Is science opposed to faith?

Charles Darwin

The opposition between science and faith is a nineteenth-century invention. And it was not scientists who invented it, since most of them were believers. Those responsible were atheist philosophers such as Marx, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. I count Marx among philosophers, even though he abhorred philosophy, which he considered dead (he said in the Manuscripts), just as Stephen Hawking did a century and a half later, as I commented in this post. I once said that Marx would have been horrified to know that he is studied today in the history of philosophy, for he did not consider himself a philosopher, but an economist.

I doubt readers would be able to name a single scientist persecuted by the Catholic Church after Galileo. Even Darwinian evolutionism did not provoke an open confrontation. The Origin of Species and The Origin of Man were never included in the index of forbidden books, and some of the proponents of evolutionism were convinced Catholics, even though the official position of the Church was suspicious for quite some time. I have quoted Teilhard de Chardin, who could not publish his books while he was alive, but the ban was not due to his science, but to his ideas regarding original sin. It is a case similar to that of Giordano Bruno, whom atheists often present as a martyr of science, when the reason for his condemnation had nothing to do with science, but rather with his denial of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

In the 20th century there have been famous scientists who did not see any clash between science and their faith. One of them was Arthur Eddington, a practicing Quaker, author of the book The Nature of the Physical World, which I discussed in the previous post. Let's look at this suggestive quote from chapter 9:

In the last century—and I think also in this—there must have been many scientific men who kept their science and religion in watertight compartments. One set of beliefs held good in the laboratory and another set of beliefs in church, and no serious effort was made to harmonise them. The attitude is defensible. To discuss the compatibility of the beliefs would lead the scientist into regions of thought in which he was inexpert; and any answer he might reach would be undeserving of strong confidence. Better admit that there was some truth both in science and religion; and if they must fight, let it be elsewhere than in the brain of a hard-working scientist. If we have ever scorned this attitude, Nemesis has overtaken us. For ten years we have had to divide modern science into two compartments; we have one set of beliefs in the classical compartment and another set of beliefs in the quantum compartment. Unfortunately our compartments are not watertight.

In other words, believers who are scientists have been accused of trying to hold two incompatible beliefs at the same time: in their faith and in science. While Eddington denies that they are incompatible, he also points out that, in fact, it is ironic that this situation has happened in science, which in his time was (and continues now) in the contradictory situation of being based on two theories, one classical, Relativity, and the other non-classical, quantum theory, which are incompatible with each other.

In chapter 10 he says this:

[Heisenberg's uncertainty principle] means a denial of determinism, because the data required for a prediction of the future will include the unknowable elements of the past. I think it was Heisenberg who said, "The question whether from a complete knowledge of the past we can predict the future, does not arise because a complete knowledge of the past involves a self-contradiction."

Werner Heisenberg

In a previous post I mentioned that Heisenberg was also a believer (in his case a Lutheran), and in another post I made reference to the incompatibility of his uncertainty principle with determinism, as Eddington correctly points out.

Science says (it has been saying this for a century and a half) that a human being begins to exist at the moment of fertilization of an egg from his mother by a sperm from his father. But the dominant ideology insists, contrary to what science says, that a fetus is nothing but a part of the mother's body, and that she can do with her body what she wants. That is why women who are going to have an abortion are forbidden to see an ultrasound of their womb. Perhaps if they saw it, they’d realize that they are killing their child, and would give up the abortion, which the dominant ideology requires of them.

Similarly, science has no doubt (it has not had it for a century and a half) that human beings are divided into males (with XY chromosomes) and females (with XX chromosomes). See in this post the minority exceptions. But the dominant ideology holds that all human beings can decide to which sex they belong, although to disguise the absurdity of the statement they don’t use the word “sex,” but “gender,” a word with purely grammatical connotations. A professor of biology was fired in Spain, for teaching what science says, because scientific truth is a threat to the dominant ideology.

Can anyone doubt that the enemy of science and reason is not religion, but the dominant ideology?

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread about Science and Faith: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca