Faith Versus Fact : Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (9780698195516) Read Online Free

evolved features like our tendency to attribute events to conscious agents, and still others the usefulness of faith as a societal glue or a way to control others. Definitive answers aren’t obvious, and in fact may never be forthcoming. To explore the many secular theories of religion, one should begin with Pascal Boyer’s
Religion Explained
and Daniel Dennett’s
Breaking the Spell .
    I will have achieved my aim if, by the end of this book, you demand that people produce good reasons for what they believe—not only in religion, but in any area in which evidence can be brought to bear. I’ll have achieved my aim when people devote as much effort to choosing a system of belief as they do to choosing their doctor. I’ll have achieved my aim if the public stops awarding special authority about the universe and the human condition to preachers, imams, and clerics simply because they are religious figures. And above all, I’ll have achieved my aim if, when you hear someone described as a “person of faith,” you see it as criticism rather than praise.

CHAPTER 1
The Problem
    For we often talked of my daughter , who died of the fever at fall.
    And I thought ’twere the will of the Lord, but Miss Annie she said it was drains.
    â€”Alfred, Lord Tennyson
    T here are no heated discussions about reconciling sport and religion, literature and religion, or business and religion; the important issue in today’s world is the harmony between
science
and religion. But why, of all human endeavors that we could compare with religion, are we so concerned with its harmony with science?
    The answer, to me at least, seems obvious. Science and religion—unlike, say, business and religion—are competitors at discovering truths about nature. And science is the only field that has the ability to disprove the truth claims of religion, and has done so repeatedly (the creation stories of Genesis and other faiths, the Noachian flood, and the fictitious Exodus of the Jews from Egypt come to mind). Religion, on the other hand, has no ability to overturn the truths found by science. It is this competition, and the ability of science to erode the hegemony of faith—but not vice versa—that has produced the copious discussion of how the two areas relate to each other, and how to find harmony between them.
    One can in fact argue that science and religion have been at odds ever since science began to exist as a formal discipline in sixteenth-century Europe. Scientific advances, of course, began well before that—in ancient Greece, China, India, and the Middle East—but could conflict with religion in a public way only when religion assumed both the power and thedogma to control society. That had to wait until the rise of Christianity and Islam, and then until science produced results that called their claims into question.
    And so in the last five hundred years there have been conflicts between science and faith—not continuous conflict, but occasional and famous moments of public hostility. The two most notable ones are Galileo’s squabble with the church and his sentence to lifetime house arrest in 1632 over his claim of a Sun-centered solar system, and the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” involving a titanic clash between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan over whether a Tennessee high-school teacher could tell his students that humans had evolved (the jury ruled no). Although both of these incidents have been recast by accommodationist theologians and historians as not involving genuine conflict between science and religion—it’s always construed as “politics,” “power,” or “personal animosity”—the religious roots of these disputes are clear. But even setting these episodes aside, there are many times when churches decried or even slowed scientific advances, episodes recounted in the two books I’ll describe shortly. (Of