Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think
by Elaine Howard Ecklund and Christopher P. Scheitle (Oxford University Press, £19.99)
Christopher Moriarty
Scientists are subversive. Good scientists are supposed to question everything within their sphere. Institutional religion on the other hand demands obedience to the authoritative word and forbids questioning.
The title of this book, by its use of the contraction for ‘versus’, implies that the two are in conflict and, logically, that one or the other should win. It’s an unfortunate, and somewhat misleading choice of words, because the main thrust of the work being done is to encourage dialogue and understanding rather than to produce a winner.
Sadly, this is far from being the only rather loose or almost misleading aspect of the book. For a start the word ‘American’ is used for a survey which actually means a sample of the inhabitants of the United States. That is a common enough generalisation.
The general thrust of the book shows that by ‘science’ the authors mean a couple of important branches of science, particularly the Darwinian theory of evolution and various aspects of cosmology which disagree with the rather low estimate of the age of the earth, as calculated from the Bible.
Evolution
These two are a long, long way from encompassing the discipline of science as a whole. Evolution by natural selection is an excellent theory, but not a scientific statement of fact.
The authors are sociologists who courageously set out on a five-year project to make an assessment of some aspects of the relationship between perceptions on science and religion held by the people of the US.
The book is a study of the replies to questionnaires which the authors compiled and a great number of interviews which they conducted. They also, in the course of their work, visited many churches and religious institutions. It was clearly a very thorough study and the results are given in the book in the form of statistical tables and summaries of the interviews with representative individuals.
The work gives a broad illustration, including a statistical statement, of the facts that a great many scientists are also committed believers in the transcendental either within established religious denominations, or in their personal development of belief. In this sense it is a useful and interesting snapshot of the current situation within a very substantial and influential portion of humanity.
The interviews it presents are wide-ranging and some of them saddening. One such is that of a young person who felt she could not embark on a university course in biology because it might contain teaching which disagreed with her fundamentalist biblical faith.
Another is the way in which people with similar problems go to their pastors for advice – unaware of the probability that the pastor will be unlikely tell them anything other than the sect’s official teaching.
The subtitle of the book ‘What Religious People Really Think’ underlines the supposed problem which it aims to solve. By no stretch of the imagination does the adjective ‘religious’ define any human population in creation. Similarly, ‘science’ is difficult to pin down.
The work of a great many scientists, myself amongst them, is often classed as ‘unscientific’ because the results cannot be repeated. In their attempt to quantify the unquantifiable with definitions of the indefinable the authors provide some interesting observations on a supposed conflict and they may be commended for their courage.