Morals Not Knowledge: Recasting the Contemporary U.S. Conflict between Religion and Science, by JOHN H. EVANS

In Morals Not Knowledge, Evans (2018) lays out a convincing case for the appropriate way to conceptualize the debate in the public sphere between religion (writ large) and science (likewise). Put simply: Evans argues that the disagreement, such as it is, is one over morality, not knowledge. This is not to say that there are no differences in accepted facts between some religious traditions and some disciplines within science—such differences are easily documented. Rather, the core of the public debate is not about truth, Evans argues, but the good.

This is not a view that theologians would likely disagree with, but it is one that many scientists would challenge. Science, they might argue, does not transmit moral views in the same way that most religions do. However, Evan’s primary focus is not debate between theologians and practicing scientists or other elites, but rather how the public views the struggle for dominance between science and religion.

In constructing this argument, Evans introduces the reader to the concept of knowledge structures, or hierarchical belief systems. These systems are pyramid-like, with central facts at the top of the pyramid (e.g., for science, facts are derived through observation and reason; p. 8). At the bottom of the science pyramid might be beliefs such as plants produce oxygen. Beliefs higher in the pyramid justify those lower. Lower beliefs must be logically consistent with each other, and with those higher in the pyramid. With these structures, Evans argues, it would be impossible for a person to hold both that grass produces oxygen and Moses parted the Red Sea (p. 8). Evans argues that elite academics and others build their work using similar structures, hence they apply these systems to the religion/science debate. Evans argues that the lay public, on the other hand, does not reason this way. Thus, the public does not consider (necessarily) the beliefs that grass produces oxygen and Moses parted the Red Sea as logically inconsistent.

In my own work, I have speculated that the rejection of human evolution in the United States was for moral rather than fact-based reasons (predominantly by conservative Protestants, and I used the term “identity” rather than morality; see Roos 2014, 2017). This finding has been echoed by Guhin (2016), in his ethnographic study of religious schools. It is hard to believe that a third of the U.S. population either hasn’t heard of evolution or is unaware of the mainstream science position on it. However, what better way to signal moral distance from mainstream science than by rejecting one of its major theories? The challenge here, as Evans notes, is that we lack survey instruments administered to representative samples that are designed to measure this potential difference in morality. What is readily available (in the General Social Survey and elsewhere) was originally designed to measure public science literacy (Miller 1987, 1998), not forms of moral conflict (but see Hill 2014).

Evans argues for the development of such instruments in the future. He also notes that while assessing the moral frameworks of adherents to particular religious traditions may be easy (in part, by inferring their frameworks based on the dogma of their tradition, group, or congregation), this is necessarily more difficult for science—both with practicing scientists and “science-oriented” members of the general public. After all, as a set of tools, science has no inherent moral framework, other than that falsification of theories is good and falsification of data is bad; parsimony is good, failure to replicate not quite bad but grounds for abandoning a theory or larger model, etc.

FOUR QUESTIONS, THREE AGENDAS

In the conclusion, Evans presents three broad research agendas to advance the state of research on the overlap between science and religion in light of his key argument about mismatched moral sets. The first of these relates to the actual shared moral values of science—if there even are any. He agrees with Wuthnow, that if anything, a “can-do attitude” (p. 169) and a striving for constant progress is most likely. Evans argues that this is a potentially main source of value mismatch with the public. The view that scientists desire progress above all is a double-foul, as it calls into question sacred truths while at the same time trending toward the abstract rather than concrete. Evans speculates about this attitude and argues that we should investigate whether or not it is true (and, concurrently, whether or not the public sees this attitude as a source of conflict). An alternative set of values in science might be put simply as status attainment—that is, practicing scientists work to attain personal status more than to achieve constant progress. This is a set of values not altogether different than many in the United States outside of science.

The second question in this agenda Evans raises is whether or not the natural and physical sciences place themselves above “other branches of learning or culture” (p. 169) as many in the general public assume. Whether or not it is true has little bearing on whether or not the public believes it. We should explore the degree to which this belief is held among the general public and the extent to which practicing scientists take positions that justify it.

A third question Evans raises is whether scientists put forth new moral ideals rooted in science—to be sure groups have done so in the past (Evans references the eugenics movement as a notorious example), but do these movements come from disciplines, and do entire disciplines espouse or agree with them? Lastly, Evans suggests an empirical project examining the values and moral beliefs espoused by scientists on a public issue such as stem cell research, and the degree to which these values are commensurate with those values of publics.

A second agenda Evans sets out relates to what he terms the “morally expressive nature” of scientific discoveries (p. 170). The development of specific technologies (and policies) is value laden in a way that abstract research is not—although the latter must happen to enable the former. His argument, citing Parens, that “the fact that a technology exists” can “turn into an ethical obligation to use it for a specific purpose” (Parens 2014:72–87, cited in Evans 2018) is intriguing. However, while there may not be unanimous support for the use of certain new technologies (e.g., genetic screening for disease), there also is not unanimous lack of support for them—heterogeneity in moral sets.

This leads to the third agenda Evans sets out—moral conflict over specific experiments and technologies. The controversy over the immortal cell lines of Henrietta Lacks is a prime exemplar. Evans suggests we focus not on the easy questions (does the public oppose embryonic stem cell research more than scientists in that field?), but rather whether or not the public sees “science” writ large as pressing for embryonic stem cell research. Relatedly, how does the public see advocates for such technologies? Questions like “should we?” but also “who says we should?” and “why do they say it?”

The point Evans is making about the perceived moral divides between “regular folks” and science or scientists in the United States is important. Much of the early science literacy work in the public understanding of science focused on fact-based knowledge—either the populace retained the knowledge they should have learned in high school, or they did not. In the public understanding of science field, things quickly moved to measure attitudes about science, rather than science knowledge, and the deficit model was the dominant idea. In the deficit model, those who knew less science tended to have a more negative attitude about it. In the past 10 years or so, work has shifted to reversing the order of the deficit model—that is, negative attitudes about science lead to less knowledge (Sturgis and Allum 2004), however the source of these attitudes isn’t well understood, and many of the empirical findings are tenuous. Others have argued that a political (rather than religious) moral shift is associated with negative attitudes about science (Gauchat 2012), although the conservative political sphere and the conservative Protestant religious sphere remain tightly linked in the United States.

If Evans is right, we ought to be able to pinpoint which (religious) publics are most likely to reject science broadly on moral grounds. Further, we ought to be able to locate which publics reject which disciplines or even specific avenues of research (which is more likely than science as a whole). In the United States, this is likely to mean which religious traditions, at least in part. Whether the relevant grouping is tradition, congregation, or in between, it should be possible to enumerate the values that the groups hold that differ from their perceptions of the values that science or scientists hold. It should also be possible to enumerate how those perceptions of values differ from the values held by scientists themselves.

It is clear in the conclusion that this is an agenda-setting book. As far as agendas go, we could do far worse. However, accurately measuring sets of moral values in different populations remains a challenge.

THE CHALLENGE OF MEASURING MORAL SETS IN HETEROGENOUS PUBLICS

In the area of overlap between the sociologies of knowledge and culture (and where, I would argue, any sociology of religion must situate itself), there are three broad cultural domains of relevance: The good, the regular, and the true. That is: what is moral (e.g., Durkheim), what is normal (e.g., Bourdieu), and what is fact (e.g., Mannheim). Each of these thinkers was more nuanced than that, and it is also true that there is broad overlap between these domains—what is regular is often good, what is good is often true, and so on. Most of the debate about the science/religion “debate” frames it as one about truth. The Earth is old, The Earth circles the Sun, Humans evolved from earlier species, modern humans spread first out of Africa (when though, is still a matter of debate). While it is true, there are some who challenge these specific facts on grounds of truth (a point Evans readily admits), this is not the main avenue for discussion about the boundary between science and religion.

Measuring moral values is necessarily more difficult than measuring scientific knowledge for three general reasons. First, the types of questions needed to measure moral values or moral sets are more complicated than those that measure science knowledge, where we can generally assume a correct answer is known and cleanly poll a participant for it. Second, moral sets represent complex collections of moral values and thus make for complicated latent constructs to measure. They may require a clear elucidation of the belief systems that Evans outlines before the structure of particular moral sets is obvious. Lastly, population heterogeneity (or, sources of measurement variance) complicates measurement.

The agendas Evans sets for us are first and foremost measurement projects. What are the core sets of moral values (or moral sets) of specific religious publics? How do they perceive the core moral values of science, and what are the gaps or points of incommensurability? Are these perceived moral sets accurate? One of the challenges here is that Evans is pointing us not to the positions of elites (whose moral sets are, at least in the religious sphere, often publicly enumerated), but to the general public. This means that if we wish to know their moral sets or their perceptions of the moral sets of science, we will have to ask. This will require considerable work “on the ground” before survey instruments of any usefulness are likely to be created.

To adequately respond to this agenda, we must focus beyond the low-hanging fruit—conservative Protestants or Evangelicals who may have a specific knowledge (truth) conflict with some areas of science. Different faith traditions will obviously have different moral sets, and the gaps between these moral sets and those perceived of science will differ. It is also likely that these different religious publics will have different perceptions about the moral sets of science—for a multitude of reasons.

Going about defining and measuring these moral sets requires several sets of skills. First of these are ethnographic—even if the goals are survey instruments that can be administered to representative samples of the general public, identifying the components of the moral sets of specific religious publics will require in-depth data collection first. Beyond this stage, survey instrument creation and pilot studies are necessary for a reliable instrument. Once complete, an analyst can then determine where the gaps between the moral sets of specific publics and the perceived moral sets of scientists may be. Such a project must necessarily be engaged in for each religious public—as the moral sets of conservative Protestants are most certainly not isomorphic with the moral sets of U.S. Jews, Muslims, or other groups. Luckily, much of this ethnographic and survey work has already been collected for some groups in the United States. We have only to complete it.

The project set out for us by Evans is an ambitious but important one, and it will set the foundations for numerous future avenues of inquiry into the overlap between science and religion, both in the United States and elsewhere.

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