Praising science, with restraint
Recall (see What is Science?), in the excerpt from Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself", the last of the narrator’s words in praise of scientists and their findings:
Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.
I want to return to that last line—which seems to temper or qualify the praise—and to show you what it suggested to me. I’ll get there from a question.
Is science a religion?
Why do I ask? Some skeptics of science, particularly postmodernists who have tried to apply the tools of literary criticism to such “texts” as human activities like science and government, assert that science is just another religion, and as such, makes truth claims that are no “better” than those made by religions, folklore, witchcraft, astrology, and the like. This claim results from a confusion of categories. Science and religion are not at all alike. They are not just different things, they are different kinds of things. To say that science is a religion is like saying that llaissez faire economics is a citrus fruit.
At the level of ideas, religions are systems of beliefs that are accepted by, or imposed upon, religious adherents. The beliefs come down by tradition, usually said to derive from an authority, a god or prophet, and the beliefs are not open to question.
Realms of belief
I categorize all beliefs, including religious beliefs, into three realms: 1) the physical realm of belief (What is nature and my place in it?), 2) the spiritual realm (Is there a god, do I have a soul, is there an afterlife?), and 3) the moral realm (How should I behave; what are my place and my responsibilities in my family, in my religious group, in society, in nature?).
This table summarizes my take on the nature of these realms of belief, their subject matter, guides appropriate to in each realm, and the potential for conflict or inconsistency among those guides. When I try to put into my own words what the narrator in "Song of Myself" might have meant by “an area of my dwelling”, the physical realm of belief is as close as I have come so far to naming that area, with the findings of science being the means by which we enter that realm. Other areas of dwelling might include the equivalent of the spiritual and moral realms listed in the table.
How like a scientist, you might be thinking, to take Whitman’s pregnant little suggestion and respond by building a table! It could be worse: I could have made a graph.
Science is not its findings
Unlike religion, science is not a system of beliefs, despite what some of its over-simplifying critics assert. Science is instead a process for discovering truth in the physical realm, which means reliable knowledge about nature. Science is sort of like a procedure—but a very free-wheeling and creative one. I described the process of science in an earlier essay, and will review it briefly now.
Scientists start with observing, experimenting, and measuring, which gives data or facts. Beyond observing, scientists find patterns or trends in the data, which they call laws. Scientists ask why the laws hold, seeking explanations involving other detectable entities (such as molecules), producing theories. This interplay of facts, laws, and theories is not as linear as it sounds. A scientist’s first actions in an area of knowledge are suggested by currently unanswered questions, so the scientist might start by checking existing data, looking for laws, or theorizing. A theory might predict lawful behavior in areas not yet examined, suggesting new experiments, giving new data, and perhaps a newly-noticed law. A broader law might supplant one that works for data in one area, but fails to fit data from another, whereas the broader law fits both. Scientists do what works to produce reliable knowledge in the form of data, laws, and theories. Technologists use this knowledge as a guide to designing useful products.
Facts, laws, and theories are open to question. They are public information and fully available to anyone who wishes to understand, check, or use them. All three are in that sense self-correcting. If the same measurements in other labs produce different data, if additional data do not fit a law, if the explanation suggests other laws that do not hold, then these discrepancies lead to rechecking and correction. The process, for centuries now, has been converging on a unified picture of the physical world, a picture that is a quite comprehensive and reliable guide to action in the physical world, although it is doubtful that this picture will ever be complete.
Religions are systems of beliefs. Where are the beliefs in science? Science produces public evidence that can support—sometimes strongly, sometimes with only a probability of correctness—specific beliefs about the nature of the physical world. These beliefs are not imposed upon the scientists themselves or anyone else. The evidence (data), the laws, and the theories, what I call science’s findings, become part of a larger marketplace of ideas about nature. People can choose to use these findings as guides to action, if they wish. Effective guides to action become popular items in the marketplace of ideas. Science’s guides to action, just like products from Honda and Apple, are extremely popular for, among others, one very simple reason: they work. If you want to know whether you are pregnant, you can hang a crystal or pyramid over your tummy, consult an intuitive or a fortune teller, flip a coin, check your horoscope, or go to the drug store and get a pregnancy test kit. Guess what most people do—and guess why. In the marketplace of ideas, the ideas that work attract the most users.
My answer to the question—Is science a religion?—is no. Religions are systems of beliefs about the physical, spiritual, and moral realms, but science is a communal process that seeks truth in, and applies to, only one realm, the physical. Science helps us to understand the material world. In the spiritual and moral realms, science is mute, because there is no physical data upon which to build bodies of fact, law, and theory. Science’s findings can certainly lead one to strong and defensible beliefs about nature, but these beliefs are simply there for the using and the checking, and they are not imposed upon anyone. They are widely used because they are likely to work.
Can a scientist be religious?
How do scientists stand on religion? When you start asking scientists about their religious views, you find the full range of positions that you would find in any segment of society. Whereas you might think that most scientists would be agnostics, suspending judgment in the face of inadequate evidence, in fact, you find Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and the completely uninterested.
How can a scientist be religious? Aren’t there all kinds of conflicts between beliefs of scientists and those of religious people? How can both sets of beliefs co-exist in one person?
There are two tacit and fallacious assumptions in this question. One is the assumption, common among academics, that all people work at constructing a consistent set of beliefs in all three of the Realms of Belief: the physical, spiritual, and moral realms. But some people simply do not worry about it. Their beliefs in the three realms are in two or three separate boxes, and inconsistencies do not seem to bother them or occur to them. It appears to me that some people simply do not examine the contents of these three boxes for internal consistency. This might seem, especially to anyone drawn to readings like this one, like leading unexamined lives, but there it is. One of the college deans I worked with had a motto about facing complicated matters: “Keep it fuzzy.” He used it during committee and policy meetings when he saw that excessive attention to detail and consistency was preventing action altogether. I have met many people who appear, when it comes to unifying their beliefs in all areas, seem to prefer keeping it fuzzy, and getting on with life.
The second fallacious assumption is that conflicts can arise between science and religion on spiritual and moral matters. In my view, on which the Realms of Belief table is based, there can be no such conflicts. Science has nothing to say about the central spiritual questions (Does God exist? Is there a soul and an afterlife?) and moral questions (What is sin? How should I behave? What are my moral responsibilities to others?). As I mentioned (opined, to be accurate) earlier, science cannot answer questions in the spiritual realm because no physical, widely acceptable evidence exists on those subjects. And no scientific experiment can give evidence that a specific behavior is sinful. Science can inform moral decisions, by giving the most reliable forecasts of the consequences of actions in the physical world, but ultimately, the moral decision is based on whether those consequences are morally acceptable to the doer, and to those affected.
Where's the beef?
So where are these oft-mentioned conflicts between science and religion? According to the Realms table, there is only one type of conflict that can pit science and religion directly against each other, and that is when the two have different stories to tell about nature—about the observable, testable, physical world.
For example, James Ussher (1581-1686), an Anglican Archbishop, used the Old Testament to conclude that the earth’s creation, as described in Genesis, began on the evening preceding Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC. On the other hand, abundant physical evidence, consistent over many different scientific fields, suggests that the earth is about 4.54 billion years old. Now here is a conflict: 6000 or so years versus 4.54 billion, with science supporting the view that the earth is half a million times older than Ussher concluded. What is your choice? It depends on where you look for answers about the physical realm. Knowing how science works, and how landforms, fossils, and genomes are dated by scientific experimentation, I’ll go with the 4.54 billion-year answer, and that creates no conflict with my beliefs in the spiritual and moral realms, because science does not enter there.
Why do some religious people find it hard to resolve science-religion conflicts in this manner, that is, to let science have its say in the material world? One reason is bound to be that the perception that science is right and the religious authorities are wrong on any question, in any realm, undermines the religious authorities, and calls into question what they teach in other realms. For me, no problem, I can take science’s view while looking to other means to make decisions outside the physical realm. Not so easy, apparently, for those who don’t even want public schools to teach the most widely accepted age of the earth, or anything about evolution. These teachings bring into question the teachings of religious authority about the physical realm, and thus, by association, undermine that authority in other realms.
Do scientists have any basic beliefs in common?
Religions are systems of belief, and science is a process for discovering truth in the physical world. But do scientists themselves, like religious adherents, share any common beliefs? There is one, although I prefer to call it a working hypothesis: it is the notion that nature is accessible to reason, or to put it another way, that observing and experimenting can tell us more about nature. Scientists share this working notion for a simple reason: it works. We seem to get very reliable knowledge from this process. Beyond this, scientists try anything that gives promise of enlarging our knowledge of the physical world.
Does science have anything to say in the spiritual realm? The answer is a firm no, by definition. Spiritual entities—gods, souls, afterlives—are defined in such a way as to preclude their giving any physical evidence of themselves. For religious leaders, this property has the advantage of making spiritual entities irrefutable, along with the authority of the leaders. For religious adherents, irrefutability makes spiritual entities matters of pure faith; people who constantly seek physical evidence for the existence of a god lack faith—in a deep sense, they are not religious. For scientists—when they are being scientists—irrefutability makes gods, souls, and afterlives simply uninteresting.
Does science have anything to say in the moral realm? I can imagine no experiments that would give data proving that an act is moral or immoral. Science can, however, serve the moral realm as an advisor. The findings of science can help us see the likely consequences of our actions, and thus give important guidance in moral decisions. For example, should I smoke cigarettes? Science’s findings give no answer, but they do predict consequences of the act. They suggest that if you smoke, your life will be shortened (chances are at least one in three that your death, when it comes, will be smoking-related), and you might well die just at the age when your spouse and children are depending on you most. Science’s findings also suggest that your smoking will bring harm to those who live with you. If your moral beliefs tell you that you should avoid actions that harm others, or habits that are likely to make you an unreliable spouse or parent, then science’s findings about smoking might lead you to decide that, for you, smoking is immoral.
Does the practice of science itself entail any moral decisions?
According to Jacob Bronowski (1), there is one place where science, which some have called the world of what IS, comes into contact with the moral realm, the world of what OUGHT to be. Science is a cooperative or shared venture. No single scientist, working alone, can build a full and reliable picture of nature. So scientists share the load, the data, the reasoning, the dissemination, the whole task. This means that scientists must be reliable sources of information for each other, and thus that a commitment to be a scientist is a moral commitment. According to Bronowski, when I decide to be a scientist, I make this commitment:
I OUGHT to behave such that we can learn what IS.
This is not like a religious commitment to a moral belief. It is a commitment that is necessary if science is to work. Being dishonest thwarts the work of others. So in a sense, the commitment is typical science: do what works. In fact, modern philosophers like John Searle (2) argue that this is/ought dichotomy is illusory, and that in fact, the ought is inherent in the is. In other words, if you are doing science, the goal is to discover what is true, and to be untruthful is simply to not do science.
The values of science
To make the communal activity of science effective, scientists must be honest, reliable, of good judgment, willing to accept criticism, tolerant of the views of others, permissive of dissent, and willing to share information openly. If scientists do not bring these values to their work, then they will not help science to enlarge, correct, improve, and refine its findings. A culture that does not value dissent or tolerance is not fertile ground for science. But as Bronowski said, when science moves into such cultures, it brings those values with it, which means that science can benefit the culture that supports it.
Science and morality intersect in each person’s voluntary commitment to be a scientist.
Science is not a religion
Science and religion are not just different human activities. They are different kinds of human activities. Most of what appear to be conflicts between them are illusory. The only truly logical conflicts between them come when religion demands acceptance of a view about nature—about the material world—and science provides reproducible evidence that this view is untenable.
Only three realms?
A final question about Realms of Belief. Are the three realms—physical, spiritual, moral—comprehensive? That is, do all of our beliefs fit somewhere in this table? This morning at a nearby pond, the sun, low in the east, laid across the water long shadows, entrancing me with distended images of alders, reeds, and a great blue heron. Last week at a local museum, I stood for a long time before Wassily Kandinsky’s painting Stramm (3), one that I try to see on every visit. (At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, I always spend some time before this very different painting). Recently, channel-surfing, I hit on an old movie, and was immediately glued to the screen while Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced. "Wow! Beautiful," I say to myself. In feeling this way, am I expressing a belief? If so, does the feeling of beauty belong to one or more of the Realms of Belief? Are there other realms of belief? Finally, if these reactions are not beliefs, what are they?
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(1) Science and Human Values, Harper and Row, Publishers, 1956, p. 58.
(2) Fact and value, “is” and “ought”, and reasons for action, Philosophy in a New Century, John Searle, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 161-180.
(3) Wassily Kandinsky, Stramm, (1929), from the collection of the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine. To see an image of this painting, click HERE.
