As a physicist who is also trained in history and sociology of science and who has been regularly reading Physics Today for more than 30 years, I cannot let Tom McLeish’s Commentary on science and religion go unanswered.
Far from “thinking differently,” McLeish rehashes the usual confused discourse on the topic. For example, he never defines the term “religion.” As a consequence, the author mixes religion as a social institution with the personal beliefs and convictions of scientists. All natural philosophers from the 17th century to late in the 19th century had a personal belief in a kind of god, creator of the universe. But that is a different matter from the social conflicts that have emerged at different times as religious institutions worked hard to impose what they considered the proper understanding of nature. Those conflicts were many; they involved first astronomy, then geology and biology, and, later, history of religious texts and of the origins of humans.
The second confusion at the root of McLeish’s argument is between what is and what should be—that is, between fact and norm. That there should not be conflict between science and religion is what we all may want, but such conflicts have existed in various societies and times, and there is no reason to believe they won’t continue. The basic logical and philosophical distinctions between what is and what ought to be have been known at least since John Locke and David Hume, but McLeish still writes that “it is, sadly, possible to invent conflict where none needs to be.” It should not have happened that—among many—Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Bernard de Fontenelle, Francesco Algarotti, and even the priests Henry de Dorlodot, John Zahm, and Dalmace Leroy saw their work censured or put in the Catholic Church’s index of prohibited books. And it should not have happened that Alexander Winchell lost his job at Vanderbilt University because of his talks on evolution. But those things did happen.1
Instead of suggesting that such historical conflicts are “hurting science,” we must examine why those events occurred. And to understand them, we must talk about religions as social institutions that have varying amounts of power to limit scientific freedom. Some readers may well agree with McLeish that the literal reading of texts such as Genesis is an “aberration away from orthodox Christianity,” but such believers do exist, and they do their best to limit scientific research: Recall President George W. Bush’s 2001 decision to limit federally funded research on stem cells.
The best way to think differently about science and religion is first to realize that the personal beliefs and religious convictions of scientists have never been the root cause of those historical conflicts. The conflicts were—and still are—the result of a clash over the social authority of two important institutions: organized religions that want to control the behavior of citizens in the name of a creator and science as a collective organization that pursues the empirical and naturalistic explanation of nature. Negating a reality that one dislikes is not the best way to change it for a better one.
