Comparisons of science and religion

After reading Marilynne Robinson's superb novel Gilead, I wondered whether she might have written anything about the 'new' atheism. Looking about, I found this review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I want to discuss the following passage from it:

There is a pervasive exclusion of historical memory in Dawkins's view of science. Consider this sentence from his preface, which occurs in the context of his vision of a religion-free world: "Imagine... no persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers.'"... While it is true that persecution of the Jews has a very long history in Europe, it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale - Jewishness was not religious or cultural, but genetic. Therefore no appeal could be made against the brute fact of a Jewish grandparent.

Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil "in the name of... an insane and unscientific eugenics theory." But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear...

... To Dawkins's objection that Nazi science was not authentic science I would reply, first, that neither Nazis nor Germans had any monopoly on these theories, which were influential throughout the Western world, and second, that the research on human subjects carried out by those holding such assumptions was good enough science to appear in medical texts for fully half a century. This is not to single out science as exceptionally inclined to do harm, though its capacity for doing harm is by now unequaled. It is only to note that science, too, is implicated in this bleak human proclivity, and is one major instrument of it.

The nineteenth-century abolitionist, feminist, essayist, and ordained minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson made the always timely point that, in comparing religions, great care must be taken to consider the best elements of one with the best of the other, and the worst with the worst, to avoid the usual practice of comparing, let us say, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie with the Golden Rule. The same principle might be applied in the comparison of religion and science. To set the declared hopes of one against the real-world record of the other is clearly not useful, no matter which of them is flattered by the comparison. What is religion? It is described by Dawkins as a virtually universal feature of human culture. But there is, commingled with it, indisputably and perhaps universally, doubt, hypocrisy, and charlatanism. Dawkins, for his part, considers religion wholly delusional, and he condemns the best of it for enabling all the worst of it. Yet if religion is to be blamed for the fraud done in its name, then what of science? Is it to be blamed for the Piltdown hoax, for the long-credited deceptions having to do with cloning in South Korea? If by "science" is meant authentic science, then "religion" must mean authentic religion, granting the difficulties in arriving at these definitions.

Now, it's easy to anticipate a line of defence here on behalf of both Richard Dawkins and science. It might go like this. Not everything done in the name of science has been good, but the principles and procedures of science allow for - no, they demand - critical scrutiny of existing results, the correction of errors, the falsification of unsound hypotheses and theories, all in the light of the evidence that becomes available and is indeed actively sought by working scientists. On the other hand, at the heart of religion - religion as such and not just of what Robinson calls bad religion - is a reliance on faith rather than evidence, and this for its most central beliefs.

I hold that view myself. And yet I think Marilynne Robinson's point in the above passage remains a good one. If religion is to be measured against the scientific consciousness in broad historical terms, then it won't do simply to compare the harms of religion with the virtues and benefits of science. This is a particularly dubious form of comparison for partisans of critical rationality and the weighing of evidence. So, on the one side, the benefits of religion and the good that has been done by religious believers has to be properly acknowledged. It is mere ignorance to deny it and mere prejudice to make little of it. On the other side, the harms that have been perpetrated in the name of scientific knowledge have also to be weighed fully. It's no use pretending that there are none, via some such claim as 'if it was bad, it wasn't real science'. Anybody can purify what they want to defend by narrowing down the object of defence to exclude the things they don't want to have to face.

(There are Marxists who think that Stalin and Stalinism had nothing to do with Marxism, and liberals who don't see that there's anything of 'true' liberalism reflected in the impoverishment and want that millions of people have experienced within liberal societies.)

The scientific consciousness, too, has its limits. It may claim, and with good reason, that science has a better authority for its hypotheses and explanations than can be got from non-scientific sources, but those hypotheses and explanations can still be wrong; and the acknowledged fallibilism of science at its best notwithstanding, they can be asserted sometimes as if their authority was absolute or unanswerable. Again, there's nothing internal to the scientific enterprise that guarantees that its results will be used for morally acceptable ends. Well, science doesn't have to cover everything. But its partisans could do with acknowledging the contribution made by other bodies of thought to humanistic ethical values.

I don't mean, in all this, to put science on a par with religion, for that is not how I view them. My intention has been only to endorse a central point of Marilynne Robinson's.