SCIENCE VS.

RELIGION: ATTENUATING REFLECTIONS

It was with some misgivingsblended with a masochistic attractionthat I agreed to talk about this topic. Not that my friend Chris Muire was so inflexible as to require that I talk specifically about thisthere were other choicesbut I felt what I can only describe as a reluctant attraction to the theme of Science versus Religion. Let me explain myself. The question of science versus religion is embedded in several other issues so intimately that it is not easy to disengage it from that complex of problems. There is the issue of faith versus reason, and of religion versus atheism, and of creationism versus Darwinism, all of which are clearly connected to the specific topic I have chosen, namely science versus religion. I should point out, too, that this mutual entanglement is not just conceptual, but historical as well. In fact, while it requires some analytic effort to distinguish these topicsand to describe their interconnections as well it is even more difficult to explore their historical overlap through more than two millennia during which they have been in play. Were I to order them historically, I would say that science versus religion is probably the formulation that has had the longest life. Faith versus reason came to the fore as a problem mainly during the Christian Middle Ages, and of course creationism versus Darwinism (or evolution) is a midnineteenth-century issue that lingers particularly in the United States. As for religion versus atheism, it is perhaps advisable to speak more in terms of specificity of place than time. Atheism comes to us through a particularly Greek tradition, one that was tied to the development of Greek thought, Greek philosophy. It also seemsand here I am following the research of the French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy, in a work not yet translated into Englishthat atheism is tied to theism and monotheism

in a rather specific and interesting way. As the German philosopher Schelling remarked provocatively, monotheism is an atheism. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for my listeners this evening) this topic presents complexities that I will sidestep for the moment. Suffice it to say that monotheism presents the notion of God as an ontological principle a principle that the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) demonstrated to be beyond the ken of reason to knowthus opening up the need for something beyond reason, required by reason, but out of the reach of reason: something like a faithfulness beyond reason to which reason opens our minds. But now I will leave these suggestive phrases for something more solid that I can present to you more coherently. Science versus religion in an historical, down-to-earth way. In considering the relationship between science and religion historically, I will begin with a dichotomy that has become fairly traditional: logos versus mythos. Mythos, the telling of a story, a narrative usually involving supernatural beings, offers an explanatory tale of why things are the way they are todayhow they got that way. Mythos is a Greek word, the etymological source of our English word myth. But in current usage myth connotes something that is not true, or else the object of the comfortable philological enterprise known as mythology. Unfortunately both of these meanings betray the spirit of the Greek term, because the person passing down a traditional mythical account did so in the belief that the story was true, and was not interested in collating myths from different cultures in the spirit of historical criticism or objective scholarship. In fact, the transition from myth to mythology clearly subordinates mythos to logos, by adding logos to mythos, thus creating another ology. Logos was the attempt to explain natural phenomena on the basis of other natural phenomena, and so

we may say that that trend, which developed a bit later, though largely parallel to mythos, is also Greek. The difference is that logos developed into what we now know as logic, and it has survived and grown as a branch of philosophy. Logic, since the work of Bertrand Russell and Alfred Lord Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, is now widely recognized as being the basis of mathematics, without which there would be no science as we know it today. The tension between science and religion is already quite clearly present in the work of the Latin poet and enthusiastic follower of Epicurean philosophy, Lucretius. He is the author of De rerum natura, On the Nature of Things. This long poem, in 6 books, each of which is over a thousand verses in length, sets forth in a way that is at once scientific and poetic, the philosophy Epicurus, who lived from 341 to 270 BCE: his atomic theory, his understanding of the godswho live in an intermundia, or interworld and are invisible to the human eye because their simulacra or visible emanations are too fine to be observed. Lucretiuss attitude toward religion is complex. He believes that the gods exist, but not that they created the world, nor that Jupiter hurls thunderbolts. If Jupiter did that, he would only strike the guilty, while in fact the innocent are also struck. This is an interesting observation, because it implies that it is possible separate ethics from a belief in a creator god. The thunderbolt is a natural phenomenon, explained as the collision of clouds. It is observed that there is an increase in lightening bolts in fall and spring, when there is a change of temperature. The fact that we see the lightening before hearing the thunder is noted, and explained by the fact that things always take longer to reach the ears than to produce vision. But they were produced by the same collision: similarly, if you should see someone at a distance

cutting down a well-grown tree with a double-headed axe, you hear the stroke before its thud sounds in your ears. Here Lucretius succeeds in making a comparison between two phenomena, which will eventually lead to the sort of scientific generalization that later led to such breakthroughs as the universal law of gravitation during the Enlightenment period. But this procedure of finding and isolating similarities amidst disparities is also present on the poetic plane in the form of the following simile: Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life. This comparison of the passing on of life from generation to generation and the passing of the torch between runners at the Olympic games is not so very different from the ability to see what the delayed hearing of an axe chopping a tree and that of the thunder from a lightening bolt have in common. It is the Aha-Erlebnis, the sudden insight of the keen observer endowed with the ability to make analogies and extrapolate from individual occurrences. By and large, Lucretius paints a rather unfavorable picture of religion, which he feels holds mens minds in the shackles of fear and superstition. Science liberates men from fear. The soul is not eternal, and there is no afterlife. After this early testimonial of the tension between nascent science and a much older religion, I would like to proceed to the period of the Enlightenment, that is the 18th century in France, Italy, England and Germany. I quote the following lines from a poem by the most celebrated writer and thinker, Goethe.

Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, Hat auch Religion;

Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt, Der habe Religion. In my literal and non-poetic translation: He who has science and art, also has religion. He who has neither of these, let him have religion.

This was a widespread attitude of the intelligentsia of the time. It was certainly that of the French philosopher Voltaire. In other words, religion may be alright for the unlettered, because it can be their substitute for science (or knowledge and general) and art, but it is unnecessary for the well educated or enlightened.

It was probably in reaction to this that Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed a more heartfelt and personal view of religion (Protestantism, that is), and of live in generala view that he conveyed to the world in a certain style of writing, a confidential tone that came to be known in retrospect as pre-romantic. For Romanticism, the opposite of the cerebral and critical approach of Voltaire and of the 18th century in general, began with the beginning of the 19th century to usher in a worldview that opposed religion to science in a new way. Christianity became an affair of the heart. The existence of God was not to be proven philosophically, but to be felt. And the scientific revolution, first beneath the pen of William Blake but then by a host of European writers, was seen as a threat to the beauty of nature and the virtues of live, spontaneity and movement. Never more sharply than in the 19th and early 20th century was the positivistic view of scientific progress pitted against the vitalistic, romantic and post-romantic enthusiasm of poets and thinkers

Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Keats, Shelly, Chateaubriand and the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson in France, and the American poet Walt Whitman, celebrating life, sounding his barbaric yawp from the rooftops, as he put it. A romanticized Christianity and a lyric pantheism joined forces against the anti-humanism of science and technology. In the mid-twentieth century a French phenomenologist formulated his critique of science versus not religion by lived experience at the beginning of a work called Eye & Mind (1961). He writes:

Science manipulates thing and gives up living in them. Operating within its own realm, it makes its constructs of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals. It is, and has always been, that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as if it were an object-in-general as though it meant nothing to us and yet were predestined for our ingenious schemes.

Of course we have learned to pause with thoughtful hesitation at the word real. What real world exactly does Merleau-Ponty have in mind when he says that science comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals? Since the passage occurs at the beginning of a philosophical examination of painting, we immediately have an intuitive

sense that what is meant is the visible world of the painter. Is this world more real than that of the scientist? One thing is clear: the world of the painter is closer to the one we experience directly in our livesit is closer to the lived world. The scientific world is one that, while based on direct experience, is not apparent to the naked eye. It is made up of entities that are posited as the cause of our perceptions, though not directly perceptible themselves. Where are we today in this science/religion dichotomy? What form does the tension take, and how pronounced is it? In Europe it is my impression that the roles of science and religion in the lives of most people have settled into harmonious coexistence. Environmentalism and health care are at once mediated by science and dedicated to ethically lofty goals. Humanism has morphed into humanitarianism, and although its projects often miscarry, responsible efforts have been made through science, guided by ethical intent, to relieve the suffering of the third world, as if there were more than one. The rise of fundamentalism in the Islamic world and in Christianity as well as motivated the atheistic philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris to author a recent work (2002), The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Faith, to speak out strongly against religion in general, not limiting his criticism to fundamentalism but including moderate religious beliefs also. The book has found surprisingly strong support in this country. And as we know, the polemic between creationists (and/or supporters of intelligent design) on one hand and creationists on the other proceeds with as much heat and little light as usual on this side of the Atlantic. Which brings me to my opening remark. I feel little inclination to take part in that debate because it seems to me both sides are stretching things. They do not speak confidently, like people who are

comfortable with themselves. They are on tip-toe so to speak. They remind me of that witty remark by the Jewish comic Jackie Mason when he was taken to see a ballet. Couldnt they find a taller girl? If I were forced to express an opinion on the issue itself I would probably resort to quoting the marvelous passages at the end of the Book of Job: Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. Who determined the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Who stretched the line upon it? Or who laid the cornerstone thereof, when the morning stars stand together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? I will conclude by line I used a lot when I was a child. How am I supposed to know?

(Talk by Michael B. Smith given to undergraduate students at Berry College in 2006, at a friend and colleagues invitation.)