In response to the Michael Reiss affair, Harold Kroto has claimed that his sacking was necessary since Reiss (along with all religious people) show their lack of intellectual honesty by claiming religious knowledge.
Is religious knowledge possible? Surely, it is in principle. If an all-powerful God exists, there must be something that he could do to demonstrate to a reasonable person that he exists. If, before our eyes, all the stars in the heavens collected above Richard Dawkins house and spelled out: “That’s enough, Richard” …
With this in mind, how can Kroto claim that the science / religion interface is characterised by “fundamentally unresolvable conflict”? Suppose, for a moment, that the following scenario is true. There is a God, roughly Judeo-Christian. He is a necessary being, who can exist without the universe. He freely decides to create a world. He decides that “the ordinary course of nature in the whole of creation [will have] certain natural laws … determining for each thing what it can do or not do” (St Augustine, 408 A.D.). These laws will be chosen to allow for the development of intelligent beings. The universe is “set off” with certain initial conditions. The intelligent beings, in turn, use their intellect to study the natural universe, and through empirical evidence and mathematical reasoning, discover the laws of nature. They call the enterprise, “science”.
In such a universe, it is clear that science would have ultimate, unchallenged authority in investigating the physical world. There would not be a necessary conflict between science and at least some religions. Religion would ask questions like:
- Why does science work?
- Why is mathematics so unreasonably effective in describing our physical world?
- How is it that we can, with exquisite accuracy, predict the behaviour of the physical world by writing things on a sheet of paper?
- What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? (S.Hawking)
- Why are there the same scientific laws today as yesterday?
- Why are there scientific laws at all?
- Why does the universe exist at all?
- Why are the laws of nature, constants of nature and initial conditions of the universe fine-tuned for intelligent life?
- What are mathematical truths, and why do they preside over all possible universes?
- What are the laws of logic, and why do they preside over all meaningful truths?”
These are not scientific questions, but they are undoubtedly meaningful. And, in such a universe, their answer would be found in God. Science, in such a universe would (in the words of C.S.Lewis) “explain everything except what we should call everything. The only thing they omit is – the whole universe”. Atheists in such a universe would simply be mistaken in any attempt to argue that these questions are meaningless, and even the lesser claim that God is not a good answer to these questions would be false. An intelligent being in such a universe who considered these questions meaningful would rightly be lead to infer the existence of an entity who deserved the name “God”. Such a belief would certainly not be an “unfound dogma” or “irrational” or “unsubstantiated”. In such a universe, some kind of religion (but not all imaginable religions, obviously) would not only be allowed but correct, all the while being outside the legitimate realm of the methods of science. Further, the existence of a “plethora of more-or-less incompatible religious concepts that mankind has invented” (including creationism) would do nothing to undermine correct religious beliefs.
Thus, Kroto is in a bind. If he is to establish his claim that religious belief is necessarily irrational, that there is an unresolvable conflict between science and religion, he must show that the scenario I imagined above is impossible, that our universe cannot be like that. Further, if he still accepts his “lemma”, he must do this using the methods of science. He must propose an experiment, an observation, a way of producing data to support this assertion. This data must somehow show that the “religious questions” we asked above are meaningless – not just that we do not now know the answer but that they are non-questions, cleverly disguised gobbledigook.
Kroto thinks he can resolve the science / religion debate by taking some construction paper, redrawing the boundaries of knowledge to place all his opponents on the outside, and then pointing and shouting “LIAR!”. Such a blatant smear campaign against all scientists who are believers is frankly inexcusable from a man who claims to put such a high price on “integrity”. The sacking of Michael Reiss remains a disgrace.