I could not help but notice that many of my academic friends and favorite blogs expressed a serious thrill about two particular things in President Obama’s inaugural address:
- his promise to “restore science to its rightful place”;
- and his mentioning of “non-believers” in the list of religious types.
My friends and favorite blogs didn’t mention these things separately. They mentioned these two things as one, even though the two appeared in very different parts of Obama’s speech.
Coincidence? Of course not. Most “non-believers” of religion have a belief in science. And so, one of my students asked me, isn’t that at some level a tacit acknowledgment that belief in science is just another religious belief?
And I answered what I always do: Only one of these “belief systems” gets you the development of novel reliable vaccines and airplanes that fly.
Is it true that we science-believing/religious-non-believers find that our belief in science plays a role in our lives that is often played, in others’ lives, by religion? Sure. Our belief in science leads us to a community of like-minded souls. It helps answer the big “why’s?”. It helps us make sense of the past and prepare for the future. It helps us understand (and often to forgive) ourselves and others.
But just to reiterate what so many already have said: Science isn’t a religion, because it holds no idea sacred. Any “dogma,” any belief, any “god” in science can be overturned. We science-believers may be irrationally stubborn (i.e., unscientific), sometimes, in our beliefs. But we remain, at our cores, open to the idea that we may be wrong about anything and everything.
As I’ve so often said to students, science is not fundamentally about having (or even achieving) certainty; it is fundamentally about reducing uncertainty, while always recognizing uncertainty will remain. It must remain if we are to remain scientific.
This week my students read from the Flexner Report, the 1910 white paper that exposed the mess that was medical education in the U.S. at that time. In that Report, the ever-wise Flexner addressed the question of what to make of all the different forms of “medicine.” Should “allopathy” necessarily be placed on a pedestal above homeopathy, osteopathy, and the rest? No, said Flexner. To be scientific is to give up on medical sects:
Prior to the placing of medicine on a scientific basis, sectarianism was, of course, inevitable. Every one [of the medical sects] started with some sort of preconceived notion; and from a logical point of view, one preconception is as good as another. Allopathy was just as sectarian as homeopathy. Indeed, homeopathy was the inevitable retort to allopathy. . . . But now that allopathy has surrendered to modern [scientific] medicine, is not homeopathy borne on the same current into the same harbor? [In other words, doesn’t homeopathy, too, have to be held to a scientific standard?]
Modern [scientific] medicine has . . . as little sympathy for allopathy as for homeopathy. It simply denies outright the relevancy or value of either doctrine. It wants not dogma, but facts. […] One cannot simultaneously assert science and dogma; one cannot travel half the road under the former banner, in the hopes of taking up the latter, too, at the middle of the march. Science, once embraced, will conquer the whole.
Obviously medicine still has a way to go to be really evidence-based in approach, but Flexner was right in the basic principle that she who is scientific necessarily has no religion. She has a philosophy, a methodology, an attitude, but this is not religion.
So I always feel a little queasy when I hear scientists assure undergraduates who are religious that they need not fear science, for science threatens not religion. Hmmm. The truth is, if you’re really scientific in your understanding of the world, by definition, nothing is sacred.