As we now start getting into the details of Jerry Coyne’s book Faith vs. Fact, I am going to try to cover each chapter in the same manner. I am going to first provide a brief synopsis/overview of the main points or topics Coyne covers in that particular chapter, and then I will proceed to touch upon every main point he makes. There are five chapters in Coyne’s book, and I don’t imagine I will be able to cover each chapter in a mere post. Therefore, I imagine this book analysis of Faith vs. Fact will eventually be upwards of ten posts. With that said, let’s get to it.
Overview
Chapter 1 of Faith vs. Fact is entitled, “The Problem.” So, what’s the problem? Coyne tells us on page 1: “Science and religion…are competitors at discovering truths about nature.” And “Religion…has no ability to overturn the truths found by science.” Coyne further claims that this conflict between science and religion began in 16th century Europe, when science began to exist as a formal discipline and began to challenge religion’s power and dogma (i.e. Christianity’s power and dogma) that had dominated society up to that time. Coyne then appeals to the stories of Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial to further illustrate this conflict between science and religion, and in particular, religion’s persecution of science.
Given that conflict, Coyne then discusses how liberal churches deal with this conflict by modifying their theology, whereas conservative churches put up a fight. In addition, Coyne also talks about accomodationism and the attempts by some groups like BioLogos and the Templeton Foundation to show that there really isn’t a conflict between science and religion. He notes that, in addition to groups like BioLogos and even the official catechism of the Catholic Church, organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Center for Science Education also promote this very thing. This is a problem in Coyne’s opinion because in his view there really is a conflict. In his opinion, the only reason why some scientific organizations promote accomodationism is because they simply don’t want to offend religious people. In addition, many scientists are strapped for cash and they really want Templeton Foundation grants, so they go along with the charade in order to secure money for their scientific research.
After that, Coyne then denies the notion of free will and the idea of consciousness or a “metaphysical I.” He claims that “most scientists and philosophers” are determinists who deny there really is anything like free will. Everything we think we choose really is just the results of our genetic makeup and environmental factors. Coyne then ends the chapter by reiterating his opening point: religion and science are in conflict, and religion makes empirical claims about nature and reality that it can’t scientifically prove and/or that science can actually disprove. Simply put, religious claims fail scientific questioning.
Galileo and the Inquisition
I am going to address Coyne’s first (and last) point of the chapter regarding the conflict between religion and science at the end of my analysis of chapter 1. Given that main point, Coyne argues that science and religion have been in conflict ever since the 16th century, when the formal discipline of science began to wrest control of society away from Church power and dogma. And he holds up Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial as exhibits A and B that illustrate Christianity’s hostile persecution of science. He writes, “…it’s a self-serving distortion to say that religion was not an important issue in the persecutions of Galileo and John Scopes” (5).
Well, at the risk of sounding self-serving, let me suggest that the commonly accepted narratives about both the trial of Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial tend to shade the truth about the reality of those two events. Yes, it certainly is easy and convenient to just accept the cartoonish and over-simplistic narrative of each event, but I think looking at the historical facts of reality might be a better route to take. I write about Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial in a bit more detail in both Christianity and the (R)evolution in Worldviews and The Heresy of Ham, but for now, a brief summary of events will have to do.
The typical story about Galileo that most people assume is true goes something like this: The Catholic Church taught the sun goes around the earth; Galileo, an enlightened scientist, said, “No, the earth goes around the sun!” And so, the Inquisition put Galileo on trial for heresy, tortured him in prison until he recanted, and then put him under house arrest for the rest of his life. Reality tells a different story.
The first thing to realize is that from the time of Copernicus up to Galileo, the jury was still out in regard to our understanding of the Solar System. What is obvious to us now wasn’t so obvious back then. This is reality of scientific discovery. Until a convincing argument is made, there is always a certain level of uncertainty across the board. Back in the time of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, these things were being hashed out and debated.
Here are the facts regarding Galileo. In 1616, Cardinal Bellarmine of the Inquisition ruled that Galileo should abandon his advocacy of Copernicus’ theories. But then in 1623, Galileo’s friend, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. It was the Pope who actually encouraged Galileo to write a book that discussed the controversial issue of heliocentrism—there was only one request: do not advocate for it; just lay out the arguments for and against it. In other words, the Pope wanted to address and discuss the issue, but he wanted Galileo to just lay the facts out first.
So, at the Pope’s request, Galileo wrote Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The book was written in the form of a dialogue between an advocate of the heliocentric view (a man named Salviati), and an advocate for the geocentric view (a man named Simplicio…that is, “Simpleton” or “Fool”). Now, Galileo didn’t actually advocate heliocentrism, but he did basically call the man in his book who advocated for geocentrism (whom it was clear was Cardinal Bellarmine), “stupid-butthead.” In short, Galileo got called up before the Inquisition not so much because of heliocentrism, but because he insulted Cardinal Bellarmine. And what happened at his trial? Well, it wasn’t prison and torture. When Galileo was called before the Inquisition, he spent 18 days (April 12-30, 1633 AD) being interrogated. During that time, he stayed at the prosecutor’s six-room apartment, was given a servant, and was served meals twice a day that came from the Tuscan embassy. His ultimate punishment was that he had to live in Florence, Italy.
To be clear, the whole trial of Galileo was incredibly stupid and petty. But we need to see that what precipitated it had more to do with Galileo’s snarky jab at Cardinal Bellarmine that it was actually about his advocacy of heliocentrism. At the time, within the medieval universities that were largely invented by the Catholic Church, this was the new scientific issue that was being debated and discussed. Long story short, the often-repeated narrative about Galileo being imprisoned and tortured by the Catholic Church that was dead set against heliocentrism is simply a false and misleading caricature that wilts in the light of historical reality.
The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925
The Scopes Monkey Trial is another instance where historical reality proves the accepted narrative to be false and misleading. The standard narrative is this: John Scopes was a heroic science teacher, determined to teach evolution in his public school, but the Bible-thumping crazies in Dayton, Tennessee took him to trial and found him guilty. Well, here are the facts that should provide context.
Since the publication of Origin of Species, Darwin’s theory of evolution was being hashed out and debated in scientific circles. On the religious side, there were Christians who accepted the scientific theory and there were some who didn’t. But we need to understand a bit of what was going on in our culture in the 1920’s. In regard to the trial itself, Tennessee had passed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution, and certain people in Dayton, Tennessee wanted to put the law to the constitutional test. And so, they got John Scopes to claim that he had taught evolution at the local high school, so that they could have trial. It was, from beginning to end, a show trial ultimately about the issues of politics and morality, and not really about science and religion.
But why all the fuss to begin with? Well, to the point, eugenics was all the rage in the 1920s, and the science textbook in question at the trial, A Civic Biology, didn’t just teach the actual scientific theory of evolution, it actually promoted eugenics and the racial superiority of the white race. It said that the same breeding methods used on animals should be applied to human beings for the betterment of the human race. It claimed that the human race should demand of anyone who gets married “the freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring.” And it claimed that certain diseases were “not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity.”It described eugenics as “the science of being well born.” It went so far as to characterize people who couldn’t contribute to society as “parasites,” and contemplated killing those parasites off as a means to cleanse the gene pool, only to lament, “Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.”
In fact, the same year A Civic Biology was praising European efforts to rid the world of the degenerate races, Adolf Hitler was publishing Mein Kampf, in which he too endorsed those same efforts. Hitler was not an anomaly—he was a product of the times. What he did was what the eugenicists of Europe and America were calling for—and they made it a point to use evolution as their justification. To the point, A Civic Biology was not simply a science textbook. It was a propaganda manual that advocated the very things that later Nazis and Communists enacted. It had a clear agenda: treat human beings in the same way you treat your dog. We now rightly condemn the Nazis for their “final solution,” but we also need to come to terms with the fact that Hitler merely put into practice the very things American biology textbooks were advocating in the 1920s.
And that was what William Jennings Bryan fundamentally opposed. In truth, in the course of the trial, it was obvious that he didn’t really understand what the actual scientific theory was about. His concern was with Social Darwinism, not the biological theory itself. In fact, at the end of the trial, Bryan issued a summation that was passed out to those in the courtroom but was not read in court. Far from being some sort of wild-eyed young earth creationist fundamentalist, Bryan’s statements were remarkably poignant and thoughtful. He wrote:
“Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo.
“In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane, the earth’s surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times as bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love. Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future. If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.”
Bryan’s problem was not so much in the actual theory of evolution itself, but rather very real danger that science, when unchecked by a moral code, could bring great destruction upon human society. And at that time in the 1920s, many people were pointing to “science” and “evolution” in order to justify some absolutely horrific things. Bryan’s summation is not only true, but his statement proved to be absolutely prophetic as the 20th century witnessed the greatest atrocities known to man: it was advances in science, coupled with the tearing away of the Christian moral code that had governed Western society for almost 2,000 years, that made it possible for things like the gulag, Auschwitz, and the atomic bomb.
Note: To clarify something in light of a few responses to this post, I’m not saying Bryan and the people of Dayton opposed evolution because they were specifically opposing eugenics. They were opposing Social Darwinism–they didn’t really even understand the actual theory of evolution. They were concerned what science, unchecked by the moral compass of Christianity, might lead to–and that very book at the center of the trial was advocating something that would, in fact, lead to millions of deaths.
Conclusion
Does all this mean there are no religiously motivated zealots who oppose evolution because they think that Genesis 1-11 is 100% historical and literal? Of course not. One can travel to see a huge ark in Kentucky to confirm that. What this does mean, though, is that Coyne’s “Exhibit A” and “Exhibit B” that supposedly prove his claim that Religion and Science have always been at odds with each other, and that Christianity has always opposed the advancement of science is not so much based in reality, as it is based on false caricatures of history. If Coyne really knows the historical reality behind Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial, I have to thus conclude he is being purposely dishonest. If he doesn’t know the actual history, then he has no business writing a book like Faith vs. Fact until he has done some proper research.
Final Note: Someone shared with me this fascinating article on Galileo that, quite frankly, better explains it than this post!
There never has been a conflict between science and religion. For approx. 1200 years the medieval Roman Catholic Church was the primary sponsor of scientific inquiry.
The 12th and 13th centuries in Western Europe saw the rise of scholasticism and the foundation of the first universities. And as mathematics and science were a compulsory part of the syllabus in medieval universities, by 1200 almost half of the highest offices in the Church were held by degreed masters. Thus, Oxford Professor of the History of Science James Hannam argues that the Christian Middle Ages paved the way for the 17th century scientific revolution.
The problem with medieval astronomers of the Church is that they put all of their eggs in Aristotle and Ptolemy’s baskets, who both argued for an earth-centered solar system. It made sense at the time as it fit the observable data, but it was wrong. As you said, the “Galileo affair” had much more to do with politics and interpersonal relationships than it did with actual science. Basically, Galileo didn’t know when to shut up. Yet his second treatise was published during his house arrest under the very nose of the Inquisition, who totally ignored it.
But the Catholic Church has more than redeemed itself. For example, the astrophysicist and cosmologist who first postulated the Big Bang Theory in the 1920s was Belgian Monsignor Georges Lemaitres.
Pax.
Lee.
Good points nicely made. I was unaware of the nuances you explained. Thanks for shared research.
It’s important to note, for the sake of historical accuracy, that the biology book involved in the Scopes Trial advocated eugenics, but I seriously doubt that Bryan or the people of Tennessee were particularly concerned with this point.
After all, lets not forget Tennessee is in the “Bible Belt”, or, historically, the Jim Crow South. Most people in this region, religious or secular, would have agreed with the rhetoric about degenerate races, and anti-miscegenation.
I agree that the idea of faith and science in conflict misses the point, and I agree that there’s a lot of historical nuance in the Scopes Trial that gets glossed over. However, while the eugenics passages should be troubling for us modern audiences, I don’t think we should suggest that that particular aspect would have been troubling to the people of Dayton, Tennessee.
It’s important to note, for the sake of historical accuracy, that the biology book involved in the Scopes Trial advocated eugenics, but I seriously doubt that Bryan or the people of Tennessee were particularly concerned with this point.
After all, lets not forget Tennessee is in the “Bible Belt”, or, historically, the Jim Crow South. Most people in this region, religious or secular, would have agreed with the rhetoric about degenerate races, and anti-miscegenation.
I agree that the idea of faith and science in conflict misses the point, and I agree that there’s a lot of historical nuance in the Scopes Trial that gets glossed over. However, while the eugenics passages should be troubling for us modern audiences, I don’t think we should suggest that that particular aspect would have been troubling to the people of Dayton, Tennessee.
True, Bryan had much to say about science’s inability to provide moral guidance, but the examples he gave all involved warfare, not racism or eugenics.