There is no "war" between science and religion

Jerry Coyne, Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, argues just the opposite in this post that appeared recently on Yahoo! News (via a site called The Conversation).

Professor Coyne scoffs at the notion that faith can be compatible with science. He aruges that "science and religion are not only in conflict -- even at 'war' -- but also represent incompatible ways of viewing the world." He insists that religion is not the "sole bailiwick of 'purposes, meanings, and values.'" Reason, rather than faith, can serve "as a fount of morality," he asserts, adding, "All serious ethical philosophy is secular ethical philosophy." Coyne concludes that faith is "not a virtue but a defect."

The good professor misunderstands both science and religion. Like many atheists (and, indeed, many religious fundamentalists) Coyne does not give God nearly enough credit.

My high school calculus teacher long ago went to his eternal reward (I met his widow nearly 20 years ago, when I was planning my own father's funeral Mass). Mr. Meinhard strongly disapproved of hand-waved proofs. Unfortunately, so many years removed from the formal study of mathematics, I will have to "hand wave" this explanation quite a bit. But, with apologies to Mr. Meinhard, let's imagine a graph, where the x-axis is time and the y-axis is infinite knowledge.

That red line represents an idealized view of human knowledge -- steadily improving, even accelerating, over time. But the line is meant to display asymptotic behavior -- no matter how much humanity learns, we will never know everything. Surely even Professor Coyne would accept that no ultimate computer will ever flash the Answer to the Ultimate Question (42, in case you've never read Douglas Adams) and put all scientists out of work forever. Our red line will never cross the y-axis.

Of course, the progress of science, like every other human endeavor, is not so smooth as this ascending red line. The example that was popular in my youth was Roman concrete -- the ability to make long-lasting concrete structures, like the Roman Colosseum, was lost to science for over a thousand years. And, if you've ever driven in Chicago, you know the knack of making long-lasting concrete is still lost, at least for road contractors. My current favorite example comes from the Bronze Age. The Minoans had flush toilet and water treatment technologies over 3,000 years ago which were not really equalled until the late 19th Century (the Romans came close, according to the views of some scholars, but I would argue the Minoans' private facilities were vastly superior to the communal facilities used by the Romans).

Anyway, though various technologies have been lost to human folly over the centuries, requiring their eventual rediscovery by hopefully more enlightened persons, let's use the red line as a rough guide of the growth of human knowledge.

Here's where my high school calculus comes in: For any point along the x-axis that one cares to plot, the area below the red line between the designated point and the y-axis will be infinite. That is more than enough space for God, no matter how much humankind learns.

There is, admittedly, tension between science and religion. Science is the study of the known and the knowable. Religion is the study of the unknown and unknowable. Every year -- every day -- as human knowledge increases, the areas that are the exclusive province of religion shrink. Our anscestors did not understand the changing of the seasons, the movement of game, the growth cycle of plants. Each was, in every human culture I've ever heard of, at one time the exclusive subject of religion: Deities of one sort or another were posited to account for these things. Some were more benign than others.

And, of course, Religion does not always graciously acquiesce in the surrender of its territory: Professor Coyne's own discipline of evolution is certainly an example of that. Even now, there are otherwise normal people who think that dinosaur bones were put in the ground by the Devil to tempt our faith. The fundamentalists don't give God credit for a world that is wondrous beyond their limited imaginations. But, then, Science does not always accept new discoveries in its realm with open arms either: Not all scientists were immediately enamored of the idea of evolution, for example. Or plate tectonics. Or almost anything else. Indeed, science, properly understood, is not a very secure place. After sometimes lengthy struggles for acceptance, facts and theories can be toppled at any moment by some new revelation. Aristotle was the height of scientific knowledge at one time -- though couched in biblical and theological language, when it condemned Galileo, the Catholic Church was as much defending Aristotle as the Bible.

Religion, on the other hand, is the realm of absolutes. There is absolute Good. That is God. There is perfect Justice. That, too, is God. There is true Peace and Happiness. God, also. The problem with religion is that we imperfect, unhappy, turbulent people do not know these absolutes. We strive for them, hopefully, but we use our God-given gift of reason here, too (not "faith" as Professor Coyne suggests), just as we use reason in pursuit of scientific knowledge. We have faith in God, but we must use reason in religion to try and figure out what God wants of us in any given situation. We have always failed -- millions who have died in religious conflicts testify to this -- but, even though our best efforts are doomed to failure, just as a scientist must keep trying to understand the universe, even though he or she will never know everything, we are compelled to keep trying. We must have faith that we can improve.

Which brings us to Professor Coyne's "secular" ethics. Reason, not faith, is the "fount" of ethics for the religious person and atheist alike. I accept that a person can be an ethical atheist, but only because that person does not understand that the pursuit of God is at the core of our study of ethics. But, as long as the ethicist is seeking Absolutes, he or she is seeking God, knowingly or not.

Without acknowledgement of an absolute good, reason can be perverted to any purpose. We can provide 'reasoned' explanations for slavery. For genocide. For the murder of those that disagree with us on anything. The court system did not disappear in Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union. The courts simply became untethered from their ethical moorings. Pursuit of the Leader's approval was substituted for the pursuit of Justice. Germans went to prison or even to the gallows at Nuremberg insisting that they were merely following the law.

Science, like law, is morally neutral. We can determine, through science, what happens when two or more substances are combined -- but it does not matter to science that a hietherto untried reaction produces a life-saving vaccine or a deadly nerve gas. The sum of human knowledge advances either way. We need religion (and, specifically, ethics) to know whether, or how, to use what science discovers for us.

Professor Coyne would presumably recoil at that thought, perhaps imagining a board of ayatollahs limiting scientific inquiry and suppressing scientific discovery. At various places, at various times, this has happened. It could happen here if people like Professor Coyne succeed in eliminating religion from science and vice-versa. But that would be the worst sort of tragedy. Using our God-given reason properly, we can understand that God gave us the universe to discover and learn and, I hope, one day soon, to settle. We do not honor God by spurning His invitation or His gifts to us. Give God some credit. Hopefully, He'll cut us some slack, too.