Question The debate between science and religion has gone on for many years, and many people think that they must choose one or the other to believe. To me, it's a lot like trying to collide two trains on parallel tracks. If one chooses to believe in God, then that person can still believe in the big bang or evolution while believing that God created the universe, because religion explains what happens on a spiritual level, and science explains what happens on a physical level. The two run parallel. Using this as a way of thinking, can science contradict religion at all, and why has the debate between the two gone on for so long when this explanation reconciles them?

Accepted:
April 27, 2007

Comments

Your idea works fine on a certain modest understanding of religion. If religion were only about the Divine, perhaps with the additional thought that God created the universe, then no explanation given by science of anything in the universe could interfere with religion.

Religions are typically not so modest, however. A typical religion may ascribe certain duties to human beings along with the freedom and responsibility to live up to these duties. And this can raise scientific (and philosophical!) doubts about whether human beings have the requisite freedom.

In response, you might propose dividing human beings over your two levels: into a physical body (brain included) and a spirit or soul. But this proposal raises further puzzles about the relation between these two parts or components of human beings. If religion attributes some of what you do to your soul it may compete with scientific theories that attribute all your conduct and thinking to physical causes. If religion attributes nothing you do to your soul, then it is hard to understand in what sense it is your soul at all or can bear any responsibility for what your body does.

There are philosophical accounts of how the kind of human freedom religions typically assert is compatible with any explanatory account science may end up providing of human thought and conduct. (A famous such account is given by Immanuel Kant.) But such accounts remain contested.

There is another, less obvious way in which science may interfere with religion: Science may provide an explanation of our religious beliefs, and some such explanations may tend to undermine these beliefs. Suppose, for example, that scientists develop a neat evolutionary explanation of why human beings are prone to believe in in gods. Such an explanation would not show that there is no god, but it might well undermine the conviction that there is. An analogy: Your strong belief that you have once spent a summer in Antarctica is likely to be undermined when you are shown a videotape of how you were hypnotized to believe that you once spent a summer in Antarctica and hypnotized to forget the hypnosis. In both cases, to be sure, the scientific explanation of the belief does not refute its content. You might say that God created a world in which religious beliefs emerge through evolution. Still, religious communities typically tell rather different stories about their origins, and these stories may turn out not to fit with the best scientific explanation.