Some critics insist that religions originated as primitive attempts to answer questions that now belong to science. Accordingly, they suggest, modern science’s explanatory successes have rendered religious belief obsolete.
But this seems untrue. First, “religion” as a category contains a wide variety of practices, movements and beliefs, and generalizations about “religion,” as such, are just as risky as generalizing about “language.” (What’s true of Chinese, for example, may not apply at all to Spanish, Icelandic or Hebrew.) To choose just one illustration: Criticisms of fundamentalist Protestant views of the first chapters of Genesis have no relevance whatsoever to Buddhism.
But even if we confine ourselves to the Abrahamic religions that Western critics typically have in mind, scientific issues (while they sometimes appear) are mostly peripheral matters. There’s no clearly biblical or Quranic teaching on gravity, blood circulation, plant genetics, the causes of disease, chemical reactions or motions of planets. And, while Genesis 1-2 plainly offers an origin story, it’s strikingly short on detailed mechanisms of precisely how things came to be, and the Bible as a whole contains very few etiological stories (causal explanations) of the “and that’s how the leopard got its spots” type.
On the whole, religions speak, rather, to issues on which science has little if anything to say: Was the world created for a purpose? What happens when we die? How should we live? Do our lives have meaning?
Modern western science can say essentially nothing about purpose, for example. In fact, one of the distinguishing marks of modern science, one of the very things that first made it possible, is the abandonment of “teleology.” Aristotle had identified four distinct kinds of “causes”: material, formal, efficient and final. To take a statue as an illustration, the marble of which it’s made would be the material cause. No marble, no statue. Nothing. The formal cause or form is what makes it a statue rather than just raw marble. The efficient cause would be the sculptor himself. If he hadn’t taken a chisel to the marble, it would have remained an unfinished block. And the final cause (or, in Greek, the “telos”) would be the “end” or purpose for which the sculptor did his work — perhaps to adorn a temple, to earn a paycheck or to win praise. But again, without that purpose there would be no statue.
Modern science abandoned the four-cause model and concentrated, very efficiently and productively, on only (impersonal) efficient causes. What made “x” happen? What brought it into existence? “Purpose” or “intent” was ignored — or even, as in much evolutionary thinking, altogether denied.
Religion, by contrast, has much to say about “purpose.”
Science can also say nothing about ethics or morality. It can build a bomb, but it can’t tell us when or whether to use that bomb. It’s good at generating “is” statements, but getting from those to “ought” statements is a very different matter. It can tell us that widespread honesty will help a society thrive, but it can’t really tell any particular individual whether he or she should be honest — especially when dishonesty might both pay well and go undetected. Should a husband be faithful to his wife? Or should he, in line with sheer evolutionary biology, seek to spread his genes as widely as possible?
Science may tell us that altruism toward kinfolk would serve the interests of a genetically related group, but why should an individual care about the future of his or her kin — especially when we’re talking about distant posterity or when such care might be very costly in the here and now? And, if “morality” emerged through natural evolutionary causes, why should we feel bound by it? Why do we continue to feel its dictates as specifically “moral” rather than as mere instinct that can (and sometimes should be) overcome?
In fact, quite radically opposing lessons can be derived from science alone. The German militarism and eugenics of both World War I and Nazism, for instance, were fueled to a striking degree by the doctrines of “Social Darwinism.” Yet Charles Darwin’s theories, as such, entail no such doctrines.
Science is wonderful, but it cannot answer all human questions. In fact, science can’t answer many of the most important ones.
See Richard Weikart's “From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany” and the short video “The Biology of the Second Reich: Social Darwinism and the Origins of World War I.” (
Daniel Peterson teaches Arabic studies, founded BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, directs MormonScholarsTestify.org, chairs mormoninterpreter.com, blogs daily at patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson, and speaks only for himself.