From the FEB/MAR 2006 issue of Seed:
Jesus, made from the elements.
Religion is such an important phenomenon that it is high time we directed all the magnificent truth-seeking tools of science on religions, to see what makes them work in the ways they do. I am not suggesting that science should try to do what religion does, but that it should study, scientifically, what religion does. Is there a good reason to oppose this? Those who are dubious about, or fearful of, the authority of science will have to search their souls. Do they acknowledge the power of science, properly conducted, to settle controversial factual questions or do they reserve judgment, waiting to see what the verdict will be? The ethos of science is that you pay a price for the authoritative confirmation of your favorite hypothesis, risking an authoritative refutation of it. Those who want to make claims about religion will have to live by the same rules: prove it or drop it. And if you set out to prove it and fail, you are obliged to tell us.
The potential benefits to religion of joining the scientific community are enormous: getting the authority of science in support of what you say you believe with all your heart and soul. Not for nothing have the new religions of the last century or two been given names like Christian Science and Scientology. Even the Roman Catholic Church, with its unfortunate legacy of persecution of its own scientists, has recently been eager to seek scientific confirmation--and accept the risk of disconfirmation--of its traditional claims about the Shroud of Turin, for example.
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In spite of this progress, the church's attitude toward science is still in disarray. In 1996, Pope John Paul II declared that "new knowledge leads us to recognize in the theory of evolution more than a hypothesis," and while many biologists were cheered by this acknowledgment of the fundamental scientific theory that unifies all of biology, they noted with dismay that he went on to insist that the transition from ape to human being involved a "transition to the spiritual" that could not be accounted for by biology. According to the pope, the theories of evolutionary biology provided an acceptable account of the rest of the biosphere but were "incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person." Last summer, Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, published an op-ed essay in the New York Times emphasizing that the official position of the Roman Catholic Church is actually opposed to neo-Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection.
According to Archbishop Schönborn, Catholics may use "the light of reason" to arrive at the conclusion that "evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense--an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection" is not possible, a conclusion firmly refuted by thousands of observations, experiments and calculations by experts in biology when they use their own light of reason. So, in spite of some important concessions over the years--and an official apology to Galileo centuries after the fact--the Roman Catholic Church is still in the awkward and indefensible position of trying to lean on scientific authority when Catholics like what it concludes while flatly rejecting it when it contradicts their traditions.