Why Are Religion and Science at Odds?

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.

A Few Myths About Religion in America

1, "This country was founded on Judeo-Christian values."

Well, not really. It was in the sense that the founders were white, and thus came from a Judeo-Christian background. By the same logic, Led Zeppelin was founded on Judeo-Christian values. So was the Geek Squad, the film "Happy Gilmore," and the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices.

Cuz see, this country was actually founded on Enlightenment values. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion -- these are Enlightenment values, not Judeo-Christian ones. These are values created in opposition to the religious oligarchies that filled Europe at the time. At our country's founding, there were plenty of countries actually based on Judeo-Christian values, and none of them had any of the freedoms that form the basis of our country's greatness. These countries had state religions, and woe to those who didn't agree with them or with the monarchs.

The most illustrative example of this is to actually look at the Ten Commandments. I love when people want to post the Ten Commandments in public buildings, because they're a set of laws, and public buildings deal with sets of laws, right? And the Ten Commandments is older, so it must be the basis for what we have now. QED.

Try actually reading the Ten Commandments. Then compare them to the million gabillion laws, state, federal, etc., that govern our land. How many laws are shared by both? Two: Don't kill, don't steal. We're perfectly free to dishonor our mother and father, make graven images, covet our neighbor's ass -- eight of the Ten Commandments disallow things that we definitely CAN do, according to the highest law of our land, the Constitution. And the two that are shared by both sets of laws are also laws that exist in every country, and are certainly not unique to either the United States or Judeo-Christianity. Yeah, I think I could have figured out not to kill or steal without the Ten Commanments telling me. Doi.

I'm not a fan of American exceptionalism, in which we arrogantly think we're a beacon to the world and a moral authority to all and generally the bee's knees, but our Constitution really is an exceptional step forward in the evolution of society. And we can thank the Enlightenment, and our Enlightenment-minded Founding Fathers, for it. Not Christianity. Or even Judeo-Christianity.

2. "Our founders were deeply religious."

This is sort of a corrollary to the prevous one -- the Founding Fathers were actually so irreligious that they made the then-radical move of founding a country on Enlightenment values instead of religious ones. Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, etc. threw God's name in here and there in their speeches, but most were deists, who had a vision of God as a watchmaker: God wound up the world and then left it alone ever after. God isn't watching over us, isn't judging us and punishing us, isn't favoring us if we pray to him before a football game, and generally isn't that interested in our daily lives.

Mind you, they were quite interested in the moral lessons of the Bible. They went to church, learned from the Bible -- but they also learned from the Koran, from John Locke, etc. They were bookish, wealthy intellectuals. Basically, they were the Liberal Elite. John Kerry would have been much, much more at home with the Founding Fathers than would George W. Bush.

3) "Today's Christian conservatives hearken back to the Puritans."

Well, sort of. Yes, in the sense that both groups are really freakin' Christian. But there are some important differences.

Modern Christian conservative groups, such a Pentacostals or what have you, base everything on a person's personal relationship with Christ. God speaks to them personally, and their faith flowers from this. This idea would have been extreme blasphemy to the Puritans. In fact, it was: In 1638, a firebrand revolutionary Puritan named Anne Hutchinson was exiled from the community for saying, among other things, that God was speaking through her.

I learned about this in Sarah Vowell's "The Wordy Shipmates," which is a fun book even if you're not that into history. It talks about how the Puritans believed that God only spoke to them through the Bible, so they studied it like crazy. They actually remind me more of modern Orthodox Jews, endlessly picking apart and analyzing every word of their text. They were generally very literate and bookish, constantly writing and reading everything they could get their hands on.

So they were as nerdy as the Founding Fathers, but they sure as heck weren't deists. They believed everything they saw was a portent. Vowell talks about one Puritan who saw a mouse beat up on a snake. What would now be a funny YouTube video was then seen as a extremely meaningful signal of the Puritans defeating the devil, or something.

And, for the record, the Puritans did believe in at least some measure of separation between church and state. Preachers were prevented from running for government posts, that kind of thing. But in reality there was a lot of influence running back and forth and a lot of unabashedly religious laws on the books.

Another revolutionary figure among the Puritans, Roger Williams, had an opinion about the separation of church of state that more closely matches our modern one. Williams believed that there had to be a huge wall between church and state -- not because he wanted government freed from religion as much as he wanted religion unsullied by government. He had seen Catholicism in Europe warped by political concerns, misused as an instrument of power, and spawn horrible wars, like the 30 Years War that was raging at the time between Catholics and Protestants.

Williams was an interesting guy. He was an arrogant ultra-religious blabbermouth, but he was also remarkably tolerant in a lot of ways. He would harangue you for days on end to become Christian, but he didn't believe in ever punishing anyone for not being Christian. He was also exiled from the Puritain communities because of his views, and went on to live amicably with the American Indian tribe the Narrangasett and become the founder of both Providence and Rhode Island.

Anyway, modern Christian conservatives are much more beholden to a religious movement called the Great Awakening in the 1800s. That's when you got the tent revivals and fire and brimstone and such.

In conclusion (that's how I always ended every high school history paper), sure, The United States has a long history of strong religious feeling. But let's not forget that it also has a long history of irreligious feeling. And the government is and always has been a bastion of that feeling. It's worked pretty well so far, so let's keep it that way.