The Difference Between Science and Religion Isn’t the Individuals
Posted on Feb 19, 2016 by Trevor in Religion, Science
In The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, distinguished primatologist Frans de Waal considers whether there are any substantive behavioral differences in the way of thinking between religious people and scientists, ultimately rejecting any such claim. He reasons that no individual is exempt from cognitive biases, and that the true significant differences between the theories of religion and science stem from the culture and communities surrounding them. I’ve copied a segment from the book below.
Accepting that faith is driven by values and desires makes at once for a greater contrast with science, but also exposes common ground, since science is less fact-driven than is widely assumed. Don’t get me wrong, science produces great results. It has no competition when it comes to understanding physical reality, but science is also often, like religion, based on what we want to believe. Scientists are human, and humans are driven by what psychologists call “confirmation biases” (we love evidence that supports our view) and “disconfirmation biases” (we disparage evidence that undermines our view).
Like the rest of humanity, scientists apply flight-or-fight responses to data: they go for the familiar and avoid the unfamiliar. … Scientists praise the “plausibility” and “beauty” of theories, making value judgments on the basis of how they think things work, or ought to work. …
If faith makes people buy an entire package of myths and values without asking too many questions, scientists are only slightly better. We also buy into a certain outlook without critically weighing each and every underlying assumption and often turn a deaf ear to evidence that doesn’t fit. We may even … deliberately turn down a chance to get enlightened. But even if scientists are hardly more rational than believers, and even if the entire notion of unsentimental rationality is based on a giant misunderstanding, we cannot even think without emotions.
There is one major difference between science and religion. This difference lies not in the individual practitioners, but in their culture. Science is a collective enterprise, with rules of engagement that allow the whole to make progress, even if its parts drag their feet.
What science does best is to incite competition among ideas. Science instigates a sort of “natural selection” so that only the most visible ideas survive and reproduce.
[De Waal then gives the example of Moravian monk Gregor Mendel, who cross-pollinated pea plants and discovered a great deal about how traits are passed from parents to their offspring.] At first, the monk’s work was criticized, then ignored and forgotten. Science was simply not ready for it. Fortunately, it was rediscovered decades later. The scientific community compared ideas, looked at evidence, listened to arguments, and began to favor the monk’s explanation. Since his experiments were successfully replicated, Gregor Mendel is now celebrated as the founder of genetics.
In comparison, religion is static. It does change with a changing society, but rarely as a result of evidence.
