Book Review: Jerry Coyne, Faith Vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible

Jerry Coyne, Faith Vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible (New York: Viking Press, 2015), 336pp.

Viking Press kindly provided me with a review copy which - as you can tell - in no way guaranteed a favorable review.

           

 The period of 2005-2006 was, by all accounts, the time of the atheist.  Major publications by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens had just been released, and in Dover, Pennsylvania, Intelligent Design as a movement was designated by a Federal District court as “unscientific”, thereby disallowing it from being taught in the classroom alongside evolution.  As shocking as it might sound, then, the “New Atheists” are not so new anymore, now that we are nearly a decade out from this initial bloom.  The latest offering from among their faithful is Jerry Coyne’s Faith vs. Fact, and in part it is encouraging to note that the last ten years of criticism of many facets of the New Atheist movement have not been lost on him. Quite reasonably, Coyne doesn’t think that religion poisons everything; he is perfectly aware that there are many intelligent people—scientists included—who are believers; and he also realizes (as he lays out especially in chapter four) that theology is not merely a “God-of-the-gaps” enterprise.  Rather than the promiscuous internet narratives of religion’s outright toxicity—which so easily slides from the idea that religion poisons everything, to everything poisonous being identified as religion—on the surface, Coyne has much humbler goals than his New Atheist compatriots: to demonstrate that science and religion are in principle, as a matter of methodology, incompatible.

Despite what Coyne would have us believe, however, the path to whittle down the issues to a simple duel of “fact vs. faith” is far from simple—and indeed, far from “scientific.”  For even those who advocate a “scientific theology” are perfectly aware that there are methodological differences that must be respected.  Once one gets past the many caveats appearing to present us with a much more leveled—even winsome—no-nonsense approach to religion, many of the assertions Coyne supposedly discards in the name of nuance creep in the back door.  I will generally refer to this strategy as the “give an inch, take a mile” gambit.  Sometimes this method is subtle, and the ideas do not do a lot of major lifting.  For example Coyne (rightly, I think) says it would be pointless to engage in the “who has caused more violence in the 20^th century” debate between religion and atheism.  Yet—parenthetically after this statement—he notes that religion would, in his opinion, lose should the contest be waged.  Now, he is certainly entitled to his opinion.  Yet for our purposes, look at what has happened: he has essentially insulated himself from reprimand because he disavows using such a statement as an argument (even though secretly, it has in fact just affected the judgment of the reader).  This would be a harmless instance if it were not so prevalent as a general method, subtly shaping the cumulative opinion of the science-religion relationship, building a sort of implicit “horizon” in which Coyne fits his thesis. 

            

Another, much more important instance of the gambit, regards Coyne noting that it would be “petulant to argue that religion, or Christianity … made no contribution to science,” (this is more than many New Atheists would admit!). Nonetheless, that said, he affirms as true the  “conflict” thesis of Andrew Dickson White and John William Draper, penned over a century ago, that Christianity has been the perennial foe to the progress of science.  He makes an attempt again at nuance, acknowledging many of the critiques lodged against White and Draper (and those who follow in their footsteps): “Yes [White and Draper] did make some errors and omit some countervailing observations, but not nearly enough to invalidate the books’ theses.”  He continues with a jeremiad against so-called “revisionist” historians by saying, “Its self-serving distortion to say that religion was not an important issue in the persecutions of Galileo and John Scopes. … The religious roots of these disputes are clear.”

Well no, they aren’t.[1] Much as with the topic of violence above, Coyne concedes an inch, only to take a mile.  Here he is drastically out of step with the emerging consensus on the historical relation of science and Christianity, where historians not only believe White and Draper’s works to be useless (aside from being taken as interesting cultural artifacts of their time), but these historians also explicitly target the so-called “warfare thesis” as a clear case of how metaphors can utterly warp historiography.[2]  This muddled understanding of history not only continues to set the backdrop in which Coyne’s thesis is pursued (despite his insistence that he is only interested in methodology).  In addition, the inadequacy of his use of history is made all the more pronounced, given that one of the most important works published on the topic in the last twenty years—Peter Harrison’s The Territories of Science and Religion—hit the presses nearly contemporaneously to Coyne’s own book.[3]

This is no obscure point.  Historical pictures hold us captive, and often provide the ballast for the public imagination at large—even shaping how specialists interpret the evidence.[4]  In fact this leads to a related point made by Coyne: if science and religion are in harmony, he asks, why then is so much ink spilled to prove as much?  He detects in this fervor that all is not well in paradise.  And yet Coyne misses the point: the continual need stems not from an actual conflict, but because so many unthinkingly conflate ontological naturalism (a philosophical position) with their empiricism.  One wishes that Coyne was as perceptive and straightforward as Richard Lewontin, who wrote “It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.  Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”[5]  

Coyne’s gambit of conceding an inch, and taking a mile, does not end there.  Another complaint typically leveled at the New Atheists is that they do not deal with the strongest Christian theological arguments and defenders.  He remedies this to an extent—names like Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Francis Collins, Simon Conway-Morris, and Kenneth Miller do appear.  But aside from citing them as evidence of the fairly benign point that theologians believe God is “a person,” or when Coyne dismisses the fine-tuning argument, he does not deal with any material these thinkers put forward.  The copious scholarship regarding the historical reliability of the Gospels, the early worship of Christ, and the historicity of the resurrection, are dismissed in a single, flippant paragraph (in a hilarious moment, perhaps wanting to emphasize just how many problems there are, he picks one problem at random.  He thus notes there is no independent evidence of the darkness during Jesus’ crucifixion.  As far as random picks go, this one is unfortunate since its incorrect.)[6] 

William Lane Craig’s cosmological arguments are not mentioned, miracles are dismissed without so much as a nod to Craig Keener’s two-volume work on the subject (in fact Hume is simply considered the last word), and Plantinga’s argument that Christian beliefs can be counted as “basic” are not even spoken of.  In fact, in a strange move for a book on scientific method, Coyne explicitly absolves himself of dealing with epistemology at all, saying he is not going to dive into those “murky waters.”  Yes, that would be inconvenient for him, indeed.  At one point he even appears to justify this superficial handling of Christian theologians, because “it is more important to deal with religious beliefs as they are held by a vast majority of people on earth.”  By “people” he generally means Christians, and by “Christians” he generally means American fundamentalists.

In doing a run-around epistemology, and by equating the Christianity he attacks with Fundamentalism, Coyne can therefore put forward without argumentation both that “scientific” means “empirical,” and, that by “religious explanation” he means: “how religion makes empirical claims.”  As such, whenever he sees someone exclaim that the Bible is “not a science textbook,” he translates this to mean: “that the bible is not completely accurate.” Though throughout the book Coyne plays the part of uncompromising rationalist, when it suits him he can play the part of befuddled every-man.  At one point he asks, with tongue nowhere in his cheek: how we are to know what a text means if we don’t “take it literally”? Elsewhere he makes the claim that the Bible nowhere—except for the parables of Jesus—gives any indication that it is to be read as anything less than literal accounts (read: a science textbook).  Almost as if he waved a magic wand, Coyne unceremoniously “disappears” the entire discipline of hermeneutics, and all of its intricate sub-fields.  He intends to take religion “seriously” but only by identifying it nearly exclusively with an American fundamentalism he has cherry-picked to suit his argumentative needs (he again tries to justify this move, but his reasons are some of the weakest in the book).

Likewise, he has nothing but scorn for “apophatic” theologians who advise us that God escapes our conceptual categories (humorously, at one point he calls Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart “a liberal” for in fact following a time-honored method of the Church).  This also lets Coyne collapse the metaphysical aspects of Christian explanation into merely physical statements.  By doing so, Coyne therefore rejects all Christian explanation as nothing but physical placeholders, that is, the dreaded “God-of-the-gaps.”  Thus, for example, when Christians argue that morality requires a transcendent source, Coyne interprets this argument as turning on a lack of a physical explanation, and says its ridiculous to assume that science will never make inroads into the physical mechanisms behind morality (thereby, of course, completely missing the point of the argument).

As such, when we actually arrive at the few instances where Coyne is actually on-topic, the arguments he ends up putting forward feel more like isolated anecdotes that are connected by little more than the force of the impression radiating off of his background material (the history of Christianity and science, accomodationists motivated only by money, etc. …)  Which is not to say Coyne makes no good points.  To my mind Coyne is right that theologians who have found an “opening” for God’s activity in quantum fluctuations are talking nonsense, while the empirical (non) demonstrability of prayer is something that we must think about and take seriously, if it is indeed true.  In the end though, Coyne’s work merely feigns advance over his predecessors, relies on selective and one-sided citation, and ultimately remains woefully tone-deaf to philosophy, hermeneutics, history, indeed nearly anything else outside his own preferred fields.  While Christians should read this book to familiarize themselves with what is being said, there is little here that hasn’t arisen before.  That yawning you hear is not the chasm between science and Christianity, it’s the unfortunate side-effect of disappointed boredom.

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[1] For a small sample on Galileo, cf. John Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 106-141; Maurice O. Finnocchiaro, “Science, Religion, and the Historiography of the Galileo Affair: On the Undesirability of Oversimplification,” John Hedley Brooke, Margaret Osler, and Jitse M. van der Meer, eds., Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 114-133.  These are just a handful of samples from an ocean of literature.  And for a broader contextual look at the Scopes trial, cf. Adam R. Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2015), esp. 87-111. 

[2] For the curious, here are a few fantastic introductory texts.  Cf. Ronald Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail, And Other Myths About Science and Religion (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009); Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey, eds., Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Gary B. Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Ronald Numbers and David Lindberg, eds., God & Nature: Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (California: University of California, 1986); John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

[3] Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 

[4] On the use of historical myths in science, cf. Derrick Peterson, “Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes: Rethinking the History of Science and Christianity,” available at  https://www.academia.edu/11315184/Flat_Earths_and_Fake_Footnotes_Reconsidering_the_History_of_Science_and_Christianity.

[5] Richard Lewontin, review of Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World in The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997.

[6] Cf. Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2000), 20.