Originally published 6 June 2001
The writer and conservationist Wendell Berry is just the latest in a long line of critics who accuse science of being a religion.
“We really seem to have conceded to scientists, to the extent of their own regrettable willingness to occupy it, the place once occupied by the prophets and priests of religion,” he writes in his newest book, Life Is a Miracle.
He echoes the Czech poet, playwright, and statesman Václav Havel, who famously said of science that “it kills God and takes his place on the vacant throne…as [the] sole legitimate arbiter of all relevant truth.”
Christian fundamentalists, too, accuse scientists of embracing Darwinism on faith, not evidence. They try to turn science on its head: You guys are pushing unsupported faith in the classroom, they say; we just want equal time.
Curiously, the intellectual left and the religious right agree: Science is grounded on faith just as much as any traditional religion. It has made of itself a new dogma, and scientists are the high priests who dispense these presumed “truths” to the masses.
The theme is worth examining: To what extent has science made of itself a new religion?
Yes, it is true that science is based on unproven articles of faith. What are they?
There is a world that exists independently of our own minds.
The world is conformable to our minds; that is, it is rational, logical, and mathematical.
Things happen according to natural laws, not whimsically or arbitrarily.
Nature’s laws can be known with an ever greater degree of confidence.
That’s it. That’s the extent of the “faith” of science. No one can prove these articles of faith. Our conviction of their truth is supported only by the manifest success of science as a way of acquiring reliable knowledge. Every other avenue to truth — myth, magic, revelation — is static. Only science is open-ended; only science is an engine of change.
Whether the changes we attribute to science are good or bad is a matter of debate, and critics from both left and right have accused science of leading us into a moral wilderness. “Science, quietly and inexplicitly, is talking us into abandoning our true selves,” writes the cultural critic Bryan Appleyard. What all of these critics long for is the kind of fixed and certain truths that characterized a presumed Golden Age in the past.
But the past was perhaps not as “golden” as the critics claim, and few folks anywhere on the Earth today would choose to turn the clock back.
If science has acquired so much influence, it must be because it offers something people want. The scientific community has no coercive power to make people believe, no claim of infallibility, no threat of hellfire, no gulags. Let’s face it: science has become a widely embraced human way of knowing because it generates desirable benefits — technology, medicine, agricultural abundance.
It hasn’t been so long, after all, since people spent half their lives with toothaches or putting babies in the grave. None of that changed a whit during the long reign of myth and magic.
There are important ways in which science is not like religion.
It is cold, faceless, abstract, and opaque. Not even scientists generally understand much of science except their own areas of expertise. Although there is a widespread intuitive feeling that science is a good thing, most people choose to live their lives adhering to some more personable form of traditional knowledge. They want antibiotics and miracles, the Internet and revelation.
Science is perhaps most unlike religion in that it rejects dogma (taking time occasionally to examine even its own unproven articles of faith), in spite of the claims of critics that science abides no dissent. Like any truth system, science is conservative, but change is essential to the way science works. A scientist must be radically open to marginal change and marginally open to radical change, and the history of science confirms that this is pretty much the case.
Scientists are not like the prophets and priests of old. They are our sons and daughters, our next-door neighbors, the person sitting across the aisle on the subway. They don’t wear fancy vestments, dispense wisdom, issue blessings or curses. They make no claims for moral superiority. They are just making a living, getting paid for doing something they very much like to do — namely, tease out one more of the presumed natural laws that govern the world.
There are no churches where we go to worship science, no god of science to whom we can pray. Tolstoy was right when he said that science tells us nothing about “What shall we do and how shall we be?” For that, we still need the guidance of more ancient forms of wisdom.
