Reviewed by JEFFREY TAYLER

A new book by the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne tackles arguments that the two institutions are compatible.

In May 1988, a 13-year-old girl named Ashley King was admitted to Phoenix Children’s Hospital by court order. She had a tumor on her leg—an osteogenic sarcoma—that, writes Jerry Coyne in his book Faith Versus Fact, was “larger than a basketball,” and was causing her leg to decay while her body started to shut down. Ashley’s Christian Scientist parents, however, refused to allow doctors permission to amputate, and instead moved their daughter to a Christian Science sanatorium, where, in accordance with the tenets of their faith, “there was no medical care, not even pain medication.” Ashley’s mother and father arranged a collective pray-in to help her recover—to no avail. Three weeks later, she died.

Had Ashley received medical care, Coyne writes, she would likely have recovered. The Kings, tried in an Arizona court for negligent homicide, expressed no remorse, pleaded no contest, and were convicted on a lesser charge. They effectively escaped punishment, because their actions were faith-motivated. “Had the Kings been atheists,” Coyne writes, “there was a good chance [Ashley] would have lived.”

This tragic story backs up the chief argument Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, makes in Faith Versus Fact, namely that “it is time for us to stop seeing faith as a virtue, and to stop using the term ‘person of faith’ as a compliment.” In the book’s 262 pages, Coyne tackles arguments stating that belief in God is a laudable quality, and reasons instead that faith is detrimental, even dangerous, and fundamentally incompatible with science, even while peacemakers try to find common ground between the two. Coyne, it should be noted, has spent much of his career objecting to religious rejection of Darwinism—he published a bestseller, Why Evolution Is True, that was based on his blog of the same name. In Faith Versus Fact, his overarching argument is that religion and science both make claims about the universe, but only one of the two institutions is sufficiently open to the fact that it might be wrong.

In calm, levelheaded prose, Coyne refutes the “accommodationist” position that science and faith belong to “two non-overlapping magisteria”—a theory coined by his late colleague Stephen Jay Gould that espouses that science concerns itself with establishing facts about the physical universe, while religion is interested in spiritual matters, and the two therefore cannot be in conflict. Reconciling the two is impossible, he writes, because religion’s “combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic,” while science, in contrast, acknowledges the fact that it might err, arriving at truths that are “provisional and evidence-based,” but at least testable. Unlike religion, science self-corrects, points out its errors, and tries again.Faith Versus Fact arrives at a time when non-belief is increasing among young Americans, with a recent Pew survey showing that 34 percent of adult Millennials are unaffiliated with any particular religion—compared with 25 percent in 2007. But Americans on the whole are still largely religious, with 70.6 percent identifying as Christian in 2014. Out of those who did so, the largest group (25.4 percent) identified as Evangelical, and the survey shows that Evangelical Protestantism has lost fewer members over the past seven years than other branches of Christianity (a drop of 0.9 percent, compared with 3.1 percent for Catholicism).

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The Muslim Times’ Editor’s comments

Prof. Jerry Coyne, I believe, has presented a case for science, which is more a case for militant atheism; which is a totalitarian philosophy.

Here I link some more balanced cases for science and its correlation with religion:

From the Muslim Sunrise: Truth and Science

Science in the Service of the Scriptures

The Root Cause of Science and Religion Conflict: Wrong Theology!

If Atheists and the Christians Debate, Islam Wins!