Religion vs. Science? Look more deeply
Date: May 15, 2007
Time: 9:34am est

The mainstream media, by and large, have parsed our national debate over human embryonic stem cell (ESC) research in terms of "religion vs. science." But consider the following.

In a recent interview published in The New England Journal of Medicine , Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) attempted to articulate the reasons for his support of embryonic stem cell research. It is well known that on all other life issues, the senator has a clear and unambiguous voting record in defense of innocent human life. On the stem cell question, however, he changed course, apparently unable to discover an inviolable value in the early human embryo. Then, last month he voted in favor of legislation that would increase federal funding of embryo-destructive research. When asked about the current Bush policy of limited federal funds for ESC research, Hatch had this to say:

I really don't believe that the President has been given good advice on this. I believe the advice he has been given is political and not scientific. And I don't believe he has had the time to really study it as I have, as someone who has helped leading the fight up here.

What lands Orrin Hatch, an otherwise pro-life conservative Republican, on the same side of the stem cell issue as outspoken advocates of ESC research cannot be understood through the lens of "religion vs. science" or-supposedly within a shaper focus-that of "religious conservativism vs. science." Such a taxonomy is a worn-out canard that needs to be retired. And Orrin Hatch is the best example of the strain on discursive versatility occasioned by these hackneyed categories-not to mention the millions of Church-going Americans who say they support embryo-destructive research.

What makes for such strange bedfellows on the pro-ESC research side might be understandable, however, if -as the preceding interview seems to suggest at least-Orrin Hatch shares with millions of Americans a particular kind of conviction about the role, importance and place of scientific knowledge vis-à-vis public policy.

Millions of Americans approach reality through a worldview in which the only kind of 'knowledge' really worthy of the name is scientific (empirical) knowledge: what's really real is what science tells us is real.

Now, you and I and most of us happen to value scientific knowledge rather highly. But we differ on just how highly we value it. It's just not the be-all, end-all for most of us. Millions of us hold that there is more to "what's really real" than what science alone can tell us. But millions of Americans, consciously or not, relegate non-empirical ways of knowing (moral valuations, religious dogma, non-discursive intuitions, interpersonal communication-'Grandma loves me'-and our commonsense grasp of how things are in the world) to some much lower realm of significance, as if in a kind of epistemological caste system.

Reflecting on just such a worldview and, within it, the role of scientific knowledge in shaping public policy, Yuval Levin wrote, in the fall 2006 edition of The New Atlantis:

Science, as the servant of the highest good [e.g., personal health and well being], is deemed to be above politics, and described by its defenders as an agent of truth, not of action. Any subject on which science speaks or acts therefore comes to be seen as off-limits for policymakers informed by other kinds of analysis: by moral premises, or tradition, or religious or personal views, as if every question of public policy with any scientific dimension must be understood as a matter of pure science alone.

He goes on to note several recent instances in which politicians have attempted to muzzle public policy debates precisely because science has spoken on the matter. That conclusion, of course, does not follow normally-at least within a worldview which values other avenues, non-empirical ones to be sure, of arriving at true knowledge about how things really are in the world.

Within one and the other worldviews, we obviously all value, and indeed recognize our need-today more than ever-for scientific knowledge. I work with scientists on a regular basis. I know, for example, that as we move forward on the question of the value of embryonic human life, we need scientists to articulate precisely what is and what is not a human organism, and how we are to distinguish the living human (embryonic) organism from an array of bioengineered non-embryonic laboratory artifacts.

But it will not be the role and place of science to emit definitive value judgments as to the true value and worth of the human embryo. The opinions of scientists on such a question are as legitimate as anyone else's. But the answer to such a question lies outside the domain of empirical knowledge.

Hopefully as a country we will recover an understanding of the proper domain and validity of moral reasoning. Aided by science as often as must be, moral reasoning nonetheless thrives independently of the empirical realm, within its own domain of access to valid and true propositions about right and wrong in the world.

Now, I know that sounds 'old-fashioned' - or should I say 'Aristotelian'? In my opinion, Aristotle pretty much got it right on lots of questions. He was a proto-scientist and a metaphysician; while he knew nothing of our fragmentized, hard-and-fast distinctions between 'science', 'theology', 'morality', 'politics' and so on, he did value multiple forms of knowledge and knew how to derive from them a harmonious grasp of the whole of existence. And that ability is something most persons of learning, politics and culture could sorely use a lot more of today.

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