Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, has recently published a book called Why Evolution is True, and started up a blog of the same name. He’s come out swinging in the science/religion debates, taking a hard line against “accomodationism” — the rhetorical strategy on the part of some pro-science people and organizations to paper over conflicts between science and religion so that religious believers can be more comfortable accepting the truth of evolution and other scientific ideas. Chris Mooney and others have taken up the other side, while Russell Blackford and others have supported Coyne, and since electrons are free there have been an awful lot of blog posts.
At some point I’d like to weigh in on the actual topic of accomodationism, and in particular on what to do about the Templeton Foundation. But there is a prior question, which some of the discussion has touched on: are science and religion actually compatible? Clearly one’s stance on that issue will affect one’s feelings about accomodationism. So I’d like to put my own feelings down in one place.
Science and religion are not compatible. But, before explaining what that means, we should first say what it doesn’t mean.
It doesn’t mean, first, that there is any necessary or logical or a priori incompatibility between science and religion. We shouldn’t declare them to be incompatible purely on the basis of what they are, which some people are tempted to do. Certainly, science works on the basis of reason and evidence, while religion often appeals to faith (although reason and evidence are by no means absent). But that just means they are different, not that they are incompatible. (Here I am deviating somewhat from Coyne’s take, as I understand it.) An airplane is different from a car, and indeed if you want to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco you would take either an airplane or a car, not both at once. But if you take a car and your friend takes a plane, as long as you both end up in San Francisco your journeys were perfectly compatible. Likewise, it’s not hard to imagine an alternative universe in which science and religion were compatible — one in which religious claims about the functioning of the world were regularly verified by scientific practice. We can easily conceive of a world in which the best scientific techniques of evidence-gathering and hypothesis-testing left us with an understanding of the workings of Nature which included the existence of God and/or other supernatural phenomena. (St. Thomas Aquinas, were he alive today, would undoubtedly agree, as would many religious people who actually are alive.) It’s just not the world we live in. (That’s where they would disagree.)
The incompatibility between science and religion also doesn’t mean that a person can’t be religious and be a good scientist. That would be a silly claim to make, and if someone pretends that it must be what is meant by “science and religion are incompatible” you can be sure they are setting up straw men. There is no problem at all with individual scientists holding all sorts of incorrect beliefs, including about science. There are scientists who believe in the Steady State model of cosmology, or that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, or that sunspots are the primary agent of climate change. The mere fact that such positions are held by some scientists doesn’t make them good scientific positions. We should be interested in what is correct and incorrect, and the arguments for either side, not the particular beliefs of certain individuals. (Likewise, if science and religion were compatible, the existence of thousands of irreligious scientists wouldn’t matter either.)
The reason why science and religion are actually incompatible is that, in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions. It’s worth noting that this incompatibility is perfectly evident to any fair-minded person who cares to look. Different religions make very different claims, but they typically end up saying things like “God made the universe in six days” or “Jesus died and was resurrected” or “Moses parted the red sea” or “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility.
But the superficial reasonableness of a claim isn’t enough to be confident that it is true. Science certainly teaches us that reality can be very surprising once we look at it more carefully, and it’s quite conceivable that a more nuanced understanding of the question could explain away what seems to be obviously laid out right in front of us. We should therefore be a little more careful about understanding how exactly a compatibilist would try to reconcile science and religion.
The problem is, unlike the non-intuitive claims of relativity or quantum mechanics or evolution, which are forced on us by a careful confrontation with data, the purported compatibility of “science” and “religion” is simply a claim about the meaning of those two words. The favored method of those who would claim that science and religion are compatible — really, the only method available — is to twist the definition of either “science” or “religion” well out of the form in which most people would recognize it. Often both.
Of course, it’s very difficult to agree on a single definition of “religion” (and not that much easier for “science”), so deciding when a particular definition has been twisted beyond usefulness is a tricky business. But these are human endeavors, and it makes sense to look at the actual practices and beliefs of people who define themselves as religious. And when we do, we find religion making all sorts of claims about the natural world, including those mentioned above — Jesus died and was resurrected, etc. Seriously, there are billions of people who actually believe things like this; I’m not making it up. Religions have always made claims about the natural world, from how it was created to the importance of supernatural interventions in it. And these claims are often very important to the religions who make them; ask Galileo or Giordano Bruno if you don’t believe me.
But the progress of science over the last few centuries has increasingly shown these claims to be straightforwardly incorrect. We know more about the natural world now than we did two millennia ago, and we know enough to say that people don’t come back from the dead. In response, one strategy to assert the compatibility between science and religion has been to take a carving knife to the conventional understanding of “religion,” attempting to remove from its purview all of its claims about the natural world.
That would be the strategy adopted, for example, by Stephen Jay Gould with his principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria, the subject of yesterday’s allegory. It’s not until page 55 of his (short) book that Gould gets around to explaining what he means by the “magisterium of religion”:
These questions address moral issues about the value and meaning of life, both in human form and more widely construed. Their fruitful discussion must proceed under a different magisterium, far older than science (at least as a formalized inquiry) and dedicated to a quest for consensus, or at least a clarification of assumptions and criteria, about ethical “ought,” rather than a search for any factual “is” about the material construction of the natural world. This magisterium of ethical discussion and search for meaning includes several disciplines traditionally grouped under the humanities–much of philosophy, and part of literature and history, for example. But human societies have usually centered the discourse of this magisterium upon an institution called “religion”…
In other words, when Gould says “religion,” what he means is — ethics, or perhaps moral philosophy. And that is, indeed, non-overlapping with the understanding of the natural world bequeathed to us by science. But it’s utterly at variance with the meaning of the word “religion” as used throughout history, or as understood by the vast majority of religious believers today. Those people believe in a supernatural being called “God” who created the universe, is intensely interested in the behavior of human beings, and occasionally intervenes miraculously in the natural world. Again: I am not making this up.
Of course, nothing is to stop you, when you say the word “religion,” from having in mind something like “moral philosophy,” or perhaps “all of nature,” or “a sense of wonder at the universe.” You can use words to mean whatever you want; it’s just that you will consistently be misunderstood by the ordinary-language speakers with whom you are conversing. And what is the point? If you really mean “ethics” when you say “religion,” why not just say “ethics”? Why confuse the subject with all of the connotations that most people (quite understandably) attach to the term — God, miracles, the supernatural, etc.? If Stephen Jay Gould and the AAAS or anyone else wants to stake out a bold claim that ethics and moral philosophy are completely compatible with science, nobody would be arguing with them. The only reason to even think that would be an interesting claim to make is if one really did want to include the traditional supernatural baggage — in which case it’s a non-empty claim, but a wrong one.
If you hold some unambiguously non-supernatural position that you are tempted to refer to as “religion” — awe at the majesty of the universe, a conviction that people should be excellent to each other, whatever — resist the temptation! Be honest and clear about what you actually believe, rather than conveying unwanted supernatural overtones. Communication among human beings will be vastly improved, and the world will be a better place.
The other favorite move to make, perhaps not as common, is to mess with the meaning of “science.” Usually it consists of taking some particular religious claim that goes beyond harmless non-supernatural wordmongering — “God exists,” for example, or “Jesus rose from the dead” — and pointing out that science can’t prove it isn’t true. Strictly construed, that’s perfectly correct, but it’s a dramatic misrepresentation of how science works. Science never proves anything. Science doesn’t prove that spacetime is curved, or that species evolved according to natural selection, or that the observable universe is billions of years old. That’s simply not how science works. For some reason, people are willing to pretend that the question “Does God exist?” should be subject to completely different standards of scientific reasoning than any other question.
What science does is put forward hypotheses, and use them to make predictions, and test those predictions against empirical evidence. Then the scientists make judgments about which hypotheses are more likely, given the data. These judgments are notoriously hard to formalize, as Thomas Kuhn argued in great detail, and philosophers of science don’t have anything like a rigorous understanding of how such judgments are made. But that’s only a worry at the most severe levels of rigor; in rough outline, the procedure is pretty clear. Scientists like hypotheses that fit the data, of course, but they also like them to be consistent with other established ideas, to be unambiguous and well-defined, to be wide in scope, and most of all to be simple. The more things an hypothesis can explain on the basis of the fewer pieces of input, the happier scientists are. This kind of procedure never proves anything, but a sufficiently successful hypothesis can be judged so very much better than the alternatives that continued adherence to such an alternative (the Steady State cosmology, Lamarckian evolution, the phlogiston theory of combustion) is scientifically untenable.
Scientifically speaking, the existence of God is an untenable hypothesis. It’s not well-defined, it’s completely unnecessary to fit the data, and it adds unhelpful layers of complexity without any corresponding increase in understanding. Again, this is not an a priori result; the God hypothesis could have fit the data better than the alternatives, and indeed there are still respected religious people who argue that it does. Those people are just wrong, in precisely analogous ways to how people who cling to the Steady State theory are wrong. Fifty years ago, the Steady State model was a reasonable hypothesis; likewise, a couple of millennia ago God was a reasonable hypothesis. But our understanding (and our data) has improved greatly since then, and these are no longer viable models. The same kind of reasoning would hold for belief in miracles, various creation stories, and so on.
I have huge respect for many thoughtful religious people, several of whom I count among the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. I just think they’re incorrect, in precisely the same sense in which I think certain of my thoughtful and intelligent physicist friends are wrong about the arrow of time or the interpretation of quantum mechanics. That doesn’t mean we can’t agree about those issues on which we’re in agreement, or that we can’t go out for drinks after arguing passionately with each other in the context of a civil discussion. But these issues matter; they affect people’s lives, from women who are forced to wear head coverings to gay couples who can’t get married to people in Minnesota who can’t buy cars on Sundays. Religion can never be a purely personal matter; how you think about the fundamental nature of reality necessarily impacts how you behave, and those behaviors are going to affect other people. That’s why it’s important to get it right.
What about the legal argument, espoused by accomodationists, that using science to draw conclusions about religion would make it harder to teach science in public schools?
JP, you don’t have to be religious to appreciate music, enjoy sunsets, or fall in love, and you don’t even have to be religious to begin to understand why we do all these things. Indeed, the fact that they are likely a byproduct of human evolution is fascinating in itself.
There is absolutely no danger of scientific reductionism taking all the fun and wonder out of life. We aren’t robots. Even if we invented a time machine tomorrow and went back in time to discover that none of the religions had any basis in fact, it would not appreciably change the way we think about or go about our lives.
Only if we ever invented something like the Total Perspective Vortex would we be shocked by the randomness and insignificance of our existence, but as it turns out our brains tend to be well protected against such thoughts. For example, how often do we ponder the millions of events that had to have happened in the lives of your parents and grandparents for you—specifically—to have been conceived? Almost never, I’d wager, and that’s only taking into account the events in the lives of six people.
And really, bringing religion into it doesn’t help much anyway. If you believe that your existence was ordained by God (as the only solution to this randomness) then that makes your parents and grandparents little more than oblivious puppets being led down the only trail that led to your conception.
So both “honest” views on life are highly disconcerting–religion doesn’t protect you from anything. Only the fuzzy thinking and lack of attention to the issue that we all engage in does that.
Science and religion should be considered to operate in two distinct spheres. Religion operates in the realm of Mythos, which should never be construed as “not true”, or should it be confused with scientific reality. Mythos creates a framework for describing origins and creating a moral basis for social interaction, whereas science is the accumulation of knowledge. Science can never be expected to prove or disprove the existence of God, just as religion can never be expected to explain the physical universe.
The reality is that science will not sway the beliefs of the faithful (nor should it try), and religious writings and teachings should not substitute for science.
The scientists that attempt to force their non-God world view on the faithful are just as much to blame for this controversy as the faithful who claim thier religious writings and teachings constitute an absolute and factual truth.
Religions should encouraage the explorations of science, and science should encourage the free expression of faith.
What? That’s nonsense. I would wager there are thousands of scientific papers dealing with each of the three issues you listed. Dealing with bereavement is certainly a well studied field in psychology and I have no doubt that there are plenty of non-religious resources available to those who are having such difficulties based on scientific studies of the bereaved and how they coped best with their situation.
Religion has certainly codified some of the things we have learned throughout our history (the Jewish prohibition against eating pork had a certain amount of sense for the time) but really, much of it is little more than common sense when it boils down to it. And in many cases, the religious advice is hopelessly contradictory. In the case of betrayal, is it “an eye for an eye” or “forgive those who transgressed against you”? Ask ten Christians and you’ll get at least five different answers, probably more.
Thus religion is, at best, a useful shorthand to help in these situations (it’s far easier to say that “God says do this” instead of having to explain the scientific and historical reasoning why they should do something) but at worst it can make situations far worse than they might otherwise have been.
Big Vlad. Is the fact that it matters simply because one is wrong and one is wright? How long ago was the creation story told? What did the evidence point to at the time? So the author of the creation story was wrong about how long it took to create the earth. That is not the point of the story. i doubt he even cared how long it took. It is by taking the context out of the bible that both extremes of the debate miss the true meaning. It is true that a hare and tortise do not race in nature. But that deos not make the fable meaningless.
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A disappointingly sloppy use of words and reasoning. You claim incompatibility, and allude to a more general referent for that incompatibility, but rely only on personal (almost aesthetic) reasons to support your claim. So they seem incompatible to you. And you admit that at a rigorous level scientiic knowledge is different to pin down. Then why should you deny incompatibility to others more skeptical than you of how knowledge might evolve? Science as operationalized through Popper simply cannot refute a one-off historical, personal experience that would otherwise defy known laws of physics. You should be more forthright in acknowledging that your claim about the incompatibility of science and religion is not itself scientific except in the sense that you are a scientist (not a trivial sense, but not definitive!).
Incompatible with the common simple ideas most people hold of religion, but religion isn’t constrained to the same limitations science is and can adapt to incorporate or dismiss it as irrelevant to its domain. It does not have to be incompatible with it though more often than not is while it shouldn’t be. It seems in your conception the supernatural must exist within the confines of nature, rather than outside of nature, and even deny anything outside of nature. It seems to you nature is a monism so all is amenable to science, whereas religion is a dualism where all may or may not be, and not just concern the unknown, but possibly the unknowable. Now you will dismiss this as impractical and useless, lacking evidence and unprovable, unscientific, but that is the point, they are those things to which science doesn’t apply. Is there anything more? Religion is about the more. We lack the tools to know the unknowable, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to know. That is something religion and science share.
I paraphrase a quote from an older post of Sean’s (pre-merger with Discover Magazine) that I can’t seem to find at the moment. It came from an interview he had with someone who brought up the science vs. religion angle.
I believe in God and I consider myself religious. But,…(here’s the paraphrase part)… ‘I don’t believe in religion as an alternative to, or an answer for, science.’
Sean said it much better than my paraphrase, but I just can’t seem to find that post.
The purpose of Science is to prove that nothing runs on magic.
The purpose of Religion is to prove that everything runs on magic.
The two are totally, absolutely incompatible.
Monty’s #59 is maybe a caricature of the anti-accommodationist position, but it kind of sums up some of the general themes I see from that camp:
1) Scientism
2) Religion is whatever I think it is, not what religious people think it is.
And, fine if that’s your view. But if you can’t do any better than that, at least don’t try to be snide about it, you know?
Sean is 100% correct.
If I were God and I would communicate with some prophet who would write down some religious texts for the Bible, then my Bible would contain absolute proof that I’m for real.
My Bible would contain some facts about mathematics, physics, astronomy that are easy to verify. E.g., I could give the first few thousand decimals of pi. I could tell about the solar system, the planets, the masses of the planets, about nearby solar systems, about particles, the masses of particles, incuding the mass of the Higgs boson, etc. etc. etc. Then every new scientific result would confirm the truth of the Bible.
In case of the real Bible, the opposite has happened.
Sean, your blog page is showing adverts for two brands: Shell and Templeton. What is brand Templeton? I suggest that it is selling the same commodity that the Discovery Institute is selling: religion. They are selling two brands of religious ideology. One claims to be science; the other claims that religion and science fit together like hand in glove. Both ideologies believe that science should be used to serve the purpose of religion.
The comments here show that there are many possible philosophical views on the compatibility of science and religion. The AAAS, NAS and the NCSE have publicly expressed the view that science is or can be compatible with religion. I believe that the interest of science would be better served if scientific organisations did not take sides on controversial religio-philosophical questions. It is immaterial to the practice and teaching of good science whether it is compatible with any religion.
I know people who think that we are probably living in a simulation (call this the Matrix religion). The theory is that, as computer power increases, the ability to simulate the world (planet, solar system, whatever) to any desired degree with grow, and at some point the of number people in simulations will dominate the number people out of simulations will dominate the number of people out of them. The conclusion is that we are highly likely to be in a simulation.
Is this consistent with science ? There is no evidence for it, but there is not exactly evidence against it either. It is certainly possible imagine falsifying it in principle (say by looking at ever smaller distances / larger energies, and seeing if things start to look discrete). It doesn’t (to me) see much less scientifically compatible than (say) the idea of multiple universes.
In the matrix religion the entity controlling the simulation has many of the attributes of a deity. It is interesting to me that the people who will accept religion generally won’t accept the matrix religion and vice versa
What bothered me the most in this blog post was… “an hypothesis”. I know some people say it has a silent H, but that’s just wrong. Like pronouncing the R in idea.
My thoughts exactly monty.
smijer:
Physics describes the reality we live in. Therefore by the very definition of the word *everything* is merely a subsection of physics, ultimately, whether you’re talking about social sciences or astronomy. To believe anything else is to arrogantly assume that your particular thought patterns are somehow “special”, and outside of normal reality.
So I fail to see how saying someone holds that “scientism” is true automatically implies that they are arrogant. Indeed, I’d say that those who are anti-scientism are arrogant, because they are self-centred enough to think that they are outside of nature.
(I think that scientism is a really weird word to pronounce (it just feels funny on my tongue for some reason), and an unnecessary one at that, since Metaphysical Naturalism already covers scientism. EDIT: I see that scientism has a great many potential different meanings. In fact, the word is so broad, that it can mean practically anything. It’s the philosophical equivalent of the word “whatchamahoozit”.)
Sean,
If you consider the history of religion and not a particular static subset of it, then religion is a logical institutional evolutionary adaptation. Are there any social groups you are a member of that have no idiosyncrasies? Now think; What is the purpose of these particular habits, other than to define ones group as distinct. In fact, the more illogical the belief systems, the more effective they are at distinguishing those most defined by their faith and those just wanting to be part of the group.
Then there is the evolutionary process by which this entity further distills its core message, while still maintaining some necessary contact with the outside, thus legitimizing the existence of the institution with its long history and giving its adherents what they prize most, a sense of immortality, or association with it.
Science and religion may not be compatible, but they are complementary, in the way that Democrats and Republicans are not compatible, but they are complimentary. One is inherently about bottom up process and the other is about top down order. Contradictions are what give reality its multidimensionality.
As for God, the logical flaw in monotheism is that the universal state of the absolute would be the elemental, not the ideal, so a spiritual absolute would be the raw essence of awareness from which life rises, not an ideal form of it from which humans fell. It just happens to be politically convenient to assert the ideal is also the source, thus giving all legitimacy to top down order and none to that messy bottom up process.
Marshall, if we’re living in a Matrix universe then there really isn’t any science we can do that could prove it either way. There’s certainly no reason to think that pushing the boundaries of our knowledge in any direction will lead us to uncover a glitch or limitation in the programming (as you can in a video game, for example). Whether we drill down to subatomic particles or unleash the energy of a neutron star, we’ll still only be seeing what the simulation allows us to see.
To all intents and purposes it *is* our reality, whether or not we are merely inside a simulation, so we might as well live out our lives as though we’re not.
Science today is thoroughly naturalistic. Any movements to the contrary are fervently and noisily resisted. The supernatural, we are told most firmly, has no place in science.
For practical reasons, it may make sense for scientists to talk about natural causes only, for natural causes are what they are interested in. What does NOT make sense is to turn this into an argument that claims that science therefore proves that natural causes are the ONLY causes.
In fact it is almost tautological to say this. Current scientific dogma cannot incoporate supernatural phenomena for whatever science can study and analyze is defined as natural. For instance, magnetism was once thought of as an occult force, but in becoming analyzable and quantifiable, in coming under the aegis of science, it came to be thought of as natural.
In the nineteenth century, it became very popular to try to verify the existence of spirits scientifically. People would set up scientific apparatus to try to detect changes in electrical charges or currents or other physical phenomena in an effort to find scientific evidence for the existence of spirits. If they had found such evidence, however, the spirit would now be an object of scientific study. It would be part of the “real” world that science studies. It would then no longer be supernatural. From the perspective of a naturalist, it would be just another, albeit bizarre, phenomenon of the world. When there is scientific evidence for any thing, then that thing is considered to be something in this world, and it is studied as if it were natural.
Whatever might be supernatural, if it is genuinely supernatural (i.e. beyond this world), then it is not able to be studied by the activity that studies this world. Consequently, science is unalble to disprove the spritual, for if the spiritual agency does something in this world, then the evidence for the spiritual agency is precisely the evidence for what is defined as a natural activity. The current dogma is that whatever science discovers is natural.
Folks, this way of looking at the world is NOT based on an an argument: it is a matter of DEFINITION!
In short, Sean et. al. have not argued (in this or any other article or book) that God doesn’t exist. They have just defined their world in such a way that they close themselves to the possiblity that God exists.
It is they who are the closed system!
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In many ways, religion is armchair theorizing about the unknown and possibly unknowable, speculation in other words. I wouldn’t say disbelief in more is arrogant, only an application of occam’s razor, but it is a choice and the more interesting question often is what if? Even natural theories are often initially speculative and untestable and must be explored and investigated before drawing any conclusions. There are a great deal of parallels between religion, a multiverse, and a matrix/simulation. All are considerations of more. More is always a possibility and one we should always be open for. Speculation can be interesting and useful to our way of thinking even if not knowable or provable.
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Those of us who are teachers have an opportunity and indeed a responsibility to educate students. While I don’t address science and religion in my classes, students do ask what I believe. I suspect that my responses often disappoint students. Probably some of them are hoping that I’ll agree with them so they can use it to justify their own existing beliefs. Some maybe be trying to provoke an argument. But I believe that many of them are genuinely curious because they are struggling with this issue themselves. They are willing to change some of their beliefs about science and/or religion in order to resolve their cognitive dissonance. How I reply has the potential to change not only their own religious beliefs, but also the scope of religion in their world view, i.e., how they define religion. I do not tell them what world view they should have or how they should define religion, as such a response would implicitly endorse obtaining knowledge through authority and/or belief. I do give examples of questions that I believe are best addressed by scientific, experiments, observations, and models along with examples of questions that I can not see how one could answer scientifically. If students leave a class better appreciating the power of the scientific process and what sorts of questions science is well-suited to address, so that they revise their views on the appropriate scope of religion, then I would consider that a remarkably educational experience.
For some reason, people are willing to pretend that the question “Does God exist?” should be subject to completely different standards of scientific reasoning than any other question.
That reason is simply because atheist scientists like yourself do not understand what God is. The very use of the term “the God hypothesis” indicates that you’re talking about something subject to empirical science. When you try and subject it to empirical science, you end up deciding that it’s ill-defined, unhelpful, etc. All of that is because it’s not science.
The question as to whether the dead rise again — well, clearly, it doesn’t happen systematically. Did it happen once or twice, as a miracle? Science doesn’t support the existence of miracles, and they sure don’t seem to be happening now, so it’s dubious. But there’s wiggle room if you want it. My own position as a Christian is that the bodily resurrection of Jesus probably didn’t really happen– and I know that a lot of Christians would consider this to be a destructive view to the religion, but I’m very far from the only Christian with that view.
However, to reduce God to a hypothesis that can be tested empirically makes no more sense than to reduce a symphony, or a work of art, to a hypothesis that can be tested empirically. There are more ways of knowing than science. There are more fields of human intellectual endeavor than science. Scientists would do well to remember this– those who recognize it in the first place, anyway.
Another thing re: how things are done. You would agree that there are things in science which were accepted by all scientists which have since been shown to be wrong. Consider the Steady-State Universe (which was a dominant view), or the geocentric Universe.
Given that the broadly accepted tenets of science can be seen to be wrong without having to undermine all of science, why not the same with religion? Creationism is patently wrong, and is no longer accepted by an overwhelming majority of the religious (although it’s accepted by far too many). Once upon a time it was accepted by *all* of the religious. Our understanding of religion, just like our understanding of science, evolves. Some of the evolution of religion has been informed by science, but not all of it.