Science vs. religion : what scientists really think - File PDF

The Voice of Science 19And they often have a narrow definition of science, too, seeing all science in thepure Mertonian form as described above. These scientists do not only comefrom fields like biology—fields currently embroiled in public debates aboutreligion and science. Scientists across all disciplines have adopted a “conflictparadigm,” although this group makes up only a small percentage (15 percent)of the 275 scientists I interviewed. A few scientists, some of whom alluded toGalileo’s conflict with the Catholic Church, flatly declared that there is no hopefor achieving a common ground of dialogue between scientists and religiousbelievers.The public conflict is most clearly manifested in debates about teachingintelligent design in public schools. 12 There are also controversies aboutresearch on embryonic stem cells and about human genetic engineering. 13Beyond such public conflicts, 10 percent of scientists also mentioned personalconflicts with religion that led them to reject faith once they learned moreabout science.From a very early age, Arik was convinced that science had largely replacedreligion. Although he was raised in a Jewish household, for his parents, beingJewish was largely a matter of following rules and cultural practices ratherthan religious belief. As an adult, he has become even more convinced thatreligion is deleterious to science. (He wondered aloud if he was extreme inthis view compared to the other scientists I talked with.) He told me that theconflict between religion and science is “not a conflict between opposingforces,” since what science is up against is nothing but “garbage—the detritusleft over from the age of enlightenment and the scientific revolution.” Hesaid, “It’s the only realization of the battle between good and evil that I knowof.” For Arik, science embodies everything good, and religion is beyond irrelevant.It’s evil.Although perhaps less contentious than Arik, a sociologist 14 who taught ata large research university in the Midwest said that religion is “a response thatpeople generate to [deal with] general basic fears about life and death andwhere we come from.” He quickly added that the more he learns about science,the less religious he becomes. When I asked him whether he thinks thereis a conflict between religion and science, he said without hesitation that thereis. The conflict arises because science is, at its core, about observing. By contrast,religion involves believing in things that you cannot observe. As hethought about it further, he reasoned that scientists who have faith must beexperiencing “some kind of schizophrenia between two parts of their livesand fulfilling different functions [rather] than [having] an integrated way oflooking at things.” For this sociologist, science and religion seemed so verymuch in conflict that it was hard for him to imagine how one could even be a