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<H1>The difference between science and religion</H1>
<P class=byline>By Faye Flam</P>
<P class="byline lastline"><EM>Philadelphia Inquirer</EM> Staff Writer</P>
<DIV id=body-content class=body-content>
<P>To those of us who like science, the difference between science and
religion can seem pretty self-evident: Religion requires faith, for one
thing, and science demands evidence.</P>
<P>But that doesn't always satisfy the true believers. "You can't prove
there isn't a God," they say, "and if scientists can't prove God didn't
create people, how can they claim their 'belief' in evolution is any less
religious than religion?"</P>
<P>In 2005, with the country watching, the task of answering that question
fell to U.S. District Judge John E. Jones, who had to untangle the nature
of science and religion to decide whether "intelligent design" theory
could legally be taught in public-school science classes in Dover, Pa.,
near York.</P>
<P>Though he was a liberal-arts major, a Republican, and an appointee of
an openly creationist president, George W. Bush, Jones ruled against the
teaching of intelligent design as science.</P>
<P>His decision is admired by scientists and philosophers of science, not
just because they agree with his answer, but also because he left the
world with a clear, succinct document that, among other things, helps
clarify the nature of science and show why it's not religion.</P>
<P>On Saturday, Jones will speak at Community College of Philadelphia,
part of the citywide science festival that began Friday and will continue
to April 28. The free talk is being presented by the Philadelphia
Association for Critical Thinking.</P>
<P>In light of all this celebration of science, it seemed apropos to
devote a column to what qualifies something as science, and why Darwinian
evolution makes the grade and intelligent design does not.</P>
<P>I.D. is a brand of creationism that allows living things to evolve,
albeit guided by an intelligent designer, the nature of which is never
made clear.</P>
<P>The Dover trial was not an obvious battle between scientists and people
of the clergy. On the side of I.D. were several Ph.D. biology professors,
and on the opposing side was a well-known theologian.</P>
<P>Jones said he wasn't required to rule whether I.D. constituted good
science, only whether its promotion in public schools amounted to
endorsing a particular religious view. But he realized the two questions
were connected. His decision might have been different if I.D. had been a
solid, powerful, well-tested, widely accepted theory that just happened to
coincide with Christian teachings. But it wasn't.</P>
<P>Jones used several criteria to distinguish science from nonscience,
including testability and acceptance in the scientific community. But it
was another, less familiar criterion that proved crucial in deciding
whether I.D. was science.</P>
<P>That is what is known as "methodological naturalism" - one of the few
jargon terms he used in his decision. It's simply a rule for doing science
that excludes the invocation of gods or other supernatural entities.</P>
<P>To do good science, scientists don't have to prove supernatural beings
don't exist. They can still believe in God or any other supernatural
beings if they're so inclined.</P>
<P>But they can't build scientific theories based on supernatural entities
any more than an engineer can build a bridge using angels instead of
girders.</P>
<P>The world of science came slowly to this conclusion, making a great
leap in the Renaissance, when Newton found that heavenly bodies and
earthly objects followed the same laws, and Copernicus and Galileo moved
the Earth from the center of the universe.</P>
<P>That last part did create friction with the Roman Catholic Church, but
as Galileo so poetically summed up his methodological naturalism: "The
Bible shows how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."</P>
<P>By the 1700s, Benjamin Franklin and others continued in the same vein
in seeking a natural explanation, rather than a religious one, that
unified lightning with other electrical phenomena.</P>
<P>But biologists were slow to adopt methodological naturalism. As late as
the 19th century, serious intellectuals were still debating whether God
created the "races" of man separately or together.</P>
<P>Jones said his task was made much easier thanks to the witness who
spoke out against teaching I.D. as science. "It was like the science class
you wish you'd had in school," Jones said. The defense side, however, was
not as organized. "They couldn't explain what intelligent design was," he
said. Many of their witnesses never showed up.</P>
<P>After his decision, Jones received death threats and was pilloried by
conservative television personalities. Ann Coulter tried to paint him as
too poorly educated and unsophisticated to grasp the merits of intelligent
design.</P>
<P>Most scientists, on the other hand, were relieved and impressed.</P>
<P>Jones was smart to use several criteria to separate science from
nonscience, said Massimo Pigliucci, a biologist/philosopher and author of
the book <EM>Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk.</EM></P>
<P>Testability can be a good first-order rule, said Pigliucci, who teaches
at the City University of New York and recently spoke for the Philadelphia
Association for Critical Thinking, a group of skeptics. But that test
sometimes rules out ideas that later become important. Take Copernican
astronomy with its sun-centered solar system, he said.</P>
<P>It didn't fit the astronomical data of the time any better than the
Earth-centered system did. Despite this, Galileo just knew there was a
very important baby in Copernicus' bathwater, and once Kepler figured out
that the planets traced elliptical paths rather than circular ones, the
sun-centered system worked.</P>
<P>Acceptance in the community is another imperfect measure of science.
It's always possible some great idea is simply too revolutionary to be
accepted right away, a common claim by pseudoscientists. But over time,
the scientific community does tend to weed out the science from the
pseudoscience.</P>
<P>Some advocates of intelligent design have tried to argue that God
didn't have to be the designer. It could have been space aliens, for
example. That still doesn't make it science, says Pigliucci, since there's
no mechanism or evidence being proposed. It also leaves open the question
of who designed the designers.</P>
<P>Thanks to methodological naturalism, science doesn't require faith, the
way religion does. And science is therefore not a religion, but a
discipline, a way of thinking, investigating, and testing the nature of
the physical universe.</P>
<P>Following the rules allowed scientific fields to become global group
projects, where Muslims and Christians, Hindus and atheists could
contribute as equal partners without having to give up their faiths.</P>
<P> </P>
<HR>
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<P></P>
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</P>
<P><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial; FONT-SIZE: x-small">Contact staff
writer Faye Flam at 215-854-4977 or <A
href="http://www.philly.com/philly/health_and_science/mailto:fflam@phillynews.com"
target=_blank>fflam@phillynews.com</A>. Visit her "Planet of the Apes"
blog </SPAN></P>
<P><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial; FONT-SIZE: x-small">at <A
href="http://www.philly.com/evolution"
target=_blank>www.philly.com/evolution</A>.</SPAN></P>
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