Which side should win when religion squares off against science? The media have treated this as the crucial question being put front and center by the renewed effort to push the teaching of religion as science in the guise of Intelligent Design. Proponents of ID have evolution in their sights in biology classes throughout America. According to the media, the question is, who is going to win? But this is the wrong question. The real question is, how is it possible that science finds itself stuck in the middle of this debate in twenty-first-century America in the first place?
Some members of the scientific community do not want to engage the proponents of ID. They maintain that to do so is to give credit to a point of view that is patently wrong. But they are completely and utterly wrong.
It is absolutely essential to debate proponents of intelligent design, not only to ensure that high school students in America graduate with some knowledge of one of the key foundational theories of modern biology, but because what is really at stake is educating every American about the nature of science and scientific discourse. And as recent events well beyond the scope of the debate over ID quickly reveal, no one should take for granted the idea that Americans know what they are talking about when it comes to distinguishing science from either nonscience or nonsense.
Why is it so difficult for some Americans to see that a position which holds that the creatures and plants around us are so unique and complex in their design that the only way to explain their existence is by invoking a grand designer (otherwise known as God) is a religious explanation? The main reason is that too many Americans have no idea what makes an explanation a part of science as opposed to a part of religion, fiction, or fantasy.
In making the case for ID, critics of evolutionary theory delight in pointing out that there are phenomena that are difficult to explain by means of natural selection acting on genetic differences over long periods of time. And they are partly correct. There are many biological facts that evolution has had a difficult time explaining. But, ironically, that is one of the distinctive characteristics of a scientific theory—that there are facts or phenomena that seem inconsistent or at odds with the validity of the theory. What is presented as a vice, a limit on the explanatory power of a theory, is in reality a defining virtue of science.
Consider the case of social behavior among sterile insects. For decades, biologists knew that ants, bees, termites, and many other insects had members with highly developed behaviors but which were completely sterile. How could a theory that explains complex behavior by the slow process of selection acting on small genetic changes manifest over long periods of time possibly account for these critters? Darwin’s critics had delighted in confronting him with the reality of sterile social insects. Any fan of Intelligent Design would have drooled at the prospect of torturing later generations of evolutionary biologists to try and explain what was obviously and certainly inexplicable—if they had known enough biology to do so. They didn’t. But biologists still realized the nature of the problem. There was a limit to what evolutionary theory could explain. Except that there wasn’t!
It took some hard thinking by some of the giants of late twentieth-century evolutionary biology such as W.D. Hamilton, R.L. Trivers, and E.O. Wilson, but biologists recognized that evolution does not have to act on individuals to select for social traits—it acts on genes. And if animals or plants have enough genes in common then evolution could select for very complex behavior in sterile insects if that behavior conferred enough advantage on other animals or plants with the same genes—in the case of the social insects—queens and other unique egg layers. Kin selection and reciprocal altruism could explain what up until the 1970s had seemed inexplicable. By modifying their understanding of how evolutionary forces worked from individual organisms to genes, biologists were able to see how some environments could elicit the existence of sterile social insects.
There is a very clear moral to this story. What makes something scientific is not, as proponents of Intelligent Design would have it, that a theory can explain everything. It is that it is possible to imagine or even encounter a fact that will or does imperil the truth of the theory.
What makes an explanation scientific is not that it is true. It is rather that an explanation that seems valid or correct can be tested, verified, or falsified. Truth, or at least the blind allegiance to the validity of a doctrine or explanation come hell or high water, is of necessity a matter of faith. There are certainly scientists who push on with their pet theory or hypothesis in the face of the evidence. But, at some point, be it astrology, Marxist explanations of history, Freudianism, UFO abductions, leeching, or alchemy, proponents either concede that they could be wrong or they get consigned to the categories of ideology or faith.
Proponents of ID do not admit that they might be wrong. There is nothing that could possibly show why the invocation of a designer or God as the explanation for the diversity of life on earth is false. That does not make ID false. But it surely does exclude it as science.
So, if it is so clear that ID is religion gussied up as science, then why it is that science has fallen into such disrepute throughout many sectors of American society? And this dismissal of science is hardly confined to evolution.
Science and religion subtly squared off over the subject of why so many intense hurricanes have devastating the Gulf region in recent years. The Reverend Franklin Graham, son of the Reverend Billy Graham, thinks New Orleans was targeted because of the city’s sinful reputation. At a speech in Virginia, he said, “This is one wicked city, OK? It’s known for Mardi Gras, for Satan worship. It’s known for sex perversion. It’s known for every type of drugs and alcohol and the orgies and all of these things that go on down there in New Orleans….There’s been a black spiritual cloud over New Orleans for years.”
Jennifer Giroux, director of Women Influencing the Nation, a fundamentalist group, said on national television that she did not “have any problem with what the Reverend Graham said. I believe that, when he talks about New Orleans and a cloud of darkness hanging over an immoral city, he could be referring to any city in the United States. I believe that God will not be mocked. . . . But let’s look at the state at which our country is in, abortion, contraception, homosexuality, cloning, I mean, it all really comes together in one big picture.”
The ninety-two-year-old Archbishop of New Orleans also ventured into the explanatory arena concerning the weather. He claims that the hurricanes that hit New Orleans are a chastisement of the city and of the United States.
The media is flush with many more such claims that bad weather is God’s vengeance upon a sinful nation, group, city, or person.
Why does this drivel proliferate? Why do the claims of those professing that babies and the frail elderly are being killed by a wrathful God in New Orleans for the sins of out-of-town gamblers and revelers or that kids on break from college are being drowned by God to show that adherence to Islam is the only true path go unchallenged when science has sound explanations to offer for the weather including hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons, and tsunamis?
It is because our culture does not understand the difference between faith and science. The media often presents them as two sides of a story in the name of balanced reporting. Those who fear science simply ignore scientific explanations or dismiss them as inconsistent with religious accounts. Worse still, scientists do not even enter the fray either believing themselves to be above such mundane matters or uncertain themselves about what are the defining characteristics of science.
If the United States is going to deal with the challenges of global warming, air and water pollution, emergency contraception, vaccination, species extinction, waste disposal, abortion, cloning, and stem cell research among other crucial problems, then scientists must be engaged about topics when religious accounts appear on their turf. And much more attention needs to be paid to what it is that separates science from faith. Both can most assuredly coexist. But that is precisely because they are very distinct.
One of America’s foremost bioethicists, Arthur Caplan is the Emmanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
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