Posted by Steven Weinberg has a characteristically insightful essay in The New York Review of Books on the conflict between science and religion. He writes, with respect to people who insist there is no conflict between them:
Some scientists take this line because they want to protect science education from religious fundamentalists. Stephen Jay Gould argued that there could be no conflict between science and religion, because science deals only with facts and religion only with values. This certainly was not the view held in the past by most adherents of religion, and it is a sign of the decay of belief in the supernatural that many today who call themselves religious would agree with Gould.
Quite right. It is also not the view held by most adherents of religion today.
Continuing from the previous quote:
Let’s grant that science and religion are not incompatible–there are after all some (though not many) excellent scientists, like Charles Townes and Francis Collins, who have strong religious beliefs. Still, I think that between science and religion there is, if not an incompatibility, at least what the philosopher Susan Haack has called a tension, that has been gradually weakening serious religious belief, especially in the West, where science has been most advanced.
Again, quite right. Relgious beliefs are sufficiently malleable, and standards of plausibility sufficiently low, that it is possible to accept the findings of modern science and also maintain traditional religious beliefs. The fact remains that religion as an intellectual enterprise has been in abject retreat for close to two centuries, and the relentless march of science has been a primary cause of that retreat. Right up through the mid-nineteenth century natural theology held an honored place in the academic curriculum, but those days are long gone. Theology is now a spectator to the grand project of understanding nature. It can only react to what scientists say, having long ago proven its worthlessness as a tool for understanding anything.
Weinberg argues that science and religion clash on a number of fronts. One of the most important of these is the following:
The problem for religious belief is not just that science has explained a lot of odds and ends about the world. There is a second source of tension: that these explanations have cast increasing doubt on the special role of man, as an actor created by God to play a starring part in a great cosmic drama of sin and salvation. We have had to accept that our home, the earth, is just another planet circling the sun; our sun is just one of a hundred billion stars in a galaxy that is just one of billions of visible galaxies; and it may be that the whole expanding cloud of galaxies is just a small part of a much larger multiverse, most of whose parts are utterly inhospitable to life. As Richard Feynman has said, “The theory that it’s all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.”
At the risk of being repetitive, this is once again exactly right. In an earlier paragraph Weinberg argued that the conflict between science and religion is not primarily (his word) that science frequently contradicts specific religious doctrines. I would agree, so long as we pay attention to the word “primarily.” The cumulative effect of one religious cleric after another finding his dogmas refuted should not be overlooked in explaining the decline of religion.
But Weinberg is right that the main conflict is between what science is telling us about ourselves vs. what religion is telling us. Religion, at least in its Christian form, has as its centerpiece the idea that human beings are the point of creation. We are the reason for it all. Any sober consideration of the evidence as we know it makes that belief look terribly naive. It is all the more telling since there is no shortage of things scientists might have discovered that would have affirmed our confidence in our own importance. If you are desperate to do so you may still graft notions of human significance onto the data of cosmic and natural history, but the fit between them is decidedly less than perfect.
After going on in this vein for several more paragrpahs Weinberg turns to the question of how one lives without God. He writes:
I’m not going to say that it’s easy to live without God, that science is all you need. For a physicist, it is indeed a great joy to learn how we can use beautiful mathematics to understand the real world. We struggle to understand nature, building a great chain of research institutes, from the Museum of Alexandria and the House of Wisdom of Baghdad to today’s CERN and Fermilab. But we know that we will never get to the bottom of things, because whatever theory unifies all observed particles and forces, we will never know why it is that that theory describes the real world and not some other theory.
Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.
I hear these sentiments all the time, usually from religious people, but I still do not understand them. The picture they paint is that of someone wallowing in nihilism, overwhelmed by the sheer pointlessness of it all, consciously deciding to believe in God for the purposes of extricating himself from the emotional pit. For me, living without God is the only way to live. I wouldn’t know how to believe in God even if I wanted to, and I don’t understand how other people come to have such faith.
In short, I find it easy to live without God. It’s living with God that is hard, in much the same way that it is hard to live with the invisible dragon in your garage. Surely some religious folks must grow frustrated with the complete lack of direct evidence for their beliefs. They must have noticed that nothing really changes just because you pray about it or that they go through their day to day lives without anything remotely supernatural happening. They must recognize they are playing games with language in describing, say, the birth of a child as a miracle, and that real miracles of the sort described in the Bible just never seem to happen anymore. The possibility that they are deluding themselves, that the reason so many religions put such a premium on faith is that evidence is in such embarrassingly short supply, just has to gnaw at them. How you maintain your faith in an all-powerful, all-loving God in the face of all the evidence to the contrary is the mystery. Living without God comes naturally.
Anyway, Weinberg’s essay has all sorts of other quotable nuggets, so I recommend reading the whole thing. Good stuff.
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