Religion and Science: A Beautiful Friendship, Part 1 (Guest Voice) Reason to Hope: A New Deal for Religion and Science
Religion and Science: A Beautiful Friendship, Part 1
Reason to Hope: A New Deal for Religion and Science
by Robert Fuller
[The 21st] century will be defined by a debate that will run through the remainder of its decades: religion versus science. Religion will lose.
– John McLaughlin, TV talk show host
Former priest John McLaughlin is hardly alone in his pessimism about religion’s future. A spate of bestsellers—The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; The End of Faith by Sam Harris; and God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by the late Christopher Hitchens—argues that religion, as we’ve known it, no longer serves the needs of people with a modern education and a global awareness.
Books like these have spelled out religion’s shortcomings and I see no point in piling on. Rather, in a series of posts, I’ll make the case that, in the long view, both religion and science come off as godsends (forgive the pun). And that, looking ahead, both are indispensable to letting go of old predatory practices and creating a fair, just, and peaceful world. If religion can see its way clear to making a mid-course correction and science can get off its high horse, John McLaughlin’s prediction could be proven spectacularly wrong.
Many of the voices now being raised against religion are over-confident and patronizing, rather like those of trial-lawyers who feel the jury is in their pocket. Perhaps that’s because they are increasingly preaching to a public alarmed by clerical abuses and fundamentalist zealotry. Contemporary religious leaders, painfully aware of the relationship between public participation and institutional viability, realize that religion is in a fight for its life.
I realize that this terrain is full of landmines. In the hope of defusing a few, let me acknowledge at the outset that the word religion means different things to different people. To some, it’s knowledge and wisdom; to others, superstition and dogma. To some, it’s worship; to others, wonder. To some, religion is salvation; to others, it’s seeking. To some, religion is of divine origin; to others, it’s manmade.
I use “religion” to refer loosely to the metaphysical, moral, and transformational precepts of the founders, prophets, saints, and sages of the major religions. The focus of these blogposts is neither the theological doctrines associated with particular faiths nor the liturgical practices characteristic of various sects. Rather, the goal is to present a unifying perspective on the findings of religious and scientific inquiry.
Then, since the divergence between science and religion no longer serves either, I’ll address the obstacles that have kept them from developing a “beautiful friendship” and describe the pay-off we may expect once they’re both on the same side.
Science gives us reason to think we can vanquish famine, disease, and poverty. Religion heralds “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.” Neither of these venerable institutions can deliver on its promise without help from the other, but together there is reason to hope that they can. As partners, science and religion can make the golden rule largely self-enforcing, and hasten our arrival into a world wherein everyone’s dignity is secure.
I know this sounds utopian, but wait and see. Developments in both science and religion have laid the foundation for a new synthesis. Ending centuries of fruitless squabbling and initiating a beautiful friendship is at last possible. If you’ll suspend your skepticism long enough to follow this series of posts, I think you’ll agree. And, if you’re not persuaded, you’ll at least come away with some new questions.
The next post tells what hooked me on these issues in the first place: the incompatible notions of truth advocated by my two schools—Sunday School and Public School.
Robert W. Fuller, Ph.D., former president of Oberlin College, is an internationally recognized authority on rankism and dignity. His books and ideas have been widely covered in the media, including The New York Times, The Oprah Magazine Magazine, National Public Radio, C-SPAN, The Boston Globe, the BBC and Voice of America. Fuller has also given hundreds of talks at a variety of organizations, from Yale University to Microsoft to Kaiser Hospital. This is cross posted from his blog Breaking Ranks.
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As we all know, science is verifiable and based on evidence – for the most part. Religion is another animal entirely. I think the increasing number of people who are turned off by it are more often than not spiritual and moral people who are just fed up with so many of religions standard bearers talking the talk but not walking the walk. Faith is the bedrock of any religion and it has to be based on something real.
This is an important topic that needs to be constantly brought up and respectfully discussed. I see the capacity of religion to serve an individual’s ‘spiritual’ needs (whatever they may be) as something good and innately human. But when religious ideology intrudes into politics and government, it is a net detriment to society and effective government.
Part of the net detriment comes from the astounding capacity of religion to distort reality into something it is not. For example, a June 1, 2012 Gallup poll of Americans (http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/Hold-Creationist-View-Human-Origins.aspx?ref=image) found that 46% of adults believe that God created humans within the last 10,000 years. Presumably, many of those people also believe that the Earth and the rest of the universe are also is about 10,000 years old. That speaks for itself, loud and clear. There is nothing ambiguous about this. Scientific evidence is simply brushed aside as irrelevant by 46% of adult Americans.
Political ideology has about the same capacity to distort.
Ideology, religious or political, is a real drag on political progress and that fact needs to be respectfully repeated a thousand times. Without constant repetition of this point in many fora and contexts, most people will never become even a little comfortable with the idea that their ideologies (religious and political) just might not necessarily be connected to reality and thus policies flowing therefrom therefore will not be effective, except by sheer coincidence.
These are points I have been trying to make for the last five years, but without tangible success. Maybe my failure is due to my shortcomings as a communicator. However, I think it is more than just that. I suspect that most Americans (probably 90% to 95%) are really afraid to face reality and accept it for what it is. If they do that with a range of political issues, they are confronted with solid evidence that reality doesn’t care what anyone’s ideology is. Similarly, the best solutions to problems, a part of reality, can easily fall outside the scope of what ideology says the best solution ought to be.
Facing reality like that takes real moral (yes, moral) courage. It is not so clear that Americans have that kind of courage. With any luck, that is wrong and a well-known, charismatic leader will be able to articulate these ideas in a respectful, non-threatening way that begins to change people’s thinking. Right now, there is no powerful champion of reality politics. Its simply too toxic for powerful and well-known people to touch.
I’ve been an atheist since I was 8, and I like to think of myself as a relatively polite one. I’m fairly contemptuous of the stereotypical angry atheist that seems like an emo teenager more mad at god than anything else, who has a chip on their shoulder regarding any discussion of religion. But the last few years as I get older I find myself getting more angry at organized religions and less tolerant. My group of friends runs the gamut from the aforementioned angry atheist type to 2 of them that are creationists. Having once more decided to put some thought into what it is that’s bugging me here is what I’ve come up with.
Frankly, I don’t see how there can be real harmony between science and religion since they perform differently. Religion is a belief system that says “I have all the answers already figured out. Where we came from, where we are going. There is a being that guides this all and we can have a personal relationship with it.” Its a pretty amazing claim, one that requires acceptance and not a whole lot of examination as far as I can tell. Basically religion gives us answers without a process, and requires little in the way of proof. It gives us a beginning and and end, and leaves the middle largely unexplained. This middle gets filled up with all sorts of odd bits. Like we can’t eat meat on Good Friday, or that pork is bad for us spiritually, etc..
Science on the other hand isn’t a set of answers so much as a process. The answers come as a byproduct of that process. It just so happens that this process tends to very often take a whack at that stuff in the “Middle” of religion that I mentioned. Like that the Sun goes around the earth. Or that the earth is really old and we evolved from other creatures, and it didn’t all happen in the last 6000 years. Science handles the beginning, and the middle, and the end comes to us as information, but largely the end is empty, as it will be for the foreseeable future. In the meantime it will keep giving us things like space travel, electronics, medicine that works, etc…, this is how we know that the process of science has its validity. Because it allows us to affect the world around us in a consistent way.
The conflict with religion is that people really hold on dearly to the “middle” parts that have been filled in by those who came before. Since its basically stuff people pulled out of their imagination, its always going to be vulnerable to being refuted by the process of science. And to those who hold onto it really tightly, it will seem as an attack. But eventually, even the most skeptical will have to admit that the scientific process produces some pretty amazing results, and because of this, there will be an erosion of the beliefs that have existed because of lack of examination.
To sum up, it is not the beginning that is the problem, we all can see eye to eye on that. Its not the end that will cause conflict, because science will never claim to have all the answers, so religion will have the upper hand there. But the middle is where we will have conflict. There is a line in HP Lovecrafts story “The Silver Key” that really sums this up for me as a guy is trying to make sense of the world and what happened when he turned to first science, then religion for answers. Neither of which fit for him,
He would “feel to the full the awkwardness with which it(religion) sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown.”
This to me sums up the friction between science and religion.
Sounds interesting. I’ve never had a problem with believing in God and evolution and hope your series will explain how that could be a good thing.
I enjoyed reading the comments from Calmoderate and slamfu. I find it curious that the USA, for all it’s revolutionary origins, invention, innovation, as well as it’s leadership role (not so much in recent decades) in free and independent thinking is still a nation so consumed with religion. I think slamfu’s Lovecraft quote goes to the reason, whether the “devout” are willing (or capable) of facing that or not. As Calmoderate says, facing reality takes a great deal of courage. To me this means courage not of the sort that takes people into battle, but the inner courage to examine who we are, what we can be, and how best to make it happen.
Robert Fuller, dynamite piece. Thank you. More. More.
Im with Ohioan, never had an issue between hard evidentiary science insofar as we’ve come with it (sometimes I find issues re the uses science can be/ is put to, tho) and religious belief. To me, they are two different and clear systems of understanding and thought, with protocols to each.
The issue for many of us, is when fundamentalist attitudes in science or in religions seize ‘spokespersons’, who then leap to impose ‘rules’ of ‘right thinking’ on all others, and follow up with disgracing and scorning all others who do not buy their, not science, not religion, but their vastly ego inflated narrow view toward controlling others… for money, self-importance, “fame”: and general public blathering. That kind of foolsgold is what appears to have taken over the public airwaves re religions in particular, far and above the voices of thoughtful science followers, thoughtful religious views.
If there’s a bridge between science and religion, it will include more than the rational mind. The opposite of rational is not the ‘irrational’ but rather the comlementary of the rational mind is called by many names over time and cultures, but it is not disqualified because it does not lie in the small pocket of the brain set aside for what we call “rational” thought. One of the time honored names for the complementary of rational mind over the last 100 years, is the non-rational mind. Not irrational. Non-rational.
I think often that art and music, because they combine both the non-rational in terms of the inspiratus, and the rational in terms of notating, composing, are likely the bridges in terms of pattern recognition of rational and non-rational merging for the good in a single individual.
The series will deal with evolution and its denial. The alternative to fundamentalism is not relativism, it’s model building. Both religion and science build models. Most of them are found wanting. But a few stand the test of time and serve as the pillars of human civilization. I’ll highlight those in part #5 of the series, after first giving some examples of some incredibly accurate and useful science models. I see some of the most enduring precepts and proverbs of religion as having been “divined” by close human observers, often drawing on the combined wisdom of elders who’ve been around long enough to notice some regularities. The reason I’m resorting to serialization of my point of view is that I just couldn’t fit it all into a single post, even a long one. So, I hope you’ll bear with me as I first establish a vocabulary, then a framework, then draw up a peace treaty between science and religion, and finally describe the peace dividend, which will enable them to work together on the life-threatening problems that we now confront.
“I think often that art and music, because they combine both the non-rational in terms of the inspiratus, and the rational in terms of notating, composing, are likely the bridges in terms of pattern recognition of rational and non-rational merging for the good in a single individual.”
Great example Dr. E. Thank-you.