Responding to the Jerry Coyne essay on science and religion that Jim and Alan blogged about last week at the Scene, Ross makes an important point:

… people move in and out of religions all the time, based on experiences they’ve had, polemics they’ve read, and so forth. The belief in God is no more impervious to argument, alteration or abandonment than a belief in Randian objectivism or Rawlsian liberalism. Pace Coyne, the problem of theodicy does, in fact, persuade some people to abandon their belief in God – just as the sense that they’ve encountered God in prayer does, in fact, persuade some spiritually-inquisitive agnostics to take up a religion. Some religions’ claims about the world look more implausible than others; some religions (like some political ideologies) lose adherents because their predictions don’t come true; some religions clash directly with the current scientific consensus and some do not. (Even Coyne, who I think wildly overstates the conflict between Christianity and science, allows that “pantheism and some forms of Buddhism” are potentially compatible with scientific truth.) It’s true that I can’t think of a single one-off experiment that would disprove my belief in God once and for all, but I can think of all kinds of experiences and discoveries that would weaken that belief. And I’m pretty sure that Mother Teresa doubted the truth claims of Christianity more frequently than, say, Howard Dean has ever doubted the truth claims of the Democratic Party.

This is, I think, exactly right. I’d started to write a post on this last week before chaos struck, and in reading and re-reading the portions of Coyne’s argument that raise the charge of unfalsifiability – much of which Jim, by the way, seemed pretty willing to grant – I found myself less and less able to make out what Coyne is trying to get at when he says, e.g., that “religious truths” [sic!] leave no room for an answer to the question, “how would I know if I were wrong?” But it is crucial, I think, to see that Coyne is not best read as arguing that religious beliefs are unfalsifiable in principle: indeed, he makes it quite clear that he thinks they are false, and indeed that a great many of them have been straightforwardly falsified by such things as the truth of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the (supposed) scientific impossibility of miracles, the inefficacy of prayer, and so on. (Young Earth Creationism, for example, is wildly unpopular precisely because it can do no justice whatsoever to a host of obvious scientific facts: if this isn’t falsification, I don’t know what is.) Hence when Coyne says that “[t]here is no way to adjudicate between competing religious truths as we can between competing scientific explanations”, this strikes me as more a misstep than a substantive point: if all orthodox religious beliefs – with the exception, perhaps, of “pantheism and some forms of Buddhism”! – are demonstrably false, then we clearly can adjudicate between at least some of the different truth claims in question. The traditionally Popperian conception of falsifiability cannot, I think, be what’s at stake in his argument.

Rather, what Coyne really seems to be focusing his scorn on is the particular ways in which religious beliefs are held: they are “immune to ugly facts”, he says, adding that he has “never met a religious person who could tell me what would disprove” the existence of God. But then as Ross points out, this is simply false, since people lose or switch their religious convictions all the time – the reasons for this are a bit hodgepodge and unsystematic, to be sure, but then again so are our religious convictions themselves, and the key point is just that a belief’s being firmly held does not mean that it can or will never be let go. I may not be able to tell you in advance exactly what it would take to get me to abandon or radically revise my belief in God, but that doesn’t mean that belief is unaffected by the events and ideas I encounter throughout my life.

Now this is not, of course, to say that religious believers leave their convictions open to falsification or revision in the same ways as scientists do; hence Coyne writes:

Like all sciences, evolution differs from religion because it constantly tests its assumptions, and discards the ones that prove false.

But even if we choose to overlook the fact that this is a hopelessly idealized picture of the way that real science works, it’s once again unclear why this should matter. True, religious believers don’t put their core convictions to the test in the same sorts of ways that scientists tend to, but that has quite a lot to do with the fact that they’re different sorts of convictions: faith in God, and in a particular understanding of his actions in history, is the sort of thing that shapes one’s entire life in ways that a merely empirical theory never can, and so resists revision or wholesale overturning in the sorts of ways that any overarching Weltanschauung almost essentially will. To use a somewhat clumsy analogy, a body of religious belief is rather more like the attachment to the Newtonian system in general than to one of its specific claims; hence one or two or even a handful of apparent weak points usually aren’t going to be enough to overturn the whole system, especially without an obviously superior contender waiting in the wings.

Note that my point here is emphatically not to claim, as far too many do, that science is in no place to criticize religion because “everyone’s got to believe in something”, as if there were nothing more to religious faith than the kind of garden-variety confidence that scientists have in the possibility for progress in their field. That view is a false one, and at the end of the day its prevalence does religion far more harm than good. Rather, my central points are that (1) the fact that religious belief is a radically different kind of belief than the scientific kind is precisely why it’s foolish to hold it to scientific standards (a point which, as Ross notes, holds with equal force for political ideology, much of academic philosophy, and so on); and (2) the fact that the standards for the abandonment or revision of religious convictions are different than those for theory change in the philosophy of science does not mean that there are no such standards in the former case – indeed, it’s only because of the false equation of the proper standards for believing in general with the standards that govern the kind of belief that we have in science that this kind of confusion could be possible.

     Filed under: philosophy, religion, science/tech