Morally Superior Science

One of the most annoying and overused Christian anecdotes is the story of how some well-known scientists/atheist/God-hater eventually turned to God on his deathbed, thus proving that he was wrong and vindicating religious belief once and for all. And of course, there may be some instances of this happening, though I suspect it is far less common than one might think.

An example from last month can be found in the famed philosopher-scientists Daniel Dennet who is a member of the 'religion has no value' gang (see his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon). Dennet was recently rushed to the hospital, diagnosed with a dissection of the aorta, and underwent seven hours of delicate surgery to fix it. He's sixty four and has had heart surgery before, so it was no walk in the park. But did it shake his evangelistic atheism? Not at all. He recounts his ordeal and its effects on him in this article at edge.org. In it, he thanks the 'goodness' that has come about because of the science of modern medicine. The most interesting part to me was this passage:

One thing in particular struck me when I compared the medical world on which my life now depended with the religious institutions I have been studying so intensively in recent years. One of the gentler, more supportive themes to be found in every religion (so far as I know) is the idea that what really matters is what is in your heart: if you have good intentions, and are trying to do what (God says) is right, that is all anyone can ask. Not so in medicine! If you are wrong—especially if you should have known better—your good intentions count for almost nothing. And whereas taking a leap of faith and acting without further scrutiny of one's options is often celebrated by religions, it is considered a grave sin in medicine. A doctor whose devout faith in his personal revelations about how to treat aortic aneurysm led him to engage in untested trials with human patients would be severely reprimanded if not driven out of medicine altogether. There are exceptions, of course. A few swashbuckling, risk-taking pioneers are tolerated and (if they prove to be right) eventually honored, but they can exist only as rare exceptions to the ideal of the methodical investigator who scrupulously rules out alternative theories before putting his own into practice. Good intentions and inspiration are simply not enough.

In other words, whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its members to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does! And I'm not just talking about the standards 'at the top'—among the surgeons and doctors who make life or death decisions every day. I'm talking about the standards of conscientiousness endorsed by the lab technicians and meal preparers, too. This tradition puts its faith in the unlimited application of reason and empirical inquiry, checking and re-checking, and getting in the habit of asking "What if I'm wrong?" Appeals to faith or membership are never tolerated. Imagine the reception a scientist would get if he tried to suggest that others couldn't replicate his results because they just didn't share the faith of the people in his lab! And, to return to my main point, it is the goodness of this tradition of reason and open inquiry that I thank for my being alive today.

Though Dennet is wrong here about Christian teaching, I can easily imagine that he is right about much of the church. Very often we mistake the importance of good motives (which by definition underlie actions and are important in Christian teaching) for an importance of good intentions (which have no value in Christian teaching). We are also prone to value faith for the sake of faith - as if using our minds to reason and eliminate less rational choices is somehow to abandon our trust in holy Providence. But this is not a Biblical understanding of faith. Faith in the Bible is a component of a way of living - trusting in God in daily life as well as in extra-ordinary circumstances. "Leaps of faith" are only required when explicitly called for, often when more reasonable choices are not available. These are grave errors to make, and the only way to eliminate them is through Biblical study and teaching.

But what about Dennet's more serious charge of the moral irresponsibility of the church? His observation is that in few religious communities is there any standard for what effective religious practice should look like and there are seldom any consequences for someone who may decide, on a whim, to practice their religion (or interpret the Bible) in a radically different way. Science, on the other hand, has such standards (namely, the form and limits of logical reason) and they are enforced (by peer review for academics and by the law for practicioners). For Christians, clearly such standards are provided in the Bible and reflected in Christian tradition. Our irresponsibility then lies in our inability or unwillingness to enforce these standards - to require people to, as a friend of mine puts it, 'do theology responsibly.'

Pulling back to the larger picture, when I read works like Dennet's, I am always struck by how blind the church is to its own state of affairs. Dennet is a philosopher and scientist. Yes, biased as an atheist perhaps, but he is "morally" responsible to his scientific code. He looks out at the religious landscape and reports what he sees: large numbers of people who use religion to make themselves feel good about maintaining the same standards of morality that non-religious people hold to, but whose actual theological beliefs have very little impact on how they live their lives. Given that state of affairs, is it any wonder why Dennet and others would question religion's usefulness? If our faith doesn't do any obvious good for mankind, is it any wonder some would ask whether it is actually doing harm?

Cave Man Genetics

The mid-semester pile-up has yielded a big gap between this post and the last one, and I still don't have the time I need to get a few of the posts I have rolling around in my head digitized. But an NPR story I heard recently inspired me to attempt a little something.

Perhaps the coolest research project being conducted on our planet right now is the complete sequencing of the Neanderthal genome being undertaken by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Neanderthals, you may know, were a distinct species of the same genus as us (homo), and, we believe, the only homo species to be on the earth at the same time as modern humans. They may have died out as recently as 27,000 years ago, and as a result there are quite a few fossil around from which viable DNA can be extracted.

Sequencing the Neanderthal genome (which will likely take about two more years before its all done) is exciting for obvious reasons: Neanderthals are much closer to us on the evolutionary tree than anything alive and comparing our DNA with theirs can tell us a lot about what sorts of evolutionary changes had to take place to make us who we are.

The work has obvious theological implications as well. Christian theology takes the relationship between God and man to be a privileged one. Only man is created in God's image and given the responsibility of caretaker for creation. But what about Neanderthal? Modern man and Neanderthal were on earth at the same time and may have even interbred. Did the special God-man relationship extend to Neanderthal as well or does he fall in to the category of the creation that man was put in charge of back in Genesis? If the latter, what is it that separated homo neanderthalensis from homo sapiens? We know Neanderthal had some higher cognitive skills since he used 'advanced' tools. But did he have language? A sense of morals? Abstract reasoning? Until now there has been no way to answer such questions, but the genome projects underway should, at the very least, narrow down the range of possibilities and sharpen our idea of precisely what it means to be human.