The Belief That Science And Religion Are Incompatible And Contradictory Is Superstition

"Small draughts of philosophy lead to atheism but longer draughts bring one back to God."
Luigi Galvani

The other day, in a blog brawl at Salon, a commentator whose identity I happen to know told me that you could either believe in science or God, that was it.   Now, I know this guy to have been most well known under his real name as a rather minor composer who was unable to keep on with his work, mostly film scoring, due to hearing loss and who, perhaps as a result, has gone into pretty much full time being an atheist blog troll.  As a musician, my sympathies are with his personal tragedy, if musical training in the United States and, indeed, many other places had put a proper emphasis on ear training he may have been able to do what Beethoven could do, keep composing despite hearing loss.  If I were faced with that situation, I'd try to work on that with what little hearing I might have left or through imagining sounds, intervals, rhythms in an orderly and disciplined manner, trying my best to make up for what my education had deprived me of.   I am not, though, in sympathy with his chosen path of making stupid, bigoted and hateful remarks about the large majority of humanity who disagree with him about God and religion.

I am certainly not sympathetic to his bigoted and superstitious remark about science and religion.   And his assertion, widely repeated among atheists is, truly, a superstitious remark because the existence of scientists, some of them among the greatest of scientists, who were also very religious makes that co-existence as real as any of the factual findings of science.   In fact, it is incontrovertible that those religious scientists existed and do exist, that some of them are the very founders of modern science, Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo, Steno, Newton, Volta, Dalton, Faraday, Mendel, Lemaitre, ....  Those people who contained both God and science in their singular minds, some of them attributing their belief in God as inspiring their science is definitive refutation of that widely promoted superstition of atheists.  To deny the existence of that phenomenon is as superstitious as it would be to deny the evidence proving evolution, it is, in fact, far stronger proof than that which can be cited to support many of those things accepted as science*.   In a post I did on this subject once, I was able to quote the non-scientist, Herbert Spencer as promoting it

"Of all antagonism of belief, the oldest, the widest, the most profound and the most important is between religion and science."

while Lord Kelvin, the most prominent British scientist of the same time refuted Spencer,

"Science confirms the existence of A Creator."

Which, while out of style, today, is remarkably consonant with many of the things which the first generations of scientists believed they were doing, they believed they were discovering the thinking of God as revealed by the creation of God.  I, like my antagonist mentioned at the start, am not a scientist so I really am not qualified to enter into that discussion, neither was Spencer, by the way.

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By chance, I was looking at the poetry of  Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan priest, poet, theologian and leftist politician, the one who Pope John Paul II shook his finger at because he disapproved of his political activities when he was trying to keep Nicaragua from reverting to the fascist dictatorship which had been overturned by the original Sandinista revolution.  I may post some of it in translation but, for now, In doing that I happened to find this New York Times article from last winter in which he, at the age of 90, talked about how science had deepened his faith and informed his religious belief.

Science brings me close to God because it describes the universe and creation, and that brings me close to the creator.  For me this is a prayer. 

His use of the science of evolution as an explanation of creation, of why we are here and why there is something instead of nothing would certainly not be welcomed by Spencer or by the neo-atheists but it proves the other side of what is proved by the existence of religious scientists who were inspired by their religion, science can also inspire religion.

He [Fr. Cardenal] recalled the tranquillity of a boat ride back to the peasant community he had founded on the islands of Solentiname in Lake Nicaragua, and he repeated his wonder at the knowledge that all life evolved from a single cell.

That fascination with evolution recurs through much of his later work. In the last poem in the anthology, “The Saga of the Third Chimpanzee,” Father Cardenal describes how speech distinguishes humans from the other primates, but in the final lines he makes a plea for humility.

“The third chimpanzee has dominated earth/ the one that made Chartres and the Sistine Chapel/ and now begins to explore space/ he is speaking to the stars/ that have yet to respond/ has seen the birth of the Big Bang/ from which everything was born and he was born/ and like a baby with his mother/burst into babbling with God.”

The laws of science are not just a source of awe and poetry to Father Cardenal. Their transformative force has a greater purpose. To illustrate what he meant, he repeated these lines from his 1989 “Cosmic Canticle,” an epic musing on the origin of the universe:

“Biology also teaches:/ the peaceful animals are favored by selection/ The murderous groups in the same species do not prosper/ (Somozas, Pinochet, etc.)”

TO Father Cardenal, science shows why tyranny will ultimately crumble.

“We have to have hope that the world will change,” he elaborated. “And, going back to modern science, it has been shown, with the discovery of the Big Bang, the great explosion in which the whole cosmos was born, that we are in an incomplete universe. That is why there is evolution — because the universe is incomplete.”

Those points, seem to me, to be as important a refutation of the asserted incompatibility of science and religion, perhaps even more so because they are of a piece with his view of the continual evolution of political events, as well.  He is certainly a major critic of the return to power of his one-time co-revolutionary, Daniel Ortega, a government vastly different from the original Sandinista government.    

Father Cardenal later became a critic of the Sandinistas for what he believed was a distortion of their cause. He continues to condemn the actions of President Daniel Ortega and has been a fierce opponent of the government’s project to dig a channel across the country that would presumably compete with the Panama Canal.

“What would Sandino have done about the canal?” he asked the audience at the reading, referring to the revolutionary Augusto César Sandino, who fought the American Marines occupying Nicaragua in the 1920s.

Considered in the sweep of history, the collapse of Nicaragua’s revolution barely seems to give him pause.

“The Bible is full of revolutions. The prophets are people with a message of revolution,” he said. “Jesus of Nazareth takes the revolutionary message of the prophets. And we also will continue trying to change the world and make revolution. Those revolutions failed, but others will come.”

When the original Sandinista government fell, in elections as a result of the vicious and massive terror war financed by the Reagan administration, I was in despair.  I had occasion to ask Noam Chomsky how he kept going, decade after decade, concentrating on the massive evil that was rampant and which seemed to never decrease,  how did he manage to not give in to despair?   His answer to me was that he had no right to become discouraged, that he had an obligation to keep going.  Which advice probably kept me from just giving up.   Now, with Ernesto Cardenal's further observations, I feel even less like giving in to despair.

Cardenal's account of the discussion group of poor people generating theology in The Gospel in Solentiname is even more important than that.  In that discussion I had the sense of the Gospels in a more authentic context, in the lives of people living in the kind of poverty, grinding oppression, foreign occupation and daily encounters with violence and death that the people Jesus talked to experienced.  Like some of those in that discussion, Jesus, his cousin John the Baptist, I believe virtually all of the Apostles if not all of them, met violent deaths at the hands of dictators and hostile establishments,  Science might provide one important frame to understand the world, The Gospel in Solentiname, liberation theology, makes that science seem like it might actually be important to continued human existence.  Perhaps even important enough to actually do instead of just pontificate about ideologically on blog discussion threads.  But it won't turn out that way without that religious context, science without morality will kill us.  Morality without God is unanchored.

*  I am, of course, referring to natural selection, among other things, which also informs Ernesto Cardenal's thinking, as noted above,  but, about which, I am very skeptical.   The minds of religious scientists are indisputably there, they are not disputable, the support for natural selection as being anything but a conventional framing required for talking about how species evolved through the deaths of individuals with certain "traits" is entirely more tenuous.   I might go so far as to claim that natural selection as the ultimate force of biology and Daniel Dennett's insane extension of natural selection outside of biology, is far more superstitious than to believe that science and religion are not only compatible but are able to inform each other.