The Time Has Come to Put an  End
to the Needless Conflict
Between Two Great Human Institutions

    What kind of world do we live in? That's a question that both science and religion attempt to answer. In the next few days, a pair of notable anniversaries will illuminate the kind of answers that each one gives.
    So long as they don't tread on each other's feet, each can give a valid answer about this most fundamental of questions. Unfortunately, all too often science is regarded as a threat precisely because religion clings to illusions about the kind of world we live in.
    As we all saw on December 26, 2004, ours is a world in which natural events take place without regard to human wishes or well-being. The Indian Ocean tsunami struck near and far, wreaking havoc without warning and claiming more than 200,000 lives. The most distinguishing feature of the victims was not their religion, moral worth, or talent, but their bad luck in being poor coastal dwellers.
    Science can explain in great detail what led to the tsunami. In brief, one tectonic plate slipped under another off the coast of Sumatra, displacing a huge volume of water that rolled away in an expanding wave until it reached shorelines. Pretty simple, really. It's something that has happened many times before. Yet, an astonishing number of people were ready to interpret this natural disaster as the deliberate act of an angry God.
    The excellent Religioustolerance.org site has archived some of them, and you only have to browse to see that if in fact God meant the tsunami to be a message, He failed miserably to convey His meaning. Was it a blow against abortion? Homosexuality? Fornication? Muslim oppression? Hindu shinanigans? Buddhist misconduct? Or just worldwide moral turpitude? Nothing in the tsunami itself offers any guidance, but the religious orientation of the speaker is a strong predictor of the answer.
    All such attempts to interpret natural events as divine acts are, I suggest, deeply misguided. They are holdovers from the prehistoric origins of science and religion, which in all probability were born as twins in the cradle of human civilization.
    Today, science decisively shows that the physical world we inhabit operates according to natural laws and chance, and is entirely indifferent to human needs or desires. To be sure, we are well adapted to this world, and our ability to remodel our environment to suit us makes life infinitely more comfortable for the lucky ones of us who live in technologically advanced societies.  Still, we can never take our comfort for granted. As the tsunami showed, everything can change in an instant. Yet, religion tells us that, in a larger sense, we live in a world of hope. It directs our attention to ultimate reality, that which lies beyond the observable bounds of nature. 
   If religion offers hope, science provides much of the actual comfort we enjoy. In 19th century America, despite all the prayers and piety of the times, nearly every family lost at least one child to disease. Some were wiped out altogether. In the 20th century, deaths from infectious diseases plummeted, thanks to scientific understanding of germs and the remedies provided by sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines.
   Despite this historical evidence, there are still people who believe that prayer effects cures. It is a forlorn hope. If that were the case, why did a third of Europe's population die during the great plagues of the late Middle Ages, when Europe was known as Christendom? You think they didn't pray hard enough?
    Through science, we can know when hurricanes are approaching, stave off epidemics, anticipate volcanic eruptions, and explore other worlds. Science has succeeded better than any other human endeavor in discovering how nature works and turning understanding into mastery.
    Why, then, is science so bitterly opposed by some religionists? I suggest that it is because they mistakenly believe that religious narratives provide a roadmap to the physical world, and that if that map proves false then faith must fail. This is a double error, one that has caused much needless anguish and harm. I suspect one reason for the confusion lies in the common origin of science and religion.
    Along with religion, science began when hunter-gatherers applied their collective wisdom to deciphering tracks, recording and then predicting seasonal migration routes, and then trying to back their skill with rituals, prayers, and sacrifices. How do we know this if it all happened before recorded history? As is often the case in science, we have various lines of evidence that converge on a single conclusion. Anthropologists have observed the remarkable powers of deduction that "primitive" hunters employ in the few hunter-gatherer societies that remain. At times they make Sherlock Holmes look like a slacker.
    Archaeologists have found evidence of human and animal co-migration, and the success of the human hunters is all too evident in the loss of much of the wild megafauna in the world. Bye bye, mammoth; so long, moa; dear old dodo, fare thee well.
    As for religion, it too dates back long before the rise of agricultural societies. The cave paintings of Lascaux have been authoritatively deciphered as magico-religious icons for young hunters undergoing the ritual of induction into the troop. Some uncertainty remains, of course, but there are so many similar examples of ancient ritual intended to make the environment more friendly to humans that there can be little doubts about the broad origins and functions of religion. That of course does not invalidate any particular religious narrative, but it does put them all in a context worth pondering.
    The tradition that I am culturally closest to is the one that dominates American religious life: Christianity. And the anniversary that Christians will soon be celebrating is the birthday of Jesus Christ. Only, it isn't. If there is one thing that religious scholars agree on, it is that there is virtually no likelihood that Jesus of Nazareth was born December 25th. It is a mythical birthday -- no less important for all that.
    How do we know? Multiple reasons lead any open inquiry to conclude that this particular date is highly unlikely to be the actual anniversary of Jesus's birth. The gospels offer no date for the birth of Jesus. What clues there are tend to point to other times of the year - spring seems to be the favorite of scholars, though some argue for fall.
    Most important, however, is that December 25th was the date of at least one pre-existing pagan religious holiday. It was co-opted by Christianity as it spread throughout the Roman Empire. The original significance of the date was most likely tied to the winter solstice, which it follows by a few days. (Bear in mind that the calendar was unstable until the 16th century.) Despite marking the beginning of winter in the Northern hemisphere, it also contains the seeds of hope, inasmuch as every day after the solstice grows longer and longer, while the gloom of night gradually recedes. No wonder, then that some of the central symbols of Christmas, such as the illuminated Christmas tree, retain their pagan origins as symbols of light.
    Here we come to the gates of religion's true realm. Myths and symbols have tremendous power, and seen in the proper light they can be forces for good in society. It is when people wrongheadedly insist on making scripture do the work of science that things go wrong. Just as insisting on December 25th being the actual, literal, no-two-ways-about-it birthday of Jesus entirely misses the point of Christmas, so trying to rig the evidence of science to support a literal interpretation of scripture completely misses the point of religion. Instead of being a beacon of hope, it becomes a charlatan.
    Science and religion long ago parted ways, and this is as it should be. Science has nothing to say about the realm of religion. If there are souls, spirits, demons, angels, and of course God, they are metaphysical entities. (Does any theologian dispute this?) As such, science must remain mum about them ... until someone goes and makes a foolish claim about their action in the physical world. Does God direct the weather? Recombine the genes of flu each season? Pick the winners of football games? C'mon. Surely He has better things to do.
    That's where science-religion conflicts arise, and by any honest accounting, religion loses everytime. There are no moral patterns in nature. (If there were, would we have so many good and decent people stranded in airports this Christmas?) The evidence overwhelmingly shows that nature operates according to natural laws and chance -- not some supernatural gameplan. Events like the 2004 "Christmas" tsunami take place without the least regard for the religion people follow, their moral worth, or their just deserts. That is the kind of world we live in.
    This does not, however, mean that faith is bunk, or that we live in a world without hope. The more science discovers, the deeper reality appears to be. Solid steel is mostly empty space. Time, at the subatomic level, moves forward and backward, or disappears altogether. Place loses its clarity and becomes mere probability. Things themselves become less certain than the quantum numbers that define them.
    Who is to say that no metaphysical reality underlies the physics we have so far been able to probe? No one with any authority or evidence, that much is for sure. Indeed, physics calls on a metaphysical system -- math -- to reach the depths it has so far explored.
    Methodological naturalism -- the working assumption that there is nothing more than laws and chance operating in nature -- is an indispensible tool of most sciences, but it does not necessarily capture the ultimate truth. It is entirely possible, for example, that the world we inhabit is the handiwork of a Creator who set everything in motion and then left it alone to play out according to his intentions.
    Deism, as that form of belief is known, has a long and noble pedigree. Its founding American adherents include Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. Among the more recent notable deists was Albert Einstein.
    However, deism is not the only possible truth consistent with the world that science reveals. It's also possible, for example, that there are contending deities, whose moves and countermoves cancel each other out to such an extent that the world looks natural all the way down. This is more or less what the Greeks believed, and it is not far off what many fundamentalists believe -- if you strip away the overlying superstition.
    There are many more possibilities than these. It's not for me to tell anyone what to believe about ultimate reality. That is the true subject of religion, and for all I know there may be more than one true answer.
    My purpose here is only to offer this Christmas wish: may we all find a way to accept the world as science shows it to be without abandoning hope of a better future, however we may conceive it to be. To my Christian friends and secular celebrants of Yuletide, Merry Christmas! To all others, Joy of the Season! And with the new year, let us get to work building a better world.