Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [28]
The separate aims shouldn’t be a source of conflict—in fact they seem in principle to create a nice division of labor. However, religions don’t always stick to questions of purpose or comfort. Many religions attempt to address the external reality of the universe as well, as can be seen even in the definition of the word: The American Heritage Dictionary tells us that religion is “belief in a divine or superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and worshiped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe.” Dictionary.com says that religion is “A set of beliefs concerning the causes, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observations, and of constructing a moral code governing the morality of human affairs.” Religion in these definitions is not only about people’s relationship to the world—be it moral or emotional or spiritual—but it’s about the world itself. This leaves religious views open to falsification. When science encroaches on domains of knowledge that religion attempts to explain, disagreements are bound to arise.
Despite humanity’s shared desire for wisdom, people using different methods to ask questions and find answers or people with different goals haven’t always gotten along and the pursuit of truth hasn’t always neatly separated along lines that would avoid controversy. When people apply religious beliefs to the natural world, observations of nature can push back, and religion has to accommodate these findings. This was as true for the early church—which had, for example, to reconcile free will with God’s infinite powers—as it is for religious thinkers today.
ARE SCIENCE AND RELIGION COMPATIBLE?
Science and religion didn’t always face this quandary. Before the scientific revolution, religion and science peacefully coexisted. In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church was content to allow a generous interpretation of scripture, which lasted until the Reformation threatened the church’s dominance. Galileo’s evidence for the Copernican heliocentric theory, which contradicted the church’s claims about the heavens, was particularly troubling in this context—the publication of his results not only defied church orders, but explicitly questioned the church’s sole authority in interpreting scripture. The clergy were therefore none too fond of Galileo and his claims.
More recent history has provided numerous instances of conflict between science and religion. The second law of thermodynamics, which says that the world is moving toward increasing disorder, can dismay people who believe that God created an ideal world. The theory of evolution of course creates similar problems, erupting most recently with “debates” over intelligent design. Even the expanding universe can be disturbing to those who want to believe that we live in a perfect universe, notwithstanding that it was Georges Lemaie, a Catholic priest, who first proposed the Big Bang theory.
One of the more amusing examples of a scientist confronting his faith concerned the English naturalist Philip Gosse. He faced a quandary when—in the early nineteenth century—he realized that the Earth’s strata, which hold fossils of extinct animals, contradicted the idea that the Earth could be only 6,000 years old. In his book Omphalos, he resolved his conflict by deciding the Earth was created recently—but included specially created “bones” and “fossils” from animals that had never existed and other misleading signs of its (nonexistent) history. Gosse posited that a world in working order should show marks of change, even if they had never actually occurred. This interpretation might sound silly, but technically it does work. However, no one else has ever seemed to take this interpretation very seriously. Gosse himself switched to marine biology to avoid the annoying tests of faith that the dinosaur bones posed.
Happily, most correct scientific ideas become less