Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

But what about all the controversies in science? New theories are trumpeted one week and discredited the next. When Nobel laureates disagree over a scientific claim, at least one of them is just wrong, in spite of being an anointed prince or princess of the church of science. And what about the occasional scandals of fraudulent data and suppression of results? Scientists are not infallible, nor are they, as a rule, more virtuous than laypeople, but they do submit to a remarkable discipline that keeps them honest in spite of themselves, imposing elaborate systems of self-restraint and review, and to a remarkable degree depersonalizing their individual contributions. So, although it is true that there have been eminent scientists who were racists, or sexists or drug addicts or just plain crazy, their contributions almost always stand or fall independently of these personal failings, thanks to the filters, checks, and balances that weed out the unreliable work. (Occasionally, a scientist or a whole school of scientific research will fall into dishonor or political disrepute, and since serious scientists don’t want to cite those pariahs in their own work, this blocks perfectly good research for a generation or more. In psychology, for example, research on eidetic imagery—“photographic memory”—was stalled for a long time because some of the early work was done by Nazis.)

Through a microscope, the cutting edge of a beautifully sharpened ax looks like the Rocky Mountains, all jagged and irregular, but it is the dull heft of the steel behind the edge that gives the ax its power. Similarly, the cutting edge of science seen up close looks ragged and chaotic, a bunch of big egos engaging in shouting matches, their judgment distorted by jealousy, ambition, and greed, but behind them, agreed upon by all the disputants, is the massive routine weight of accumulated results, the facts that give science its power. Not surprisingly, those who want to puncture the reputation of science and drain off its immense prestige and influence tend to ignore the wide-angle perspective and concentrate on the clashes of schools and their not-so-hidden agendas. But, ironically, when they set out to make their case for the prosecution (using all the finely polished tools of logic and statistics), all their good evidence of the failings and biases of science comes from science’s own highly vigorous exercises in self-policing and self-correction. The critics have no choice: there is no better source of truth on any topic than well-conducted science, and they know it.

What about the distinction between the “hard” sciences—physics, chemistry, mathematics, molecular biology, geology, and their kin among the Naturwissenschaften—and the “soft” social sciences (along with history and the other disciplines in the humanities), the Geisteswissenschaften? It is widely believed that the social sciences aren’t really science at all, but, rather, just gussied-up political propaganda of one sort or another. Or at best they are a kind of science (hermeneutical or interpretive science) that plays by different rules, with different goals and methodologies. There is no denying that ideological battles rage within the social sciences over just these issues. What chance is there that the work that passes muster with one camp or another will be worthy of the respectful attention we give to results in the hard sciences? The discipline of anthropology, notoriously, is divided in two, with the physical anthropologists siding with the biologists and other hard scientists and typically unable to conceal their contempt for the cultural anthropologists, who side with the literary theorists and other folks in the humanities and typically express an equally withering contempt for their “reductionist” colleagues in the other camp. This is deplorable. A few hardy anthropologists, such as Atran (2002), Boyer (2001), Cronk et al. (2000), Dunbar (2004), Durham (1992), and—leaping to late in the alphabet—Sperber (1996), try to bridge the gap between evolutionary biology and culture, and they have to deal with an incessant swarm of ideologically driven critics.