Galileo Goes to Jail is a book I would highly recommend, as an accessible and quick-reading introduction to many historical aspects of science and religion. The book will challenge any reader’s presuppositions through a series of nuanced and educated essays.

The historical approach to issues in science and religion is both useful and misleading. Useful, because it gives insights into how the relation between the two has actually developed as opposed to how any single person thinks they are principally related. However, history can be misleading when it is used as a normative benchmark for what should be or even what is normal. Sometimes I fool myself into thinking that extensive knowledge of history will make people act more sensibly. In reality, however, such knowledge is only what it is; it does not necessarily lead to anything.

Still I am convinced that the contributors to Galileo Goes to Jail had a good measure of idealism when writing this book. Surely they are convinced that knowing about the past relation between science and religion will make readers reconsider some radical or absolute views and think more nuanced about the subject. Christianity was not science’s enemy, but neither was it the sole driver of scientific curiosity. Islam has made important contributions to science. Religious scientists did not ‘outgrow’ a set of naïve superstitions in order to become rational champions, but neither were they blessed with a fully worked out research program based on whatever tradition they believed in. The book tries to find a middle ground between views and confront every reader with his or her bias. Nuance can be confrontational, as it turns out.

The approach of the book is chronological. Each short chapter starts with a bluntly formulated myth. In the context of the book, a myth is synonymous with a falsehood. Each myth is accompanied by two or three quotes from reputable or well known sources that, to some degree, perpetuate the myth. These chapters all have different authors.

The first chapters deal with the medieval period, which means that there are no chapters about the classical period. Out of twenty-five myths, Copernicus is already the subject of myth number six, so there is a strong emphasis on the periods known as the scientific revolution, the enlightenment and the modern period. The subjects are not completely balanced. There is only one chapter about Islam, the others are explicitly about or most relevant to the relation between science and Christianity. Another imbalance lies in the myths generally adhered to by Christians and those that live among atheists. I think there are quite a few atheists who think that ‘the scientific revolution liberated science from religion’ (myth #10), that ‘copernicanism demoted humans from the center of the cosmos from the center of the cosmos’ (#6), or that ‘the Scopes trial ended in defeat for antievolutionism’. Christians may be slightly less confronted by ideas alien to them, although they will have to let go the notions that  ‘Einstein believed in a personal God’ (#21) or that ‘Christianity gave birth to modern science’ (#9).

This latter myth, dealing with the question of science having been helped or hindered by christianity during the scientific revolution, carries a rather ambiguous message. The author is Noah J. Efron from Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv. On the first pages of his essay, he makes it clear that there is a kind of consensus among historians that Christianity’s role was ‘crucial’ in the development of science. What then, is his point in debunking the myth that Christianity gave birth to modern science? Efron apparently tries to walk a fine line between considering Christianity irrelevant or damaging to science on one side and giving it too much credit on the other. This kind of message doesn’t lend itself well to a format that gives the impression of bluntly debunking a myth. In this case, the book’s format is hindering the message of the author.

The book discusses twenty-five myths. Out of these, I counted seventeen that are most likely to be held by atheists. The theme that runs through these is: Christianity was not destroyed by science and has never been in conflict with science. This is not an easy message when publishing a book with the words ‘evolution’ and ‘religion’ in its title will bring you death threats, as neurologist David Linden once stated during a lecture. However, hostilities from christians towards science are not typical for history and that should mean something to everyone. Nobody can prescribe exactly how history should be translated to personal meaning, but a good understanding is available. Galileo Goes to Jail offers exactly that.

Dutch atheist philosopher Herman Philipse included this assertion in his book Het Atheïstisch Manifest (‘The Atheist Manifesto’). Rather than coming up with a definition, Philipse chose to sweep all definitions together and bluntly state that whenever some property had been assigned to God, this property had been falsified. The best conclusion is that there is no God. Explicitly, Philipse disregards the possibility for an immanent God – which makes him one of the few atheists to do so. If you go by the Manifest, belief in an immanent God is compatible with atheism, which presents some interesting dilemmas for atheists who reject Christianity as a whole. There may be a lot more Christians believing in such a God than many of us would consider.

But aside from that, the transcendent God has apparently been swept off the table. Evidence suggests he doesn’t answer to prayer, he did not create life on earth, and he did not take on mortal form to consequently die on the cross. At least, this is how I would interpret atheist videoblogger Aronra, who gives particular weight to the argument that God apparently is unable to make his followers better people, even though this would be a typical biblical theme. The Old Testament is full of believers acting in awful ways, even, *gasp*, worshipping other Gods! “Every claim that religion makes that has been tested has already been proven wrong,” is Aronra’s central message.

Faulty falsification

However, there is a difference between Philipse and Aronra, a subtle one, which betrays the fact that the first is a professor of philosophy while the latter is not. Philipse has his bases covered better, albeit not completely, but we’ll get to him in a moment. First I would like to state what error Aronra has made.

Falsification is a tricky notion. It is intimately tied to Karl Popper, the philosopher of science who considered it the logical criterion for scientific theories. Popper wanted to know how scientific knowledge could be separated from pseudoscience. So he devised the concept of the ‘critical experiment’, the ultimate test of a theory that would falsify it. He acknowledged that it is impossible to really prove a theory right, but it is possible to prove a theory wrong. If a prediction, based on the theory, doesn’t hold true during an experiment, the theory must be discarded. Science is made up of as-of-yet-undiscarded theories, as Popper saw it.

Yet there is a problem with this. It is a practical one: scientists are not constantly in the business of testing their theories. Rather they assume them to be right and continue working with them. When observations prove the theory wrong, it is usually changed rather then completely discarded. A whole school of philosophers made this point extensively based on historical observations, but suffice to say here that Popper was unable to give a logical definition of what scientific knowledge is. This problem has remained, more or less, although most scientists are unaware of it. Popper’s criterion has proven to be very influential, while philosophy has progressed beyond it.

So falsification doesn’t work that well: scientists, in their normal work, don’t apply it as Popper intended. Should we, as atheists, ask differently from theists? I don’t think so. If we, as Aronra seems to do, discard the notion of God using scientific arguments, referring to scientific experiments, we should also allow Christians to amend rather than discard their beliefs. It’s common courtesy at the very least. Looking at history, this is typically what Christians have done: increases in knowledge have led to different notions of what God is supposed to be. We may not like it, but the debate seems to end here.

Faulty theories

But it’s worse. There is a fact that is more damning to Aronra’s falsification of God: scientists don’t just amend falsified theories, they actually continue to use them. There are dozens of models in science that are known to be incorrect, but are still applied. Why? Because they represent the best knowledge that scientists have? I don’t think that is quite the way to put it. Rather, I would say that falsified theories can still be applied within certain limits. Climate models are typical examples of this: they may not place the exact rise in temperature on the exact year, but we know that their prediction that the earth is warming is right. Different descriptions for the behaviour of light fall in the same category: they are accurate for a certain purpose. Scientific models, which are composed of theories, describe the world for a certain purpose and can be used within their own framework.

Coincidence or not, Christianity works in pretty much the same way. It is quite common in Christian doctrine to consider analogies describing God inadequate for his true nature. For example, one might say that God is a shepherd, but this would only be accurate for describing the relation between him and his people. It should not be taken that God looks like a man with a stick. Perhaps there are more biblical stories that originally were meant to describe relations between God and the world, rather than true events; perhaps Genesis is meant as such a story? But that’s neither here nor there.

Different methods, all the same

What I’ve shown is that theology and science sometimes use the same rational methods to construct their knowledge. Both describe their subjects in terms that have actually been proven not to be 100% correct, but both accept that the descriptions are still useful for certain purposes. However, in theology as well as in science, true falsification is possible. Theories have been abandoned and beliefs have been discarded.

This is where Philipse comes in again. Aronra never makes explicit what he considers sufficient ground for falsifying anything, whether it’s a scientific theory or a theological dogma. He constantly goes back to science, so one would assume that falsification is meant in the scientific context. Philipse operates from a broader base. Or at least, by stating that he cannot falsify the existence of an immanent God, he acknowledges that at least philosophical arguments hold water for him, not just scientific observations. Philipse also considers paradoxes to offer sufficient ground for falsification. In other words, if a theological dogma describing God produces a logical paradox, that dogma must be abandoned.

The more rational types of Christianity – like Catholicism and Protestantism – are sensitive to this argument, but it has less impact in traditions like Gnosticism or the Eastern Orthodox church. This might be because as a Western atheist, Philipse is mostly dealing with rationalist, western Christians. His concept of falsification is philosophically broader than that of Aronra, but not so broad as to include all possible theologies. I expect that would be impossible anyway.

Aronra leaps from one claim to another. Sometimes he seems to state that Christianity is damaging to society, which basically means nothing with respect to God’s existence, and sometimes he seems to dispute religion’s metaphysical claims, which cannot logically be falsified by modern science. Atheism, however, is defined by one claim: that there is no personal God, so Aronra really didn’t have to go to these lengths. However, giving proof for that particular claim, especially given that his falsification has failed, is something that Aronra has not done.

Assuming he was talking about the book of Genesis and the order in which the different groups of animals and the plants appear, I did not recall any similarity to the order with which organisms first appear in the fossil record. In fact, the two creation stories (and yes, there are two) can be interpreted with so much ambiguity that one has a lot of elbow room when projecting them on the real world. Having read Robin Lane Fox’s The Unauthorized Biography, I am also wary of a claim that these creation stories contain any singular message, since they contradict each other.

Still I was wondering what a comparison between chapter 1 of Genesis and the fossil record would bring. That would be the first story of creation, since any attempt to make such a comparison with the second story seems doomed even as an intellectual exercise. If you start reading from the second half of Genesis 2:4, you’ll see what I mean.

The creation in six days however, is from the viewpoint of a geological timescale very ripe for comparison. The stepwise introduction of groups is not unlike the way my geological time table (by Haq and Van Eysinga) places the appearance of each clade in its respective period. Of course the big difference lies in the process of evolution: while the bible does not describe what the earliest animals and plants looked like, the earliest members of some groups were hardly recognizable as such. The first fish did not look like your typical salmon.

The dimension of time is also clearly different; modern life is about 3,8 billion years in the making, but recognized groups did not appear at a steady pace. According to the creation story, it took ‘days’ and at a steady rate, almost staccato.

But let’s, for the sake of the exercise, ignore all such issues and see if the authors of the bible really were so inspired that they basically ordered things correctly.

First come the plants, in Genesis 1:11. But not just any plant: the word ‘seed’ always comes back, no matter what translation I bother to read. Using seeds for procreation is, however, a fairly advanced adaptation for plants. The first plants on land used spores, like ferns. That was of course after there had already been a lot of development in marine plants and algae, who did not bear seeds.

Fossil plant remains from the Carboniferous. Scale: width is about 6 cm.

Were the first organisms plants? No, certainly not. Even stretching of what a ‘plant’ is as far as it will go, the first organisms were not advanced enough to be called a plant. There is no word for a prokaryote in the bible.

Disregarding the peculiar appearance of stars after plants, the next living beings to appear in Creation are the creatures of the sea and the birds. While we all know that the oldest fossils are those from marine creatures, birds are another matter entirely. Birds descend from dinosaurs, so there were creatures walking around before any bird took to the air.

Genesis, however, describes how God creates the animals that crawl and the cattle next. Describing cattle as a relatively recent addition to creation is a safe bet, but the bible did get right that the groups of plants, aquatic beings and birds were firmly in place before animals were domesticated.

Going over it, I think Genesis scores rather badly on biostratigraphy. I cannot see how anyone would mutilate this story to such a degree that it is taken to be in relative accordance with what we know from fossils. To shoehorn Genesis into science takes more interpretation than the story can bear.

But there is a very serious reason why the comparison between Genesis and the actual history of nature is important to some Christians, and I think this reason can say something about atheism as well. By recognizing the creation story in nature, Genesis becomes ‘anchored’ in the real world. By an ‘anchor’ for religion, I mean a tangible, universally identifiable thing that gives the reassurance that a certain kind of faith is not just a personal illusion. A relic is a different kind of anchor, but it basically does the same thing: one can point to it and say, that object, that thing, is the bridge between what I believe in and the material world. Isn’t it spiritually immensely fulfilling if all of nature can have such purpose?

The relevance to atheism is this: atheists often deny to have any kind of faith, but I do think they look for anchors for what they believe in. After all, no atheist is defined just by what (s)he doesn’t believe in. Atheism may be reactionary, it is not purely negative or negating, despite the word beginning with an ‘A’.

What else can the atheists’ anchor be, other than science itself?

What does Q-Dragon do when he debunks? The young man (1993) is quite brilliant, and naturally applies his knowledge about physics and the universe. By his own admission, however, Q-Dragon does not read books about philosophy, and that turns out to be a problem here. The pastor’s article makes a clear statement in terms of the philosophy of religion, but Q-Dragon does not recognize this. It follows he doesn’t debunk that part either.

Pastor Rob Daley wrote a small op-ed piece titled ‘Universe proves existence of God’. Note the way this title is phrased with a purpose typical for evangelicals: it’s not the universe proving the existence of God, no, this is phrased like a front page headline. Stop press! ‘Hey,’ readers are likely to think, ‘this is big news.’ Daley wants to activate his readers from the beginning.

What follows is a typical statement of natural theology, or the idea that the existence of God can be derived from nature itself. One might think Daley is a creationist, because the website of his church flatly states those connected to it believe ‘the Bible is the infallible, inspired Word of God and…final authority in all matters of faith and practice.’ The article, interestingly enough, suggests he at least interprets doctrine with at the very least some flexibility in the light of modern science: ‘Scientists are convinced that our universe began with an enormous explosion of energy and light.’ Er…well, sort of. This is like comparing atoms to very small spheres and thinking that turning off the hot water three seconds earlier will lessen global warming a tiny bit. Rather than being blatantly false, it is a lay person’s way of interpreting and describing science. Point is: he is describing, with limited science education, science itself and certainly not creationism.

It’s an observation Q-Dragon fails to make. Rather, he focuses on Daley’s following point: that this must have been caused by a God, because there’s no other credible explanation. Justifiably, Q-Dragon points out that a current lack of an explanation for any phenomena does not mean it must have been miraculously caused by God. But that argument goes both ways – by the same token, a scientific explanation for any phenomenon does not mean it is outside the influence of God. Who knows? What Daley is actually saying is only that the explanation must be a creator God, he doesn’t specify where this God’s influence begins or ends, how God went about His business, nor how His influence can be recognized. It is possible to understand how events took place and still attribute them to God. Religious persons do this all the time. Given the fact that Daley seems to have some conception of the Big Bang and a faith that probably won’t be shaken by new discoveries, it seems likely he will maintain that God influenced Creation no matter what scientists discover.

Q-Dragon claims there are good hypotheses for the origin of the Big Bang. A typical creationist will dismiss them, listen to them and then justify his predetermined dismissal. Daley will probably listen to them, misunderstand them and then accept or dismiss them within his knowledge about physics. Pretty much like the average lay person does, really.

So Q-Dragon debunks less here than he perhaps believes. However, Daley does make a mistake when he uses the term ‘proof’. Does he really believe there is such a thing as proof in theology? I wouldn’t be so sure there is. If so, it is likely not to be the same kind of proof that is accepted in science. Q-Dragon understandably interprets proof in scientific terms, because proving has become connected to measurable and testable things. In other words: science. When Daley talks about proof, he means that which is the most convincing matter of faith. The ‘complexity and design’ of the earth ‘argue persuasively’ for God, which is different from logically proving He exists. What the pastor does is not solving an unknown in an equation, it’s preaching.

Daley makes a more interesting point when he talks about the laws of nature being uniform and reliable. This touches on the basic assumptions of science. According to Daley, the fact that science works at all is because of God. Again, the term ‘proof’ is out of place here, but this does remind of the basic Christian premise of exoteric monotheism – the idea that God exists outside of humanity and is a singular being. This kind of faith is very helpful to science, at the centre of which is the idea that nature forms one system that behaves in a consistent way. If Christians can accept that through religion, I’m all for it, and it is what Daley argues.

Feynman, the atheist who is quoted by Daley, was right: the fact that there are laws that can be derived by observation and the logic of our limited minds seems miraculous. I can completely understand why a christian would consider it nothing short of divine. Atheists should accept that such a belief does not at all prohibit any scientific theory, even if they don’t share it.

So Daley’s letter to the newspaper is not a creationist text, and it seems likely he isn’t a creationist either. Reading this text, he is carefully arguing for his audience to accept what science comes up with and have faith in Jesus. Why the latter? Well, because it’s Jesus, that’s why! Notice how the last sentence of the article – ‘through faith in Jesus we come personally to know the God of the universe’ – actually contradicts the title, in a fashion. If you have come to know God through Jesus, why would you need proof from nature? (Some theologians, like the influential Karlt Barth, answered: you don’t).

Treating religious teachings itself as the source of faith is regarded as a weakness by Q-Dragon, but really, isn’t that what we, atheists, believe to be the case? I don’t think Christians study rocks, planets, animals, oceans and the behaviour of gamma particles, only to conclude ‘hey, 2000 years ago there was a man crucified and he was the Messiah!’. No, we think people become Christians because of a tradition, and we think this was a historical development. Which fits perfectly with a Christian claiming he has faith in Jesus because the bible says so. Again, it is not a logical proof and this is where Daley should consider himself debunked, but at the same time he does admit himself that it’s mostly about what is considered most convincing.

So to conclude, I’m rather disappointed Q-Dragon did not look a bit more carefully at the text; it is not a typical creationist rant. Atheists should be aware of the group of Christian philosophers and theologians who on the one hand claim their faith is rational and defensible, yet at the same time accept modern science. Debating such people is not the same as debunking creationist drivel. On the one hand, we owe it ourselves to step up for atheism because that’s what we think is true, but on the other hand, science benefits the most by being an open process where all religions can participate and when it is understood by the largest amount of people.