By “Scotsman” here, I mean not only the newspaper in which this mushbrained article appeared yesterday, but also its author, Peter Kearney, director of the Scottish Catholic Media Office. The piece, “Science and religion can be compatible,” floats a twisted form of “compatibility” which isn’t compatible at all. The thesis is simply this: science doesn’t understand everything, and therefore science and religion are compatible. He doesn’t even suggest directly that what science doesn’t understand—and by this I mean tangible, empirical observations—is the purview of God, though of course that’s probably his motivating idea. I suppose he’s simply recasting the God-of-the-gaps arguments: when we solve a mystery, it’s not that another appears, creating a gap, but that we simply can never solve the “why are things like they are” question. He uses the Higgs boson as an example:

The “discovery” of this particle, quickly christened the “God Particle”, brought him worldwide recognition. Despite its seemingly spiritual title, the “God particle” or “Higgs-Boson” does not conclusively prove the existence of God. Rather it conclusively proves the existence of the inexplicable. It is, in effect, a proof of doubt. Though lauded by science, and by many atheists, all too eager to use scientific discoveries or developments as nails to be hammered into the coffin of religion, it does in fact present a problem for science. It seems Professor Higgs and his colleagues proposed this particle as a way to explain the existence of mass, since without it, science can neither explain why matter has mass, nor why it sometimes behaves as it does. By postulating that this particle exists, that problem is solved by presuming the existence of another, heretofore unseen or unknown entity.

What? The particle was postulated, and THEN IT WAS FOUND. We don’t need yet another particle to explain the Higgs. The problem is solved. Kearney is deeply confused. And I’m not a physicist, but it seems to me that the existence of the Higgs field indeed explains why matter has mass. And we can explain most of what it does, too. But even if we can’t yet, why does that make religion and science compatible?

As for why the laws of physics are what they are, I find the answer “we don’t know yet, and maybe we never will” more satisfying than “There’s a triune God, a disembodied mind, who will take you to heaven if you accept as saviour the part of him that is the Son. If you don’t, you’ll fry forever.”

Kearney says even crazier things about dark matter and dark energy than he does about the Higgs. We don’t understand them and haven’t yet observed them directly, and so he claims that any explanations are “gap filling theories.” He doesn’t realize that these theories are provisional, but rather implies that making such hypotheses suggests there’s something wrong or even devious about science. He doesn’t seem to realize that that is in fact the way science works. Have a look at this crazy argument:

This isn’t the first time that science in general and cosmology in particular has had to come up with a “workaround” to explain the inexplicable. Among them; Guth’s Theory of Inflation which attempts to explain the absence of temperature disparities across the universe; the theory of “Dark Matter”, which is defined as something which can’t be perceived or measured in any way but whose presumed existence helpfully papers over a large number of theoretical cracks in our knowledge; and “Dark Energy”, an invention designed to explain why far from slowing down from the moment of the “Big Bang”, the expansion of the universe actually appears, counter intuitively, to be speeding up. They are all far from satisfactory “fixes”. The so-called “scientific” explanation for the beginnings of the universe is very far from the neat and mathematically exact calculation, which many assume it to be. We’re told rigorous scientific method is the universal panacea to all our doubts and questions, a dependable calculus which always and everywhere explains the particulars of our origins and existence. The fact that it doesn’t comes as a bit of a shock. The proliferation of gap-filling theories is an acknowledgement of the unknowable and the unprovable. In short, we don’t know everything. Reasonably, science accepts that things which can’t be seen or detected can have their existence proved by the measured reactions of other bodies affected by them – a rather spiritual formulation!

Well, Darwin’s 1859 book was also a “gap filling theory” at the time, but it’s one that proved to be correct, so the “unknowable” can indeed be known. Does Kearney know anything about science? Why did The Scotsman publish his lazy lucubrations?

Further, dark matter and dark energy are not “fixes,” they are “hypotheses,” and the conflation of these words (“fix” sounds both devious and pejorative) shows again that Kearney doesn’t understand science, and thus has no business saying that it’s compatible with religion. Can you show me a physicist who claims that dark matter and dark energy are “spiritual formulations”? Yet Kearney sees stuff like dark matter as a severe blow to unbelievers:

Such messy realities deal a significant blow to atheists and humanists who have invested so much of their energy in the primacy of what might be called “scientism”, the false creed which asserts that everything can be fully explained, leaving no need or place for a creator or deity. With the “discovery” of Higgs-Boson the jury is now in, and the verdict is clear; it can’t deliver it.

Of course even the most negative formulation of scientism doesn’t assert that scientists can explain everything “fully.” That’s Kearney’s take. In fact, I doubt you’d find a scientist who thinks that everything can and will be explained fully. We may be able to recreate life under primitive-earth conditions in the lab, but we will never know for sure that that is how it happened. So many historical events in evolution, geology, and cosmology are beyond our grasp that it would be insane to think that we could ever explain everything. As the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane said, in what I think is his best bon mot: Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

Yet in that normal part of science, the part temporarily or even permanently beyond our reach, is where Kearney sticks his God. I find the following sentence rather amusing:

The unknowable and inexplicable is terrain on which the Church speaks with vast experience.

What Kearney means here is that the Church speaks on these matters with vast authority (“authority” meaning only that lots of people believe them). The church has no more knowledge or experience with scientific mysteries (or even matters like morality and meaning) than anybody else. All it has is millennia of pretended knowledge. But Kearney deliberately conflates that “tradition” with “experience”—with “experience” meaning “wisdom.”

The area of doubt or mystery, understood as that which is beyond human understanding, is very often where humanity finds itself. Grappling with mysteries, inaccessible to reason alone. That reality of course should no more deprive us of faith than our inability to fully explain the beginnings of the universe should undermine our belief in its present existence.

That is so garbled I don’t know where to begin. First, scientific theories like that of dark matter and energy, are based on evidence, not faith. The existence of God and other religious “mysteries” is based on faith and revelation, not evidence. When scientists don’t know something, they admit it. When the faithful don’t know something, they believe it anyway, and make up reasons (which they see as “rational”) why it’s true.

What should deprive us of our faith in God? The same thing that deprives us of our faith in Nessie, UFOs, or ESP: lack of evidence. Kearney is a man who starts out knowing what he wants to prove (probably because he was brought up Catholic) and then justifies it a posteriori. Such a method cannot be compatible with science. Further, Kearney cannot give us evidence that could disprove his God Theory. I can give you at least a dozen potential observations that could disprove the theory of evolution (none of those observations exist). And we can do that in physics: the Faster-Than-Light-Neutrino Theory was disproved by finding a loose cable.

In the end, perhaps unconvinced by his own argument, Kearney uses the Last Resort of the Beleaguered Theologian: he drags science down to religion’s level by assuming that both are based on faith:

Too often, however, we hear that doubt does not exist in the measurable and empirical world of science. It does. It always has. Faith and science in their own ways are driven by it as they seek truth. The “Big Bang Theory” is simply a theory, an effort to explain how something might have come from nothing.

But science can find truth (provisional, to be sure, but often very sound and unlikely to be overturned), while religion can find no truth. If it could, all faith-based inquiry would result in the same conclusions. The more than ten thousand religions on this planet, all with different tenets (does God love homosexuals? How many wives can you have? Is there a triune God, or only a unitary God? Must women sit at the back of the house of worship? Can you work on Saturday?) prove that faith is completely useless at understanding our cosmos.

And, by the way, the Big Bang is not simply a theory. There are ample observations to support it, including the temperature of the universe and the persistence of background radiation. How it came about de novo is a theory that hasn’t yet been substantiated, but it’s one that we might understand some day. That will never apply to the theory held by Catholics that Wine and Crackers Turn into Jesus on Sunday.

Kearney’s article doesn’t begin to prove that science and religion are compatible. He doesn’t even try. What it does prove is that theology and incoherent arguments are compatible—indeed, synonymous.

h/t: pyers