Galileo, Darwin, and Hawking: The Interplay of Science, Reason, and Religion [Paperback]

This book is a somewhat quirky introduction to the philosophy of science from a theistic viewpoint. It is quirky in that Dowe does not use a systematic approach, but rather his discussion flows loosely around three historical case studies. As he builds up to each case study Dowe tends to wander around a bit, discussing the philosophical background. This meandering, while interesting, makes often makes the book's train of thought hard to follow. The book could be accurately retitled, "Aristotle, Augustine, Calvin, Copernicus, Galileo, Bellarmino, Newton, Osiander, Van Fraassen, Feuerbach, Wittgenstein, Descartes, Bacon, Hume, Paley, Darwin, Gray, Hawking, and Davies: the Interplay of Science, Reason, and Religion."

Dowe's central thesis is that the relationship of science and religion is best understood as one of "harmony, with a considerable amount of fruiful interaction." (p.195) According to Dowe, "science and religion are neither in conflict nor completely compartmentalized. Rather, there is genuine interaction between the two." (p.5) Further, the Judeo-Christian tradition "is neither incompatible with nor a hindrance to science; there is no philosophical conflict between the two." (p.195) In fact, "science and religion are not only compatible, but are dependent on one another." (p.5)

Dowe begins with a clear summary of Aristotelian cosmology & how it shaped Christian thinking up to the time of Galileo. While this context helps us understand Galileo's conflict with the church, unfortunately Dowe's discussion of Galileo's case is too much like a legal argument with a lot of confusing back-and-forth. I think the main point is that both Galileo and the church were committed to the idea of unity--that there is one God behind both Scripture and nature. Both sides believed that if a scientific theory was proven to be true, then the theory could not contradict the Scriptures when the Scriptures were rightly understood. (p.38) Was Copernicus' model proven to be true? That is where the dispute truly lay, if I follow Dowe rightly. (I'm not sure I do.)

This raises the philosophical question of what science means when it claims to be true. Does science describe what is real? Or is science just a way of accounting for observational results? In considering the realist vs antirealist accounts of science and of religion, Dowe explains the principle of inference to the best explanation (pp.46ff). Throughout the book, Dowe shows that this rational principle is a shared methodology of science and religion.

Dowe shows that "thinkers in the seventeenth century [Galileo, Descartes, Bacon] saw the relationship between science and religion as one of harmony, guaranteed by the fact that the two books, Scripture and nature, have a single author..." (p.79) "...there is a two-way relevance between science and religion. Certain religious beliefs provide the motivation for doing science, and science's success confirms the truth of those beliefs." (p.80)

Moving to Darwin, Dowe's explanation of Darwin's logic is helpful and illuminating. "It is best to think of Darwin's argument as an inference to the best explanation... The rival hypotheses are the theory of natural selection and the theory of special creation, the idea that each species was created in its final form." (pp.118-119) Given that nature reveals tremendous variety but little innovation, the more likely hypothesis is that organisms are shaped by natural selection rather than by special creation. Dowe makes very clear the force of Darwin's reasoning.

Darwin knew that a key challenge for the theory of natural selection is how to explain the development of "Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication" (one of Darwin's chapter titles), such as the eye. Dowe quotes and explains Darwin's approach to this issue for most of two pages, which is a considerable length in this brief book. Dowe seems to accept Darwin's idea that even an eye can be developed by natural selection through enough "trial and error, accident, improvement, and gradual variations." This vague answer amounts to arm-waving and is not likely to persuade readers made skeptical by Behe's _Darwin's Black Box_. Dowe, however, keeps his discussion in the historical past, and does not mention current controversies.

Dowe is keen to show that early Christian opposition to Darwin's ideas was generally not based on taking Genesis 1 literally, but rather based on logical and/or scientific grounds. Dowe contends that not all leading conservative evangelical scholars opposed Darwin. At the 1895 Niagara Bible Conference which defined the five fundamentals of Christian faith, Dowe notes, "interestingly, and as many deliberately overlook, several of the contributors were Darwinists, most prominently, B.B. Warfield." (p.137) Dowe suggests that, in the history of the interplay of science and religion, the modern creation science movement is an odd latecomer, unsupported by Christian tradition, which only assumed its militant anti-Darwinist character in a period of panic between 1910 and 1925.

Despite Hawking's name in the book's title, Hawking's cosmology gets little more than a mention. The main issue regarding cosmology, says Dowe, is that the fine-tuning of the universe requires an explanation. It is not satisfying to say this universe was only the result of chance. A more adequate explanation, argues Dowe, is design. "Provided there is no independent evidence for multiple worlds, we should infer the existence of a designer." (p.193)

Moving to quantum physics, Dowe explains how Bell's Theorem indicates that there are no `hidden variables' behind the statistical results of quantum mechanics. This seems to mean that determinism, at least on the quantum level, is wrong. Events may happen at the quantum level for no reason, literally without any cause. In view of this remarkable phenomenon of nature, (p.179) Dowe concludes that we "have to infer that God at least causes some of the objective chances in the world." (p.189) Unfortunately Dowe doesn't explore the implications of this significant conclusion.

STRENGTHS: Well-reasoned, even-handed, non-technical, non-simplistic explanations of several key historical and philosophical issues common to science and religion. His often-surprising insights from the history of science and religion challenge the usual conflict model. His book encourages readers who struggle to reconcile their faith with science, by showing the two disciplines share much common ground, both historically and philosophically.

WEAKNESSES: Many sections meander and are difficult to follow. Stays in the abstract realms of history and philosophy, and does not offer much application. His discussions often leave the reader wondering, OK, but so what? How does that affect us today?

This book was an adequate to good introduction on the issue of the compatibility of religion and science. Its review of Darwin and Galileo were good, while the Hawking overview was adequate. Dowe concludes that religion and science can be viewed as compatible, or in harmony. He has an open-minded and fairly balanced approach, even briefly discussing Creation Science in objective terms. This book is a satisfactory text for introductory students to the issues of religion and science. Chapter Two on "realism and antirealism" was the least compelling, and could probably be skipped. Some of the explanation and analysis becomes cumbersome, but on the whole Dowe's book contributes a good starting point to think about the compatibility of religion and science.

This book is about whether science and religion are in conflict or in harmony, and whether they are isolated from each other or interact. The conclusion is that they are in harmony and interact. Thus the Galileo case was not a conflict between science and religion, but a social conflict. The controversy over Darwinian evolution was not about Biblical literalism, but about Paley's Natural Theology.

Dowe claims that scientific method is based on inference to the best explanation. He claims, oddly, that religion uses this method also, so that this becomes a point of commonality between science and religion. Inference to the best explanation is essentially Bayesian statistics. For example, if God created the world, including humans, humans should have rational abilities that correspond to the creator's rationality. Hence belief in God should raise the probability of the success of science above its prior value. By inference to the best explanation, it follows that the probability of the existence of God given the success of science is greater than the prior value of that probability. Since science has indeed been successful, Dowe concludes that the existence of God explains the success of science. Such arguments occur throughout the book. Dowe never explains exactly what he means by probability. Since it's hard to think of an objective interpretation for the "probability of the existence of God", he is presumably thinking of some kind of subjective probability.

He has a similar argument concerning cosmic fine tuning, i.e., the fact that the basic constants of nature seem to have the precise values needed for the appearance of human life. Dowe argues that if there is a God, he wants intelligent beings like humans to appear. Hence the probability of a fine-tuned universe given the existence of God is much greater than the probability of fine tuning without that assumption. By inference to the best explanation, again, the fact that there is fine tuning greatly increases the probability of the existence of God. Again, this is a Bayesian argument, based on the assumption that the probability of the existence of God and the probability of a fine-tuned universe have numerical values.

Dowe considers alternative, non-theistic explanations for fine-tuning. He rejects pantheism as a possibility because he believes pantheism requires an immanent teleology in nature, and for Dowe all teleology requires the deliberate intentions of conscious persons. He rejects the multi-world explanation because he agrees with Ian Hacking that to suppose that there are many universes and we just happen to be in a fine-tuned one would be to commit the "inverse gambler's fallacy." It is fallacious to suppose that the probability of our universe being fine-tuned increases if there are other universes. Dowe is assuming, in effect, that one possible universe is picked out as "ours" without regard to whether it is fine-tuned. Then we have to consider the probability that the selected universe is fine-tuned, and that probability is very small. He rejects John Leslie's counter-argument, which says in effect that the universe picked as "ours" must be fine-tuned at the outset, because we humans must be living in it. The question of whether it is fine-tuned does not remain to be decided.

Dowe rejects this "observer selection effect." He argues that the existence of human observers is an effect. Fine tuning is its cause, and the effect cannot explain the cause. But his reasoning here is fallacious. The existence of human observers doesn't have to explain the existence of the universe or its fine-tuning. It merely has to explain why we identify a certain universe as our own.

Dowe again is assuming that it is meaningful to speak of the numerical probability that a certain universe is fine-tuned. He doesn't consider what the alternatives to fine tuning would be or what probabilities they might have. He wishes to avoid a design argument that would posit a "God of the gaps", a God who simply fills in for what science currently doesn't know. However, he doesn't seriously consider the possibility that an underlying scientific explanation for cosmic fine tuning may be discovered in the future, and in the end he opts for a simple Paley-like argument from design: There is something unsatisfactory about putting a universe like ours down to chance.

This book is good for introducing readers to issues in the relation of science and religion that they may not have thought about before. But its quirky arguments limit its value as a contribution to the subject.

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