God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (7 page)

Everyone recognizes that water is a very important ingredient of nature, not some abstract or imagined entity. It appears in solid, liquid, and vapor forms, and so is capable of change. All living things require water. Thales proposed that water was the sole ingredient from which everything else was constructed. Although this was wrong, as was his explanation of earthquakes, it nevertheless represented a revolution in human thinking in which gods were no longer needed to understand the universe. This was the first break between religion and science, and it suggests why the two are often in conflict—they have utterly opposing views about the nature of the world. Even contemporary theologians, while paying lip service to science, do not see reality as scientists see it.

Thales's notion that everything could be reduced to an elementary substance epitomizes a major difference between natural and supernatural thinking. For millennia after Thales, the common belief was that matter was composed of four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. Although this specific belief was wrong, it reflected Thales's key insight: this was not an abstract concept; it was observed in the natural world.

Still, Thales's picture of water as the primary ingredient of things was not pure materialism by our current standards. He still viewed matter as alive and as containing an immortal soul. Thales and the Presocratic philosophers who followed made no distinction between living matter, nonliving matter, and the soul.

Succeeding Thales, Anaximander (ca. 610–546 BCE) became the first to write in prose with a work called
On Nature
, which has been lost but is referred to by Aristotle. Prior to this achievement, all writing was poetic storytelling—myths and legends designed to provide explanations for the many puzzling and mysterious experiences in the lives of early humans that cried out for explanation.

Anaximander made
apeiron
, a word that is uncertainly translated as “without limits, boundless, or infinite,” the principle of all things. No one really knows what Anaximander really meant, but here again the significance is not the specific teaching but the introduction of a new kind of thinking—philosophical argument. Aristotle interpreted Anaximander's principle as having no origin. This is important, I think, because Christian theology holds that everything has an origin except God, who is the origin, the uncreated creator. This is how Christian believers answer the nonbeliever's taunt of “If God was the creator, who created God?” God just is, say the believers. But if God can be uncreated, why can't the universe?

Anaximander constructed a spherical model of the universe with Earth at the center, surrounded by three hollow wheels containing fire. Holes in the wheels through which the fire could be seen corresponded to the sun, moon, and stars. Earth did not fall because there was no preferred direction for it to fall, no force to attract or repel it. Although Anaximander had no notion of gravity, we can see here an intuition of equilibrium or symmetry.

Anaximines (died 528 BCE) was a third philosopher from Miletus who presaged several modern ideas. He proposed that air was the source of all things. Many cultures have held the view that air is the breath of life, the soul. After all, it leaves the body upon death. Anaximines claimed that when thinned, air becomes fire, when condensed it becomes cooler wind and clouds, and when further condensed it becomes water and earth. He provided experimental evidence. Blow on your finger with a wide-open mouth and your finger becomes hot, indicating that when the air is rarefied it is fire. Blow again, but this time with pursed lips, and your finger feels cold, showing that when air is condensed, it becomes colder. Try it. This is an empirical fact and we are talking real science here, even if the specific theory is primitive.

THE ATOMISTS

So we have for the first time in recorded history the notion that everything is composed of fundamental stuff—matter and nothing more. Following on the heels of the Milesians, Leucippus (died ca. 440 BCE) and Democritus (ca. 460–370 BCE)
proposed that matter was composed of tiny particles that could not be further subdivided. They called them
atoms
, meaning “uncuttable.” This brilliant intuition, based on no empirical data whatsoever, remains the view of physics to the present day—buttressed by the last two centuries of supporting evidence with not a shred of evidence against it.

In the nineteenth century, the ninety-plus elements of the chemical Periodic Table were regarded as the basic constituents of matter, since they could not be broken down further by either alchemy or chemistry. In the twentieth century, however, the elements were split into smaller parts by nuclear collisions that take place at energies thousands of times higher than can be generated with a Bunsen burner or electric spark. This showed that the chemical elements are not elementary after all. While the term “atoms” is still retained to refer to the physical bodies that constitute the chemical elements, they are no longer “uncuttable.” Thus I will refer to them as “chemical atoms” to avoid confusion with irreducible atoms.

Early in the twentieth century, the chemical atom was shown to be composed of a tiny nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons. The nucleus was then found to be composed of protons and neutrons. And these protons and neutrons also turned out to be cuttable, although electrons are still irreducible.

In the 1970s, physicists produced what became known as the
standard model of particles and forces
, in which everything is reduced to quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons (don't worry about what they are exactly). In particular, just three elementary particles—the electron and two quarks called “up” and “down”—are all that are needed to describe all the matter of normal experience, including the sun, moon, planets, and all the stars and galaxies in the sky. The proton is made of two up quarks and one down quark:
uud
. The neutron is made of one up quark and two down quarks:
udd
. Every chemical atom in the universe is then composed simply of
u
's,
d
's, and
e
's. Add the photon, the particle of light represented by the symbol γ, and you have everything visible to the naked eye.

Although atomic matter is everything that “matters” to most of us, it constitutes only 5 percent of the total of the mass of the universe. The rest of the mass of the universe is contained in still unidentified
dark matter
and
dark energy.

The reduction of matter to more elementary levels that are themselves irreducible contrasts not only with the god-centered universe of traditional religions, it also clashes with the “new spirituality” that claims the universe is one irreducible whole.
²⁰
Once again, there is no sign of compatibility between religion or spirituality on the one side and science on the other.

As mentioned, the views of the Presocratics sharply collided with those of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and just about everyone else. This disagreement, which is particularly exemplified by the views of the early atomists and their successors, will turn out to be the archetype of the timeless conceptual clash between science and religion. Science as an alternative to religion was thus born in ancient Greece, although it must be said that it would be millennia before the distinction between the two was clear in people's minds.

PYTHAGORAS

Pythagoras (ca. 570–495 BCE) is the final Presocratic thinker that I will mention. What little we know about him is from later scholars, but the ideas associated with his name have had significant influence on both science and religion. Certainly the Pythagorean theorem is widely used in science, although it had previously been discovered in Babylonia and India. Pythagoras's empirical discovery that musical notes can be represented numerically was an important step in the realization that mathematics can be used to describe observed physical phenomena.

Born on the island of Samos, Pythagoras may have traveled widely before settling in Croton in southern Italy. There he set up a religious brotherhood called the “semi-circle” that was also concerned with philosophy and politics. Eventually the brotherhood was suppressed when its enemies took control of Croton.

Unlike the common belief among Greeks at the time, Pythagoras seems to have advocated the immortality and transmigration of souls.

CREATION AND DESIGN

While the Presocratics were materialists, most still attributed some kind of divine power as the source and continuing governor of the material world. An exception was Anaxagoras (ca. 500–428 BCE), who taught that the world was originally a homogeneous mixture in which everything was indistinguishable. Then
nous—
mind, or intelligence—created a cosmic vortex that separated out the ingredients, although it did so only partially. This brings to mind the modern notion of order coming out of chaos. Anaxagoras was the first in history to distinguish mind from matter. If mind were not separate from matter, he reasoned, mind could not act upon matter.
²¹
I don't see this myself. A fully material hammer can act on a fully material nail. In any case, Anaxagoras introduced the duality between mind and matter that to this day remains embedded in much human thinking but is within a hair of being completely ruled out by science.

Despite this, contemporaries regarded Anaxagoras as an irreligious figure. He taught that the sun and moon were not divine beings but simply huge, inanimate objects. His supreme power,
nous
, was not overtly divine but a naturalistic concept more akin to human intelligence. Anaxagoras had to leave Athens after being found guilty by a court of impiety.
²²

The Presocratic era ends, as you might have guessed, with Socrates. While most of what we know about this pivotal figure in the history of thought comes from Plato, Socrates's discomfiture with science is most marked in
Memorabilia
, written by Xenophon (died 354 BCE). Therein Socrates is said to object to the attempt to intellectually reconstruct divinely created mechanisms, since that overreaches the nature of human beings.
²³
Furthermore, Socrates asserted that there was a study infinitely more worthy than that of trees, stones, and even the stars—the study of the human mind.
²⁴

The atomists had introduced the notion that chance, or accident, actually has creative power. This anticipated Darwinian evolution and modern cosmology, as well as some modern theologies in which God makes use of chance in his creation.
²⁵
Creation by chance competes with that of intelligent causation. While no one except the atomists really questioned the presence of intelligence underlying matter (see Anaxagoras above), Plato was the first to
intellectualize what we now call the
argument from design
. This appears in his
Timaeus
, perhaps the most significant philosophical text of antiquity.

I will not present all the explicit arguments but will just note that they sound very much like the arguments for intelligent design that we hear today. For example, Plato notes that products of chance do not serve a manifest purpose, while designed objects do. And, living beings, Plato insisted, exhibit manifest purpose. The notion that the universe has purpose, called
teleology
, was a common one in antiquity and was especially promoted by Plato's student Aristotle. This is very much a religious concept that modern science, to the distress of many, has questioned.

Plato's creator god is an intrinsically good, divine craftsman called the
Demiurge.
In Plato's view, our world is a single, spherical, intelligent entity consisting of the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—plus a soul.
²⁶

While Plato cannot be classified as a scientist, his metaphysics continue to have a strong influence on modern mathematicians and theoretical physicists. Plato was a
realist
, meaning that he believed in the existence of an external world. In this he holds the same view as the overwhelming majority of scientists and philosophers of science, as opposed to the doctrine called
idealism
in which everything is all in our heads, a concept that has resurfaced in recent years with
quantum spirituality
. The realist Plato taught that the “true reality” was not the objects we perceive through our senses but an ideal world of perfect mathematical
forms.
A circle or triangle drawn in the sand with a stick is an approximation to the form of a circle or a triangle, which is precisely defined mathematically. Our senses distort the true reality the way a lens distorts an image. For example, the planets have been observed since antiquity to wander about the sky (the word
planet
comes from the Greek word for “wanderer”), sometimes turning around and going back the other way for a while before turning back to continue their original paths. In Plato's theory of forms, the planets really move in perfect circles around Earth and the observed wandering is an optical illusion.

In the
Phaedo
, Plato maintains that the senses are useless for the acquisition of truth, that knowledge can only obtained through philosophical reflection.
²⁷
This contrasts sharply with the most important principle of science as we know it today: our best knowledge of the physical world is obtained from what we observe or can derive from what we observe. The ancients debated
the point. For example, Parmenides (died ca. 450 BCE) agreed with Plato, asserting that truth cannot be known through sensory perception but only through reason. Empedocles (died 435 BCE), on the other hand, defended the senses—although he admitted they were imperfect and must be employed with care. Anaxagoras (died ca. 450 BCE) argued that the senses offer “a glimpse of the obscure.”
²⁸
Even the atomists did not hold the modern scientific view that only by observation can we learn about the universe.