Not sheepish, but individ-ewe-al

Consider the following pair of statements:

A] God created the world.
B] A combination of random mutation and natural selection gives rise to new species.

There seems to be a persistent assumption that A implies not B. Even worse, there is a minor industry based on the false corollary that B implies not A, which really has no logical basis at all. This annoys me, because a lot of energy is being expended on debates which are logically stupid, but which also have harmful effects.

A is of course commonly known as creationism, and B is commonly referred to as the theory of evolution. I would argue that the two statements are almost independent. Without violating logic, a person could easily assent to both statements, or hold that both statements are false, as well as the more typical configuration of assenting to A and not B (the stereotypical fundamentalist Christian creationist), or not A and B (the stereotypical strictly materialist atheist).

Consider, for example, a Buddhist who does not believe statement A, because he holds that the world has always existed, and that there is no supreme being who could reasonably described by the English word God. I don’t think we can predict anything about what this person believes about whether or not new species evolve by mutation and natural selection. Consider also a positivist materialist type who is absolutely convinced that no such thing as a deity could possibly exist (not A). There is no reason to assume that this person believes in Darwinian evolution (B); she could for example be a strict neutralist, who believes that the persistence of some variants in a population is totally stochastic and natural selection has no significant effect. As for someone who assents to both A and B, I don’t have to make up an example; I myself hold both statements to be true (though my attitude towards the two statements is not at all identical).

Clearly the root of the problem is not in fact poor logic, it’s the existence of a very vocal group of people who say that they believe A, when in fact they also believe α, namely that the creation account in the book of Genesis is “literally” true. α can reasonably be said to imply not B, because if all the species were there at the moment of creation, then there is no speciation and no evolution. In fact, it’s not totally unreasonable to say that α and B are fully mutually exclusive; B doesn’t strictly imply not α (because Genesis could be literally true, but the standard interpretation of its literal truth could be wrong), but it’s close enough.

The people who are putting serious effort into convincing everybody of α and not B are, I believe, rather dangerous. Let’s call them political Creationists (to distinguish them from the much larger group of everybody in the world who believes A; that distinction is going to be important for the development of this argument). I don’t think that ultimately, political Creationists really care whether the account in Genesis is literally true. The originators of this philosophy are American fundamentalist Christians, and they have two rather unsavoury aims. The first is to force their brand of Christianity into a position of direct political influence, including in public schools. That means they’re working to undermine the US Constitution whose First Amendment prohibits establishment of any religion. In one way that’s kind of a local issue, but American politics does tend to spill over into the rest of the world.

The second aim is to undermine the credibility of science in general. In order to increase the powerbase of a fundamentalist religion, political Creationists are trying to make critical thinking more difficult. That’s what makes it really scary for those of us who are not Americans. It also explains why people who are not at all American fundamentalist Christians are getting involved in this, including a growing minority of Muslims and a few rather wacky Jews, as well as some other Christian groups. It seems like these other groups want a slice of the power that fundamentalists in the US are accumulating, and political Creationism looks like a way to achieve that.

It’s understandable that people are worried about this phenomenon. But I find there’s a big problem with the measures being taken to combat it. I think the people who are writing books and making TV programmes in which they eagerly try to convince people that evolution really does happen, claiming that this shows all religion is false, are actually allowing the unpleasant element to frame the debate. I am not saying that arguing with them gives them legitimacy, exactly, but more that arguing with them on their terms is already giving them a significant advantage, even if their arguments are weaker. (There’s also the fact that the militant atheist crowd annoy me because of the lack of logic mentioned at the start of this post; there’s no good reason to assume that all people with any religious views at all necessarily believe α, and it’s entirely fallacious to claim that evidence in favour of evolution is evidence in favour of atheism.) But more seriously, arguing as if verifying the Darwinian view somehow “proves” that God doesn’t exist (B implies not A), is only encouraging people who don’t understand or don’t find the theory of evolution satisfying towards the theist, creationist view (not B implies A). For one thing the theory of evolution is hard to understand and not at all intuitive. For a second thing, Darwin himself said some things that were wrong, and other evolutionary biologists have also occasionally said wrong things. Nobody sensible is claiming that scientists are infallible. But the way the debate is being framed by the political Creationists, and the way that framing is accepted by the militant atheists, make it tempting to infer that if Darwin was wrong, then fundamentalist Christians must be right.

In order to “win”, all the political Creationists need to do is to convince people that there’s a legitimate controversy about the theory of evolution. They don’t have to convince people that their version of the origins of life is correct, simply that the standard scientific model is “just a theory”, and it’s a matter of pure personal preference whether you decide to “believe” in evolution or in literal-according-to-the-fundamentalist-interpretation-of-Genesis Creationism. That’s enough to challenge the scientific edifice. Once this false controversy is legitimized, it’s easy to promote other similar false controversies, because you’ve encouraged an atmosphere where the scientific method is worthless, and it’s all just a matter of what view seems most appealing. There are similar bits of propaganda about climate change, with a false controversy about whether human activity is altering the global environment or whether God promised there would never be another flood so no person of faith needs to worry about sea levels rising. And about the effectiveness of various kinds of contraception and exactly how certain medical procedures work. If there’s believed to be a controversy, most people’s sense of fairness means that they want to give equal consideration to the two “sides”, even if in fact one side is utterly disingenuous and will say anything until they come up with something that sounds plausible, while the other is based on empirical evidence and entirely open to legitimate challenges.

Let me make a note about the different values of belief for the two statements. A is clearly a statement of religious belief. You can try to challenge it on logical or empirical grounds if you really want to, but you’re probably just going to end up annoying the people who hold the belief. I would venture that the vast majority of people who hold religious beliefs do not hold them because they are completely convinced by some practical evidence or some irrefutable logic. They hold the beliefs because they find them emotionally appealing, or perhaps because they come from a community where those beliefs are common currency. That goes for a lot of atheism too, I would argue. People who hold a particular philosophical or religious belief may try to rationalize it by presenting arguments and evidence, but in the end the justification is primarily a way to make them feel better about themselves, it’s not the reason for believing a certain way. (My personal opinion is that anyone who claims they can “prove” God’s existence is believing in something that isn’t God, and anyone who claims they can prove God’s non-existence has misunderstood the nature of religion.)

B is a scientific theory. I happen to think the evidence for it is pretty solid at this point, and it does seem to make good predictions about how biology works. Rationalists defending the theory of evolution often make pious (sic) pronouncements about how scientific theory can always be challenged by new evidence or a better interpretation of current evidence. In principle that’s true, but really, how many people have personally examined all the evidence in favour of Darwinian evolution and found it satisfactory? I know I haven’t, and I’m a professional biologist! So to some extent people believe B as a matter of trust; we believe in the scientific method, with its empiricism, its peer review, its assumption of induction. And we believe in the scientific establishment as people who are true to the principles of the scientific method, and who genuinely are willing to revise their models when new evidence appears. We accept things as being true because scientists have come to a consensus on them, which is essentially an argument from authority, when it comes down to it.

Now, I do happen to think that science is about the best method we have of understanding the world. But I also think that we shouldn’t go too far in assuming that “Science” has access to the Ultimate Truth, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is an element of trust and assumptions involved. This situation also implies that scientists have a responsibility to communicate their results clearly and honestly to the non-scientific world, and people who are not scientists have a responsibility to be educated enough to maintain a reasonable level of skepticism.

Anyway, the main conclusion is that statements A and B are independent because they are different kinds of statements. If people want to argue for or against one, they shouldn’t muddy the waters by trying to talk about the other. The secondary conclusion is that there are some extremely unpleasant people who have a vested interest in convincing people of not B, and that decent people should be very careful in how they argue against such unpleasant elements, to avoid accidentally playing to their hidden aims.

A random passer-by contacted me to ask: Is it difficult to reconcile science and religion? The flippant answer is: in my world, they never really quarrelled. But I thought I might expand a bit on that, especially as a few people expressed interest in seeing my thoughts on the topic when I alluded to it.

I think asking this kind of question relies on certain (often unstated) assumptions about both science and religion. So let me have a go at defining why I am not religious in the sense that some random stranger probably assumes, and also why science is different from the conception of it I think the questioner holds.

I can’t remember who it was that said we shouldn’t assume that a certain strand of Fundamentalist American Protestantism represents all religion. (I also suspect that the media portrayal even of that sort of religion is an unfair caricature, but I’m no expert.) My religion, Reform Judaism, is closer to that assumed model than many; we’re working from a similar founding principle of monotheism, and we have one major text, the Old Testament, more or less in common. So we’re using some of the same metaphors. But I do think the differences between my religious approach and that stereotype is more profound than just, I’m nice and tolerant and emphatically non-proselytizing whereas they are mean old fundamentalists who hate gay people and want most of the world to go to Hell.

So what does religion mean to me? I will admit I am somewhat embarrassed about talking about my personal beliefs and religious understanding (you’ll get a readier answer if you ask personal questions about, say, sexuality, for sure). But I’ll have a go, and if you want to ask further questions, I’ll do my best to answer them.

The starting point of my religion is monotheism: God is One, and almost everything else is up for grabs, but not that. God is so utterly unique that it is not possible to describe or define God, because God can not be compared to any material thing. There is some relationship between the nature of God and the nature of the universe and existence, which for a limited human understanding is partially approximated by talking of God as the Creator.

So far so deist; I suppose where religion comes in is that I believe that this God has, so to speak, chosen to enter into a relationship with human beings. Revelation, not creation, strikes me as the real miracle. By revelation I don’t necessarily mean that a particular set of texts were dictated word for word by God, but that God has given people some means by which they can try to relate to the Divine, however paradoxical this may be for a God who is so utterly unique and undefinable. I’m sorry if this is couched in rather abstract terms, but that’s the best I can manage for an explanation.

Claiming to know how revelation works would be like claiming to know how God works, which I emphatically don’t (to me, that is essentially idolatry). But it seems to me that part of it is living within and exploring the system defined by centuries of religious thought. And part of it is looking for God within God’s creation. Believing that God created everything we can observe (and probably a whole load of things beyond what we can observe too) doesn’t at all seem incompatible with wanting to know exactly how the universe works. In fact, I would go so far as to say that my belief in a Divine Creator encourages me to study creation in as much detail as I am able.

Science, to put it very simply, seems like one of the best tools available for doing this. To me, science is definitely a tool, a method, not a collection of facts. The only way science can be seen as being in conflict with religion is if science makes one set of assertions which conflict with the assertions made by a particular religion. I don’t think science is about making assertions anyway; it’s about making deductions from experiments to construct falsifiable hypotheses. And my religion is not making the kinds of assertions that conflict with empirical evidence either; I don’t hold it as an article of faith that the world was created in 7 days 6000 years ago. This isn’t because I have rejected that belief in favour of scientifically derived facts about the history of the universe, but because my religion never asserted that in the first place.

I am aware that to certain people at certain times, science has meant rational positivism or dogmatic materialism. If science is seen as being atheist by definition, then it’s pretty circular to point out that it is in conflict with theistic religions! But that’s not what science means to me. Equally, I am aware that some religious people, including a minority of Jews, believe that the Bible is literally true and discusses actual historical facts. That belief does require one to deny some empirically derived models of things like cosmology, evolution, and what happened several thousand years ago. I don’t think that denying those models is to reject science altogether, because science is not a dogma, but it is very likely to lead to rejecting science.

Anyway, that is not my attitude to the Bible; my religious tradition has a very creative relationship with sacred texts. They are spiritual and moral guides, and they give people an insight, as far as it is possible for finite human beings to have such insight (see above about the miracle of revelation) into the nature of God. My religion has no problem with telling God to butt out of discussions of Biblical interpretation, since God gave the text to us and our human perspective. And it has no problem with making interpretations such as from creating an imagined dialogue between Jonah and the whale about theology and eschatology, to creating an elaborate legal and practical system of separating meat products from dairy products based on the injunction not to boil a young animal in its mother’s milk. So it’s a long way from being a literalist tradition!

Science is a good tool for understanding how the material world works, and the latter is a religious duty for me personally, as I understand these things. Science is not a good tool for probing the question of whether there is anything out there which is metaphysical, whether God or anything else. Because by definition if metaphysical entities do exist, they are not susceptible to empirical analysis. God who can’t be defined is also God who can’t be measured or tested or analysed. Science is not a tool at all for defining moral values, because it isn’t really even possible to frame the right questions in a scientific way. But science may well be a good tool for working out the practical consequences of moral values once defined.

So, primarily I see science as a religious value because as a scientist, I am devoting a great part of my life to studying an aspect of how God’s creation works. It’s also a religious value because using science to know more about how the world works helps people to create technology to improve the human condition. This is not an essay about technology and religion, but if you are curious, I am (from a religious standpoint) absolutely pro technology. My religion does not give value to leaving God’s creation in its so-called “natural” state; we are specifically enjoined to have dominion over the earth, and later tradition has built on this to regard people as God’s partners in creation. The world is not perfect; to regard it as such is pretty insulting. I don’t claim to know why God decided to create an imperfect world, but I see it as a core religious value to try to improve and repair it.

As it happens I have ended up in a quasi-medical field. It’s easy to justify that helping to find better cancer treatments is a good thing for a religious person to be doing, but I am very suspicious of the attitude that directly medical research is somehow worthier than any other kind. Primarily, I think what I do is morally good because it adds to human knowledge, and that’s true of much less directly applied scientific research. I also think it’s religiously good to try to maximize one’s potential as a human being, and science is something that I happen to be good at so it seems morally right for me to put effort into that area.

So, months ago, a friend asked me to go into detail about what it is about Christianity that I find so off-putting. I’ve been thinking about this in the intervening months, and I think I’m about at the stage where I can try to write it up.

This isn’t a disclaimer, as such; if you want to take offence at this little essay, you’re probably entitled to. To a very large extent, I’m shelving all I have learnt in over a decade of serious commitment to Jewish-Christian dialogue, and reverting to my eight-year-old self who got into trouble for complaining to my form teacher, But your religion makes no sense! I do want to point out, though, that I don’t mean this in any way as a personal slight against any Christian individual. I am also very well aware that Christianity isn’t monolithic, and I do already realize that you could almost certainly point to a Christian who doesn’t do or believe any one of the items on the list.

A parable that I rather like: To-what-may-this-be-compared? A traveller comes to a foreign country. He peeks in through the windows of a building, and sees people moving about in a bizarre way. These foreigners are right weird, he concludes, as he goes on his way. Later, a second traveller arrives at the same building. Instead of peeking through the windows, he knocks on the door. The foreigners welcome him in and he finds himself in a dance hall. At the moment I’m being the first traveller; Christianity looks weird to me because I don’t hear the music.

• Translated texts. OK, some Christians don’t take the Bible seriously, which is fine. But those who do think that Scripture has authority really confuse me when they don’t bother to learn the original languages. I don’t get how anyone is prepared to take someone else’s word for what a sacred text actually says.

• Vows. Christians seem to be positively encouraged to make vows, and religious vows at that, all over the place. Vows that are not time-limited, vows that they have no way of being sure that they will be able to keep, vows that are too general so it’s not clear what one is vowing. And there seems to be almost an expectation that vows will be broken. The kinds of Christians who accept divorce still make marriage vows, for example. Christians even make vows on behalf of others, which I find a seriously unpleasant concept.

  I know several people who prefer to publicly name themselves oathbreaker rather than live in a way that would be untrue to themselves. I have nothing but admiration for people who are brave enough to make that decision, but it seems to me a very bad thing for a religion to create the kind of situation where this is likely to be a frequent outcome. There are even, apparently, formal religious structures for abjuring / renouncing / annulling vows, which does suggest that the system is geared for vows not to be kept. And as for encouraging children to make vows they are too young to understand, that’s simply obscene.

• Original Sin. Yeah, this is a pretty obvious one. Stereotypically, the Jewish / OT view of God is perceived as being too focussed on Justice (as opposed to Mercy). So maybe I’m living up to the stereotype a bit here, but I’m inclined to ask, Will not the Judge of all the earth do justice?; how can one follow a God who would be so utterly unfair as to blame the whole of humanity for something Adam and Eve did?
• Faith. Following on a bit from the previous one, I find it offensive that someone can live a completely blameless, even a saintly life, making the world a better place, and yet be condemned because they have wrong ideas about some extremely complicated matters of theology. I have no problem in principle that I don’t understand how something like the Trinity is supposed to work, but I do have a problem if this means I’m going to Hell, however wonderful a person I may be. The converse, that someone who is absolutely horrible and vile, but manages all the mental gymnastics to understand and believe all the ins and outs of Christian teaching, can be forgiven, is less problematic; forgiveness is on the whole a good thing. It does seem a bit odd that it’s predicated on having exactly the right views about such things as the nature of God, though, especially since I’m kind of inclined to think that anything that can reasonably be called God is probably beyond ordinary human understanding.
• Proselytizing. This is the big one, for me. However many aspects of Christianity I don’t understand, (and there are lots I haven’t listed here, because I’m focussing on the ones that really make my skin crawl), in general my attitude would be, well, that’s because I’m ignorant, and trying to understand the Divine is so complicated that it’s reasonable that different religions are going to come up with different approaches to spirituality. But proselytizing goes completely against that pluralism which is far more fundamental to who I am than any particular position I happen to take on any topic. I don’t like proselytizing in general, but religious proselytizing is the very worst kind, it’s an attack on something which, for those who are religious, is the very foundation of their life and identity.

  I suppose this does follow from the previous bullet-point; if one believes that theology is all-important, then it makes sense to want to bring as many people as possible to the ‘correct’ beliefs and thus to salvation. But it’s so appallingly, sickeningly arrogant. (I’m not talking about the fact that certain evangelists use really crass methods of trying to get converts, I’m talking about the principle of holding that as an aim at all.) It’s really, really hard for me to respect a belief system that is based on such a total lack of respect for not only my beliefs, but for those of anyone who thinks differently from the believer.

  Please feel absolutely free to argue with me, or tell me that I’ve got the wrong impression of how Christianity actually works, or whatever. Discussion is good.