A new unpublished paper titled “Science and Religious Dogma” by Matías Cabello has caught the attention of Jerry Coyne, who blogged about it at Why Evolution Is True. Coyne has questions about the paper’s methodology, but he nevertheless likes the paper because it supports the religion and science conflict thesis with data. Cabello’s historical analysis seems to show that church dogma stifled science, but being freed from its influence opened up new ways of thinking, allowing science to flourish,
Coyne uses his commentary on Cabello’s paper to push his own dedication to the conflict thesis. In fact, he charges scholars like Ronald Numbers and Michael Ruse, who have adopted the no conflict hypothesis, with holding a “’woke’ point of view: it goes along with the virtue-flaunting idea that you can have your Jesus and Darwin too.” For Coyne, religion and science have always been and always will be in conflict. Further, he thinks they should be in conflict — religion and science are completely incompatible in Coyne’s worldview. Perhaps he could spend more time studying history.
Epicycles and Equants
Not nearly enough attention has been paid to Copernicus’ justification for proposing his heliocentric model of the universe. Copernicus possessed no empirical data leading to the overthrow of the centuries-old Ptolemaic system. The latter still worked well for practical purposes. But to make it work, astronomers had to add ad hoc features like epicycles and equants. Over time, the model became messy and ham-handed. Copernicus reasoned that placing the sun at the center (in contrast to church doctrine) created a simpler and more elegant model. But why should the universe be simple and elegant? Because the God that Copernicus believed in as he affirmed in De Revolutionibus would never create the monstrosity that the Ptolemaic system had become.1 Copernicus was led by a religiously inspired esthetic sense to a correct understanding of the structure of the cosmos. No conflict between religion and science here.
Interestingly, this drive toward simplicity and elegance as a guide toward scientific truth has survived in modern physics in the search for a Grand Unified Theory or a Theory of Everything, even though this drive has been shorn of its original religious context.
As another example, the 18th-century Scottish astronomer James Ferguson employed a religious argument to argue that stars are bodies like our sun that likely harbor their own planetary systems revolving around them. Ferguson wrote:
It is no wise probable that the Almighty, who always acts with infinite wisdom and does nothing in vain, should create so many glorious Suns, fit for so many important purposes, and place them at such distances from one another, without proper objects near enough to be benefitted by their influences. Whoever imagines they were created only to give a faint glimmering light to the inhabitants of this Globe, must have a very superficial knowledge of Astronomy, and a mean opinion of the Divine Wisdom.2
Ferguson certainly had no empirical evidence for the existence of exoplanets, but today we know that his religiously inspired insight led him to the correct understanding of the structure of the physical universe. Once again, no conflict between religion and science.
Newton’s Religious Beliefs
In a passage of Cabello’s paper cited by Coyne, Cabello lets Issac Newton off the hook on the grounds that Newton had abandoned orthodox belief in the Trinity at a young age. His unorthodox religious beliefs may then have opened the way for his scientific accomplishments. But unorthodox religious beliefs are still religious beliefs, and they infused all aspects of Newton’s thinking. As he wrote to Richard Bentley:
I am forced to ascribe the design of the solar system to the counsel and contrivance of a voluntary Agent. The motions which the planets now have could not spring from any natural cause alone but were imprest by an intelligent Agent.3
Newton’s religious beliefs certainly did not hinder his scientific accomplishments.
The House of Wisdom
Cabello’s paper deals only with the influence of European Christianity on science. But Coyne likes to talk about religion in general as being incompatible with science. Perhaps he should study the medieval Islamic Abbasid Empire where one of the great early flowerings of science and culture took place. Centered on the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, Muslim astronomers calculated the circumference of the earth to a value close to modern measurements. The great mathematician al-Khwarizmi (10th century) developed algebra (al-jibr in Arabic), and the Latinized form of his name gave us the familiar word “algorithm.” In optics, the law of refraction known as Snell’s Law was worked out centuries earlier by Ibn-Sahl. Many advancements in engineering were also made during this time, especially in hydraulics and irrigation systems enabling food production in arid climates. There was simply no conflict between Islamic religion and science in the medieval Islamic world.
One gets the impression that Coyne is not really concerned with religion writ large and its relationship to science, but really with a particular type of religion — the conservative evangelical Christianity he identifies with those pesky advocates of creationism and intelligent design that he so despises. But even here, he is off base. Many conservative Christians are capable of producing good science as we see all the time in the ID community.
Jealous, Dr. Coyne?
I dare say that Michael Behe has had a far greater influence on the field of evolutionary biology than Jerry Coyne has. Behe has conceptually influenced the entire field by introducing the term irreducible complexity, an idea that even skeptics must now engage. Note the words of Jan Spitzer in the Journal of Molecular Evolution, discussing the origin of life:
Since the subject of cellular emergence of life is unusually complicated (we avoid the term ‘complex’ because of its association with ‘biocomplexity’ or ‘irreducible complexity’), it is unlikely that any overall theory of life’s nature, emergence, and evolution can be fully formulated, quantified, and experimentally investigated.4
When biologists resist using a word like “complex” simply to avoid being associated with the ID movement, you know Behe has had a major influence on the field. I don’t know that Coyne can match this influence and today he has become mostly just a polemicist.
Perhaps Coyne is just jealous of the scientific achievements of the ID community. I don’t really know. But at the very least, his fidelity to the conflict thesis withers under critical scrutiny.
Notes
- For more on this argument see, Bruce Wrightsman, “The Legitimation of Scientific Belief: Theory Justification by Copernicus” in Scientific Discovery: Case Studies edited by T. Nickles, (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980), 51-66.
- Quoted in Michael J. Crowe, “Astronomy and Religion (1780-1915): Four Case Studies Involving Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life,” Osiris 16 (2001): 212.
- Quoted in Stephen Snobelen, “’God of gods, and Lord of lords:’ The Theology of Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia,” Osiris 16 (2001): 173.
- Jan Spitzer, “Emergence of Life on Earth: A Physicochemical Jigsaw Puzzle,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 84 (2017): 2.
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