Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion

263 Pages·2018·2.15 MB·English

by  Michael Newton Keas

Unbelievable
7 Myths About the History and
Future of Science and Religion
Michael Newton Keas
For my extended family, especially my grandfather Newton Watson Keas
Also for John, Edna, Chris, Martin, and Loetta
Contents
Introduction: The Truth Is Out There
Part 1: 7 Myths About Science and Religion at War
Chapter 1: Bigger Is Better
Chapter 2: Idiots in the Dark
Chapter 3: Flat Earthers
Chapter 4: Burning Bruno
Chapter 5: Gagging Galileo
Chapter 6: Copernican Demotion
Chapter 7: Extraterrestrial Enlightenment
Part 2: Seeking Sources and Solutions for the Warfare Myths
Chapter 8: Creating ET: Science Fiction as Futuristic Myth
Chapter 9: Preaching Anti-theism on TV: Cosmos
Chapter 10: Kepler, Devout Scientist
Chapter 11: Remembering America’s Harmony of Science and Faith
Chapter 12: Telling the Larger Truth
Appendix A: The First Urban Myth of the Space Age
Appendix B: A New Argument for Pascal as a Copernican
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Introduction
The Truth Is Out There
As much as any other human enterprise, science needs stories— to portray
its origin and development, to glorify its heroes, to dramatize its methods
and values, and to proclaim its place in human civilization.
—Gregory Schrempp, The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science: A
Mythologist Looks (Seriously) at Popular Science Writing (2012)
As members of the human race, we are currently the only highly intelligent
beings in our corner of space. We have looked around, peered out from our
earthly platform, and discovered the universe. We have mapped it and
deciphered much of its history. Maybe we are the first to do so. Maybe the
universe . . . has slept in ignorance of itself these aeons until suddenly in a
few years mankind’s curiosity . . . has opened its cosmic eyes and the
universe has seen itself for the first time. Maybe we are the brains of this
outfit. . . . We are like Robinson Crusoe, stranded on a cosmic island, not
knowing whether or not we are alone until we can see the footprints in the
sand.
—Paul Hodge, Concepts of Contemporary Astronomy (1979)
Scientists enjoy telling stories. They tell stories about, among other things, the
quest to understand the universe—stories that sometimes have implications for
belief or disbelief in God or a spiritual heaven.
Too often, however, these stories are false. They are nothing but myths. And
yet some leading scientists and science writers offer these stories as unassailable
truth. The myths make their way into science textbooks—which is a useful
measure of a myth’s influence, as we will see in this book. They also enter
popular culture, whereby the myths pass as accepted wisdom.
This book examines seven of the most widespread and influential science
myths. These myths concern the relationship between science and religion,
especially Christianity. More specifically, the stories depict religion and science
as being perpetually at odds.
In our time, history is commonly abused for polemical purposes, wielded as a
long sword in the culture wars. The cultural wave known as the New Atheism
has grossly distorted the history of science and religion. Yet atheist activists are
far from alone in misleading the public. Prominent scientists and science
educators—including influential popularizers such as Bill Nye the “Science
Guy,” the late Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson—lead the chorus of voices
portraying Christianity as anti-science, and science as liberating us from
religious dogma.
But that narrative is deeply flawed. Sometimes those who champion the
misleading narrative acknowledge its holes. As chapter 9 will show, one
prominent historian and philosopher of science thinks that it might be
permissible to offer an inaccurate history of science for an ideological-political
“greater truth.” He even suggests granting science educators an “artistic license
to lie.”
Taking such a morally ambiguous approach to the history of science is
disturbing and dangerous. This book corrects the record, revealing the truth that
the proliferation of myths has obscured.
So in addition to debunking seven pervasive myths about science and religion,
I will present a more accurate, and I hope more interesting, history of how
science and religion interact.
The popular science fiction TV series, and later movie, The X-Files had a
famous tagline that suggested a conspiracy to cover up evidence of
extraterrestrial life and the paranormal: “The Truth Is Out There.”
It certainly is—but not in the way the tagline suggests. The truth about
science, and even about the likelihood of extraterrestrial life, is there for us to
see. But first we need to clear away the myths that have done so much to confuse
our understanding about science, religion, and our place in the universe.
Seven Myths, Debunked
You’ve probably heard many of the myths I examine in this book. These seven
stories are widely known and accepted even though they rely on exaggerations at
best and completely distort the facts at worst.
The first six myths relate to the history of science and religion. The seventh is
subtly connected to the six historical myths but imagines a future far removed
from what we know today.
Myth #1: Premodern scholars in the Western tradition thought the
universe was small—a cozy little place just for human benefit. Modern
science displaced this Church-sanctioned belief with a vast cosmos that
revealed humans to be insignificant.
The truth: Even ancient thinkers recognized that the earth was tiny in
relation to the immense cosmos. In any case, size doesn’t necessarily mean
significance, as many theologians and philosophers recognized.
Myth #2: The medieval Catholic Church suppressed the growth of
science, causing Europe to descend into the “Dark Ages.”
The truth: The medieval Catholic Church positively influenced science
and other intellectual pursuits. There were no “Dark Ages.”
Myth #3: Because of Church-induced ignorance, European intellectuals
believed in a flat earth until Columbus proved earth’s roundness in 1492.
The truth: Ancient and medieval intellectuals in the Western tradition
had many evidence-based reasons for belief in earth’s roundness.
Myth #4: Giordano Bruno became a martyr for science when the Catholic
Church burned him at the stake because he supported Nicolaus
Copernicus’s contention that the sun, not the earth, occupied the center of
the universe, and because he believed in extraterrestrial life.
The truth: Bruno’s execution occurred almost entirely for theological
reasons, not scientific ones.
Myth #5: The Church jailed Galileo Galilei because it rejected his
telescopic observations and rational arguments that had proved the
Copernican system.
The truth: Most early modern astronomers up through the mid-
seventeenth century resisted a moving earth primarily for scientific, not
theological, reasons. Galileo failed to prove that earth orbited the sun (that
came later).
Myth #6: Copernicus demoted humans from the privileged “center of the
universe” and thereby challenged religious doctrines about human
importance.
The truth: Copernicus (a canon in the Catholic Church) and most of his
scientific successors up through the nineteenth century considered his sun-
centered astronomy to be compatible with Christianity and human
exceptionalism. In fact, early Copernicans viewed earth’s new location not
as a demotion for humanity but rather as a promotion, out of the bottom of
the universe.
Myth #7: If and when we encounter extraterrestrial life, it will deal the
death blow to certain religions, especially Christianity, with its doctrine of
the unique incarnation and redemptive work of God’s Son on earth. Any
ET capable of traveling a vast distance to earth would have
superintelligence, technology indistinguishable from magic, and moral-
spiritual insights that would trigger global religious reorientation.
The truth: Many Christian thinkers have been open to the possibility of
extraterrestrial life, and neither a single pope nor a major church council
ever declared these ideas heretical. ET and Christianity are potentially
compatible.
These myths did not arise coincidentally. In part two of this book we will dig
deeper, exposing the sources, real and imagined, for the origin and perpetuation
of the myths. Science fiction has contributed, as have popular science
communicators. In the process, we will see that religion and science need not
war with each other—and didn’t for centuries. We will also see that these
misleading narratives did not gain traction until relatively recently.
The Other Kind of Myth
So far I have discussed the word myth in its common meaning—as a false story.
Another meaning of the term will concern us greatly.
The Harvard scholar Michael Witzel defines a myth in this second sense by
noting that it “contains and brings out such images of the world (a cosmology),
of past and present society (a history and sociology), and of the human condition
(an anthropology) as are eminently constitutive of the . . . society in which that
narrative circulates, or at least where it circulated originally,” and that “may be
invoked (etiologically) to explain and justify present-day conditions.”1
Put more simply, myths are imaginative archetypal stories that shape a
culture’s identity and dominant worldview.
So when, in the first epigraph to this chapter, the anthropologist Gregory
Schrempp says that, “as much as any other human enterprise, science needs
stories,” he is talking about myths in this other sense of the term.
And astronomer Paul Hodge’s soaring narrative in the second epigraph offers
a textbook example of how such a myth operates in the culture of science.
Hodge’s story is not a myth about the god Zeus but rather one about humanity.
The hero of the story is intelligent life, especially smart scientists who study the
origin and structure of the cosmos. Thanks to these scientists, “the universe has
seen itself for the first time.”
A myth in this second, scholarly sense of the term plays the role of
imaginative, archetypal story whether it is true or false. The last myth we
investigate in this book, about the prospects for and implications of discovering
superintelligent life, relies on flawed assumptions and ignores some of the laws
of nature (which technology can never overcome). But it also functions as a
myth in the scholarly sense. It fills the craving for human significance after
many in the world of science have tried to dismiss religious belief. If Copernicus
demoted humans, the myth of extraterrestrial enlightenment now fills that void
for many people.
Scientists, like all humans, love stories. Most of us experience the world as if
our lives are meaningfully going somewhere, tracing the arc of a story. We
discover and create. We tell about what we have discovered and created. These
are our stories. The big stories, the ones about our place in the cosmos—how we
got here and why—are our great myths.