Yes Virginia, They Do Conflict

Brights such as Richard Dawkins and Theists such as Francis Collins have both attacked Stephen Jay Gould's claim that science and religion constitute two, "nonoverlapping magisteria." And, of course, they are both right in making such an attack. Despite what theists who believe in evolution by natural selection say, natural selection is in deep tension with the specific and widely held doctrine of the immortal soul.

To make it clear why this is so, we need to acknowledge up front that, for theists, the immortal soul is supposed to explain something; it is not merely an idle and gratuitous feature of humans, but is supposed to account for something that is otherwise inexplicable. The problem arises when another, competing explanation of the same phenomena is offered, for both explanations cannot be right. This is exactly the position we are in (or will soon be in, I predict) with respect to the immortal soul.

What is the immortal soul supposed to explain? Francis Collins attributes his conversion to Christianity in large part to reading C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, and I think it fair to say that what the immortal soul is supposed to provide is moral knowledge--that without the existence of an immortal soul, ethics makes no sense. So when people like Collins say they are committed Darwinians, they mean they are committed up to a point, for a committed Darwinian wants to say that everything about humans can be given a natural explanation in evolutionary terms, and the concept of an immortal soul is not a part of the Darwinian tool kit--it simply does no explanatory work. Thus, if we ever reach a point where a Darwinian theory of morality is fully articulated, people will need to make a choice: either accept the Darwinian story and reject the concept of an immortal soul, or reject the Darwinian story and accept immortal souls. But because these accounts will be in conflict, they cannot have it both ways.

This, by the way, is where the real action should be in this debate between religion and science. A lot of focus is given to the question of whether there could be a God that created the universe, set down a system of laws compatible with our evolution, and then let nature run its course. Brights like Dawkins get in trouble here because the issues involved can by rather esoteric and hard to think about for creatures whose psychology was tuned to deal with more "local" problems, like how to survive and reproduce. Because Dawkins is seen as taking a hard stand on such issues, he is accused of overreaching. I think there is something to this criticism, but I also think the debate obscures the conflicts between religion and science that are less inscrutable.