Since 1996, this website, originally called the Truths Project, has tracked my attempt to define a “true religion” – a reality-based spirituality capable of withstanding scientific and intellectual scrutiny. Over the centuries, far greater minds than mine have failed at the task, so I’ll grade my success on a curve. But one thing is clear, even to me: a good number of people believe such a thing can’t exist.
The apparent dichotomy between science and religion can be linked to that between liberalism and conservatism, and seems central to my country’s (the USA) current hyperpolarization. But few people exist entirely in one camp or the other – it’s in groups and institutions that these schisms become hard-edged and adversarial. We’re in some ways talking about a dichotomy between the head and the heart; and while different people do seem to favor leading with one or the other, the person who actually aspires to mindlessness or heartlessness is, thankfully, rare. Institutions, on the other hand, can take things to extremes.
The institutional head/heart schism came to a head around the time of Galileo, causing a split between the religious and academic worlds that persists to this day. But the schism was always a bit artificial – universities were, after all, originally religious institutions. It was fueled from the start by political considerations, and continues to be. There is real disagreement between scientific and religious worldviews, but these debates have been swept up into larger and more acrimonious struggles between classes and cultures, etc.. Setting aside these other conflicts, let’s consider just the science/religion dichotomy, and ask how it might be resolved.
I think the solution is, at least in theory, very simple: the application of humility. It seems that much of the ongoing conflict between the worlds of science and religion is caused by an unwillingness on both sides to accept our pervasive and profound state of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t the problem: the “hard problem” is our refusal to acknowledge it.
It’s true that knowledge is power, but there’s also power in appearing knowledgeable – which presents a constant temptation to claim to know more than one actually does. Even if the claimed knowledge doesn’t entirely “work”, it can provide a sense of stability, which is in itself valuable. But pretense, however well-intentioned, eventually lands us in trouble.
The scientific world likes to imagine itself immune to such flights of fancy, but it isn’t. With hindsight, we may chuckle about presumptions made in previous centuries – each generation sincerely believing that all major features of the universe have been discovered – but such lapses of prudence continue in real-time. We’re only human.
The teachings of the world’s religions, meanwhile, are often a self-aware blending of metaphor, myth, speculation, and fact. But this awareness isn’t uniform, and church leadership is often reluctant to inform its flock of these crucial distinctions. The individuals know better, but the institution has a mind of its own.
If science and religion were both able to jettison their “pretend knowledge”, they’d find themselves very much on the same page: staring with wonder at an unspeakably complex universe, and at their own amazing selves, wishing to understand it all. The real disagreements between science and religion lie in their assumptions.
The strength of science lies in its attention to detail, but therein also lies its weakness: a tendency to overlook the forest for the trees. A broad overview of physics reveals a universe that is essentially a mystery – where even the concept of “existence” is up for grabs. The same can be said of the life sciences: despite amazing advances in the minutia of genetics, etc., we still find ourselves holding only pieces of a puzzle. Science operates on the optimistic assumption that, armed only with logic and data, we someday will understand it all, but a skeptic might describe this as magical thinking.
In the life sciences, I’m particularly fascinated by the phenomena of instinct. Science suggests that the vast complexity of such behavior is encoded in the <1Gb of our genetic material – an amount of storage that would be considered unusable in a modern computer. I’ll never forget watching a humble gopher snake do a perfect imitation of a rattlesnake – coiled, head flattened, tail “rattling” – and still wonder how a simple reptile could devise such a clever but risky trick – and then how such behavior could get to be encoded in its genes. The world of instinct is filled with such “miracles”; and while science might someday solve these riddles, there’s also the distinct possibility that, using existing models, it won’t. In the meantime, these mysteries might best be categorized as “paranormal phenomena”.
There’s no shame in allowing this category; it’s simply an acknowledgment that there are gaping “known unknowns” in all branches of science; and these in turn hint at unknown unknowns – questions we haven’t yet thought to ask.
Faced with the enormity of even our known ignorance, it seems science might find a willingness to consider even outlandish theories; but a scientist who steps out of certain bounds is generally treated as an heretic, and excommunicated. Science, as a whole, has learned to keep its blinders on, to disregard anomalies and mysteries that challenge the existing paradigm, restrained by the comedic logic of the “drunkard’s search”.
Meanwhile, religion, tunneling from the other side of the mountain, has its own set of problems. Unfettered by scientific method, religious thinkers have been free to explore every realm of reality; and while thinking outside the box can lead to epiphanies, it can also produce a lot of clutter. Having sought truth through intuition, imagination, and “inner revelation”, religion crystallizes its theories, valid and otherwise, in the form of tradition, where they lie largely protected from inquiry or improvement. The wheat and the tares grow together till the end of time.
The primary flaw of religions is that they, so heavily based on tradition, are having a hard time shedding some untruths that desperately need to be shed – destructive superstitious fictions, traceable back to our caveman days. These fear-based fantasies didn’t really serve us then, and certainly don’t now. But antiquity eventually becomes its own proof, as beliefs become calcified and sanctified, the mere presence of doubt becoming a weakness or transgression. To science, this rigid deference to dogma is downright noxious; and to the extent that they contain and promote falsehood, these traditions are perceived as a genuine threat.
Religious traditions, though, have the advantage of having been at this for millennia – they’ve had much more time to sift through data, to converse, and to slowly evolve. The scientific world has, in some areas, greatly benefited from their efforts – in pharmacology, for instance – but in other areas science seems flatly unwilling to mine religious traditions for usable truth. From the religious point of view, this rigid myopia of science seems downright immature. It is also seen as a genuine threat.
In short, both science and religion have earned each other’s distrust. Neither wants to admit its vulnerabilities and “disarm”, and this impasse, coupled with other societal head/heart schisms, has resulted in planetwide dysfunction, as needed synergies fail to occur, and actual solutions to actual problems are obscured in clouds of enmity. Oy vey.
I think science and religion can both provide valid means of discovering truth, but the real fun may start when we begin earnestly blending the two, using all our methods of discernment together. Of course this happens all the time: we all use and benefit from scientific thinking in the normal course of being human; and even the most logic-bound scientist is influenced by hunches and intuitions. But we have yet to reach a point (or actually, return to the point) where this blending occurs deliberately at an institutional level – where seminaries and research centers cooperate, collaborate, and even merge.
This state of merger was once the norm. The original PhD’s – doctors of philosophy – were expected to study all schools of thought. Folk doctors – “witches”, herbalists, and healers – drew little distinction between material sciences and the “supernatural”. And for both science and religion, it might be helpful here to redefine supernatural as “nature not yet understood”.
I was raised an atheist, but, after a series of paranormal experiences, was forced to abandon that “religion” and begin a quest for explanations of these bizarre events. It turns out that such phenomena (extra-sensory perception, intuitions, synchronicity, states of transcendence, etc.) aren’t at all uncommon – and each one offers science an entryway into a world it seems reluctant to explore. Paranormal phenomena and mysteries of consciousness fall in a no-man’s land between science and religion where, perhaps overwhelmed by their ignorance, neither want to go. Aside from humility, we’ll also need some bravery: acknowledging one’s ignorance is a difficult first step in a seeker’s journey.
Science at least has the capacity to change, but in the realm of religion, things are getting interesting indeed. Thanks to globe-shrinking technologies, the world’s religious belief systems are being forced to confront their inconsistencies and illogic as never before. A science-minded person might conclude that these are the death throes of religion, a prelude to the final triumph of the Age of Reason, but I would disagree. As William James observed a century ago, the sum total of the world’s religious experiences can’t be so easily dismissed – especially if some of those experiences are your own.
So it’s a wondrous time to be alive. Centuries-old edifices are crumbling, worldviews and philosophies are competing, evolving, hybridizing. Amongst all the chaos, one can hope that progress is being made in humankind’s quest for truth – starting, hopefully, with some courageous acknowledgment of our vast ignorance. Maybe we don’t really know what we are, or where we are, or how we got here. Maybe this universe is one huge garden of miracles, waiting to be explored.
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