I consider myself both religious and interested in science. I don’t find the two incompatible at all, but I guess I pick and choose. But I really don’t think that’s a problem either. I think a lot of the conflict between the two emerges from seeing them as sets of facts rather than methods of inquiry.

Personal Religion

Religion wise, I’m Buddhist, and my wife is Christian. We incorporate a lot of both systems into our lives, mainly because they help. We meditate and look to the example of Jesus basically every day.

Having a spiritual center — one which demands forgiveness and chillingness in the face of ape emotions and whims — is really important, to us at least. Relying on social customs and personal knowledge to live or manage a marriage isn’t adequate. In fact, that information is frequently wrong.

Personal Science

In the same way, science is a way of getting beyond the evidence of our eyes and social cues. For all the immediate evidence, the sun is forever and money is really important. In the scientific scale of things, neither is true, and that also helps us live our daily lives.

I also find this insight remarkably close to that which we get from religion. It’s the idea that there’s something bigger than us and the guidance that there’s a way to access that knowledge.

Now, I realize that these experiences are quite personal, and religion and science are actually entities with broader claims. In this article I’m mainly talking about the personal experience.

Systems Of Inquiry

If you look at both religion and science as they were when they started, they were systems of inquiry. If you look at how they’re practiced they can also be systems of inquiry.

Religious Inquiry

Religious prophets from the Buddha to Jesus to Muhammad observed, meditated, prayed and came back with different models as to how human experience worked and how to deal with it.

This wasn’t scientific observation, but their results have been roughly testable in how people live their lives. That is, you can follow their teachings and path and see where it gets you.

Mediated by priests, these religious ideas are constantly evolving, and each person can (sometimes with great effort) construct their own religious experience. Organized religions are not advertised as buffets, but in reality each persons religious experience is different.

Religion as practiced by individuals is really about living rather than some over-arching depiction of reality. It is about the daily inquiry that is life (who am I, where am I, what do I say, what do I do) with reference to some system that you trust.

Whether there is no heaven or hell or rebirth isn’t necessarily relevant to that personal equation any more than whether Pi is a rational number. If it helps you get to the result of a better life, then so be it. Of course, people often use religion as a depiction of reality to judge or bludgeon other people with, but it’s important to remember that for most people it’s just something that they’re using to try and figure out how to deal with their own trials and tribulations.

To repeat, what I am talking about here is religion as a means of personal inquiry, not as a means of inquiring about the general state of the world. People of course use it as both and the latter gets a lot more press, but it’s the former that I use it for. Understanding who I am and how to deal with other people and situations.

Scientific Inquiry

Science is much, much better at describing objective reality. In science the process of observation doesn’t depend on millenial prophets. It is a system for observation, testing and falsification which has led to a rapid and accurate expansion of human knowledge about where we are, where we came from, where we’re going and how to get there.

Mediated by scientists, it’s constantly evolving by nature, and these findings trickle down to human experience through education and, most notably, technology, which are the miracles this ‘belief system’ produces. Science, of course, isn’t really a belief system, it’s pretty damn real.

In terms of personal inquiry, however, science isn’t necessarily helpful. It doesn’t start out to tell compelling or helpful stories, its goal is just to portray what objectively is. Sometimes this is complicated, confusing or plain boring. Science is also only recently beginning to plumb the depths of human experience and suffering, and it has suffered from a lot of confident missteps (Freudian therapy, over-medication for mental troubles) which have made people doubt the applicability of science to their own lives.

None of this changes that fact that science has assembled the greatest picture of ourselves and the cosmos ever available to humankind. The amount of information and wonder we can access — from the grand scale, beauty and creative destruction of the universe to the elegance and baffling paradoxes of atomic and quantum physics — is mind-blowing.

To me learning about the universe and science is essential to understanding myself and inquiring about my place in everything. It’s not explictly spelled out, but if you look at everything from the nature of weather and clouds to the inevitable destruction of the sun, there are personal lessons to be learned. From those bits of science I can learn that I’m not very important in the cosmic scale, that all things are impermanent, and that God (or whatever you want to call it) is awesome.

The Difference

The difference, I’d argue, is that religion has evolved to be insanely user-friendly, to the point of being objectively inaccurate. It plays to human biases and expectations (a human figure for God/prophet to fit our social brains, a reliance on story-telling and parables to fit our episodic memory) so much that the underlying objective predictions (heaven and hell, rebirth, etc) can be downright illogical.

Science, on the other hand, is so focused on objective accuracy that it leaves aside the question of how this can be communicated to slightly civilized apes such that they can do anything with the information.

It’s like one is focused on the user and marketing and the other is focused on the product. My position is, put ‘em both together, you got thinking all night. To paraphrase the odious R. Kelly.