Pro-Scientific Religion

It’s been a while since I posted something sparked by an online debate.  Two or three weeks ago now, the BBC ran a story on how a patient in a permanent vegetative state had responded well to a new treatment. They opened the story up for comments, and the whole thing played out with tedious inevitability. Indeed the very first comment was a pre-emptive complaint about how no doubt religious people would soon be on there, complaining and making unfavourable comparisons between the efficacy of medical science and prayer. Sigh.

I pointed out with as much patience as possible that science and religion are not intrinsically opposed, and that prayer, scientific research and experimentation are not mutually exclusive. I received the following response:

“Fair enough comment about them not being mutually exclusive, but you cannot say religion isn't diametrically opposed to science. Stem cell research could save thousands in PVS and with congenital disorders, yet religion actively lobbies against these research methods and indeed their very funding. How can that be construed as not being opposed to science in this case?”

I think this perfectly encapsulates a widely-held misconception about the attitude of those with religious beliefs towards science and scientific discoveries. I won’t re-argue the point about ‘religion’ not having its own volition, and therefore not actively lobbying anything. Let’s take that as read, and assume that the poster was instead referring to persons with religious beliefs. Let us also try and ignore the fact that ‘science and religion’ is a false dichotomy in the first place, and just work with what we have.

The idea of ‘religion’ being ‘anti-science’ is probably rooted in the oft-repeated stories about the persecution of Galileo with regards to the heliocentric universe. It wasn’t a good episode in the Church’s history, and they have admitted since that they were wrong. It was also several hundred years ago, and to continue to use it to show that religious folk today are anti-science seems a little weak.

Nowadays, if religion were actually anti-science, religious people would object to any given scientific study or discovery simply because it’s a scientific study or discovery. They do not. Indeed, the vast, vast majority of theists are all in favour of science, along with the improvements in medicine and living conditions that it brings. What they do object to, and I think this is where the confusion comes in, is specific applications of scientific or medical techniques that they consider to be immoral.

To take the poster’s example of stem-cell research, the objections are nothing at all to do with the scientificness of the studies, but with ethical concerns regarding the sourcing of stem cells from human embryos. The arguments for and against such studies are not the subject of this post and I don’t intend to get into them here. No doubt there are plenty of ignorant people who assume that all stem cells are sourced from human embryos, which is not the case, and thus desire a blanket ban on all stem cell research. However, a few ignorant people should hardly be taken as being representative of ‘Religion’, no matter how easy it makes it for antitheists to sneer at religion as a whole. Indeed, being opposed to something simply because you don’t understand it is hardly the sole domain of theists; I would suggest that it also rather accurately describes the stance of many antitheists towards religion.

To use another common example, an opposition to eugenics would hardly be considered ‘anti-science’. The movement for nuclear disarmament isn’t an objection to science. The banning of chemical and biological weapons doesn’t imply an objection to modern medicine. They are merely objections to objectionable applications of (in the case of eugenics at least, some really rather poor) science.

We can debate the rights and wrongs of any given study or process or application of the same, but at no point is this an opposition to ‘Science’. If anything, it is an argument in favour of it. It reflects an ardent desire to make sure that science remains a force for good. In and of itself, science is merely a tool, as morally neutral as a hammer. The desire to use a hammer to build a house instead of to bash in someone’s skull hardly makes one anti-hammers; it makes one incredibly pro-hammers because you wish to see them being used properly for the purpose for which they were intended, and not abused as a weapon to increase human suffering.

Science is morally neutral, and therefore requires a moral framework within which to act. Not all such moral frameworks are religious, but historically it is religion that has supplied them. Christianity tells us that the sick ought to be healed, the hungry fed, the naked clothed. Since science, when used correctly, allows us to do this more effectively, we can hardly be opposed to it as a whole.