Science vs. Religion
The last thousand years have seen science and religion battle on many occasions. The core of this conflict arises because both science and religion share a common purpose: they both try to explain the world we live in using “fundamental truths”. Typically the conflict between science and religion is framed in terms of single issues: a round earth vs. a flat earth, morality of stem cell handling, evolution by natural selection vs. creationism or intelligent design. But these conflicts are really superficial to the fundamental differences in the framework each uses to create an understanding of our world.
Religions have relied on faith and trust-based knowledge to create a model of our world. This often involves the assumption that there is a pre-existing knowledge (usually held by God or a god) which is imparted to someone, who then shares that knowledge with the rest of us. Usually it is taboo to challenge this information or the mechanism by which the knowledge was imparted. Often times the person who passed on the knowledge is long dead.
Science asks us to start with no knowledge and to discover everything for ourselves. In purest science, it is not permissible to accept the knowledge imparted by someone else’s experience. Only hypothesis that have been verified first hand can be truly trusted in Science. Of course it is impractical for every person to discover every thing, so general practice accepts hypothesis as their predictions are verified and pronounced confirmed by increasing independent experimenters.
It is this conflict in approaches, trust vs. skepticism, authority vs. discovery, that is at the core of all religion and science confrontations. As such, the heart of the conflict is not science vs. religion, but rather a clash in methodologies for understanding our world.
So which is the better model to understanding the “truth”? Belief? Or scientific method? The question is not issue specific, so let us not waste time arguing about evolution vs. intelligent design or any “hot topic” issue. Let’s take a look at which methodology produces better results.
Creationists rely on truths derived from authoritarian sources such as an enlightened individual, a religious text, divine signs, etc. Scientists rely on published experiments and the integrity of the publishers. Both sides “trust” their sources and accept them as fact. While science has the advantage of theoretically being able to recreate experiments so knowledge is always first-hand observable, this is not practical and not done ad nausea. As such, the core argument between science and religion is the quality of their sources. The scientific community is skeptical of findings they cannot duplicate - they have a built in mistrust of their sources. The “belief” based approach is very accepting and unquestioning in it’s source of choice - though the sources of someone else’s belief if not to be trusted at all. Regardless, both sides must *trust* whatever facts they start with.
So, in this sense, science and “faith” are actually pretty similar. Both require us to trust some 3rd party to some degree (religion requires a great deal of trust, science doesn’t demand trust in a single source but for practical use it requires trust that there is no conspiracy). Science and religion both use logic as a tool to defend their positions and create plausible explanations for the “truths” they derive. Religions paint a system for reality and spirituality that “make sense” for their followers. Science likewise tries to paint a reality that “makes sense” to other scientists. Both use logic and “common sense” approaches to justify and explain their models.
The question is then, who has better sources?
History has shown that that those claiming information through religious means have later had their ideas challenged by science and found largely mistaken. Of course, “great thinkers” in science have had their ideas discredited by other scientists as well. The scientific community is fraught with politics, just as the religious communities are, but science claims no divine guidance to mitigate their political misdeeds.
Neither methodology has a perfect track record, but the inherently skeptical nature of the scientific method requires its sources to be more rigorously vetted than belief based systems. As such, on issues where the scientific method is applied, science does a better job of correcting mis-information, and as such generally has better sources. Science is therefore more likely to have the “truth”. But the edge that science has for finding “truths” is only for those questions where the scientific method can provide an answer.
This is where we need to make a distinction about “truth”. There are two kinds of truths: social truths, and absolute truths. Absolute truths are facts that can be repeatable measured. Social truths are constructs, and not measurable. Social truths are created by the beliefs of a society… and the beliefs of a society are dominated by consensus and not repeatable at every point in time.
As an example of a “social truth”, most people would agree that “murder is wrong”. But, is euthanasia murder? Is the death penalty murder? Is abortion murder? Is war murder? On these questions, the “truth” is not so obvious since “murder” is not something definable in all cases. The scientific method holds no domain to answer questions of social truth. Science cannot answer questions of value. Science may allow us to predict that a rainstorm that is coming, but it cannot judge that the rain is good. It is up to society to create “social truths” that assign value judgments, and this is largely cemented in religious values.
Science may help us determine that someone is dead and what factors contributed to the cause of that death, but science will not be able to prove that murder is wrong. That murder is wrong, or that a death was murder and not an accident or justified homicide, is an act of creating a social truth. One religion might call a certain act despicable, another find it acceptable. Even more importantly, a religion may at one time hold one set of “truths”, only to change them for another set of truths at a later date.
So science and religion should never come into conflict as the domain of one really does not overlap with the other. The nature of their conflict is the overzealous application of science or religion to problems outside it’s domain - usually due to a natural resistance to changing one’s understanding of a “truth”, or the application of a judgment to a scientific fact.
Let me give some examples here where “social truths” and “absolute truths” cause conflicts.
Global warming - Science can show that there is an carbon dioxide levels are increasing, and that the average temperature of the earth is rising. It can show that the ozone layer has diminished rapidly recently. It cannot show that this is “bad”. “Bad” is a value judgment. The earth has experienced tremendous changes in the past: ice ages, meteor impacts, and mega-volcano eruptions have all dramatically changed surface temperatures, atmosphere composition, and caused mass extinctions. We can safely say these things were not caused by man - but it’s theorized these events contributed to the rise of man. Are they bad? Science cannot say.
Stem cell & embryo research - Nearly every religion teaches us that murder is wrong. Our societies value and protect children. Most religions also teach compassion for the sick. Scientists are researching how human’s grow and develop, and they are doing it the only way they can - studying embryos as they begin development. Since we all generally agree that human life should be protected, the dilemma we face is answering the question, “when does an embryo become a person?” Only religion and our beliefs as a society can answer this question. There is no litmus test for a “soul”.
As a thinking people, we need to be aware of the differences between belief-based and science-based truths. But even more importantly than the differences, we need to be aware of the similarities so that we are not easily confused by the rhetoric of either. The application of scientific principals should be made without moral judgment. Moral truths do not arise from experimentation.
We need to recognize facts without passion, but then passionately debate the implications of the facts. When science and religion come into conflict, the goal is not to be “right”. The goal is to achieve the best possible outcome. This requires religion to have a willingness to change it’s beliefs in light of scientific facts, and it requires science to withhold and respect moral judgments.