For years, there has been a debate about which of the great authorities, science or religion, should take precedence in what we teach in schools and how we run public business. Ultimately, the question boils down to what might seem a trivial distinction: between an answer and an explanation. An answer is what satisfies you; an explanation is what others can put to the test. For instance:
Why does the Universe exist? "Because God wills it" is, for many, a satisfying answer - and there aren't yet any secular answers that have more explanatory power.
Why do the wicked prosper? "Because God wills it" is both satisfying and comforting, if it lets us stop raging at injustice. Psychology and social science, however, strive for an explanation: something others can test, letting us collectively devise strategies to address the problem.
Why does the car start when you turn the key? Even the most devout will admit that "because God wills it" is not a great explanation. There is no specifically religious way to start your car, build a highway, or perform surgery. These matters depend entirely on explanations: hypotheses judged by physical evidence, not in terms of consistency with a text or prior belief. Indeed, when religion does try to govern such matters, the results range from the inconvenient (as in Orthodox Jews not being able to use a light switch on the Sabbath) to the suicidal (as in the Jehovah's Witnesses' prohibition on blood transfusion). Religion does not do explanation well - and to ask others to "respect" its attempts out of courtesy to sincere belief is to fall into a pit of confusion, since different faiths produce contradictory explanations for the same thing.
No: science - that is, the method proposed by Francis Bacon and refined in the four hundred years since - is the only way to explain the physical facts of this world, including such ethically troublesome matters as when human life begins and ends. Its explanations may not be personally satisfying, but that's the whole point: if we are not satisfied, we can try to disprove that explanation by finding a counterexample. If we fail, though, we need to acknowledge our failure and go back to looking at the evidence.
Is this argument going to convince you, assuming that you did not already agree with it? No, probably not - and for an interesting reason, revealed in the work of Paul Harris and colleagues at Harvard. Harris studies how young children learn about the world and has found that they only rarely act like little scientists, testing their assumptions through experience. Most of the time, they are little jurors, judging the testimony of their elders. They simply don't have time to discover everything for themselves; they must take in most of their knowledge on say-so - and that includes facts about the physical world.
A trustworthy witness, such as a loving, attentive, consistent parent, will be believed on all subjects, from table manners to divine grace to the origin of species. And the more central a belief is to a family or group, the less likely any subsequent information is to change the child's mind. Children of Christian fundamentalist families retain to adulthood the creationist views they brought to school at age four, no matter what they are taught in biology class.
This means that beliefs can feel essential to identity without having to be logical. We will never reason each other out of them because we were never reasoned into them. They are part of the bond of trust and love that connects us to "our people": a group identifier, like a distinctive haircut or tattoo.
This fact confirms the wisdom of America's founding fathers when they insisted that religion and government should stay well out of each other's way: because there was and is no specifically "American" group, only a political compact that allows all groups to live together in recognition of a universal, shared humanity.
Our Republic was founded as a great social experiment in an age when almost every prominent politician was also an amateur scientist. Our system can never be based on faith, because we are continually testing it. God is at home with the family and the congregation; but elsewhere, we have only the Constitution, which remains, for all its reverend antiquity, merely a working hypothesis, not a divine text.
Is this an answer to the questions we have been debating? Maybe not, but at least it's an explanation.
If you enjoy such tales of human fallibility, you can find a new one every day at http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com. See you there.
