition' literally means a handing-on, and a handing on is exactly what an education is about. It is not necessary to have personally measured the speed of light to use the accepted value for it, for one trusts the honesty of those who have measured it. Likewise, rligious knowledge is always located within a community setting. One does not believe in the resurrection as a lone proposition to be accepted. One believes in it as part of giving ones trust and assent to an entire community, trusting in its formulations, definitions and claims. In this way we see how a scientific and a religious education are similar at the level of the individual. In each case, they involve a didactic education into the traditions and knowledge of a community. To a certain extent one may check the consistency of what one is taught. It is much, much harder to check the factual foundations.
The differences between scientific and religious epistemology lie more at the level of a community. In each case, the community is the self-sufficient unit. Religious truth is revealed truth, occurring at particular, unpredictable times and places. Truth comes to man, not man to truth. Consequently religious community must be temporally extended in order to connect the time of revelation to the time of the present. Religious communities are concerned with the faithful preservation and articulation of revealed truth. It is not true this excludes original religious thought, or that nothing more needs to be known. The one Truth is not restricted to the language or concepts of a particular people or a particular time and the constant grasping, understanding and expounding of this truth for every time and place is not an easy task. For the message to be semper fidelis, the language used must be semper mutabilis.
In the practice of science, man does not so much come to truth as seek it out. The early modern natural philosophers talked of putting nature to the rack to extract its secrets. This image captures well the deliberate nature that distinguishes experiment from experience. Experiments are not just casual studies of nature. They use highly contrived and artificial circumstances that are thoroughly untypical. These experiments are the touchstone of scientific knowledge. It does not follow from this that all scientific knowledge is provisional and subject to experimental falsification. The fact that meteorological observations or astronomical accounts are unrepeatable does not affect their status as part of the scientific record. However, it is true that scientific communities are less concerned with historical fidelity.
Scientific and religious communities differ in the origins of their knowledge and the methods used to generate it. However, we are individuals and not communities, and what is important is how the individual, not the community, learns. The question arises as to what we should believe, and how we should decide this. Of course we should believe what is true and disbelieve what is false, but that no more helps us in our decision than would posing the same question in French. We want to know whether promulgated ideas are true, whether they are in harmony with the orderings of the world. However, deciding on the truthfulness of a tradition requires not just a general appreciation of the main ideas of the tradition, but a full and deep command of the details. To truly evaluate physics, it is not sufficient to know in a general fashion that Einstein showed you cannot travel faster than light. One must be easily able to derive this and much more, and must possess first-hand familiarity with the experimental equipment and evidence. This comes not easily if at all, and obtaining it requires substantial effort over many years. This leads to the paradoxical conclusion that one cannot judge a tradition without understanding it, and one cannot understand it without having committed to it. This step of commitment is a step of faith, for it requires a confidence in the ultimate correctness of a path one cannot see along. I am by education and belief a physicist and a Catholic, but in neither case could I say with honesty that I am in a position to judge the truthfulness, as opposed to the consistency, of either tradition. I study what I believe to be true; I believe to be true what I have faith in; and I have faith because I choose to have faith. Choice is not a word much associated with belief, but it is my contention that this lies behind ones most fundamental commitments.
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