One frustrating aspect of our discussion about the compatibility of science and religion was the amount of effort expended arguing about definitions, rather than substance. When I use words like “God” or “religion,” I try to use them in senses that are consistent with how they have been understood (at least in the Western world) through history, by the large majority of contemporary believers, and according to definitions as you would encounter them in a dictionary. It seems clear to me that, by those standards, religious belief typically involves various claims about things that happen in the world — for example, the virgin birth or ultimate resurrection of Jesus. Those claims can be judged by science, and are found wanting.
Some people would prefer to define “religion” so that religious beliefs entail nothing whatsoever about what happens in the world. And that’s fine; definitions are not correct or incorrect, they are simply useful or useless, where usefulness is judged by the clarity of one’s attempts at communication. Personally, I think using “religion” in that way is not very clear. Most Christians would disagree with the claim that Jesus came about because Joseph and Mary had sex and his sperm fertilized her ovum and things proceeded conventionally from there, or that Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead, or that God did not create the universe. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints, whose job it is to judge whether a candidate for canonization has really performed the required number of miracles and so forth, would probably not agree that miracles don’t occur. Francis Collins, recently nominated to direct the NIH, argues that some sort of God hypothesis helps explain the values of the fundamental constants of nature, just like a good Grand Unified Theory would. These views are by no means outliers, even without delving into the more extreme varieties of Biblical literalism.
Furthermore, if a religious person really did believe that nothing ever happened in the world that couldn’t be perfectly well explained by ordinary non-religious means, I would think they would expend their argument-energy engaging with the many millions of people who believe that the virgin birth and the resurrection and the promise of an eternal afterlife and the efficacy of intercessory prayer are all actually literally true, rather than with a handful of atheist bloggers with whom they agree about everything that happens in the world. But it’s a free country, and people are welcome to define words as they like, and argue with whom they wish.
But there was also a more interesting and substantive issue lurking below the surface. I focused in that post on the meaning of “religion,” but did allude to the fact that defenders of Non-Overlapping Magisteria often misrepresent “science” as well. And this, I think, is not just a matter of definitions: we can more or less agree on what “science” means, and still disagree on what questions it has the power to answer. So that’s an issue worth examining more carefully: what does science actually have the power to do?
I can think of one popular but very bad strategy for answering this question: first, attempt to distill the essence of “science” down to some punchy motto, and then ask what questions fall under the purview of that motto. At various points throughout history, popular mottos of choice might have been “the Baconian scientific method” or “logical positivism” or “Popperian falsificationism” or “methodological naturalism.” But this tactic always leads to trouble. Science is a messy human endeavor, notoriously hard to boil down to cut-and-dried procedures. A much better strategy, I think, is to consider specific examples, figure out what kinds of questions science can reasonably address, and compare those to the questions in which we’re interested.
Here is my favorite example question. Alpha Centauri A is a G-type star a little over four light years away. Now pick some very particular moment one billion years ago, and zoom in to the precise center of the star. Protons and electrons are colliding with each other all the time. Consider the collision of two electrons nearest to that exact time and that precise point in space. Now let’s ask: was momentum conserved in that collision? Or, to make it slightly more empirical, was the magnitude of the total momentum after the collision within one percent of the magnitude of the total momentum before the collision?
This isn’t supposed to be a trick question; I don’t have any special knowledge or theories about the interior of Alpha Centauri that you don’t have. The scientific answer to this question is: of course, the momentum was conserved. Conservation of momentum is a principle of science that has been tested to very high accuracy by all sorts of experiments, we have every reason to believe it held true in that particular collision, and absolutely no reason to doubt it; therefore, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that momentum was conserved.
A stickler might argue, well, you shouldn’t be so sure. You didn’t observe that particular event, after all, and more importantly there’s no conceivable way that you could collect data at the present time that would answer the question one way or the other. Science is an empirical endeavor, and should remain silent about things for which no empirical adjudication is possible.
But that’s completely crazy. That’s not how science works. Of course we can say that momentum was conserved. Indeed, if anyone were to take the logic of the previous paragraph seriously, science would be a completely worthless endeavor, because we could never make any statements about the future. Predictions would be impossible, because they haven’t happened yet, so we don’t have any data about them, so science would have to be silent.
All that is completely mixed-up, because science does not proceed phenomenon by phenomenon. Science constructs theories, and then compares them to empirically-collected data, and decides which theories provide better fits to the data. The definition of “better” is notoriously slippery in this case, but one thing is clear: if two theories make the same kinds of predictions for observable phenomena, but one is much simpler, we’re always going to prefer the simpler one. The definition of theory is also occasionally troublesome, but the humble language shouldn’t obscure the potential reach of the idea: whether we call them theories, models, hypotheses, or what have you, science passes judgment on ideas about how the world works.
And that’s the crucial point. Science doesn’t do a bunch of experiments concerning colliding objects, and say “momentum was conserved in that collision, and in that one, and in that one,” and stop there. It does those experiments, and then it also proposes frameworks for understanding how the world works, and then it compares those theoretical frameworks to that experimental data, and — if the data and theories seem good enough — passes judgment. The judgments are necessarily tentative — one should always be open to the possibility of better theories or surprising new data — but are no less useful for that.
Furthermore, these theoretical frameworks come along with appropriate domains of validity, depending both on the kinds of experimental data we have available and on the theoretical framework itself. At the low energies available to us in laboratory experiments, we are very confident that baryon number (the total number of quarks minus antiquarks) is conserved in every collision. But we don’t necessarily extend that to arbitrarily high energies, because it’s easy to think of perfectly sensible extensions of our current theoretical understanding in which baryon number might very well be violated — indeed, it’s extremely likely, since there are a lot more quarks than antiquarks in the observable universe. In contrast, we believe with high confidence that electric charge is conserved at arbitrarily high energies. That’s because the theoretical underpinnings of charge conservation are a lot more robust and inflexible than those of baryon-number conservation. A good theoretical framework can be extremely unforgiving and have tremendous scope, even if we’ve only tested it over a blink of cosmic time here on our tiny speck of a planet.
The same logic applies, for example, to the highly contentious case of the multiverse. The multiverse isn’t, by itself, a theory; it’s a prediction of a certain class of theories. If the idea were simply “Hey, we don’t know what happens outside our observable universe, so maybe all sorts of crazy things happen,” it would be laughably uninteresting. By scientific standards, it would fall woefully short. But the point is that various theoretical attempts to explain phenomena that we directly observe right in front of us — like gravity, and quantum field theory — lead us to predict that our universe should be one of many, and subsequently suggest that we take that situation seriously when we talk about the “naturalness” of various features of our local environment. The point, at the moment, is not whether there really is or is not a multiverse; it’s that the way we think about it and reach conclusions about its plausibility is through exactly the same kind of scientific reasoning we’ve been using for a long time now. Science doesn’t pass judgment on phenomena; it passes judgment on theories.
The reason why we can be confident that momentum was conserved during that particular collision a billion years ago is that science has concluded (beyond reasonable doubt, although not with metaphysical certitude) that the best framework for understanding the world is one in which momentum is conserved in all collisions. It’s certainly possible that this particular collision was an exception; but a framework in which that were true would necessarily be more complicated, without providing any better explanation for the data we do have. We’re comparing two theories: one in which momentum is always conserved, and one in which it occasionally isn’t, including a billion years ago at the center of Alpha Centauri. Science is well equipped to carry out this comparison, and the first theory wins hands-down.
Now let’s turn to a closely analogous question. There is some historical evidence that, about two thousand years ago in Galilee, a person named Jesus was born to a woman named Mary, and later grew up to be a messianic leader and was eventually crucified by the Romans. (Unruly bloke, by the way — tended to be pretty doctrinaire about the number of paths to salvation, and prone to throwing moneychangers out of temples. Not very “accommodating,” if you will.) The question is: how did Mary get pregnant?
One approach would be to say: we just don’t know. We weren’t there, don’t have any reliable data, etc. Should just be quiet.
The scientific approach is very different. We have two theories. One theory is that Mary was a virgin; she had never had sex before becoming pregnant, or encountered sperm in any way. Her pregnancy was a miraculous event, carried out through the intervention of the Holy Ghost, a spiritual manifestation of a triune God. The other theory is that Mary got pregnant through relatively conventional channels, with the help of (one presumes) her husband. According to this theory, claims to the contrary in early (although not contemporary) literature are, simply, erroneous.
There’s no question that these two theories can be judged scientifically. One is conceptually very simple; all it requires is that some ancient texts be mistaken, which we know happens all the time, even with texts that are considerably less ancient and considerably better corroborated. The other is conceptually horrible; it posits an isolated and unpredictable deviation from otherwise universal rules, and invokes a set of vaguely-defined spiritual categories along the way. By all of the standards that scientists have used for hundreds of years, the answer is clear: the sex-and-lies theory is enormously more compelling than the virgin-birth theory.
The same thing is true for various other sorts of miraculous events, or claims for the immortality of the soul, or a divine hand in guiding the evolution of the universe and/or life. These phenomena only make sense within a certain broad framework for understanding how the world works. And that framework can be judged against others in which there are no miracles etc. And, without fail, the scientific judgment comes down in favor of a strictly non-miraculous, non-supernatural view of the universe.
That’s what’s really meant by my claim that science and religion are incompatible. I was referring to the Congregation-for-the-Causes-of-the-Saints interpretation of religion, which entails a variety of claims about things that actually happen in the world; not the it’s-all-in-our-hearts interpretation, where religion makes no such claims. (I have no interest in arguing at this point in time over which interpretation is “right.”) When religion, or anything else, makes claims about things that happen in the world, those claims can in principle be judged by the methods of science. That’s all.
Well, of course, there is one more thing: the judgment has been made, and views that step outside the boundaries of strictly natural explanation come up short. By “natural” I simply mean the view in which everything that happens can be explained in terms of a physical world obeying unambiguous rules, never disturbed by whimsical supernatural interventions from outside nature itself. The preference for a natural explanation is not an a priori assumption made by science; it’s a conclusion of the scientific method. We know enough about the workings of the world to compare two competing big-picture theoretical frameworks: a purely naturalistic one, versus one that incorporates some sort of supernatural component. To explain what we actually see, there’s no question that the naturalistic approach is simply a more compelling fit to the observations.
Could science, through its strategy of judging hypotheses on the basis of comparison with empirical data, ever move beyond naturalism to conclude that some sort of supernatural influence was a necessary feature of explaining what happens in the world? Sure; why not? If supernatural phenomena really did exist, and really did influence things that happened in the world, science would do its best to figure that out.
It’s true that, given the current state of data and scientific theorizing, the vast preponderance of evidence comes down in favor of understanding the world on purely natural terms. But that’s not to say that the situation could not, at least in principle, change. Science adapts to reality, however it presents itself. At the dawn of the 20th century, it would have been hard to find a more firmly accepted pillar of physics than the principle of determinism: the future can, in principle, be predicted from the present state. The experiments that led us to invent quantum mechanics changed all that. Moving from a theory in which the present uniquely determines the future to one where predictions are necessarily probabilistic in nature is an incredible seismic shift in our deep picture of reality. But science made the switch with impressive rapidity, because that’s what the data demanded. Some stubborn folk tried to recover determinism at a deeper level by inventing more clever theories — which is exactly what they should have done. But (to make a complicated story simple) they didn’t succeed, and scientists learned to deal.
It’s not hard to imagine a similar hypothetical scenario playing itself out for the case of supernatural influences. Scientists do experiments that reveal anomalies that can’t be explained by current theories. (These could be subtle things at a microscopic level, or relatively blatant manifestations of angels with wings and flaming swords.) They struggle to come up with new theories that fit the data within the reigning naturalist paradigm, but they don’t succeed. Eventually, they agree that the most compelling and economical theory is one with two parts: a natural part, based on unyielding rules, with a certain well-defined range of applicability, and a supernatural one, for which no rules can be found.
Of course, that phase of understanding might be a temporary one, depending on the future progress of theory and experiment. That’s perfectly okay; scientific understanding is necessarily tentative. In the mid-19th century, before belief in atoms had caught on among physicists, the laws of thermodynamics were thought to be separate, autonomous rules, in addition to the crisp Newtonian laws governing particles. Eventually, through Maxwell and Boltzmann and the other pioneers of kinetic theory, we learned better, and figured out how thermodynamic behavior could be subsumed into the Newtonian paradigm through statistical mechanics. One of the nice things about science is that it’s hard to predict its future course. Likewise, the need for a supernatural component in the best scientific understanding of the universe might evaporate — or it might not. Science doesn’t assume things from the start; it tries to deal with reality as it presents itself, however that may be.
This is where talk of “methodological naturalism” goes astray. Paul Kurtz defines it as the idea that “all hypotheses and events are to be explained and tested by reference to natural causes and events.” That “explained and tested” is an innocent-looking mistake. Science tests things empirically, which is to say by reference to observable events; but it doesn’t have to explain things as by reference to natural causes and events. Science explains what it sees the best way it can — why would it do otherwise? The important thing is to account for the data in the simplest and most useful way possible.
There’s no obstacle in principle to imagining that the normal progress of science could one day conclude that the invocation of a supernatural component was the best way of understanding the universe. Indeed, this scenario is basically the hope of most proponents of Intelligent Design. The point is not that this couldn’t possibly happen — it’s that it hasn’t happened in our actual world. In the real world, by far the most compelling theoretical framework consistent with the data is one in which everything that happens is perfectly accounted for by natural phenomena. No virgin human births, no coming back after being dead for three days, no afterlife in Heaven, no supernatural tinkering with the course of evolution. You can define “religion” however you like, but you can’t deny the power of science to reach far-reaching conclusions about how reality works.
Ali, you are committing a fallacy of equivocation, conflating “truth” in the usual sense of the word with an alternative sense which means something more like “useful”. You had the sense to put “truth” in scare quotes to indicate you were using the word in an an unusual sense. But then your response becomes irrelevant to Sean’s post, because you are talking about something quite different. No doubt religious myths have their uses, but this is not what Sean’s post was about. It was about whether the myths are true or false. And unlike (presumably) you, the vast majority of religious people do believe in the truth (the factualness) of some religious myths.
This one is quite unique in our limited experience. As previously mentioned, we are barely able to see into a very local neighborhood of stars’ exoplanets, and through spectroscopy can only manage to learn a tantalizingly minimal description of the exoplanets. So far those planetary systems are quite unlike our own in the sizes of the planets and their orbital periods (which is the main reason that we astronomers have been able to detect them.) There is simply not enough data to make such a sweeping statement.
We are limited in our reach by the vastness of the galaxy (let alone the universe,) and the slow speed of light to be able to know whether or not our lovely pale blue dot is so unique. It’s a good home, don’t get me wrong. Our biosphere grew up here, even if the source of life may have come from elsewhere.
The universe is by no means fine-tuned for life, either. We just happened to have found the proper hole to form our puddle.
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@Lord
“The evidence of evolution is abundant, the evidence of the absence of a single virgin birth non existent.”
That way lies chaos. There is no evidence against the existence of a species of flying pigs. We have to deal with the evidence that we actually have, and try to draw conclusions and general models from that. Just saying that we can’t 100% disprove something (which of course we never can) doesn’t make it credible.
Oh no! Mooney is going to leave Discover too!
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Excellent post, Sean. Let me suggest something that would be a good addition to this discussion and that I have yet to see someone take on directly. Chris Mooney quotes Robert Pennock as saying the following,
“Experimentation requires observation and control of the variables. We confirm causal laws by performing controlled experiments in which the hypothesized independent variable is made to vary while all other factors are held constant so that we can observe the effect on the dependent variable. But we have no control over supernatural entities or forces; hence these cannot be scientifically studied. (p. 292)”
This is the starting point of the accomodationist position. I’d like to hear your views on Pennock’s statement — you come close in this essay, but I think it needs to addressed directly.
Great article, then a lot of really depressing comments that show people still aren’t getting the point.
My response to those who are saying that miracles are not repeatable, therefore science can’t deal with them: Okay, but the existence of miracles presumably would be repeatable (unless there was only one miracle ever, in which case, you have to pick one and then discard all the others). If we assume for a moment the existence of miracles, then it is true that science could say nothing about individual miracles or make any predictions about future miracles. However, in this hypothetical reality, science would be able to observe that non-repeatable events had occurred. Furthermore, it could make a prediction that non-repeatable events would continue to occur, even though it could make no predictions about when or what those events would be.
That’s sort of the whole point of Sean’s post, if I understand it: We do not ever observe verifiable non-repeatable events. Or at least, so far, every candidate to be a verifiable non-repeatable event has eventually been shown to have a naturalistic explanation that makes the event theoretically repeatable, assuming the initial conditions were identical.
Thus, science can say something about the existence of non-repeatable events: They do not ever happen. Note that if you wind back the clock two or three hundred years, this hypothesis was much harder to support, because there were a number of unexplained apparently non-repeatable events, e.g. the evolution of life. In that time, surprise surprise, our greatest scientists tended to be highly religious, because given the available data at the time, science supported a belief in the supernatural. I put this in bold italics because it is a key point. You say science could never endorse the existence of miracles? You are demonstrably wrong, because there was a time when it did.
Today, the data is a lot different. Another surprise, the majority of modern scientists are nontheists, because given the available data today, science does not support a belief in the supernatural.
What is supernatural and what is natural isn’t even apriori clear.
This is only one mode of experimentation. It is the ideal mode, but some things can not be studied in this way — even some things that are firmly within the realm of science.
For instance, a pretty reasonable cosmology of the solar system has been around for centuries. How do you think Copernicus, Galileo, et al, came to their conclusions? Did they modify one variable (e.g. the distance of the earth to the sun) while holding all others constant (e.g. keeping all other planets stationary)? No, of course not. And yet, somehow, they were still able to use science to sift out a basic model of the solar system.
How on earth did they do it? Easy: The methodology you quoted is the ideal mode of experimentation, but it is not the only mode of scientific discovery.
Non-repeatable events (i.e. miracles) would fall in the same category as the motion of the planets. We cannot control it, we cannot deliberately modify one of the variables… but we can still observe it and make predictions about it.
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Yeah, that quote from Pennock is pretty obviously absurd. So astronomy and paleontology aren’t sciences?
It’s a perfect example of why it’s not a good idea to first try to whittle down the essence of science to a pithy motto, then apply that indiscriminately. Look at what scientists actually do!
We do observations of the behaviour of intelligences all the time — we call such study “psychology”. Just because a phenomenon arises from agency rather than “natural” forces does not mean we cannot study it. A god that performed miracles could indeed be studied and characterized based on those miracles, and its behaviour could then potentially be predicted based on its past behaviour (e.g., cities that are especially sinful might have a higher probability of suffering smiting). Just because a god does not have physical form does not mean that it cannot be studied by science.
The book of Genesis claims that at some point in the relatively recent past, a god killed everyone on earth except for one small family. Geology and biology concur that this event _never happened_. If there are any gods, they haven’t done any of the things that myths and scriptures claim they did; and, absent myths and scriptures, what kind of a god are you proposing? What is a “god”, anyway?
If you want your god to be beyond science, you’d better make sure that it never does anything with observable consequences.
Two words: Russell’s Teapot.
By that logic, teapotism has more evidence than ateapotism, because teapotism has something written about.
Therein lies the rub, as science progresses it invariably comes into conflict with well established, albeit erroneous, religious beliefs. We rarely deal with that conflict with using reason, instead selecting an emotional response.
Oh and kudos on this brilliant post.
This is just as clear and correct as the first seven times you posted it =).
If a ‘supernatural’ event actually occurs in our world, then isn’t it part of the natural world automatically even if we have no immediate explanation for it? Doesn’t this make it real and therefore natural? If a supernatural being really exists, and is a part of our world, then isn’t it natural too? If something is called supernatural but is not imaginary, even if it goes against our current ideas of how the universe operates, doesn’t this just imply our understanding of the universe is incorrect? In summary, how can ‘supernatural’ be real? If any ‘supernatural’ idea, phenomenon, or being truly exists, then it isn’t really supernatural at all, it’s now within the realm of the real as soon as it ‘exists’. We would just have to revise our idea of what nature includes, which we do all the time in science.
Most simply put:
natural = real; supernatural = imaginary
“You cannot go against nature
Because if you do
Go against nature
That’s part of nature, too.”
-From ‘No New Tale to Tell’ by Love and Rockets, a British New Wave/Post-Punk band who apparently had more insight into this ridiculous debate on natural vs. supernatural than most of the posters here
like a vampire in fear of the sunrise , religious fear the advance of science
I’m afraid that we do have to argue about definitions, because otherwise there is no possibility of mutual understanding.
It is no doubt true that some people in some religions at some times have defined religion as claims about natural phenomena, and have asserted the truth of these claims despite scientific evidence to the contrary. This “Category 1” of religious belief can pose a problem for science and teaching science.
Other people may consider religion to in part involving claims about natural phenomena, but they do not make such claims when they can be disproven by science. This “Category 2” of religious believers seems to me like a lesser problem for science, and in any event it seems like a pointless argument: what really happened when no one was looking?
Still other people define religion very differently. For example, Unitarian minister Forrest Church has defined religion as “ our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” In other words, it is the set of stories and projects we construct to find meaning in this time-limited existence. For this “Category 3” of religious believers, science and religion are trying to do two different things. Science is trying to find out what is true in the world given a certain set of procedures and empirical data. Religion is trying to determine what meaning we want to attach to our lives. Sean Carroll may consider this philosophy, but many people do consider this religion.
I believe that many Unitarians, Buddhists, and indeed many people in mainline religious groups, primarily see religion from a Category 3 perspective. And even among those religious believers who make Category 2 or even Category 1 claims, I wonder whether that’s the real attraction of religion to them. Do people primarily join a church because of its claim that the Earth is 6,000 years old? Or do they join it as a way of trying to give meaning to their lives? I’m sure many religious believers have a mixture of motives and a mixture of beliefs.
In sum, I don’t think Sean Carroll’s definition of religion captures what many people feel is the heart of their religious beliefs, which is the Category 3 role of religion. I don’t know what percentage of religious believers would agree with the following statement: “I am religious primarily as a way to give meaning to my life, not because of any religious claims about natural phenomena that can be contradicted by science.” Perhaps this percentage would be less than 50%, maybe even a lot less than 50%. But this percentage would not be zero.
Let’s say that tomorrow the sky opens up and Jesus starts flying around flinging thunderbolds (or whatever the hell he’s ‘supposed’ to do). At what point do scientists become convinced that it’s really supernatural, or do we ever? What sort of proof would we need in order to truly be scientifically convinced of the supernatural?
Of course, if any of this nonsense were even real, I’m sure religious people would be surprised that “their” Jesus wouldn’t be doing what they had thought he would… I bet it would even make them question it all!
If the virgin birth story is true, and not simply a translation mistake (eg. maid versus maiden), I’m curious how it managed to propogate. I can understand some leader, religious or otherwise, proclaiming it to be a miracle and the rest of the sheep accepting it.
However I find it hard to believe an unwed or wed mother could proclaim that they were a virgin to their neighbours without their neighbours responding “Yeah, right…”. As a friend of mine once wrote “What kind of excuse was that? If I went home and told my mother that an angel made me pregnant, her response would NOT be ‘It’s a miracle!’.” Reminds me of an episode of HOUSE, when a patient turns up pregnant and claims not to have had sex with anyone – so he does a test for the date-rape drug.
Sean wrote:
“The preference for a natural explanation is not an a priori assumption made by science; it’s a conclusion of the scientific method.”
A quibble, but one that is at the center of the issue: The existence of a natural explanation is the null hypothesis for the scientific method, not a conclusion. It has worked very well for a wide range of phenomena, and a scientist would require extraordinary evidence to overturn it (although as you correctly say, there’s nothing to prevent such evidence from appearing). A religious person’s null hypothesis includes exceptions for the tenets of his or her religion, so the burden of proof for the associated events is much smaller. The same evidence–or lack of it–has very different power, depending on where you start.
Tim Bartik,
Most religious people will make some kind of claim their god(s) intervene in the Universe. Claiming that Jesus really did rise from the dead, or that Mary really was a virgin, or that praying can heal the sick are all factual claims that can be investigated using science.
Yes, there are religious people who do not make such claims, and there is a term used to describe them, Deist.
My understanding is simple:
You can’t prove that God does not exist since you don’t know the true origin of things.
Thus as a scientist you are not allowed to talk about the existence of God.
You can say that I’m an atheist but this is a belief itself. It’s the same thing as to say that I believe in God. It’s a different kind of religion i.e. a belief system.
Also as a scientist you can comment on parts of the Bible but again this is an entire different thing. If you criticize the Bible you criticize the way people understand and think about God i.e. the specific religion.