Herbert Hauptman on Science and Religion
Yesterday Declan wrote once again to the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, following serious verbal abuse by a homeless woman in the Catholic Sisters of Mercy Dellow Centre, which belongs to his diocese (see previous blog). We should be almost invisible to other homeless who attend the centre since we are middle-aged, keep to ourselves and are in and out of the place as quickly as possible. Yet, since 10 April, Declan has been forced to wash in the street as a result of harassment and intimidation from other homeless – all our money and documents were also robbed in centre (see blog of 20 June “Declan robbed in the Sisters of Mercy Dellow Centre”). And on Monday at 5.00am, as we were about to leave the place we sleep in at night, a cleaner hosed where we bed down (see blog of 3 November “State Stem Cell Policies Deserve National Attention”). So we are very much keeping our fingers crossed for this weekend in the Catholic Manna Centre, where Declan was assaulted on 19 June (see blog “Declan assaulted in the Manna Centre”).
Two articles were written almost on the same day last week regarding religious fundamentalism in the United States: a review in The Buffalo News of Nobel Laureate Herbert Hauptman’s memoir “On the Beauty of Science”, and an article in The Times by best selling American author Susan Jacoby titled “Religion remains fundamental to US politics”. The articles especially complement previous blogs on Michigan’s Proposal 2, the amendment to the Michigan Constitution that was approved by Michigan voters in Tuesday’s general election, allowing people to donate embryos left over from fertility treatments for scientific research. The proposal pitted the state’s powerful public and private biological research centers against large, conservative Catholic and evangelical populations who equate destroying fertilised eggs with murder. According to The Wall Street Journal, the proposal’s opponents, gathered as Michigan Citizens Against Unrestricted Science and Experimentation, raised more than $7 million in contributions – $5 million alone from the Michigan Catholic Conference – to defeat the initiative and keep the ban on the destruction of human embryos for medical research in place.
Described by the Buffalo News as a “living treasure”, 91-year-old Herbert Hauptman won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1985 for his groundbreaking work in X-ray crystallography, research that helped pave the way in the development of powerful drugs. “On the Beauty of Science” is a sure-to-be-controversial call to arms, said the Buffalo News, as Hauptman argues forcefully that science and religion are incompatible and that Americans must learn to think more critically about science and other issues. Hauptman writes in the memoir: “I believe there is a direct negative connection between belief in religion, especially fundamentalist religion, and public scientific illiteracy.”
The Buffalo News reports that Hauptman believes his country would be better served if people studied more physics, chemistry, mathematics and engineering. Critical thinking, the kind fostered by a closer study of the sciences, is in short supply in the United States these days, he argues. He laments what he considers the mistaken priorities of the Bush administration, which he faults for cutting spending at the National Institutes of Health while spending billions in Iraq. “This is why it is so important for the general public to have a better understanding of where science is headed, or could be headed with the right funding,” Hauptman writes. It’s not just a matter of too little knowledge of science, he argues. The problem is compounded by too much belief in religion, ghosts, angels and alternative medicine, to boot.
“I believe that from an early age, most children in our society are inculcated in superstition and mumbo-jumbo, and so there is no development of the scientific approach to looking at the world,” Hauptman writes. He also tries to figure out why people are religious, and he wonders if human beings have a predisposition to be religious. He contends that the fact that the universe is orderly doesn’t provide evidence for God’s existence. He goes further to argue that science has done far more for humanity than religion, pointing to the development of air travel, computers and modern medicine as examples. Religion, he contends, has prompted too many people to act cruelly and murderously, as in the case of the 9/11 attacks. Hauptman also holds that science is more beautiful than religion, though many people don’t know enough about science and math to truly appreciate the beauty of, say, Gauss’ theorem (Watson, The Buffalo News, 2/11).
Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason”, begins her article in The Times by writing that to most of her European friends, an inexplicable aspect of American culture is “the quixotic persistence and social influence of religious fundamentalism”. She adds: “They cannot understand how Americans could seriously consider for the second highest office in the land a candidate who has worshipped all her adult life at churches where congregants believe the literal truth of every word in the Bible and practise ‘speaking in tongues’.” According to opinion polls, Jacoby writes, about one third of Americans subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible – from “the chatty serpent” in the Garden of Eden to “the bloody prophecies in Revelation”. They constitute a large and disciplined minority – a primarily Protestant army of Christian soldiers, with a pre-Enlightenment mindset and disdain for secular values.
Like Hauptman, Jacoby argues that there is a powerful correlation between fundamentalism and lack of education. This year, Jacoby writes, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 45 percent of Americans with no education beyond high school adhere to biblical literalism, while only 29 percent with some university education – and 19 percent of university graduates – share that old-time faith. She adds that Republicans have tapped into the fundamentalist resentment of educated, sceptical elites to form the party’s right-wing Christian base.
Another important dimension, Jacoby contends, is their strange – in view of the history of Protestant anti-Catholicism before John F Kennedy’s election in 1960 – alliance with the most conservative elements within the Roman Catholic Church. “On issues such as abortion and gay marriage, the Catholic hierarchy (as distinct from the Catholic laity, which is much more liberal) and right-wing Protestants are the best of friends,” she writes. “Fundamentalists represent a black-and-white value system. Because their beliefs matter so much more to them than religious indifference does to the religiously indifferent, they exert influence far out of proportion to their numbers. Whether that influence will continue depends partly on the election results and partly on whether the alliance between right-wing Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants endures” (Jacoby, The Times, 31/10).
Well, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in their election analysis, state the following: “After eight years of unprecedented access to the White House and (until 2006) in the halls of Congress, Religious Right organizations are about to lose a lot of clout with much of official Washington and could see their influence at the national level diminished. But it’s unlikely any of these organizations will close down. Rather, they will organize to defeat individual-freedom initiatives put forward by President Barack Obama, and they will place more emphasis on state and local governments as a way to press their agenda forward.” (I also found a similar analysis by Religion Dispatches.)
