IN A MIRROR DIMLY, THEN FACE TO FACE
Faith, Reason, and the Relationship of Religion and Science
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully.
—I Corinthians 13:12
There is a certain predictable, expected pleasure in making a discovery that comes at the end of a long and ordered journey, especially when that discovery is the goal of the trek itself. Discoveries made by accident, with no jaunt planned or purpose in mind, also generate their own unique pleasures, reserved for those rare occasions when contingent sequences include us in their wanderings. As a minimalist example of the latter, I once encountered the following coincidence at the home of a friend. During a quiet moment alone I grabbed for the nearest piece of reading material and happened to pull down a 1954 edition of The Story of the Starry Universe, part of the Popular Science Library’s series of illustrated books of science for the general reader. Flipping to the final page to see what prognostications were being made for the future, I read that V-2 rockets were being hurled into space with scientific instruments (instead of the warheads of a decade prior), so that the stars might be studied from above the ultraviolet filter of the ozone layer. The research was so new it was not even published yet, but the authors boldly speculated:
Scientists are even talking about the possibility of sending rockets completely outside of the earth’s atmosphere and causing them to move in an approximately circular orbit, permanent satellites of the earth for special laboratory studies. It has been estimated that perhaps ten years or so will elapse before such a ladder to the skies will have been perfected.
My contingent gem came later that day in the same room, when I opened the paper to view the magnificent newly released color photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope—our “ladder to the skies.”
It may have taken four decades instead of the estimated one, but the prize was well worth the wait. In science, as in most cultural productions, time frames rarely match expectations. But there is no disputing the fact that science changes faster than religion. Compare this 30-year discrepancy to the 360-year abyss between Galileo’s 1633 indictment for the heretical support of Copernicus’s heliocentrism and Pope John Paul II’s acquittal of him in his April 1993 address to the Pontifical Biblical Commission; or the 137-year gap between Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species and Pope John Paul II’s acceptance of evolution as a viable theory in his October 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
As Popes go, John Paul II is relatively progressive in embracing science and its underpinnings of logic and empiricism. He is both broadly and deeply read, and sensitive to the relationship between faith and reason, religion and science. In his 1993 address he explained that “it is necessary to determine the proper sense of Scripture, while avoiding any unwarranted interpretations that make it say what it does not intend to say,” and in order to do so “the theologian must keep informed about the results achieved by the natural sciences.” His 1996 address, entitled Truth Cannot Contradict Truth, was written to update and revise Pope Pius XII’s 1950 Encyclical Humani Generis, in which Catholics were told that there is no conflict between reason and faith when dealing with the theory of evolution: “The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from preexistent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.” For Pius XII, however, evolution as a theory was still up in the air and could one day be proved false. Thus, while there had been no opposition to provisionally accepting evolution (of the body only), if it turned out wrong, Catholics have lost nothing:
However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighted and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure … . Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.
With this level of equivocation on the part of his predecessor, John Paul II felt it necessary to bring his over one billion followers up to date on the outcome of half a century of scientific research. The verdict is now in, the Pope explained in 1996, evolution happened:
Today, almost half a century after the publication of the Encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of more than one hypothesis in the theory of evolution. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory. [Note: John Paul II’s address was published on October 22, 1996, as a translation into English from French. In the November 19, 1996, edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the editor, Father Robert Dempsey, explained that the paper’s original translation was overly literal and that instead of “more than one hypothesis,” John Paul II’s intent was to say that the theory of evolution is “more than a hypothesis” (plus qu’une hypothèse, where the indefinite article une should be read as “a” not “one”).]
John Paul II showed the depth of his reading in the evolutionary sciences by his awareness of the plurality of levels of evolutionary analysis: “And, to tell the truth, rather than the theory of evolution, we should speak of several theories of evolution. On the one hand, this plurality has to do with the different explanations advanced for the mechanism of evolution, and on the other, with the various philosophies on which it is based.” It is in these philosophies where the “Church’s Magisterium is directly concerned with the question of evolution, for it involves the conception of man: Revelation teaches us that he was created in the image and likeness of God.” Since “truth cannot contradict truth,” and since both the Bible and the theory of evolution are true, how does John Paul II reconcile the existence of body and soul? He finds a solution in Aristotle and Aquinas, in their belief that the body and soul are ontologically separate. Evolution created the body, God created the soul:
With man, then, we find ourselves in the presence of an ontological difference, an ontological leap, one could say. However, does not the posing of such ontological discontinuity run counter to that physical continuity which seems to be the main thread of research into evolution in the field of physics and chemistry? Consideration of the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view which would seem irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision and correlate them with the time line. The moment of transition to the spiritual cannot be the object of this kind of observation, which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being. But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-awareness and self-reflection, of moral conscience, freedom, or again, of aesthetic and religious experience, falls within the competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while theology brings out its ultimate meaning according to the Creator’s plans.
Catholics, says the Pope, can have faith and reason, religion and science.
Implied (but not directly stated) in John Paul II’s address is his division of knowledge into types: empirical (science), reason (philosophy), and faith (religion). The Pope’s blending of these epistemologies places him squarely in the second tier of what is here proposed as a three-tiered model of the relationship between science and religion.
1.Conflicting-Worlds Model. This “warfare” model of science and religion, in its modern incarnation dates back to the 1874 publication of John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, and the 1896 publication of Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, for three-quarters of a century considered the definitive histories of the relationship. In his preface Draper explained the difference between two ways of knowing: “Faith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them, impossible to conceal, must take place.” In his introduction, White explained that his book grew out of a lecture entitled “The Battlefields of Science,” that carried this unqualified thesis: “In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and to science, and … all untrammelled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion and of science.”Both Draper and White presented simplified histories of the alleged war through such prominent events as the discovery of the earth’s sphericity, Galileo’s heresy trial, and the 1860 Huxley-Wilberforce debate over evolution. In our own century the most famous case study in the conflicting-worlds model is the 1925 Scopes trial, where the relationship was forced into a courtroom out of which a winner and loser emerged. The monument in front of the Rhea County Courthouse where the trial was held in Dayton, Tennessee, presents the case as a conflict, but gets the outcome wrong—Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 by the judge, allowing the Tennessee Supreme Court to overturn the conviction on the grounds that the jury, not the judge, should have imposed the fine. With that, there was no conviction to appeal, the case was over, and the anti-evolution law remained on the books until 1967. Never was the conflict model so evident in practice, and clearly distorting what really happened.Among the holders of the conflict model today are fundamentalist Christians and many creationists who reject, bend, shape, or distort science until it fits their theology. Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski, for example, is a fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in Irving, Texas, where he argues that what believers need to do is “rather than look for common ground on which all Christians can agree, propose a theory of creation that puts Christians in the strongest possible position to defeat the common enemy of creation, to wit, naturalism.” Since science is based on the philosophy of naturalism, it is the “common enemy” to be defeated; stronger fight’n words were never spoken.2.Same-Worlds Model. In the last couple of decades this position has become popular among mainstream theologians, religious leaders, and believing scientists, who have moved beyond the pugnacious conflicting-worlds model, and hope for an integrative conciliation. Religion and science, faith and reason, they argue, are two ways of examining the same reality. As modern science progresses to a greater understanding of the natural world, we are discovering that the wisdom of the ancients neatly matches the findings of modern scientists. Sometimes figuratively (as in day-age models where a biblical day represents a geological epoch), sometimes literally (where scientific findings are interpreted as supporting, point by point, biblical passages read nonmetaphorically), most residing on this tier are believers who work mightily to read into these ancient writings the findings of modern science, or to read into scientific theories biblical stories. The German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, and his scientific counterpart, the mathematical physicist Frank Tipler, meet at this level, arguing that theology and cosmology are rapidly converging into one sphere of knowledge. Two signs from the wall of the museum at the Institute for Creation Research in Santee, California, demonstrate the confusion implicit at this tier. In the first sign, creationists claim that “religion and science are not separate spheres of study,” and that “if both are true, they must agree.” The implication is that if they do not agree, one must be right and the other wrong—as explained at the end of the text where the science of evolution is rejected as another false religion along with atheism, pantheism, and humanism. In the second sign (next to the first on the wall), God’s existence is claimed to be “self-evident” and science can neither prove nor disprove God’s existence, the implication being that science and religion are separate spheres. Well, which is it? You cannot have it both ways.John Paul II’s 1996 Truth Cannot Contradict Truth falls squarely in this tier as he argues here, and in his 1998 Fides et Ratio, that faith and reason can work together toward the same goal of understanding the universe and our place in it. At first blush that sounds reasonable, but as we shall see, trying to mesh these two radically divergent methods of understanding the world into one worldview does not work.3.Separate-Worlds Model. Residents on this tier are still in the minority in their belief that science and religion are neither in conflict nor in agreement, but, in Stephen Jay Gould’s apt phrase (adopted from the Pope’s 1996 address), are “nonoverlapping magisteria.” Science philosopher Michael Ruse agrees and notes: “If you want evolution plus souls, that is your option, and if you want evolution less souls, that is also your option. Either way, evolution is untouched … . More than this, together with the Pope, I believe that his tradition is right in feeling that evolution—even evolution through selection—is no barrier to faith. Were I a Catholic, I would positively welcome Darwin as an ally.” Anthropologist Eugenie Scott also believes the worlds of science and religion should be kept separate, especially in the classroom, for three very practical reasons: “Using the classroom to indoctrinate students to any belief or nonbelief is, first of all, a violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution’s establishment clause; second, it will be misleading to students who will have difficulty separating science as a way of knowing from personal philosophy; and third, it is bad strategy for anyone concerned about the public understanding of evolution.”To clarify further the similarities and differences among these three tiers, it might be useful to make a distinction between the two primary purposes of religion and belief in God: (1) an explanation for the natural world in the form of cosmogony myths, and (2) a guide to human life and an institution for social cohesiveness in the form of morality myths. Clearly, modern cosmology has displaced ancient cosmogonies in the minds of all but a tiny handful of young-earth creationists. Most believers have now abandoned the six-thousand-year-old young-earth model in favor of one that more closely parallels the tenets of deep geological time. This process of displacement has been under way for the past four centuries and continues to this day, with a few holdouts from the same-worlds tier struggling to squeeze the square peg of science into the round hole of religion. Evolutionary biology and the study of the chemical origins of life have also paved new roads into the ancient question of life’s origination, to the point where these types of religious myths are now obsolete. And, most dramatically, modern cosmology has presented us with theories so unlike anything described in any ancient myths (black holes, wormholes, quantum foam, inflationary cosmology), that a separate-worlds model really is the only viable alternative.The distinction may not be so clear as we move into the human realm, but it is there nonetheless (at least for now). Although some progress has been made since the Enlightenment to ground moral values in nonreligious, metaphysical concepts such as “rights,” and to construct a secular system by which one can live a meaningful and moral life without any belief in God, we are a long way from finding agreement among scientists and philosophers about whether, say, abortion is moral or immoral; whether lying is permissible in certain circumstances; whether we have free will or are determined; how to operationally define good and evil, especially about such subjective matters as meaning and purpose of human existence. Scientists have opinions on these questions, of course, but there is no consensus (and considerable disagreement) among them, to such an extent that these matters are rarely even dealt with in the scientific literature, let alone agreed upon. But the best reason to keep science and religion separate is because they employ radically different methods. Science is not a “thing,” but a “process”—more than a body of knowledge, science is a method for obtaining answers to questions about the natural world. Religion, in its second mode, deals with matters about which science has little to say.To that end, the separate-worlds model is better for science because religion, by definition, deals with subjects beyond our scope and practice. But the separate-worlds model is also better for religion because science is constantly changing and thus it is dangerous to attach religious doctrines to scientific theories, which may go out of date in a matter of years. If Stephen Hawking’s no-boundary universe is true, for example, then there is no beginning, no end, and no need for a creator. Catholic cleric and professional astronomer Guy Consolmagno, a scientist at the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope in the high desert of southeast Arizona, summarized this position well when he explained why he believes in God: “It’s not because of the beauty or symmetry or design of the universe that I see in my science, even though all of those things can lead me to appreciate the God I already believe in. It’s not because some particular scientific theory is true or false, but because truth and falseness themselves are important. And because, the last time I asked God if he existed, His reply was, ‘Last time I looked, I did.’” Faith, not reason, religion, not science, is the proper domain of God’s existence.
FIDES ET RATIO
Two years after his 1996 address on evolution, John Paul II released his thirteenth Encyclical Letter—Fides et Ratio of the Supreme Pontiff to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Relationship between Faith and Reason. Coming in at no less than 35,000 words, divided into 7 chapters and 108 numbered subchapters, and featuring a weighty 132 scholarly endnotes, it was a significant expansion of his commentary on evolution. By any standards Fides et Ratio is an impressive work of scholarship. It begins poetically: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” Faith and reason, the Pope points out, both must be employed in addressing the most fundamental questions about human existence: “Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? What is there after this life?”
To answer these questions, to become “ever more human,” we begin with philosophy, “one of noblest of human tasks.” Philosophers employ logic and reason to yield “genuine systems of thought” as well as “a body of knowledge which may be judged a kind of spiritual heritage of humanity.” That heritage can be seen in “certain fundamental moral norms which are shared by all,” and thus “the Church cannot but set great value upon reason’s drive to attain goals which render people’s lives ever more worthy.” However, “the positive results achieved must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth which transcends them,” giving rise “to different forms of agnosticism and relativism which have led philosophical research to lose its way in the shifting sands of widespread scepticism.” John Paul II then launches an attack on “undifferentiated pluralism” where “all positions are equally valid, which is one of today’s most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth.”
Most scientists would join the Pope in voicing their concerns for the decay of knowledge and truth standards, and the attacks from postmodern deconstructionists who claim that science is nothing more than a socially constructed myth. But these same scientists would soon part company with John Paul II when he turns, not to more rigorous philosophical standards for reason or empirical guidelines for science, but to faith: “Philosophy and the sciences function within the order of natural reason; while faith, enlightened and guided by the Spirit, recognizes in the message of salvation the ‘fullness of grace and truth’ (cf. John 1:14) which God has willed to reveal in history and definitively through his Son, Jesus Christ.” John Paul II, of course, is not proffering a radical new epistemology. According to the First Vatican Council, which he cites: “There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only as regards their source, but also as regard their object. With regard to the source, because we know in one by natural reason, in the other by divine faith. With regard to the object, because besides those things which natural reason can attain, there are proposed for our belief mysteries hidden in God which, unless they are divinely revealed, cannot be known.” Thus, John Paul II concludes: “The truth attained by philosophy and the truth of Revelation are neither identical nor mutually exclusive.”
But what does it mean to attain truth through revelation? Here the argument becomes circular. Once you have decided that there is a God, it follows that “by the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals. By faith, men and women give their assent to this divine testimony. This means that they acknowledge fully and integrally the truth of what is revealed because it is God himself who is the guarantor of that truth.” In other words, God’s revelations are true because they come from God. What we are to do, then, is apply reason as far as it will go, then take the leap of faith. Why? Because that is the only way to truly understand these divine truths: “Thus the world and the events of history cannot be understood in depth without professing faith in the God who is at work in them.” The self-evident truth of God’s existence leads to the inevitable conclusion that His revelations are true by definition. Reason cannot reveal the nature of these truths or of God, therefore we must have faith. Yet it is with faith that we come to believe in God in the first place, thus closing the circle of this circular argument. If there is no God, of course, or if God is not the omniscient, omnipotent, or omnibenevolent god of Abraham, then faith goes out the window as a viable epistemological system.
In reading Fides et Ratio, one fluctuates between awesome respect for the deep learning and wisdom of John Paul II, and befuddlement as to how so great a mind can so contradict himself in one document. On the one hand, he reflects modernity and liberalism when he writes that “inseparable as they are from people and their history, cultures share the dynamics which the human experience of life reveals,” that “cultural context permeates the living of Christian faith,” and when he warns missionaries that the cultures of other peoples should be respected and preserved because “no one culture can ever become the criterion of judgment, much less the ultimate criterion of truth with regard to God’s Revelation.” On the other hand, in arguing for “the Magisterium’s interventions in philosophical matters,” he continues to get himself entangled in logical knots, such as when he says “how inseparable and at the same time how distinct were faith and reason.” Either faith and reason are inseparable or they are distinct. They cannot be both. Yet that is precisely what John Paul II wants: “Therefore, reason and faith cannot be separated without diminishing the capacity of men and women to know themselves, the world and God in an appropriate way. There is thus no reason for competition of any kind between reason and faith: each contains the other, and each has its own scope for action.”
One problem of trying to have both faith and reason within the same sphere is in using the language of reason to describe the process of faith. When John Paul II wants to have it both ways, his language is not only circular but fuzzy as well: “Faith sharpens the inner eye, opening the mind to discover in the flux of events the workings of Providence.” If we are going to mix reason and faith, then it is reasonable to ask what it can possibly mean to have an “inner eye” that opens the mind. St. Augustine, to whom John Paul II turns for clarification, is no help in his equally tautological and woolly reasoning: “To believe is nothing other than to think with assent … . Believers are also thinkers: in believing, they think and in thinking, they believe … . If faith does not think, it is nothing. If there is no assent, there is no faith, for without assent one does not really believe.”
Another problem in wedding religion and science is in dealing with subjects appropriate in one sphere but not in the other. This forces one into the uncomfortable position of simultaneously embracing and rejecting science. For example, John Paul II eloquently expresses “my admiration and in offering encouragement to these brave pioneers of scientific research, to whom humanity owes so much of its current development, I would urge them to continue their efforts without ever abandoning the sapiential horizon within which scientific and technological achievements are wedded to the philosophical and ethical values which are the distinctive and indelible mark of the human person.” Yet shortly before this praise, he noted with distress that “Scientism is the philosophical notion which refuses to admit the validity of forms of knowledge other than those of the positive sciences; and it relegates religious, theological, ethical and aesthetic knowledge to the realm of mere fantasy.” Only those in the conflicting-worlds or same-worlds tiers would so categorize these forms of knowledge. As we saw, science cannot solve such problems, so in holding the same-worlds model the Pope is forced to lay siege to science because it “consigns all that has to do with the question of the meaning of life to the realm of the irrational or imaginary.” Such questions can only be “irrational” when inappropriately treated as subjects of rational analysis. When kept in their appropriately separate worlds such questions cannot produce conflict or paradox.
At the beginning of Fides et Ratio, John Paul II references I Corinthians 13:12, to make the point that reason without faith leaves one’s perception and comprehension faint and fragmentary: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully.” That vision and understanding, as we have seen, can only be achieved when these two different methods are employed in these two different worlds.
I witnessed a poignant example of the power of religion in the second mode (a moral guide to human life and an institution for social bonding) while on a trip to the South in late 1998 to visit a close friend on the eve of his campaign for election to the United States Senate. Michael Coles was running on the Democratic ticket, and on the Sunday morning before the election I joined him and the other Democratic candidates as they visited six different black Baptist churches in and around the Atlanta area. (Since 85 percent of the black vote goes to the Democratic party, these visits were to answer the question asked by a brochure being distributed at one of the churches, entitled “The Black Church Vote: Will God hold us accountable for who governs?”) Among the churches we attended were the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, the Ray of Hope Christian Church, and, most movingly, the late Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. The statue of a father holding his newborn child to the sky, adjacent to the church and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, is emblematic of this second mode of religion captured in the epigram beneath the statue: “Dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for his moral courage and nobility of spirit.”
I had always heard (but never witnessed first-hand) that the black religious experience is qualitatively different from that of the white. I cannot speak for all white churches, of course, but having attended a wide variety of services throughout my life, I have seen nothing quite like the elan expressed in these houses of worship. These services go far beyond mere Hosannas and Amens, with the fellowship’s vocal repartee to the songs, hymns, prayers, and sermons every bit as much a part of the service as anything planned for the day. “Say it preacher” … “Oh yeah brother” … “That’s right sister” … and hundreds of other rejoinders came bursting forth from around a room filled with energy and anima. You would have to be made of wood not to feel a spiritual presence there; thus only the tiniest amount of faith, and only a modicum of the willing suspension of disbelief is necessary to “get into the spirit” of the experience. The specific content of the services was not necessary to understand the power of religion on this most foundational level—the human experience of moral courage and nobility of spirit.
At one of the churches that morning, during a rare quiet moment between modes of spiritual expression, Michael leaned over and whispered to me: “You know, the church is the only social institution in the last four centuries that has not let these people down.” Although religion has played its own ugly role in the ghastly history of slavery, and anything can and has been justified in the name of God and religion, including murder, war, rape, and slavery, Coles is right. Through centuries of slavery, decades of corrupt reconstruction, years of Jim Crow American apartheid, and overt and covert racism at all levels of our society, religion has remained steadfast by the side of African Americans, providing a safe haven where they might enjoy (however fleeting) a sense of freedom from the physical or psychological chains that bound (and, in many ways, still bind) them.
The anthropologist Anthony Wallace estimates that over the course of the past 10,000 years humans have constructed no less than 100,000 religions. God is alive and well, not only in the past, but in the present. Most people believe in a god of some kind, and if the historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists are right, almost everyone who ever lived believed in one god or another. Religion evolved for the two modes of myth making and social bonding. To those scientists, skeptics, and humanists who believe that science and humanism will one day replace these two functions of religion, E. O. Wilson wrote the following reality check in his Pulitzer prize-winning book, On Human Nature:
Skeptics continue to nourish the belief that science and learning will banish religion, which they consider to be no more than a tissue of illusions … . Today, scientists and other scholars, organized into learned groups such as the American Humanist Society and Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, support little magazines distributed by subscription and organize campaigns to discredit Christian fundamentalism, astrology, and Immanuel Velikovsky. Their crisply logical salvos, endorsed by whole arrogances of Nobel Laureates, pass like steel-jacketed bullets through fog.
Skeptic magazine, with its circulation of 40,000, would probably fit into this category when compared to various religious publications whose circulation numbers run well into the hundreds of thousands or even millions. We might answer Wilson by explaining that we only take on Christian fundamentalists and their related brethren when they cross over into our turf by trying to use science to prove articles of faith which, by definition, cannot be proved. Indeed, some of this book is aimed at just this sort of invasion. But sometimes we go beyond what our science can really say about some of the great and enduring questions traditionally addressed by religion, particularly the big three addressed by the Pope: “Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? What is there after this life?”
Cosmology and evolutionary biology provide a good answer to the first question and a partial answer to the second—we are star stuff and biomass, we evolved by descent with modification from our ancestors, but no one knows where we are going. About the third question, science knows a lot about the process of dying, has adequate explanations for phenomena such as near-death experiences, struggles when it comes to defining death, but can say nothing about what happens after we die, other than “No one knows.”
As for the second mode of religion’s purpose in the moral and social realm, humanists have worked to present viable secular alternatives. But as Wilson observed, we are small in number and, compared to religion, largely impotent as a social force. Studies show, for example, that following the 1992 Los Angeles riots it was religion that helped rebuild the looted and torched neighborhoods, not business, not government, and certainly not the humanists. Perhaps it is because religion has a 10,000-year head start on these other social institutions, or perhaps it is because that is what religion does best. Only time will tell. But the notion that religion will soon fall into disuse would seem to be belied by the data of both science and anecdotal observation. In this sense, at least for now, the separate-worlds model emerges as the only possible description of the relationship of religion and science. While scientists may manifest commendable moral traits, or act with admirable social consciousness, they do so as an expression of their humanity, not their science. Science has never trafficked, and likely never will, in the business of moral courage and nobility of spirit.