Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

The Marriage of Science and Religion 193
ence and Common Sense” 197). He realized that even intelligent and perceptive
people will believe what is in their interest to believe, and he did
not exclude scientists from this common fate (Pearson 233). But he did not
realize that for the scientist ignorance is failure. Within his area of investigation,
to say “I don’t know” is to admit defeat. No professional wants to
be known as the “carpenter who blames his tools.” As Shaw often pointed
out, we all believe what it is profitable for us to believe.
Science is more like religion than many scientists are willing to concede.
Not only are faith and dogma crucial to the enterprise, but the mythologizing
process of science welds together two incompatibles: certainty and
doubt. The fundamental myth of science holds that it accrues certainty
through systematic doubt. Neither is true: not the method nor the result,
but the myth is accepted almost without question. Successful enterprises,
like successful nations, rarely doubt their own myths. Americans are
shocked if anyone doubts that their country’s destiny is to lead the rest of
the world into political salvation; Europeans, who have been there themselves,
look on with patronizing amusement. The amazing success of science
in the past few hundred years has led scientists into unreasonable
ideas about their own powers of understanding. They do have every reason
to be proud of their achievements. Even if science is something of a game,
it is a game played by very demanding rules, and these rules, which insist
on rigorous testing and mathematical precision, help to give credence to
the scientific myth. We do not see our weaknesses until taught by failure;
hubris is the besetting sin of heroes, not of mediocrities or losers.
Science and Religion: Separate but Equal?
If Shaw objected strenuously to the banishment of mind and value and
the dogmatic acceptance of the materialist metaphysic, he dissented as
well from the view that science and religion occupied separate, watertight
spheres. He passionately believed that it does no good to base your values
on religion, if you continue to maintain that the physical world is entirely
the domain of the mechanistic science. Here, as elsewhere, Shaw is at odds
with those one would expect to be his natural allies, in this case those who
wish to find a place for both science and religion. There is probably no
principle dearer to the hearts of those Darwinists who do not, like Richard
Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, embrace Darwin as a support for atheism,
than the belief that religion and science inhabit entirely separate realms.
Stephen Jay Gould, a good representative of that group, insists that scien-