I mean, seriously, right? They almost never try to tackle the same questions. It's not like the Bible's all "And then God saith unto him, 'The carbon atom hath 243 electrons. Not six, like those jackass scientists say. I mean, who does those guys think they are? With their "methodical empirical testing" and "rigorous peer review" and "lifetimes devoted to assiduous and dispassionate study of minute concepts"? How could they know more about something than some guy who occasionally reads the Drudge Report?'"
I suppose I just revealed where my sympathies lie here. But I think religion gets unfairly sucked in to the real issue, which is "science vs. crazy paranoid conspiracy theorists." Take global warming, for example. So 99% of all scientists agree that it's a serious problem. And there's a huge percentage of Americans who don't believe in it, because ... why, exactly? Because it sounds scary? Because they read that a couple scientists, out of the thousands doing work on the topic, sweetened their numbers a bit once? So by that logic, if a few people steal office supplies, then no one has ever bought a stapler in the history of the world?
I'm getting off track here. I just get very frustrated with people who don't believe in established scientific principles for no good reason. Look, scientists spend their entire lives studying these things. They go through incredibly rigorous processes to test their theories, from the controls in each study to the aforementioned peer review, by which other scientists gleefully tear apart any weaknesses. This process has worked extremely well to develop the many principles that have since been used to create everything from iPods to McDonald's hamburgers (which are actually sophisticated alloys of magnesium and cat snot -- I'm sorry, did you not know that?)
I'm not suggesting you should believe every study that comes out. Be skeptical about most health-related ones, for example. (Broccoli is bad for you! Now it's good for you! Now it causes cancer! Now it kills cancer! Now it is cancer!) A single study doesn't prove much of anything. But when thousands of studies have been done, and all of them support something like global warming or evolution, you should probably start to think "hmm. There might be something to this. Maybe I don't exactly understand it, but maybe if very smart people who study it for a living all agree on it, well, it could be true!"
The global warming conspiracy theorists especially get to me. It's clearly such a serious problem, and these jackasses are still refusing to face it. I'm very scared, personally. I just read, for example, that photosynthesis decreases dramatically at temperatures above 86 degrees. That means plants can't grow nearly as well when it gets hotter. I think is a more serious problem than whether Obama may at some point raise taxes on the rich.
But the global warming naysayers apparently think it's all some kind of grand conspiracy by scientists. Have these idiots ever met a scientist? Scientists are all arrogant, super-argumentative assholes (present company excepted). They live to tear down other scientists' ideas. Bad concepts would not survive a day in that kind of pressure cooker.
And how exactly would this conspiracy work? Do you think all of the millions of scientists occasionally meet in some underground bunker and go "OK, lets make up something new. How about that the planet is getting hotter? Yeah, that's so crazy it just might work! Now all we have to do is write thousands of papers and keep an incredible internal discipline among the millions of us. All so we can write books that no one reads and Al Gore can make a moderately successful movie! It's pure genius! And besides, without global warming, what would we all do for a living? After all, there are is no other science to study."
This gets at a general distrust that Americans seem to have of experts. I don't get it. We refuse to believe the conclusions of people who are spend all their time studying something that we know nothing about. Wouldn't you think they might come up something more valid than we would?
Why do Americans think that they can have a valid opinion on everything, just by following their own gut feelings? Sometimes, you don't know enough to form an opinion. Sometimes, you have to assume that the experts are not completely insane, that they might have explored the issue in such depth that they might know more than you about it. I know, I'm talking crazy talk. After all, I work hard at the shop and support my family, so don't go telling me that protein kinases add phosphate groups to proteins! I know in my heart that what they really do is help angels fly.
And hopefully that got us back to religion vs. science, which is where I meant to go with all of this. My point was that the Bible doesn't even try to get into science. It gets into history and ethics, but not science. It doesn't say how God did stuff, just that he did. It doesn't say "And God made man, and he did it with a big ZAP and puff of smoke, in like, a second." Why couldn't He have sparked the genetic mutations that led to the formation of humans, etc.? If that sounds silly, it shouldn't. Why can't God work through the physical world to do His thing?
Basically, religion isn't about how things happen. Science explores how. Religion is about why things happen, and by whom. Science doesn't have anything to say about the deeper meaning of our lives, and doesn't pretend to. Science doesn't set forth moral principles, because that's not its job. Religion and science are working on completely different sets of questions.
I suppose this false religion vs. science dichotomy came about because of all the lame explanations that people spun out of religious worldviews and then accepted as holy fact. For instance, they once concluded that the Earth was at the center of the universe, because we're all so wonderfully delightful and God loves us mucho and everything. So when Galileo realized that that wasn't true, the religious authorities came down on him hard. But note that the Bible doesn't say anything about the Earth being at the center of the universe. This was just something people made up before there was science, and then awkwardly tied in to religion.
Or take the creation story, which is at the heart of current religion vs. science talk. Yes, it does actually say that God created everything, including humans, in six days. But c'mon, is that really the most important point here? The point is that God created things. As I said in my last post, people who take the Bible literally would have to also believe that it's OK to beat your slave within an inch of his life.
Do you really think God is up there saying "Yup, six days. If you don't believe that, then go to hell! Literally." I think He's more concerned with people believing in him, and knowing that He loves them. That seems to be more His bag.
Or with global warming - what do you think Jesus would say about it? Seriously. Do you think he would say, "Naw, it ain't true, because I saw this one thing on Fox News that said it was all a lie." I think Jesus would be a lot more interested in the moral dimension of it. That's more His thing. I think Jesus would be more like "You guys really should not be consuming so much that you're threatening to destroy my creation. How about living a bit more simply? It worked for me."
So let's stop assuming that religion and science are somehow at odds. They're not. They're in completely different realms, asking and answering completely different questions.
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5 comments:
I think I largely agree with Ed. Humans possess faith, and they possess reason, and those two things tend to work differently.
I'd say, though, that science and religion can and do attempt to answer similar questions about the world around us and our place in it. Here's a sample question: Why do people do bad things? Answers: 1) Because they have been separated from God (religion); 2) Because without badness, there could be no goodness (philosophy); 3) Because of a chemical imbalance (neurosomethingerother); 4) Because Mom didn't let them play with their Legos (psychology); 5) Because of a vestigial predatory or defensive instinct (anthrobiology). So various disciplines can deal with the same questions.
In fact, the more I think about it, I think I actually disagree with Ed. Originally, I was going to say that faith and reason are mostly separate. I was going to talk about a faith-reason spectrum, saying that how we approach problem-solving depends on where we put ourselves on the spectrum. Scientists would be on the reason-heavy side of the spectrum, and non-global warmites would be on the faith-heavy side. Then I was going to berate both the non-global warmites and the faithless scientists for abandoning one or the other of these tools we have for understanding our world, advocating instead for a judicious use of both faith and reason in exploring life.
Now, though, I think I was underestimating both sides. Neither side has abandoned any tools. They just use them in ways that aren't often recognized, even (or especially) within their own groups.
Science is founded on faith as much as any religion. There is an ultimate belief by scientists that something about their observations is "true". That math is an accurate language to describe their observations. Perhaps, even, that everything is knowable, given enough time.
Likewise, the worldview of even religious fanatics make sense logically. Given that 1) the Bible is true; 2) what my church says about the Bible is true; 3) my church says that Fox News is true; then it makes sense to be skeptical about global warming, for instance.
But tell a scientist that science is entirely based on faith, and you're asking for a knuckle sandwich. Which won't hurt, by the way, since all scientists are wimpy. Tell a evangelical Christian that a religious outlook not just should be, but is underpinned by a rational scheme, and, again, you get a knuckle sandwich. Just turn the other cheek, though, and appreciate the irony.
And people don't always find science and religion incompatible, by the way. My favorite example is Gregor Mendel. I mean, c'mon - the guy was a monk AND the father of genetics! Talk about a crossover!
Well, I guess that's it. This comment made a lot more sense before I changed my mind three times about what my point was. Feel free to help me out.
What I find more amazing than the American impulse to disbelieve what 99% of scientists are claiming is their total lack of hesitation to embrace total hooey, like echinacea or colloidal silver. I know I'm straying away from global warming and into the conflicts between Western and Eastern medicines, but heck, why not. I mean, Joe, here changed his mind three times in his post. Why can't I go off topic?
Actually, I'll meander back to religion and science. I'm curious to know what percentage of scientists out there are religious. Living within spitting distance of one of the biggest bastions of global-warming hugging around, NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research, otherwise known as one of the places where Woody Allen filmed Sleeper), we know a bunch of the said global-warming huggers and they're all atheists, except for one who occasionally goes to a moon-worshipping church. I know the religious scientists are out there, so how do they justify it all? Can we look to them for guidance?
But really, the big problem is who gets to teach what, where. Scientists have a lock on public education, which pisses the Christians off, but last I looked, private Christian schools cost a buttload of money to attend. If the Christians really want to win the battle, they need to start offering free education to those who which to attend their particular type of brain-washing. And dammit, they ought to be able to, because last I noticed, they tax their members and do not pay property taxes to the government.
So I guess my stance is that religion and science will never get along and they need to continue to fight until only one remains standing. And until the churches step up to the public education plate, they're gonna lose....hopefully.
Clearly no one agrees with me that science and religion deal with fundamentally different questions. Another point I should have made is to talk about the problems with drawing religious conclusions from scientific studies. An example would be these brain studies that find a certain part of the brain lights up when people ahve religious experiences. People falsely assume that this means religion is "all in the brain." But why can't that part of the brain be the part that God works through? Much the same way we use a hand to pick up a rock. We don't loook at that and say that the act of picking up the rock is "all in the hand" just because the hand is especiallly busy during that moment.
So in Joe's example, a lot of those explanations from different disciplines are parts of the same story. So there is a predatory or defensive instinct in humans. It is regulated by neurotransmitters, which can be higher or lower depending on the individual. When is the instinct, and thus the action of the neurotransmitters, especially active? Maybe it's more manifest when someone is separated from God. Why is it all there in the first place? Maybe God it put it there because without badness there could be no goodness. Again, the science is talking about the how, while religion is talking about the why and by whom. They're answering different questions about the same thing, each tackling only part of the story. There's no reason to think one discipline's explanation is complete in itself.
So while I concede that for most people, there is a faith-reason spectrum, my point is that there shouldn't be. When you choose only one of the two, you end up with incomplete, oversimplified answers.
Or, instead of "how" and "why," you could look at science and religion as providing proximal and distal causes. Proximal causes are mroe immediate -- I am an asshole because I have a whole lot of the neurotransmitter Assholinase coursing through my brain. Distal causes are behind the proximal causes -- I have a lot of Assholinase because God created a system in which people can be assholes. Thus also, I am an asshole because God created a system in which people can be assholes. Both reasons coexist in a long line of proximal and distal causes.
Either way, the main point is that every really big problem has very complex levels of answers, drawn from many disciplines, including both religion and science. Religion tends to go wrong when it tries to explain the proximal or "how" that's best left to science, and science tends to go wrong when it tries to explain the distal and "why" that's best left to religion.
There. Have I solved this problem throughout the world now?
Hmm. There's a lot of ground to cover here. As a scientist, I actually do know a lot of people who are religious (of course the percentage is probably lower than the rest of America). Most of them are not extremely religious, though (although there were a whole bunch of mormons in grad school). I think a lot of religious scientists manage to keep the two worlds separate. When you are studying protein-protein interactions, it's pretty easy to not think about God and what his intentions are.
I agree with Ed that science and religion SHOULD occupy different realms, but I think that most religions don't have that flexibility. Plus, as science answers the questions that religions previously had dibs on, like "How did the earth begin?" "Why are there so many animals" or even "Why does that cow have two heads?", it pushes God further and further out of our immediate lives. You can definitely make the argument that God was the one who designed the physical laws and set the universe in motion, but some people just don't want a religion that involves an absentee God. They would rather not believe science and continue to believe that God's hand is constantly in everything. So I guess I agree with Amy that science and religion are always going to be at odds to some degree.
But my question is: what does this have to do with global warming? I didn't realize that religion was such a big factor in denying that global warming is caused by human activity. I though it was just people who like SUVs. I thought evolution was more of the hot topic for religious folks and schools and stuff.
I think the issue goes back to what Ed said in the original post about Americans have deep-seated distrust of experts. Like all the vaccine people who also don't believe scientific studies (not for any religious reasons, but maybe to also find an answer to the "why" question Ed was alluding to). Part of this may be an american legacy (I just read the Wordy Shipmates), but I partially blame broccoli studies and the media. Some study will come out with some data based on certain set of conditions and the media will totally twist it around. Like when scientists found that Brilliant Blue G inhibits this receptor that promotes nerve death. Basically they found that when rats were given this compound immediately (this is an important point) after spinal cord damage, they could retain some mobility. So the media was like, "Blue M&Ms can make you walk again!". This is obviously stupid and it makes people seriously question science. I can't remember what my point is here.
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