Scientific Faith Is Different From Religious Faith:
Not all beliefs are equal.
The
If you want to annoy a scientist,
say that science isn’t so different from religion. When Ben Carson was
challenged about his claim that
Scientists are annoyed by these
statements because they suggest that science and religion share a certain
epistemological status. And, indeed, many humanists and theologians insist that
there are multiple ways of knowing, and that religious narratives exist
alongside scientific ones, and can even supersede them.
It is true that scientists take
certain things on faith. It is also true that religious narratives might speak
to human needs that scientific theories can’t hope to satisfy.
And yet, scientific practices,
observation and experiment; the development of falsifiable hypotheses; the
relentless questioning of established views, have proven uniquely powerful in
revealing the surprising, underlying structure of the world we live in,
including subatomic particles, the role of germs in the spread of disease, and
the neural basis of mental life.
Religion has no equivalent record of
discovering hidden truths.
So why do so many people believe
otherwise? It turns out that while science and religion are as different as can
be, folk science and folk religion share deep properties. Most of us carry in
our heads a hodgepodge of scientific views and religious views, and they often
feel the same, because they are learned, understood, and mentally encoded in
similar ways.
In the first article that I ever
published for The Atlantic, I argued that many religious beliefs arise from
universal modes of thought that have evolved for reasoning about the social
world. We are sensitive to signs of agency, which explains the animism that
grounds the original religions of the world. We are naturally prone to infer
intelligent design when we see complex structure, which makes creationism more
appealing that natural selection. We are intuitive dualists, and so the idea of
an immaterial soul just makes sense, or at least more sense than the notion
that our minds are the products of our physical brains.
I’ve continued to develop this
theory with my students at Yale, doing experiments with children and atheists
and adults across a range of cultures, and I still think that it is correct.
But I’ve also come to see how incomplete this perspective is.
There are many religious views that
are not the product of common-sense ways of seeing the world. Consider the
story of Adam and Eve, or the virgin birth of Christ, or Muhammad ascending to
heaven on a winged horse. These are not the product of innate biases. They are
learned, and, more surprisingly, they are learned in a special way.
To come to accept such religious
narratives is not like learning that grass is green or that stoves can be hot;
it is not like picking up stereotypes or customs or social rules. Instead,
these narratives are acquired through the testimony of others, from parents or
peers or religious authorities. Accepting them requires a leap of faith, but
not a theological leap of faith. Rather, a leap in the mundane sense that you must
trust the people who are testifying to their truth.
Many religious narratives are
believed without even being understood. People will often assert religious
claims with confidence, there exists a God, he listens to my prayers, I will go
to Heaven when I die, but with little understanding, or even interest, in the
details. The sociologist Alan Wolfe observes that “evangelical believers are
sometimes hard pressed to explain exactly what, doctrinally speaking, their
faith is,” and goes on to note that “These are people who believe, often
passionately, in God, even if they cannot tell others all that much about the
God in which they believe.”
People defer to authorities not just
to the truth of the religious beliefs, but their meaning as well. In a recent
article, the philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen calls these sorts of mental states
“credences,” and he notes that they have a moral component. We believe that we
should accept them, and that others, at least those who belong to our family
and community, should accept them as well.
None of this is special to religion.
Researchers have studied those who have strong opinions about political issues
and found that they often literally don’t know what they are talking about.
Many people who take positions on cap and trade, for instance, have no idea
what cap and trade is. Similarly, many of those who will insist that
Many scientific views endorsed by
non-specialists are credences as well. Some people reading this will say they
believe in natural selection, but not all will be able to explain how natural selection
works. (As an example, how does this theory explain the evolution of the eye?)
It turns out that those who assert the truth of natural selection are often
unable to define it, or, worse, have it confused with some long-rejected
pre-Darwinian notion that animals naturally improve over time.
There are exceptions, of course.
There are those who can talk your ear off about cap and trade, and can delve
into the minutiae of selfish gene theory and group selection. And there are
people of faith who can justify their views with powerful arguments.
But much of what’s in our heads are
credences, not beliefs we can justify, and there’s nothing wrong with this.
Life is too brief; there is too much to know and not enough time. We need
epistemological shortcuts.
Given my day job, I know something
about psychology and associated sciences, but if you press me on the details of
climate change, or the evidence about vaccines and autism, I’m at a loss. I
believe that global warming is a serious problem and that vaccines do not cause
autism, but this is not because I have studied these issues myself.
It is because I trust the
scientists.
Most of those who insist that the
Earth is 6000 years old and that global warming is a liberal fraud and that
vaccines destroy children’s brains would also be at a loss to defend these
views. Like me, they defer, just to different authorities.
This equivalence might lead to a
relativist conclusion, you have your faith; I have mine. You believe weird
things on faith (virgin birth, winged horse); I believe weird things on faith
(invisible particles, Big Bang), and neither of us fully understands what we’re
really talking about. But there is a critical difference. Some sorts of
deference are better than others.
It’s better to get a cancer
diagnosis from a radiologist than from a Ouija Board. It’s better to learn
about the age of the universe from an astrophysicist than from a Rabbi. The New
England Journal of Medicine is a more reliable source about vaccines than the
actress Jenny McCarthy. These preferences are not ideological. We’re not
talking about Fox News versus The Nation. They are rational, because the
methods of science are demonstrably superior at getting at truths about the
natural world.
I don’t want to fetishize science. Sociologists
and philosophers deserve a lot of credit in reminding us that scientific
practice is permeated by groupthink, bias, and financial, political, and
personal motivations. The physicist Richard Feynman once wrote that the essence
of science was “bending over backwards to prove ourselves wrong.” But he was
talking about the collective cultural activity of science, not scientists as
individuals, most of whom prefer to be proven right, and who are highly biased
to see the evidence in whatever light most favors their preferred theory.
But science as an institution
behaves differently than particular scientists. Science establishes conditions
where rational argument is able to flourish, where ideas can be tested against
the world, and where individuals can work together to surpass their individual
limitations. Science is not just one “faith community” among many. It has
earned its epistemological stripes. And when the stakes are high, as they are
with climate change and vaccines, we should appreciate its special status.