Science vs. Religion: Teaching the Controversy

Scientific American has just published “a new column that examines the intersection between science and society,” an essay by my fellow physicist Lawrence Krauss that argues that science is fundamentally inconsistent with traditional religion. As Krauss’s conclusion states:

Until we are willing to accept the world the way it is, without miracles that all empirical evidence argues against, without myths that distort our comprehension of nature, we are unlikely to bridge the divide between science and culture and, more important, we are unlikely to be fully ready to address the urgent technical challenges facing humanity.

So, what does all this have to do with homeschooling? Like most scientists, I disagree with so-called "young earth creationists” as well as the more subtle creationism of “Intelligent Design.” But, on one point, I think the creationists are absolutely right: the “tolerant,” “moderate” position that holds that of course religion and mainstream, established science are compatible, and that, if they aren’t, at least we should be quiet about it, leads to an educational disaster.

Religion has been of crucial importance in human history; it is still extremely important to a large number of Americans.

Whether religion and mainstream science are compatible is not just a sophomoric question that can and should be quietly ignored by mature people. It is a question that is central to our understanding of ourselves, our civilization, and our future.

Krauss points out, quite correctly, that science does not disprove the existence of “a God that does not directly intervene in the daily operations of the cosmos.”

However, science does have a perspective and orientation that differs quite radically from traditional, organized religion.

The central ethic of science is that scientists should actively work to undermine existing theories, to find little details that do not fit into accepted theories and that push us onwards to new and better theories.

I know of none of the major religions that similarly urges its practitioners to do their best to undermine the beliefs of that religion!

Furthermore, science as it now exists is based on a mechanistic perspective that is antithetical to both common sense and to religious sensibilities.

Common sense thinks of flowers as striving to grow upwards towards the air and sun. Modern science thinks of a flower as a strange, squishy little machine, “designed” only by the long process of evolution, in which the banging about of atoms, the pushing and pulling due to the quantum electronic interactions of molecules, is all that is happening. To modern science, there is no real purpose, no real goals, exhibited by a growing plant – just the large-scale result of all those atoms banging into each other.

Similarly, common sense thinks of the difference between a peach and a zucchini as consisting of all the properties that a peach has that a zucchini lacks and vice versa: a peach has the property of being reddish orange, sweet, and so on; zucchinis have contrasting properties.

To a scientist, peaches and zucchinis are simply slightly different ways of arranging carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms (with a smattering of other atoms): all the apparent differences between peaches and zucchinis are due to how these different arrangements of atoms reflect light, interact with various molecules in our taste buds, etc.

Just atoms (and photons) banging into each other – the peachiness and zucchininess have no separate existence.

I think it is hard for most non-scientists to grasp how certain scientists are of the correctness of this perspective: the shining of the sun, the eruption of a volcano, the growing of a rosebush, the internal operation of our own nervous system – nothing but tiny particles of matter (and force fields) pushing and pulling on each other.

I hope it is obvious how radically this view conflicts not only with common sense and traditional philosophy but also with traditional religion.

This conflict is central to contemporary human civilization. Science cannot simply be ignored – its stunning successes not only in creating material comforts and clever gadgets but also in explaining everything from the interior of a neutron star to the functioning of our own genes makes science an overwhelming intellectual and cultural force.

Any education that ignores this conflict between science and the traditional perspectives embodied in religion and philosophy (and “common sense”) is failing horribly either to teach about traditional religion, or about the full scope of the current scientific viewpoint, or both.

So, as a scientist, am I claiming that the scientific perspective is the final word, and everyone must meekly surrender to it?

Well… the perspective of science has been stunningly successful in understanding nature, and I think that needs to be acknowledged.

But, in the interests of full disclosure, let me present here the three little clouds on the horizon that suggest that maybe science as we know it has not grasped all aspects of reality.

First, in physics, we do not know how to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of gravity (general relativity). For a long time, it was thought that this was merely a technical, mathematical difficulty that we would soon overcome (superstring theory has promised to do this, for example). But, in recent decades, an increasing number of physicists have come to wonder if maybe this is a sign that we are missing something more fundamental than we realize.

The second cloud on the horizon is quantum mechanics itself. Anyone who has learned anything about quantum mechanics, even from really bad popular books (and there are lots of those!), knows that quantum mechanics is really weird. In a nutshell, quantum mechanics seems to say that everything that could have happened affects the future, not just those things that actually did happen.

There are various ways of trying to escape this ghostly effect of unrealized possibilities. None has yet convinced the majority of physicists.

The third cloud is the problem of consciousness. Physics has nothing to say about what it feels like to be an electron. But we all know that it does feel like something to be a human being. How can electrons, protons, and neutrons, whirling around inside our head become aware of themselves?

Lots of suggestions have been made: they all ignore the fact that electrons, protons, and neutrons are a part of physics, and that the idea of an “internal perspective” is utterly alien to physics.

Quite a few philosophers and physicists have mulled over this problem: an increasing number have the humility to admit that we cannot see what an answer could even look like (for one of my favorite discussions, see the philosopher Colin McGinn’s readable and informed book The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World).

So, how will these disturbing clouds be resolved? What will the angry dance among science, religion, and philosophy look like a hundred years from now?

I don’t know. But I am confident that it is one of the great questions of the twenty-first century.

An education that tries to sweep such questions under the rug, that ignores how radically the modern scientific view of reality differs both from common sense and from traditional religion, is really no education at all.