Natalie Solent is picking fights again. This time she's arguing with Prof. A. C. Grayling about the size of religious versus scientific contributions to human welfare. I'm failing to see the conflict, myself, but both sides seem to feel that there is one.

I don't, for one, understand the criteria Prof. Grayling is using to divvy up the shares. Religious motives are not incompatible with the scientific method. Nicholas Steno was no less a scientist than he was a bishop.

Moreover, Prof. Grayling wants to have it both ways:

The express implication of my original formulation was of course that there are precious few ways in which religion does not do serious disservice to mankind, and many ways in which the benefits of science outweigh the disservice it can be used to do. The defenders of religion like to point to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Bach's sacred cantatas (etc), together with the solace afforded the old, ill and lonely (etc again), as a kind of equivalence to the payoff of science's positive fruits against Zyklon B (to use your own & well-chosen example).

But the enthymematic point I was making is precisely that even if religious art (invariably a product of devotion? or of the fact that the church had the money to commission it?) and the deceiving solaces are counted into the equation, the massive burden of conflict, psychological no less than in the way of wars, inquisitions, crusades, burnings of heretics and the rest - egregious among them the Holocaust - for which religion is directly and indirectly responsible, makes for a massive weight of harm to humanity which dwarfs these benefits.

That religion has inspired men to do wrong is not a datum I would dispute. What I fail to see is how this criterion of inspiration may ever be met by "science". If we are to judge debits and credits purely by the source of motivation, I do not understand how a method can provide this. And turning about, I fail to see how science, even Prof. Grayling's post-1600 definition of it, has been absent from tragedy. We are tool-using animals, and we have put tools to a number of nasty uses. By one standard almost all crimes can be placed at religion's door; by the other, all falls under science's broad lintel.

It is odd that Prof. Grayling places the start of science at Bacon and Descartes, ignoring the great works of the medieval logicians. The state parallels our own times rather uncomfortably. There seem to be a number of outstanding scientists (Richard Dawkins, I'm looking at you) who wouldn't know a logical fallacy if it licked their face. But empirical evidence requires this foundation of logical thought.

A postscript: I hate--detest--abominate these "science v. religion" arguments. I've tried to express what I feel is the fundamental flaw in this one. I have never felt that my belief in empirical truth was ever threatened by my faith in the Divine, and I don't see how any sensible person could find them conflicting. If you think that the world is six thousand years old, well, congratulations: you're wrong. But to use that belief as a stand-in for all religious thought is just stuffing another straw man.