The Fallacies of Religious Clerics by N. Fakhr - HTML preview

Taking Satisfaction in the Failures of Empirical Science

In recent centuries, as empirical science has gained an important place in people's minds, religious clerics have usually accepted scientific explanations when those explanations have become firmly established. In such cases, they may say that religion has no problem with the matter and that it accepts the findings of natural science.

But when modern science cannot explain something, or when a scientific hypothesis fails, religious clerics often react to the news as though a victory has been achieved.

From their point of view, it has now been shown that natural science has failed to enter a certain area.

But why do they react in this way? And what do religious clerics mean when they sometimes announce such news almost triumphantly?

Until around the sixteenth century, people generally imagined that everything, both great and small, was directly in God's hands. In other words, they believed that God directly exercised His will and power in every event.

If someone's child died, they might say that God had specifically willed this event and must have had some purpose in it. They might then guess what that purpose was—for example, to test a believer or to punish an unbeliever.

In the same way, when rain fell, those who benefited from it might see God as being on their side, while those who suffered because of it might regard the same rain as divine punishment or a test from God.

Because so many events were believed to be directly in God's hands, a large part of life was also considered part of the spiritual realm. People believed that events could be changed through religious acts, prayer, vows, religious endowments, sacrifices, curses, sins, or anything else thought to influence the final decision of God or supernatural forces.

Naturally, religious clerics claimed that they understood the relationship between these actions and their results better than anyone else.

So the realm of the spiritual was extremely wide, and the field in which religious clerics could claim authority was equally wide.

Then human beings gradually discovered the movements of celestial bodies and the laws governing them. They discovered physical laws, then the role of physics in chemistry, and later the principles of physiology.

Gradually, the realm attributed to spiritual forces became smaller.

Eventually, even sociology, economics, and psychology entered the growing body of empirical sciences.

For someone who understands natural science, meteorology, and economics, claims that a particular religious act causes rain to fall, or that another religious act increases a person's “provision” or livelihood, may no longer have the same meaning they once had.

Yet most people—even many who have studied the natural sciences—have still not reached a further conclusion:

These two views can come into conflict.

Once something such as a person's livelihood is understood as falling within the field of economics and other natural or social causes, then religious acts such as prayer would no longer be expected to affect it in the way previously imagined.

There are two main reasons why many people do not draw this conclusion.

The first is the psychology of belief that we discussed earlier: the difficulty human beings often have in critically examining their religion, including examining whether it agrees with modern scientific knowledge.

The second is the way religious clerics sometimes respond when a scientific hypothesis fails.

They may present such failures as though science has shown that it can never reach an answer in that area. From this, they suggest that not all events in the world necessarily follow scientific laws and that there is still room for the kind of spiritual intervention they believe in.

There is another reason why some religious clerics react this way to failed scientific hypotheses or to the limits of natural science.

Some of them may not fully understand the nature of the empirical approach.

They may see empiricism almost as though it were another religion standing against their own religion. Or they may sometimes want people to see it that way.

They may think that just as one error in a religion could show that the religion is false, one error in empirical science must show that empiricism itself—and all the conclusions reached through it—is false.

The cleric can then encourage people to return to his religion.

The reasoning becomes something like this:

“A certain scientific hypothesis was wrong, or science cannot explain a certain problem. Therefore, what my religion says must be true.”

Considering the way many religious believers understand the worldview produced by empirical science, it may be fair to say that this method has not been entirely unsuccessful.

But natural science is built on empiricism.

The foundation of knowledge in the natural sciences is human experience and observation.

When scientists propose a hypothesis, that hypothesis is formed from the available observations and evidence. It is called a hypothesis precisely because it may turn out to be wrong.

If new evidence later shows that it is wrong, it must be corrected.

This means that, within this method of gaining knowledge, no hypothesis and no famous scientist should be protected simply because people are attached to it.

The structure of science is such that it actively searches for its own errors and looks for better ways to explain the world.

If scientists today were unable to determine from the available evidence how human beings came into existence, they would not say:

“Science has failed here, so we should simply accept the creation story in our holy book.”

Instead, they would try to collect more evidence, develop a hypothesis, test it against further evidence, and gradually improve it.

At one time, Newton's formulas and laws of motion were used to explain motion extremely successfully.

Later, scientists discovered that at very high speeds, especially speeds approaching the speed of light, Newtonian mechanics was no longer sufficiently accurate.

New observations and experiments led to a more complete description of motion, in which the effects that become important at such speeds had to be taken into account.

No one considered this an insult to the great name of Newton.

In this way, Einstein's theory of special relativity emerged.

And this process of change, self-correction, and improvement continues today.

Failures in empiricism are accepted because empiricism never claimed from the beginning that every one of its conclusions was perfect and final.

The situation with religion is different.

Religion claims to come from an all-knowing source and to contain no error.

Scientific conclusions can be changed and corrected. They continue to develop.

Religious rules, however, are rarely abandoned.

They are usually ignored or set aside only when they create serious problems for individuals or society, and when they come into such obvious conflict with the results of experience that the conflict becomes difficult for everyone to ignore and the surrounding culture changes to the point that it will no longer tolerate those rules.

A scientific hypothesis or even a scientific law can be questioned because of a single reported experiment somewhere in the world. Scientists can then repeat the experiment, investigate the result, and, without loyalty to the old theory simply because it is old, modify or replace it if necessary.

Religious rules may require a very different process.

They may cause serious and obvious harm before they are finally abandoned, often after considerable struggle. And even after they have been abandoned, there may still be religious believers and scholars who call for their restoration.

Slavery, for example, was removed only with great difficulty from both the Christian and Islamic worlds.

Mauritania formally abolished slavery in 1981, but it was not until 2007 that the country adopted a law specifically criminalizing the practice. Even after such laws were introduced, slavery-related practices continued to be reported.

The larger point remains the same:

A failed scientific hypothesis is a reason to correct science. It is not evidence that a religious explanation is therefore true.