Usually my two passionate interests - physics and religion - stay pretty much separated. "Non-overlapping magisteria", if you will. However, my favorite physics blog,
Cosmic Variance, occasionally steps into the fray of the science vs. religion issue, as in today's entry by Sean Carroll,
Science and Religion are Not Compatible.Sean is a terrific writer, and has tackled both popularization and "real" physics (i.e. textbooks). He is easily my favorite science blogger. I was right there with him on this article until I got to this paragraph:
Quote:
The reason why science and religion are actually incompatible is that, in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions. It’s worth noting that this incompatibility is perfectly evident to any fair-minded person who cares to look. Different religions make very different claims, but they typically end up saying things like “God made the universe in six days” or “Jesus died and was resurrected” or “Moses parted the red sea” or “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility.
A bit later, Sean expands on why these are incompatible ideas:
Quote:
But the progress of science over the last few centuries has increasingly shown these claims to be straightforwardly incorrect. We know more about the natural world now than we did two millennia ago, and we know enough to say that people don’t come back from the dead.
Now, as you probably know, C.S. Lewis (IIRC) pointed out a long time ago that there is a serious problem with this argument. It's simply not true that people 2000 years ago didn't know that people don't come back from the dead. Of course they knew that - people died back then just as often as now, and came back from the dead just as rarely. That, in fact, is the whole point: a miracle is something that's
supposed to be impossible. If it was something that was known to be possible under ordinary circumstances, it wouldn't be a miracle.
A little later in the article, Sean almost gets it right. He points out that science NEVER actually "proves" anything. So it logically follows that science has not proven that it's impossible to come back from the dead. (Here we're sidestepping the whole issue of what it means to be "dead." Under the old definition of a stopped heart, it is now commonplace for someone to come back from the dead.) So I think this is just a poor example. Science says "The regular rule is that no one comes back from the dead." (Christian) religion says "There are exceptions to the regular rule: Jesus, Lazarus, the centurion's daughter, etc." I don't see an incompatibility here.
What of Sean's other examples? He mentions the idea of God creating the universe in 6 days. Another poor example, especially given that the big bang theory is now a scientifically accepted idea. One, it's not too hard to come up with an interpretation of Genesis that is compatible with scientific theory, as long as one doesn't take it too literally. Two, none of the classic Christian creeds requires belief in a literal six-day creation: only belief that God is Creator. There's no difficulty reconciling that with a big bang view of the universe.
Moses is another case like resurrection: OF COURSE what he did to the Red Sea is incompatible with normal physical laws. That's the whole point; that's what makes it a miracle.
As far as "dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden," I'm not going to touch it. Sean doesn't attempt to explain how this is incompatible with science, and I have no interest in trying to guess why he thinks it is.
So I think Sean's chosen examples are spectacularly bad for the point he is trying to make. Nonetheless, I think his point is correct. Later I'll try to explain why.
