When religion-bashing goes too far

I’ve never understood the appeal of preaching to the converted. What’s the point? Why bother bashing believers in ghosts, homeopathy and Allah or non-believers in global-warming, childhood vaccines and evolution in ways that cannot persuade but only annoy those who don’t pre-agree with you?

This question kept coming to mind as I read Faith vs. Fact, by biologist Jerry Coyne, the latest in a seemingly endless series of books bashing religious believers for their foolishness. I share Coyne’s enthusiasm for science—as both a source of truth and power over the world—and his concern about religion’s ill effects. But his defenses of science and denunciations of religion are so relentlessly one-sided that they aroused my antipathy toward the former and sympathy toward the latter.

Coyne castigates not only religious believers but even non-believers less hostile to religion than he is. He reviles “accomodationism,” the notion that science and religion can find common ground. This view, he claims, “gives unwarranted credibility to faith, a credibility that, at its extremes, is responsible for many human deaths and might ultimately contribute to the demise of our own species and other life on Earth.” If we don’t all agree Coyne, in other words, we’re doomed.

Coyne overlooks any positive consequences of religion, such as its role in anti-slavery, civil-rights and antiwar movements. Conversely, Coyne absolves science of responsibility for any adverse consequences, such as weapons and ideologies of mass destruction. “The compelling force that produced nuclear weapons, gunpowder and eugenics was not science but people,” he states. Right. Science doesn’t kill people; people kill people.

Naïve readers of Coyne might conclude that science is rapidly filling in the remaining gaps in our understanding of reality and solving ancient philosophical conundrums. He claims that free will, the notion that “we can choose to behave in different ways,” is being contradicted by research in genetics and neuroscience and “looks increasingly dubious.”

Science has shown merely that simplistic, billiard-ball-style notions of causality cannot account for the complexities of human reasoning and decision-making. How the brain, a physical object, generates thoughts, emotion, memories and other subjective phenomena remains one of science’s abiding mysteries.

Coyne’s critique of free will, far from being based on scientific “fact,” betrays how his hostility toward religion distorts his judgment. Evidence against free will, he says, “kicks the props out from under much theology, including the doctrine of salvation.” Coyne thinks that if religious people believe in free will, it must be an illusion.

Coyne’s loathing of creationism, similarly, leads him to exaggerate what science can tell us about our cosmic origins. Coyne asserts that “we are starting to see how the universe could arise from ‘nothing,’ and that our own might be only one of many universes that differ in their physical laws.” Actually, cosmologists are more baffled than ever at why there is something rather than nothing. The popularity of multiple-universe theories—which some critics dismiss as untestable and hence unscientific—merely shows how desperate scientists are for answers.

Coyne repeatedly reminds us that science, unlike religion, promotes self-criticism, but he is remarkably lacking in this virtue himself. He rejects complaints that some modern scientists are guilty of “scientism,” which I would define as excessive trust—faith!—in science. Calling scientism “a grab bag of disparate accusations that are mostly inaccurate or overblown,” Coyne insists that the term “be dropped.”

Actually, Faith vs. Fact serves as a splendid specimen of scientism. Coyne disparages not only religion but also other human ways of engaging with reality. The arts, he argues, “cannot ascertain truth or knowledge,” and the humanities do so only to the extent that they emulate the sciences. This sort of arrogance and certitude is the essence of scientism. Coyne wants to enlist more people in his anti-religion crusade, but his shrill, self-righteous diatribe is more likely to hurt his cause than help it.

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from a review originally published in The Wall Street Journal.