Science vs religion and the nature of truth

Truth is the objective realization of an inarguable facet of reality. It is the bedrock of the interaction between science and society in both the raw, cosmological, physical sense as well as the green, squishy, muddy, biological sense, not to mention the how-this-thing-you’re-reading-from-works sense.

Scientific truths provide both predictive power in how things work and understanding of how things are. Religious truths are more like outposts for people to cling to through the turbulence of existence. The science vs religion debate occurs in the area of understanding and enlightenment where there is contradiction.

Science pursues truth. Religions ordains truth, usually in a way that is designed to provide a path to spiritual enlightenment both personal and societal and from a given text like the Torah, Bible, Qur’an, Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Mormon, etc.

Ordained truths are cast in faith. When science exposes a contradiction between an ordained truth and reality, religious fundamentalists believe that their faith is threatened – hence the debate which, let’s face it, is more like a war in many parts of the world.

When Copernicus contradicted the Roman Catholic Church’s claim that Earth must lie at center of creation, he was branded a heretic. Even in cases where the scientific truth seems conclusive, there are shadows: if Earth is not the center of the universe, then surely the sun must be… and if not the sun, then what? Well, the theory of relativity requires that there are no absolute reference frames, much less a “center of the universe.”

Scientific truths tend to be asymptotic. Asymptotes are those lines that are approached over a long pursuit that we can get arbitrarily close to but never quite touch, like the pursuit of perfection. The scientific method is an iterative process of acquiring data, forming and testing hypotheses. That hypothesis which rests on the simplest set of assumptions (this ingredient is often called Occam’s razor) is developed into a predictive theory. The predictions are then subjected to further experiment. The process is repeated until a hypothesis has fully transformed into a theory. In each iteration science closes in on a truth, ever approaching but never quite touching the absolute, complete, inarguable Truth.

A good example of how science works is electrodynamics. In 1879 a theory of electrodynamics was complete. It had enormous predictive power (electricity as you use it is completely described by this theory). At the turn of the century, problems were found in the theory. As special relativity and the quantum theory of atoms developed, a new theory called quantum electrodynamics was formulated. QED, as it is known in the trade, is the most accurate theory human beings have devised – accurate to the experimental limit of less than one part in a trillion. QED is certainly closer to the Truth than the previous theory, now called classical electrodynamics. You might think, therefore, that the classical theory would be discarded in favor of the more accurate quantum theory, but science is pragmatic not ideological. Practicing professional physicists and engineers rely almost exclusively on classical electrodynamics to predict the response of electrical systems (like the one you’re reading from right now) because the classical theory is easier to work with and quite accurate at human-relevant time, length and energy scales.

The nature of the science vs religion debate is that it lies in the shadows between the current state of scientific understanding and The Truth.

(You are welcome to republish the text of this article, but not the images, without needing further permission, provided that you attribute the work to its author, Ransom Stephens, Ph.D. – who shouldn’t have been surprised at how difficult it was to compose something titled "Science vs religion and the nature of truth" in under 600 words. He is also the author of The God Patent, a novel set in the trenches of the science-religion culture war.)