Cult of Dan Brown: Religion vs Science

One of the biggest misconceptions out there (as exemplified recently by SoDrk) is that scientists must be atheists. The idea that someone could be a fervently religious person and at the same time possess scientific curiosity just boggles the minds of many people. They just don't understand how the two mindsets--one of blind faith, the other of openminded skepticism--could ever get along in the same brain.

There are a lot of scientists who hold deep religious beliefs, in fact. While they believe in a higher power (without need of any proof), they also believe that the Almighty has created a universe that operates under certain rules--there's an "order" to things, and as scientists they mean to study the universe in the hope of decoding some of those rules. In a way, they see themselves as trying to interpret the original "scriptures" of God--by understanding the mechanisms the Creator set in motion at the dawn of time. Science, to such researchers, is a means of understanding God, of becoming closer to Him in ways that reading and re-reading the Bible can't satisfy.

Another argument in that vein is that if God created us and gave us minds capable of high-level reasoning, surely it's because He intended for us to use them. We would be very boring pets indeed if we never used these mental gifts to advance ourselves as a species. What kind of deity would create humankind and then say, "I gave you the deluxe option package, but whatever you do, don't use any of the extra features"? That's where the whole Genesis story of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge comes into play. We could have been eternally content living naked and unthinking in the Garden of Eden, if only Adam and Eve hadn't eaten the apples from the Tree of Knowledge, the story goes. But if God hadn't wanted us to have that knowledge, why did He put the Tree of Knowledge there in the first place? And if He was so disappointed that Adam and Eve disobeyed Him, why didn't He just smite them both and start with a new pair of humans, repeating the process until He got a suitably ignorant and uninquisitive set? The answer, it seems, is that He must have wanted us to have that knowledge--to question the world around us, and to ask the difficult questions.

The fear among many religious people, though, is that science threatens to make religion irrelevant, and even supplant God. If science can solve more and more of the mysteries of God's universe, after all, won't His Creation seem less magical, less wondrous? When the universe and all it contains can be defined and described in mathematical formulae and mechanical processes, doesn't it lose some of its splendour? Oddly enough, it has the opposite effect for many scientists. Study mathematics to the graduate level and you finally understand it well enough to have some real epiphanies about the workings of the universe--and it's a marvellous sense of awe. I've heard other colleagues comment that it was during their post-graduate studies in quantum physics, working on sub-atomic particle physics, that they "found God." Many biologists who study the process of evolution have also remarked at how "brilliant" the mechanism seems to be, how ingeniously adaptable it is, and they see that as evidence of God's cleverness.

Where science really threatens religion, though, is in terms of the social control that organized religions have held for centuries. While people attend churches, synagogues, and mosques, they submit themselves to the moral teachings and interpretations of their religious leaders, and that gives those leaders considerable power and wealth. The congregations become voting blocs at election time, and can be rallied for political purposes to march in the streets, and even commit acts of violence, all of which gives the religious leaders more social clout. If people start embracing the principles of scientific thought--the notion of viewing all things with a healthy dose of skepticism and objectivity--they might begin to see through the manipulations of their religious leaders and refuse to go along blindly anymore. If science offers practical answers to questions that organized religion can't (without resorting to the usual "God did it" cop-out), many people will no longer feel the need to attend religious services, finding it cheaper and more satisfying to subscribe to Scientific American instead.

That's really at the root of the conflict between science and religion, I think--organized religion does not want to give up its power, its wealth, and its place in a world where "spirituality" is gaining momentum. Many people these days seem to want to form their own individual relationships with their God/Goddess/Allah/Cthulhu, etc., rather than bother with joining a formal congregation. Congregations were important in the days when most people were illiterate and needed a religious leader to read and interpret the scriptures for them, but in countries where literacy rates are high, people with religious inclinations can visit bookstores and libraries and find as many different interpretations as they could ask for. These people often end up with highly customized sets of beliefs, as they search for the right combination of moral ideas to commit to. In the end they're not Catholics, not Protestants, maybe not even Christians or Jews or Muslims or Buddhists--but they're certainly "religious" in their thinking.

The fact that they're interpreting scriptures on their own, though, is what threatens organized religion more than anything else (including science). If the masses don't need a priest/minister/rabbi/imam to interpret scripture for them--if they can get that interpretation from any number of books on the subject, from The Bible for Dummies on upward to more scholarly texts--then the collection plates at local churches and synagogues and temples don't bring in as much money, and fewer worshippers are willing to commit to tithing practices (i.e. donating a percentage of their income to the church). Organized religion is an expensive business to be in, and they're losing a lot of customers thanks to gains in literacy and access to new ideas. Ironically, though, it's not just because literate people can read science textbooks, it's that they can now read hundreds of other religious texts that offer different interpretations of the same scriptures.

The market that remains for organized religion, however, is the segment that seeks comfort and consolation from others who share the same set of beliefs. Individual spirituality doesn't help you much if you need your faith bolstered occasionally by a like-minded believer, since it's doubtful you'll find anyone else who shares your particular brand of mix-and-match spirituality--sometimes being alone with your books just isn't enough. A congregation, on the other hand, serves as a support group in a lot of ways, helping members through rough times and helping to give them a sense of "belonging" to a community. That need will never go away, and organized religion still fills it rather well, though these days they have competition from all sorts of other social groups, from bowling leagues and reading groups to online forums.

In the end, then, science is not likely to ever eradicate religious belief, any more than religion will ever completely wipe out the natural curiosity of humankind. Science and religion are not wholly incompatible, as many religious scientists will attest, even if the purists at either end of the spectrum would beg to disagree

-- Arras, Advocatus Diaboli at Large

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