Book Review: Faith vs. Fact
Faith vs. Fact:
When I was at Lourdes in August, I visited the grotto where innumerable crutches had been put on display as a sign of miraculous healing. My companion pointed out these trophies of illness and whispered in my ear:“ One single wooden leg would have been much more convincing.”
The bluntness of the punchline accurately signals the general tone of Coyne's book, a follow-up to his bestselling Why Evolution is True; in these pages, he takes up the contention made by a good many societal compromisers (he calls them “accommodationists”) to reconcile the worlds of science and organized religion – and thoroughly and systematically dismantles that contention. He reference the famous idea of the late, beloved Harvard science-writer Stephen Jay Gould that religion and science are “non-overlapping magisteria” - and then thoroughly dismantles it as well. According to Coyne – and according to any application of common sense whatsoever – the whole process of scientific inquiry is fundamentally incompatible with a religious worldview based on the miraculous, which they all are, and dedicated to proselytizing, which they all are. The two concepts are in a starkly adversarial relationship in which, as Sam Harris pointed out ten years ago, there must eventually be one winner and one loser.The fact that Harris made that same assertion ten years ago and a century after Anatole France made a very similar observation about the patent fraud of religion's grosser claims says almost everything that needs saying about the usefulness of books like Faith vs. Fact.Coyne wants to raise the alarm that while liberal-minded accommodationists are stretching out the hand of compromise, the religious are constantly seeking to take over the world – both the world of ideas, as in the case of American religious fundamentalists seeking to have Biblical creationism taught in public schools, and in the actual physical world, as in the case of radical Islamic groups like ISIS. He emphasizes the time-honored testability of science, and stresses that none of religion's claims can be tested – and that this very unverifiability is often a point of pride among the religious:
Theists' typical response to these failures is to say either that “God won't let himself be tested,” or “That's not what prayer is about: it's simply a way to converse with God.” But you can bet that had these studies shown a large positive effect, the religious would be noisily flaunting this as evidence for God. The confirmation bias shown by accepting positive results but explaining away negative ones is an important difference between science and religion.
One of Coyne's central contentions is science has long since made every aspect of religion irrelevant:
The biggest problem with theistic evolution, as with all attempts to twist theology to fit new facts, is that it's simply a metaphysical add-on to a physical theory, a supplement demanded not by evidence but by the emotional needs of the faithful. It's what philosopher Anthony Grayling calls an “arbitrary superfluity”: the cosmological twiddling that Laplace rejected when he told Napoleon that the God hypothesis wasn't needed.
Faith vs. Fact brings up all the major ways in which organized religion actively opposes science, trying to block things like global warming research, vaccinations, stem cell research, and assisted suicide policies for the terminally ill, in addition of course to the periodic attempts to smuggle creationism into high school and college curricula under its latest guise of “intelligent design”:
The Christian roots of ID, and the private statements of its proponents, show that it's intended to replace the “disease” of naturalism with purely Christian metaphysics. ID is simply creationism gussied up to sound more scientific, in a vain attempt to circumvent U.S court rulings prohibiting religious incursions into public schools.
Coyne's book is a bit drab and a bit dutiful, a comprehensive but hardly soaring second-act iteration of the party platform of the so-called New Atheists. He hits all the notes of Dawkins, Dennett, et al: that nobody needs religion in order to have morality; that organized religions are inherently fascistic; that science is a far better way to deal with reality than antiquated mythologies, etc. But alongside making these points, he also cites alarming poll numbers indicating that the making of the points produces little or no intellectual traction – huge numbers of Americans, for example, are still happy to tell pollsters that they believe in Adam and Eve and angels.Those Americans won't bother to read Faith vs. Fact, except maybe to dismiss its contents. But readers who don't believe in fairies should read the book, if only to see what the second wave of New Atheists is up to.