Spinning Yarns

This story on NPR,* about the teaching of evolution in Maryland public schools, got me thinking.

The usual story seems to be that religion began as a way for primitive peoples to explain phenomena whose causality was not immediately apparent to the casual observer—things like sunrise and sunset, thunder and lightning, earthquakes, droughts, floods, disease, birth, death, and the behaviour of domestic cats. To ascribe such events to the actions of spirits or divine beings, whose motives and powers are beyond our humble ken, makes it easier for us to cope with them, at least psychologically. The idea that adulation of gods and spirits can affect the world is possibly the most powerful and influential idea we’ve ever come up with, and it remains to this day a linch-pin of every human culture.

For better or worse, religious faith has often been exploited by individuals and small groups to wield control and influence over larger bodies of people. For millennia, pharaohs, kings, and emperors have claimed rulership by divine right, and untold numbers of mystics and prophets have wielded the belief of their followers as a tool to spread new and counter-intuitive ideas like peace, harmony, and human sacrifice to the world at large. The degree of success of these efforts has varied widely, but the principle is sound: If you can plant your ideas in a substrate of common faith, they will be propagated widely by those who believe. Organizations founded on the basis of religious influence are traditionally very jealous of their often-fragile grip over their followers, and it is quite likely that throughout human history, more violent conflict has occurred in the name of religion than any other two causes combined.

Enter science, the organized study of natural phenomena. Some people naïvely suppose that the goal of modern objective science is to bring down religion; yet nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly all the great Natural Philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, the founders of modern science, were men of profound and subtle religious faith—if anything, their careful examination of the workings of nature could be seen as a kind of worship. I suspect science and religion appear to conflict because, through science, we have discovered explanations for many of the phenomena we used to ascribe directly to the gods. We seem to be “pushing back” the boundaries of what lies within the province of religious faith, and some people fear that eventually nothing more will be left.** The fallacy of this view is to accept the metaphor that knowledge is like water, and that religion and science are two distinct basins between which we carry cups of water in some kind of zero-sum game: Each cup transferred from one basin to the other leaves the first a cupful closer to barren. In fact, knowledge, and more precisely that which is knowable, is not a fixed or finite resource like water in a basin. A better analogy is the cornu copia, the horn of plenty—no matter how much you take out, there is always more available.

If science has any destructive goal with respect to religion, it is not to bring down faith in the divine, but to reduce the susceptibility of the faithful to manipulation on the basis of their faith. The scientist is the natural enemy of the charlatan. That puts scientists at odds with organizations and individuals whose power and influence are rooted in arrogation of faith (let’s call them “faith-based organizations”), and the charge that science seeks to bring down religion is simply the most obvious rhetorical petard hurled in jealous self-defense. Science suffers from the same kinds of manipulation and false ascription that religion does, however, and people are often led just as far astray by those who misuse the results of scientific study as by those who twist the words of scripture. Part of the problem is simply bad science—there’s plenty of that to go around—but there is also the problem that advertisers, lobbyists, and politicians will spin even the results of legitimate scientific observation in order to affect the behaviour of consumers and the body politic in irrational and contradictory ways such as simultaneously voting for tax cuts and buying an SUV. In fact, in modern industrialized nations, manipulation of science has a bigger effect on people’s hearts and minds than manipulation of religion, and that grinding noise you hear is coming from the teeth of a very frustrated Pope.

Scientific claims are supposed to be precise and independently verifiable, so that we need not take them on faith; so how can people be fooled if they could just check the results themselves? The reason is that not everybody has time to personally check every claim they hear, and so we often take it on faith that scientists are playing straight with us. Ordinarily, this is a pretty safe assumption, because there’s often somebody who will check the results, and folks who do really bad science will usually get caught at it eventually. But since nearly everybody assumes somebody else will check the results and never does, we run a significant danger of succumbing to pluralistic ignorance; in effect, we are creating a kind of “scientific priesthood” whose conclusions are taken solely on faith. Although the idea seems farfetched on the surface, it’s not too far from reality, except that we use the term “Academia” instead of “the Church.” When we accept scientific claims blindly, we are not using science as a tool, but rather worshipping it as a god.

And yet, what a god it is! Instead of dusty tracts full of obtuse words written in a plethora of long-dead languages, the scriptures of science can be read and written by virtually anyone, with a little training and a modicum of self-discipline; and they are bound together by the lingua franca of mathematics. Old and new ideas alike may be challenged and accepted or rejected, without any risk of destroying the very foundation of the system as a whole. Is it any wonder, then, when people are unwittingly led astray by abuse of science? Just as with religion, reaping the proper benefits of science requires more than mere attendance; it requires individual participation—as Alexander Pope wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There, shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.” Skepticism and questioning are the most essential requirements of science, and blind adherence to any proposition is grounds for its depreciation as a scientific argument. Science does not hold that faith is bad, but rather that faith alone is unconvincing, and should be supplemented by rational causes, objective data, and sound predictions. As religious doctrines go, this has a lot to recommend it. As John Barrow wrote:

If a religion is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.

Unfortunately, it is all too easy, even for relatively well-educated people, to stray down the garden path of pseudoscientific cargo cults. Scientific methods notwithstanding, it’s awfully difficult to establish even correlation, much less cause and effect, among any complicated phenomena; true scientists know this, but the appeal of a simple explanation is almost irresistible. It doesn’t help that unscrupulous salesmen, politicians, and virtually anyone else with an axe to grind stand ready to selectively quote research reports, creatively interpret statistics, and draw a plethora of unwarrantable conclusions from virtually any scientific result ever published. To be a healthy and productive member of the scientific congregation, one must learn to be wary of anybody who purports to interpret the “meaning” of a scientific claim. Science is about hypothesis and evidence, not meaning. My advice to anybody considering science as a replacement for their old religion is this: Keep your old gods for comfort; use science only as a compass.

Although I do not worship or ascribe devotion to any supernatural or divine beings, I am somewhat disturbed by the allegation that science and religion are at odds with each other. Both, I think, are essential components of human society, and while they do overlap in certain matters of causal explanation, they are neither redundant, nor mutually exclusive, and so should be seen as complementary, rather than contradictory.

Oh, and by the way, a note to Creationists everywhere: Humans share a common ancestor with the Great Apes, we did not “descend from monkeys.” Your feces-throwing idiot second-cousin Cecil is not your father, even if the Bible tells you so.

* Courtesy of Tom Temple over at The Hanover Collaboration.

** Except the cats, who will probably remain inscrutable forever.

Filed by Michael at 16:00 under Philosophical
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