October 29, 2002

• The Autumn Grim Opus is out.
  This month's issue contains my review of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones.

  
  

   

  
  

  The meeting of sacred and profane

  
  

  "I've just never understood why technology and spirituality seem mutually exclusive in so many people's minds." Exmortis

  
  

  Short Version:
  Many people believe that science and religion are competing ways of describing reality.  Therefore, scientific explanation is equated with rejection of religious truth.

  
  

  Long Version:
  CSI Miami was brutal last night.  The story of little children abducted and murdered went straight to every parent's worst nightmare.  Of course, it being a one hour tv series, they caught the guy.  I like CSI because I'm a puzzle nut and a science junkie.  The Crime Scene Investigation unit of any large police department employs both puzzle solving logic and forensic science to test the theory.  But, last night was so difficult emotionally that instead of returning to Xanga to rewrite the losten post, I went to bed and listened to the sounds of water-splashing rain-tapping, and my husband breathing.

  
  

  Excite my emotions and I find it hard to think.  I believe that's exactly why it's so difficult for science and religion to play nicely together.  Emotional investment in a specific worldview, blinds adherents to broader truths.  When you read Exmortis' statement above, do you picture creationists, Amish communities and ayatollah's who reject modern knowledge and understanding while embracing outmoded systems of thought, lifestyle, and ethics based on an illogical view of reality?  Or do you think of the scientist who would write that science "enables man to live as an intellectually fulfilled atheist"? 

  
  

  Students of history know that until the past couple hundred years, science and spirituality have been close companions.  As historians discuss and theorize about why scientific methodology arose in the West as opposed to the East, a good case can be made that the doctrine of theistic creation common to Jewish, Christian and Muslim thought set the stage for scientific activity.  Both Greek and Biblical thought asserted that the world is orderly and intelligible.  But, the Greeks held that order is necessary and that one can therefore deduce it's structure from first principles.  Define self-evident terms, formulate statements about the evident terms which are obviously true (axioms or postulates) then combine the axioms via the rules of logic to prove that other statements must be true. 

  
  

  Only Biblical thought held that God created both form and matter, meaning that the world did not have to be as it is and that details of it's order can only be determined through observation.  Furthermore, while nature is real and good in the Biblical view, it is not in and of itself divine, as many ancient cultures held, and it is therefore permissable to experiment on it.  Whereas Aristotle worked from deduction, Francis Bacon gave us what he termed a "scientific method" (observe, measure, explain, and verify), which moved us into a whole new realm of discovery. 

  
  

  Early scientists believed they were "thinking God's thoughts after Him."  In addition, the Calvinist work ethic supported science.  In the Royal Society, the earliest institution for the advancement of science, Puritans made up 70% of the membership and many of these were clergy.  To Theists, science fills in the blanks of a theology which speaks truly but not exhaustively of Ultimate Reality.  I like to read books of science, both old books and newer ones are fascinating to me.  In these books I see a gradual progression in which the relationship of cooperation and mutual advantage has given way to a battle for the hearts and minds of men.  I frequently encounter contemporary science writers who display a decidedly anti-theistic bias. 

  
  

  Take for example the work of sociobiologist Edward O Wilson.  He traces the genetic and evolutionary origins of social behavior in insects, animals and humans.  He asks how self-sacrificial behavior could arise and persist among social insects if their individual reproductive future is thereby sacrificed.  Wilson theorizes that such 'altruistic' behavior enhances the survival of close relatives who share many of their genes.  He futher hypothesizes that all human behavior can be reduced to and explained by biological origins and present genetic structure.  "It may not be too much to say that sociology and the other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of biology" to be included in evolutionary theory.  The mind will be explained as "an epiphenomenon of the neural machinery of the brain."  He says that the power of religion will be gone forever when religion is explained by "a philosophy of scientific materialism."

  
  

  Theism and materialism are opposing belief systems, each claiming to encompass all reality.  Materialism is the assertion that matter is the assertion that fundamental reality in the universe.  Materialism is a form of metaphysics (a set of claims concerning the most general charcteristics and constituents of reality).  Scientific materialism makes a second assertion: the scientific method is the only reliable path to knowledge.  This is a form of epistemology (a set of claims concerning inquiry and the acquisition of knowledge).  The two asertions are linked: if the only real entities are those with which science deals, then science is the only valid path to knowledge. 

  
  

  Science starts from reproducible public data.  Theories are formulated as hypostheses that can be tested against experimental observation.  Choices among theories are influenced by additional criteria of choherence, comprehensiveness, and fruitfulness in suggesting further research and application.  Science is described as objective, open-minded, universal, cumulative, and progressive.  Religious tradition by contrast, is said to be subjective, closed-minded, parochial, uncritical, and resistant to change.  Science is said to require detached observation and logical reasoning whereas religion requires personal involvement in a particular tradition and set of practices.

  
  

  Persons who hold to theistic beliefs are subject to attack on their intellect.  Cosmologist Peter Atkins writes that religion is "sentimental wishful thinking" and "intellectually dishonest emotion."  Evolutionist Richard Dawkins says, "Either admit that God is a scientific hypothesis and let him submit to the same judgment as any other scientific hypothesis, or admit that his status is no higher than that of fairies and river sprites."  E. O Wilson proposes that people have in the past relied on sacred narratives to give their lives purpose, so he proposes that "The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.  Material reality discovered by science already possesses more content and grandeur than all religious cosmologies combined."  Physicist Steven Weinberg says "I'm against constructive dialogue between science and religion," and that one of the great acheivements of science has been to permit man to live as a non-religious person and that we should not retreat from this acomplishment.

  
  

  Not only do many scientific materialists fail to distinguish between scientific and philosophical questions, they also seem unaware of how often they invoke the authority of science to speak for ideas that are not a part of science.  However, it turns out that many of the characteristics present in religious endeavor are also pesent in science and vice versa.  Studies of scientific theories indicate that they do not arise from logical analysis of data, but from acts of creative imagination in which analogies and models often play a seminal role.  In religious language too, metaphor and models are prominent.  These tools enable us to imagine that which is not directly observable.  Clearly religious beliefs are not subject to direct empirical testing, but they can be approached with the same spirit of inquiry found in science.  The scientific criteria of coherence, comprehensiveness and fruitfulness have their parallels in religious thought.

  
  

  Science as science does not conflict with religious thought.  Scientific materialism cannot avoid the clash with religious thinking, because it goes beyond scientific fact to draw conclusions about ultimate reality.  As long as scientists misuse their authority to push a metaphysics which rejects the existence of God, sacred and secular meetings will continue to be power struggles benefitting no one.
  
  

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