Science versus religion? No contest

by Ian Tattersall for Natural History Magazine

April, 2002

Why do some (only some) of those with profoundly felt religious beliefs feel threatened by aspects of the very science that has brought them the material comfort and security they appear happy to accept? Presumably it is because they think that in some sense, scientific and religious beliefs are in conflict. Nothing, though, could be further from the truth. Science and religion deal in totally different forms of knowledge. Religions seek ultimate truth and do so in a variety of ways. But no really honest scientist would claim to be doing anything like the same thing. Science is a matter of honing our perceptions of ourselves and of the world around us, of producing an increasingly accurate description of our physical and biological environments and how they work. What science emphatically is not is an absolutist system of belief. Rather, it is constantly subject to rearrangement and change as our collective knowledge increases. How can we make progress in science if what we believe today cannot be shown tomorrow to be somehow wrong or at least incomplete? Religious knowledge is in principle eternal, but scientific knowledge is by its very nature provisional.

Being human, some scientists clearly like to bask in an aura of authoritativeness, and certainly nothing is more intimidating to the average person than the stereotypical image of a white-coated figure covering a blackboard with incomprehensible symbols. But in actual fact, scientists are in pursuit of knowledge about mundane realities and are not in the business of revealing timeless truths. And because science is self-correcting, its practitioners can often find themselves pursuing blind alleys.

Some scientists who dispute Darwinian theory apparently do not understand or accept this distinction between scientific knowledge and religious knowledge. Interestingly, many such people are involved in the physical sciences and engineering, areas in which hypotheses tend to be more directly testable than are hypotheses in biology. Indeed, intelligent design, which is offered as an alternative to evolution by natural selection, is essentially an engineering concept. But just look at nature with an engineer's eyes: undoubtedly it works, but this does not mean that organisms are optimized in the way that an intelligent engineer would strive to ensure. There is no better way to illustrate this than by considering our own much-vaunted species, Homo sapiens. As a result of our upright, bipedal posture, we surfer a huge catalogue of woes, including slipped disks, fallen arches, wrenched knees, hernias, and aching necks. No engineer, given the opportunity to design human beings from the ground up, would ever dream of confecting a jury-rigged body plan such as ours. But our innumerable afflictions can be understood as the consequence of adapting an ancestral four-legged body to a new, bipedal lifestyle.

Rather like the myriad infuriating versions of Windows, we humans have been cobbled together from preexisting components. Of course, there may be upsides to this, too. Thus I would guess that our extraordinary human consciousness results not from any specific structures we have acquired but rather from the complex accretionary history of our brain and its consequent untidy nature. Artificial intelligence--specifically because it is engineered--is unlikely ever to match our own strange but unique brand of smarts.

Given the current social climate and the unease that science often engenders, scientists would do well to insist on educating students better about what the profession actually involves. For if our young people think of science as monolithic and authoritarian, they are likely to have excessively high expectations for it and to be disappointed by the inevitable cases in which scientific hypotheses turn out to be wrong. Evolutionary theory is deficient because it is "just a hypothesis"? If so, then we might as well throw out all of science, for the same is true of all scientific knowledge.