Free God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion by Victor J. Stenger

by the previous event.
    Here Hume makes a clear break from the caveman logic discussed in chapter 2 . As we have seen, this is a major area of incompatibility between science and religion. Religion uses caveman logic to see divine agency, that is, causality, behind everything that happens in the universe. Biology, physics, and cosmology, on the other hand, have shown that observed phenomena occur without cause. Chance, under no control—human or divine—is not simply a minor player deciding the outcome of events; it is the major player.
    Barbour finds Hume's criticism of religion less cogent today, claiming that religious belief is “not based on rational argument but on historical revelation or on moral and religious experience.” 54 This hardly agrees with the fact that when believers are asked to provide a reason for their belief, most typically point to the world around them and say, “How can all of this be an accident?” That is, they use the argument from design. 55 And many theologians continue to provide what they regard as reasonable arguments for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. 56
    Immanuel Kant
     
    When Kant read Hume's critique of causality, he said it awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber.” This wakening motivated him to find a way other than observation and reason to arrive at knowledge of the world. He came up with the notion that the human mind is not the tabula rasa , the blank slate, that Locke and Hume proposed. Rather, it possesses certain a priori knowledge by which it organizes the data sent to it by the senses.
    Kant gives the examples of space and time and, in particular, Euclideangeometry. Although not directly observed, we express all our observations in terms of space and time. He saw no alternative. Furthermore, Euclid was able to deduce the theorems of geometry from a few simple axioms that could be seen to apply to the observable universe.
    However, one of the principles of Euclidean geometry, that parallel lines never meet, turned out to be simply a definition. By relaxing that rule, other geometries are possible. The simplest example is the geometry of the surface of a sphere, where parallel line of longitude meet at the poles. Non-Euclidean geometry was used by Einstein in his general theory of relativity.
    Furthermore, space and time are human inventions, defined operationally by what one measures with a meter stick and a clock. Space and time are used in our mathematical models, but those models can all be rewritten by means of what is known as a Fourier transform (see chapter 6 ) so that the independent variables are momentum and energy or wavelength and frequency.
    Kant also introduced what Barbour calls the independence hypothesis in the competition between science and religion. Each has its own realm. Science occupies the realm of the senses, and religion does not have to keep defending itself by seeking gaps in scientific explanations or arguments from design. The realm of religion is the moral life and its relation to ultimate reality.
    As we saw in chapter 1 , the separated compartmentalization of science and religion was reintroduced in 1999 by the famed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in Rocks of Ages . 57 Gould defined science and religion as “two non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA). Religion was to concern itself just with matters of morals and ultimate meanings, while science would deal solely with the world of the senses.
    Kant's and Gould's division of labor has been viewed favorably by the minority of scientists who are believers (see chapter 12 ). I know many personally and find that, as I have mentioned, they are able to compartmentalize their own thinking, leaving their science at the church door on Sunday and leaving God at home when they return to work on Monday morning. These individuals are sincere and able to perform their tasks just as competently as any atheist colleague. They simply avoid applying the same critical thinking tools