A new unpublished paper, “Science and Religious Belief,” by Matthias Cappello has caught the attention of Jerry Coyne, who has blogged about it at Why is evolution true?. Quinn has questions about the paper’s methodology, but he nonetheless likes the paper because it supports the thesis of religion and science’s struggle with data. Capello’s historical analysis seems to show that church doctrine stifled science, but freedom from its influence opened up new ways of thinking, allowing science to flourish.
Quinn uses his commentary on Capello’s paper to advance his dedication to the conflict thesis. In fact, he accuses scholars like Ronald Numbers and Michael Ross, who have embraced the no-conflict hypothesis, of holding a “woke” view: one that goes along with the virtue-pampering idea that you can have Jesus and Darwin too. “.For Quine, religion and science have always been and will always be in conflict. Moreover, he believes that they should be in conflict – religion and science are completely incompatible in Quine’s worldview. Perhaps he could spend more time studying history.
Epicycles and icons
Not enough attention has been paid to Copernicus’ justification for proposing a heliocentric model of the universe. Copernicus had no experimental data leading to the overthrow of the centuries-old Ptolemaic regime. The latter still works well for practical purposes. But for it to work, astronomers had to add custom features like epicycles and icons. Over time, the model became messy and clumsy. Copernicus saw that placing the sun in the center (contrary to church doctrine) created a simpler, more elegant model. But why should the universe be simple and elegant? Because the God in whom Copernicus believed, as he affirmed D Revolutionary bus He would never create the brutality that the Ptolemaic regime became.1 Copernicus’ aesthetic sense inspired by religion led him to a correct understanding of the structure of the universe. There is no conflict between religion and science here.
Interestingly, this drive toward simplicity and elegance as a guide toward scientific truth has continued into modern physics in the search for a grand unified theory or theory of everything, even though this drive has been stripped of its original religious context.
As another example, the 18th-century Scottish astronomer James Ferguson used a religious argument to argue that stars are bodies like our Sun that likely harbor their own planetary systems orbiting them. Ferguson wrote:
It is not wise for the Almighty, who always acts with infinite wisdom and does nothing in vain, to create so many glorious suns, suitable for so many important purposes, and place them at great distances from each other, without suitable objects near enough. To benefit from their influence. Whoever imagines that they were created merely to give dim light to the inhabitants of this earth must have a very superficial knowledge of astronomy, and a low opinion of divine wisdom.2
Ferguson certainly had no experimental evidence for the existence of exoplanets, but we know today that his religiously inspired vision led him to a correct understanding of the structure of the physical universe. Again, there is no conflict between religion and science.
Newton’s religious beliefs
In a passage from Capello’s research cited by Quine, Capello allowed Isaac Newton to escape punishment on the grounds that Newton had abandoned the orthodox belief in the Trinity at an early age. His unorthodox religious beliefs may have opened the way to his scientific achievements. But unorthodox religious beliefs were still religious beliefs, and they infused all aspects of Newton’s thinking. As he wrote to Richard Bentley:
I am forced to attribute the design of the solar system to the advice and management of a volunteer agent. The movements that the planets are making now cannot arise from any natural cause alone, but rather were the result of an intelligent agent.3
Newton’s religious beliefs certainly did not hinder his scientific achievements.
House of Wisdom
Cappello’s paper only addresses 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 greatest flourishings of early science and culture occurred. In the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, Muslim astronomers calculated the Earth’s circumference at a value close to modern measurements. The great mathematician Al-Khwarizmi (10th century) developed the science of algebra (Algebra in Arabic), and the Latin form of his name gave us the familiar word “algorithm”. In optics, the law of refraction known as Snell’s law was established centuries ago by Ibn Sahl. Many advances in engineering were also made during this time, especially in hydraulics and irrigation systems that enable food production in arid climates. Simply put, there was no conflict between Islamic religion and science in the medieval Islamic world.
One gets the impression that Coyne is not really very interested in religion and its relationship to science, but is really interested in a certain kind of religion – the conservative evangelical Christianity that he associates with those pesky defenders of creationism and intelligent design that he so despises. But even here, it is outside the norm. Many conservative Christians are capable of producing good science as we see all the time in the ID community.
Jealous, Dr. Quinn?
I dare say that Michael Behe has had a much greater influence on the field of evolutionary biology than Jerry Coyne. Behe conceptually influenced the entire field by introducing the term irreducible complexity, an idea that even skeptics should now subscribe to. Note Jan Spitzer’s words Journal of Molecular EvolutionDiscussing the origin of life:
Because the subject of the cellular origin of life is extraordinarily complex (we avoid the term “complex” because of its association with “biological complexity” or “irreducible complexity”), it is unlikely that any comprehensive theory of the nature, origination, and evolution of life can fully formulate it , measured quantitatively, and investigated experimentally.4
When biologists resist using a word like “complex” simply to avoid association with the ID movement, you know that Behe has had a major impact on the field. I don’t know that Quinn could match that influence and today he’s mostly just a polemicist.
Perhaps Quinn is jealous of the ID community’s scientific achievements. I don’t really know. But at the very least, his fidelity to the conflict thesis fades under critical scrutiny.
Notes
- For more on this argument, see Bruce Wrightsman, “Legitimizing Scientific Belief: Justification of the Theory by Copernicus” in Scientific discovery: case studies Edited by T. Nickels, (Dordrecht: Riedel, 1980), 51-66.
- Quoted in Michael J. Crowe, “Astronomy and Religion (1780-1915): Four Case Studies Involving Ideas about Extraterrestrial Life,” Osiris 16 (2001): 212.
- Quoted in Stephen Snobelen, “God of Gods and Lord of Lords: Isaac Newton’s Public School Theology to the World” Principles“,” Osiris 16 (2001): 173.
- Jan Spitzer, “The Origin of Life on Earth: A Physical and Chemical Puzzle,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 84 (2017): 2.
