Science vs. Religion: Reframing the debate

I’ve started to write this on numerous occasions but it’s never quite gone where I intended it, sometimes the simplest things are the most difficult to express and these concepts are pretty basic:

1. The separation of the Churches and the beliefs of the religious and

2. The separation of Religious and Scientific mindsets from specific beliefs

To the debate over whether religion is a force for good or ill I say, it’s not a force.

To define people according to whether they believe in god doesn’t really get us anywhere, it’s the way that people believe, in democracy or communism or anything else, that matters.

A little back story

I grew up as what I would now describe as a Dawkinsesque atheist: that the bible stories are ridiculous discredits the whole religion. If I ever believed in a Christian god I don’t remember doing so.

At school we studied the history of medicine and this, as with most sciences, is a story from everything being attributed to gods and spirits, through the whittling away of their influence as our understanding grows, to being unable to disprove an afterlife or a god but their existence is no longer necessary to fill the gaps.

The question, as far as I was concerned, was closed.

Then, sometime in the latter part of my twenties I read Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy.

The premise of this book is that holy people of all stripes, throughout time, the world over, who have lead similarly meditative lives, have described almost identical religious experiences and come to the same conclusion: that life should be lived by some variation of the golden rule, “do unto others as you would be done by”. There are many things to be taken from this but key here is that the church of the layman is not well connected to the religion’s spiritual heart. It might be quoted in the Sunday sermon, along with loving thy neighbour and turning the other cheek, but it is not how the institutions actually behave.

This concept is more explicitly found in Hinduism, where the upper castes practise a spirituality very much closer to what we in the west associate with Buddhism (and those referenced by Huxley tended towards): god as a common unifying essence or energy to be found in everything. The thousands of deities are for the lower castes, not trusted in seeing god in everything they are provided with a god for everything, to keep them holy.

So what is the church?

When the Romans embraced Christianity under Constantine they lay the founding of what is now the Catholic Church, a strong political body that remained at the heart of European power for almost two thousand years. This duration enabled it to rack up more crimes against humanity than possibly any another invention of man, but it is important to recognise that they were not a result of the religion it preached.

The 20th century saw plenty of horrors exacted by the fanatical, absent religious motive. This is because it is not the beliefs per se, it’s the ideological certitude that enables such atrocities: if yours is the one true way then it can justifiably be enforced by any method. When power rests in a doctrine then you have to expect it to be defended at all costs, as with Stain and Mao, so with McCarthyism and the Vietnam war.

The abuses of the churches come not from their superstitious beliefs, or the words of their prophets, they simply arise from positions of unfettered power. Jesus would not have approved and Muhammad asked his followers to address the unbelievers: “To you your religion, and to me my religion!“

Similarly, the persecutions exacted are terrible by nature of being persecutions. If it had turned out that Galileo was wrong that would not excuse his treatment: let him be wrong. But when you have so much invested in a certain opinion it becomes very difficult to allow dissent.

All churches are political and behave much as governments would, given the chance. Their teachings are all about meekness and suffering and better lives to come because this keeps the hard done by in check. I have a lot of time for Buddhist philosophy but can’t buy into reincarnation or karma because they sound too much like man-made motivational concepts — I’ve heard they used to be popular in Christianity too but got ditched in favour of hellfire and brimstone.

From the outside it is hard to see the caste system of the Vedic faiths as being anything other than a power structure designed to keep wealth and influence exactly where it’s always sat, but that isn’t so different to the British class system, rigid into the last century and from which the decedents of the Norman conquest still benefit today.

One does not have to be religious to behave religiously, which is the crux of this essay.

The devil isn’t in the detail

So let us put aside the content of beliefs for now and concentrate on the nature of them.

I would like to define the scientific mindset as being open, curious, questioning. The scientific person knows that we’re just working off a set of best hypotheses and that most of the great minds in history have been wrong about things. If we are standing on the shoulders of giants then we will support many more in time and whilst our progress is unprecedented the constant discovery of how much more there is to learn should keep us humble.

The scientist also recognises that such progress is only made by questioning what went before. Nothing is sacred or out of bounds and all assumptions need rigorous and repeated verification.

The religious person may recognise this too and for that very reason wishes to suppress and censor. Because they have a personal attachment and investment in their views they are intolerant to questioning and debate serves no purpose.

Opinions are dogmatically inherited and passed down. There is no subjectivity: what’s right for one is right for all.

As with all things, few of us are at either extreme and not all religious views are held dogmatically, but I expand the term to include opinions adopted without question.

This distinction absolutely allows for those of a scientific mindset to believe in god and for those who do not to be of the religious kind. That is the whole point.

Dawkins made a lot about religion being a choice but that is not really true. Growing up in middle England one can chose religion, but that’s actually quite radical.

There are many things that we just accept as we grow because they are the prevailing theories, if you live in a multicultural environment then you have exposure to a wider range of ideas, but there’s still peer pressure and most people on the planet do not have such access.

When I think of my parents’ bookshelf, containing The Doors of Perception, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and complete works of Carlos Castaneda, I’d have to say that my sister’s joining of the church in her early teens was far more independent and rebellious than my dalliances in mind-bending drugs many years later.

As I have said before, cultural influence is like an accent: you don’t really notice your own, some will even swear blind they have none, but there are a lot of ideas we just inherit.

I’ve never seriously questioned evolution, in fact my Jehovah’s Witness knows far more about the technical details than I’ve ever cared to learn (and apparently I don’t know what creationism is either, according to jw.org, as despite believing that god created the world as it is, they “do not agree with creationism… Because a number of creationist ideas actually conflict with the Bible.”)

It is actually quite striking how the religious people I meet in this country are often extremely clued up on modern science compared to what many advocating atheists know about religion.

This is another key point that I have written around elsewhere: that it isn’t a lack of scientific understanding that leads people to faith but a predisposition to certain beliefs, due to character as well as culture. As with conspiracy theories, the same evidence can lead two ostensibly disinterested parties to diametrically opposed conclusions based on their general understanding of how the world works and their faith in certain institutions and people.

So with scientists, impartiality cannot be taken for granted. I was impressed with Hawkins’ admission, in A Brief History of Time, that he followed a line of investigation that he had a personal preference for when the evidence pointed equally in two directions. These people are still human but there is a trust, faith even, in the loose community we refer to as Scientific, not so dissimilar to that which others hold in the churches.

Anyone who felt that The God Delusion gave them an insight into the religious mind demonstrates this perfectly.

The Dawkins Delusion

One of the things that made this hard to write is that I can get carried away with trashing his book, and that is unfair, I actually agree with quite a lot of it and it was a bit of a non-event following all of the hype.

But it is the new atheist bible and unfortunately it has been warped into a weapon for intolerance and division just like all of the others, so what I want to say is:

The book has a clear agenda; it is not a scientific work. He spends far too much time telling us what others must think due to their faith, and demanding they defend that position, but next to none seeking to understand. “How can you believe this?” is a million miles from “What do you believe?” The assumption that, especially as an atheist, he knows what people experience undermines his claim to be a man of science. If he allows for Einstein to have a god of some form that is very different to the typical Christian one then why not a man of the cloth? Prejudice.

I was staying on an ashram back in early 2011 and every evening one of the Swamis spoke on Hinduism. The first week I found really enlightening but the second a different teacher took over and I couldn’t connect with him at all. Some could have been lost in translation but I think that they just had two very different interpretations on the faith; it’s a complex and personal thing.

It is this a priori rejection of the views of the religious, the “I know all I need to know” attitude, that harms the science cause the most because it is so glaringly unscientific. Religion bashing in no way promotes science, it is just religion bashing.

Becoming the problem

So the thing about the Dawkins book really is that it has created a negative, religious following. The worst characteristic of the churches is their divisive and intolerant nature and that is exactly how the new atheist crusade appears to me.

It just enforces my point above, about the behaviour not being tied to any particular belief structure and how knowing you’re right gives you license to trample on the ideas of others, often without even stopping to find out what they are.

The oppressed becoming the oppressor; pointing to the millennia of wrongs inflicted just makes the behaviour worse, it’s an admission of guilt quoting vengeance in defence.

If we want a brave new scientific world then let’s practice what we preach. Teach creationism alongside evolution at school for, if nothing else, it will increase our understanding into the views of others. To me that is far more important than knowing where we came from anyway, but if you want to produce scientists, let kids make decisions, weigh evidence, think for themselves. Have confidence both in them and the strength of your arguments, don’t deny them information.

My new favourite phrase: censorship is the intellectual equivalent of inbreeding.

More to the point: it’s religious.

And so…

We need to accept that we’re all a little religious, have to be, with neither the time nor inclination to read up on every subject from every angle we put faith in people because they have a PhD, write a book or whatever in the same way some do with the clergy. My passive acceptance of evolution owes nothing to the curious, questioning, scientific side of my nature; that it is a scientific theory changes nothing: the acceptance is key.

If we recognise this in ourselves then we should be more forgiving of others. It actually takes just as much blind faith to be certain of the non-existence of a god as it does to believe in one. When you take into account some of the inexplicable knowledge recounted from past lives there’s a lot of explaining away to do. Maybe for the truly open-minded some form of god is the simplest theory.

Not that I’m selling faith here, but there is a fine line between healthy scepticism and closed-mindedness, between not inventing to fill the gaps and limiting oneself to what western science has observed over the past couple of hundred years. And I’m not knocking atheism, most cases for god are thoroughly unconvincing, but inherently it is neither superior nor scientific. It isn’t belief in god that makes people homophobic or denies contraception to those at risk of AIDS, it’s dogmatism, the religious mentality, and this is what we need to free ourselves from.

Hence schools should be teaching kids how to think, not telling them what to. Debate should be open and variety encouraged. The fierce secularism of France and monocultural ideal they try to preserve has driven deep divisions into their society. It makes them one of the most religious states in Western Europe and they have suffered correspondingly. I find it greatly disheartening that others are following suit, cohesion was never build on discrimination, that should be obvious.

Boots changing feet doesn’t make anything better. The enemy is prejudice itself, not the context, and we need to recognise that to defeat it.

Science, at its heart, is the search for understanding. Whatever our beliefs, that seems a good way forward.