Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, has recently published a book called Why Evolution is True, and started up a blog of the same name. He’s come out swinging in the science/religion debates, taking a hard line against “accomodationism” — the rhetorical strategy on the part of some pro-science people and organizations to paper over conflicts between science and religion so that religious believers can be more comfortable accepting the truth of evolution and other scientific ideas. Chris Mooney and others have taken up the other side, while Russell Blackford and others have supported Coyne, and since electrons are free there have been an awful lot of blog posts.
At some point I’d like to weigh in on the actual topic of accomodationism, and in particular on what to do about the Templeton Foundation. But there is a prior question, which some of the discussion has touched on: are science and religion actually compatible? Clearly one’s stance on that issue will affect one’s feelings about accomodationism. So I’d like to put my own feelings down in one place.
Science and religion are not compatible. But, before explaining what that means, we should first say what it doesn’t mean.
It doesn’t mean, first, that there is any necessary or logical or a priori incompatibility between science and religion. We shouldn’t declare them to be incompatible purely on the basis of what they are, which some people are tempted to do. Certainly, science works on the basis of reason and evidence, while religion often appeals to faith (although reason and evidence are by no means absent). But that just means they are different, not that they are incompatible. (Here I am deviating somewhat from Coyne’s take, as I understand it.) An airplane is different from a car, and indeed if you want to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco you would take either an airplane or a car, not both at once. But if you take a car and your friend takes a plane, as long as you both end up in San Francisco your journeys were perfectly compatible. Likewise, it’s not hard to imagine an alternative universe in which science and religion were compatible — one in which religious claims about the functioning of the world were regularly verified by scientific practice. We can easily conceive of a world in which the best scientific techniques of evidence-gathering and hypothesis-testing left us with an understanding of the workings of Nature which included the existence of God and/or other supernatural phenomena. (St. Thomas Aquinas, were he alive today, would undoubtedly agree, as would many religious people who actually are alive.) It’s just not the world we live in. (That’s where they would disagree.)
The incompatibility between science and religion also doesn’t mean that a person can’t be religious and be a good scientist. That would be a silly claim to make, and if someone pretends that it must be what is meant by “science and religion are incompatible” you can be sure they are setting up straw men. There is no problem at all with individual scientists holding all sorts of incorrect beliefs, including about science. There are scientists who believe in the Steady State model of cosmology, or that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, or that sunspots are the primary agent of climate change. The mere fact that such positions are held by some scientists doesn’t make them good scientific positions. We should be interested in what is correct and incorrect, and the arguments for either side, not the particular beliefs of certain individuals. (Likewise, if science and religion were compatible, the existence of thousands of irreligious scientists wouldn’t matter either.)
The reason why science and religion are actually incompatible is that, in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions. It’s worth noting that this incompatibility is perfectly evident to any fair-minded person who cares to look. Different religions make very different claims, but they typically end up saying things like “God made the universe in six days” or “Jesus died and was resurrected” or “Moses parted the red sea” or “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility.
But the superficial reasonableness of a claim isn’t enough to be confident that it is true. Science certainly teaches us that reality can be very surprising once we look at it more carefully, and it’s quite conceivable that a more nuanced understanding of the question could explain away what seems to be obviously laid out right in front of us. We should therefore be a little more careful about understanding how exactly a compatibilist would try to reconcile science and religion.
The problem is, unlike the non-intuitive claims of relativity or quantum mechanics or evolution, which are forced on us by a careful confrontation with data, the purported compatibility of “science” and “religion” is simply a claim about the meaning of those two words. The favored method of those who would claim that science and religion are compatible — really, the only method available — is to twist the definition of either “science” or “religion” well out of the form in which most people would recognize it. Often both.
Of course, it’s very difficult to agree on a single definition of “religion” (and not that much easier for “science”), so deciding when a particular definition has been twisted beyond usefulness is a tricky business. But these are human endeavors, and it makes sense to look at the actual practices and beliefs of people who define themselves as religious. And when we do, we find religion making all sorts of claims about the natural world, including those mentioned above — Jesus died and was resurrected, etc. Seriously, there are billions of people who actually believe things like this; I’m not making it up. Religions have always made claims about the natural world, from how it was created to the importance of supernatural interventions in it. And these claims are often very important to the religions who make them; ask Galileo or Giordano Bruno if you don’t believe me.
But the progress of science over the last few centuries has increasingly shown these claims to be straightforwardly incorrect. We know more about the natural world now than we did two millennia ago, and we know enough to say that people don’t come back from the dead. In response, one strategy to assert the compatibility between science and religion has been to take a carving knife to the conventional understanding of “religion,” attempting to remove from its purview all of its claims about the natural world.
That would be the strategy adopted, for example, by Stephen Jay Gould with his principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria, the subject of yesterday’s allegory. It’s not until page 55 of his (short) book that Gould gets around to explaining what he means by the “magisterium of religion”:
These questions address moral issues about the value and meaning of life, both in human form and more widely construed. Their fruitful discussion must proceed under a different magisterium, far older than science (at least as a formalized inquiry) and dedicated to a quest for consensus, or at least a clarification of assumptions and criteria, about ethical “ought,” rather than a search for any factual “is” about the material construction of the natural world. This magisterium of ethical discussion and search for meaning includes several disciplines traditionally grouped under the humanities–much of philosophy, and part of literature and history, for example. But human societies have usually centered the discourse of this magisterium upon an institution called “religion”…
In other words, when Gould says “religion,” what he means is — ethics, or perhaps moral philosophy. And that is, indeed, non-overlapping with the understanding of the natural world bequeathed to us by science. But it’s utterly at variance with the meaning of the word “religion” as used throughout history, or as understood by the vast majority of religious believers today. Those people believe in a supernatural being called “God” who created the universe, is intensely interested in the behavior of human beings, and occasionally intervenes miraculously in the natural world. Again: I am not making this up.
Of course, nothing is to stop you, when you say the word “religion,” from having in mind something like “moral philosophy,” or perhaps “all of nature,” or “a sense of wonder at the universe.” You can use words to mean whatever you want; it’s just that you will consistently be misunderstood by the ordinary-language speakers with whom you are conversing. And what is the point? If you really mean “ethics” when you say “religion,” why not just say “ethics”? Why confuse the subject with all of the connotations that most people (quite understandably) attach to the term — God, miracles, the supernatural, etc.? If Stephen Jay Gould and the AAAS or anyone else wants to stake out a bold claim that ethics and moral philosophy are completely compatible with science, nobody would be arguing with them. The only reason to even think that would be an interesting claim to make is if one really did want to include the traditional supernatural baggage — in which case it’s a non-empty claim, but a wrong one.
If you hold some unambiguously non-supernatural position that you are tempted to refer to as “religion” — awe at the majesty of the universe, a conviction that people should be excellent to each other, whatever — resist the temptation! Be honest and clear about what you actually believe, rather than conveying unwanted supernatural overtones. Communication among human beings will be vastly improved, and the world will be a better place.
The other favorite move to make, perhaps not as common, is to mess with the meaning of “science.” Usually it consists of taking some particular religious claim that goes beyond harmless non-supernatural wordmongering — “God exists,” for example, or “Jesus rose from the dead” — and pointing out that science can’t prove it isn’t true. Strictly construed, that’s perfectly correct, but it’s a dramatic misrepresentation of how science works. Science never proves anything. Science doesn’t prove that spacetime is curved, or that species evolved according to natural selection, or that the observable universe is billions of years old. That’s simply not how science works. For some reason, people are willing to pretend that the question “Does God exist?” should be subject to completely different standards of scientific reasoning than any other question.
What science does is put forward hypotheses, and use them to make predictions, and test those predictions against empirical evidence. Then the scientists make judgments about which hypotheses are more likely, given the data. These judgments are notoriously hard to formalize, as Thomas Kuhn argued in great detail, and philosophers of science don’t have anything like a rigorous understanding of how such judgments are made. But that’s only a worry at the most severe levels of rigor; in rough outline, the procedure is pretty clear. Scientists like hypotheses that fit the data, of course, but they also like them to be consistent with other established ideas, to be unambiguous and well-defined, to be wide in scope, and most of all to be simple. The more things an hypothesis can explain on the basis of the fewer pieces of input, the happier scientists are. This kind of procedure never proves anything, but a sufficiently successful hypothesis can be judged so very much better than the alternatives that continued adherence to such an alternative (the Steady State cosmology, Lamarckian evolution, the phlogiston theory of combustion) is scientifically untenable.
Scientifically speaking, the existence of God is an untenable hypothesis. It’s not well-defined, it’s completely unnecessary to fit the data, and it adds unhelpful layers of complexity without any corresponding increase in understanding. Again, this is not an a priori result; the God hypothesis could have fit the data better than the alternatives, and indeed there are still respected religious people who argue that it does. Those people are just wrong, in precisely analogous ways to how people who cling to the Steady State theory are wrong. Fifty years ago, the Steady State model was a reasonable hypothesis; likewise, a couple of millennia ago God was a reasonable hypothesis. But our understanding (and our data) has improved greatly since then, and these are no longer viable models. The same kind of reasoning would hold for belief in miracles, various creation stories, and so on.
I have huge respect for many thoughtful religious people, several of whom I count among the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. I just think they’re incorrect, in precisely the same sense in which I think certain of my thoughtful and intelligent physicist friends are wrong about the arrow of time or the interpretation of quantum mechanics. That doesn’t mean we can’t agree about those issues on which we’re in agreement, or that we can’t go out for drinks after arguing passionately with each other in the context of a civil discussion. But these issues matter; they affect people’s lives, from women who are forced to wear head coverings to gay couples who can’t get married to people in Minnesota who can’t buy cars on Sundays. Religion can never be a purely personal matter; how you think about the fundamental nature of reality necessarily impacts how you behave, and those behaviors are going to affect other people. That’s why it’s important to get it right.
On June 24th, Phillip Helbig quoted me as saying:
>“You are taking allegorical statements like “God made the universe in six days,”
> “Jesus died and was resurrected,” and “Moses parted the red sea” and
> conflating them with scientific fact statements.”
He then made an interesting comment and asked an important question:
> The historical fact is that no-one considered these to be allegorical until
> science started making them look very unlikely. YOU say they are
> allegorical. Why?
Let me try to answer. This is an important issue because a very common argument against religion these days is that it is a kind of pre-scientific science and that it’s truth statements are primitive – and wrong – truth statements of a scientific type. Carroll is making this type of argument in saying that science and religion are incompatible.
Clearly, many religionists, including such distinguished early Christian church figures as Saint Augustine and medieval authorities such as Thomas Aquinas did not mistake allegorical truth for scientific fact. The historical record is very rich on the issue of the relationships between “natural philosophy” and religious allegory, and indeed it is one of the main topics of study in fields like medieval studies, Islamic studies, or late classical studies.
So it is simply a mistake to assume that religious allegory was always interpreted as science. However, it is highly probable that the poorly educated did so.
If you are interested in European history, you might consider looking into the emergence of modern science in the so-called scientific revolution in the 17th century. Galileo was a major figure in that scientific revolution.
Galileo’s fight was not with allegorical religious truth – he seems to have had no problem at all with it. Rather, his fight was with Aristotelian science and Aristotelian philosophy that had been absorbed into Catholicism as unassailable dogma. In other words, the big fight was between old science and new science, not science vs. religious allegory.
Another thing you might consider looking into was the relationship between religious allegory and Hellenistic science in the late classical age. Judaism and especially Christianity came of age in cultures permeated with Hellenistic rationalism, the precursor to modern science. What this means is that for classically educated Christian – and later Islamic – elites the difference between allegory and what then considered natural philosophy was no great mystery.
Sean — whether or not you’ve taken a lot of philosophy of religion classes, use of the term “the God hypothesis” misses the point. It reduces that which religion talks about to a scientific model. If you want to treat God purely scientifically, yeah, I’d say that the God Hypothesis is something like MOND — it has been used by people to explain some mystifying observations, but is no longer useful in explaining those observations as we have other explanations that are extremely well supported by data.
But, while a lot of people continue to use religion as a way of explaining the mechanisms of natural events even though science has completely obsoleted religion’s role in that realm, there is more to religion than that, a lot more. You’re only tearing down one part of religion.
A thread on Chris Mooney’s blog pointed me (in the comments) to this review of Dawin’s “The God Deulsion”. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html
I recommend it. In particular, I’m fond of this paragraph: Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
Mededith #35 says,
I think you’d be surprised to find how many people are willing to flex the rules of their religious traditions and practices to reach an integration mindset with science.
I don’t know about Sean but I’d be surprised.
There are probably millions of people who THINK they’ve watered down their religion enough to be compatible with science but as soon as you start asking questions like, “Do you believe in miracles?” or “Do you believe that prayers are answered?” the illusion evaporates.
If those questions don’t work then try, “Do you believe in a soul?” or “Do you believe in life after death?” If you get a “no” answer to all four questions then you can proceed to the more difficult ones.
Sean, thanks for articulating such a well reasoned article. You’ve said it better than I could have and I appreciate it.
Hopefully you’ve not been inundated w/ hate mail.
Keep up the good work.
Arun Says:
June 24th, 2009 at 4:52 am
I won’t bother with the citation, just read this because it is fun:
“…Bayle and Voltaire had their famous controversy precisely with respect to the possibility of a Nation of Atheists. However, the difficulty lay in conceptualising such a society: how, in the absence of a conception of God, could such a Nation survive at all? Why would people keep the promises they make, if they did not fear punishment in the hereafter? How could a culture emerge in such a society, where people could never rely on each other’s word? Neither commerce nor industry would be possible; ruin and desolation would be the fate of such a nation of atheists.
—————————
I would disagree with this conclusion. It implies that all contracts (social, business, and legal) are dependent on the existence of some mythological being. Right now, contracts are violated, when they are, the government steps in imposes legal remedies. If you are discussing Morality, this also does not need a God. Morality is nothing more than a people determining what is correct behavior and what a social group stands for.
Morality is not immutable. Even if we look at the U.S. and its history, at one time it was “moral” to own slaves, same goes for Europe even when the Christian faith (mostly the Catholic Church) was the governing principle. Same goes for other parts of the world. Some moral codes sometimes appear universal, e.g., “thou shall not steal”, but we find that when you get down to specifics there is plenty of wiggle room around even that simple statement. You can’t steal from your country’s fellow man, but you can steal from other countries, etc. The largest universal “Thou shall not kill” has so many loopholes as to be, for practical purposes, non-existent at a moral code.
Religion is really a creation of social organization. How else can a large populated society keep order than by inferring that the leader speaks for some Deity, and if you don’t follow his/her rules, you will meet punishment in an afterlife for eternity. Religion allows a society to very economically maintain order without having to put a policeman on each and every corner and in every building. It also serves the state in that it creates bogeymen to instill fear into the population and keep that population tuned to whoever their leader might be. In the end, religion is a tool that societies use for controlling their population and maintaining order.
Is there a God? There might be but that being cannot be the one of our various legends and myths. Since I believe in the “Big Bang” and accept the current science about the universe, if there is a God it is not what you read in the various “Holy Books” of any religious stripe. This God, must be beyond all space and time (after it created this universe and everything in it). Is that God personally interested in our comings and goings, NO!
We must accept that our “Holy Books” are nothing more than the codified collection of our various culture’s myths and stories that helped to explain their everyday world. The Bible, Upanishads, Koran, the stories of Mt. Olympus, all are of the same stripe and equally valid. In fact, those old Roman and Greek Gods sometime make more sense than our Judeo-Christian Bible, i.e., ever try rectifying the God of the Old Testament with the New Testament?
Great post, very clear, plain language, really excellent writing … but. Sorry to nitpick, but not buying cars on Sundays isn’t a religious issue anymore. Hardly any religious people are against it. However the car dealerships (their employees) want a day off that most other people have off. They would never propose changing this blue law, and if anybody did (who would?), they would fiercely oppose it.
Very defensive Minnesotan. It took at least 5 viewings of Fargo before I stopped wincing.
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the conclusions of natural science are by definition natural, the conclusion of theology is by definition spiritual. the natural has an explanation of the spiritual, and the spiritual has an explanation of the natural. what, however, the natural can never explain is how it came to existence. what the spiritual can never explain is how the Prime Mover came to exist.
Religion and religious communities can be good and powerful in many peoples lives. However, some religions make claims which are demonstrably untrue (YEC, etc.). Your resolution to this dilemma is to discard religion lock, stock and barrel (or throwing the baby out with the bathwater).
There are other possibilities, however.
As several commenters have noted, your mental image of “religion” seems to be nearly iodentical with American evangelical Christianity. This most assuredly is a form of religion which is incompatible with a scientific worldview. It is not, however, definitional for all forms of religion. A belief in or acceptance of some church dogma (or divine revelation via a received text) is not completely normative for religion, either.
One way we can minimize the problems of this conflict is to redefine what religion “means” in America. By that effort, we may be able to change the definition of what religion is from one that is compatible with what the average person on the street may currently define it to be into a more open definition, where dogma and revelation are NOT trying to tell us untrue things about the world.
For case histories, please see some local Unitarians. They may be able to tell you that you CAN have a religion without dogma or revelation. You can have your cake and eat it too – U-U’s get to play in church softball leagues, have pot luck meals and share in ceremonial acknowledgements of big life events (births, weddings, deaths, etc.) and STILL be able to distinguish fact from fiction.
And you know that religion CAN be re-defined. It has happened many times over the course of our evolutionary history (polytheism to monotheism, blood-bathed “mystery religions” to communion, etc., etc). Maybe it would be a good time to cut away the diseased and unhealthy parts of religion rather than to shoot the patient.
scientist: Listen, strange men living in the sky distributing psalms is no basis for a system of rational inquiry. Supreme descriptive power derives from a methodical verification of theories, not from some farcical interpretation of ancient books.
theist: Be quiet!
scientist: Well, but you can’t expect to discover scientific explanations of the world just interpretin’ literature some airy tart dictated at you!
theist: Shut up!
scientist: I mean, if I went ’round saying the universe was created in 6 days just because some arsonous bint talked to me from a burning bush, they’d put me away!
theist: Shut up, will you. Shut up!
scientist: Ah, now we see the intolerance inherent in the system.
theist: Shut up!
scientist: Oh! Come and see the intolerance inherent in the system! Help, help! I’m being repressed!
theist: Bloody atheist!
scientist: Oh, what a give-away. Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That’s what I’m on about. Did you see him repressing me? You saw it, didn’t you?
@Larry Moran #128 (and anyone else who is interested!)
I recommend taking a glance at the book Practicing Science, Living Faith. It is a collection of twelve interviews with leading scientists with a myriad of backgrounds that engages questions like those you mention.
I did a significant research project for a class in 2007 exploring how folks manage to integrate religious beliefs with science. While I admittedly went in with my own person bias toward integration, I was surprised to see how many other scientists have similar views. I don’t pretend that religion OR science has all the answers, but rather I see them as places from which to probe, engage, and most importantly live the questions.
Interesting piece but a little un-nuanced about what religion is, or might be.
Religion comes in many flavours, including some non-theistic ones. It is a wider and more complex category than you imply, and is not necessarily captured in silly statements about cosmology. The Dalai Lama, for instance, is of the opinion that if there’s any part of Buddhism which is in conflict with science, then it should be reconsidered. For him religion is about consciousness, and he has embraced physics and backed neurological research into what the monks are up to. He has been perfectly happy to ditch the Buddhist cosmology, replacing it with the explanations that science offers, and relegating the older accounts to the realm of (venerable) myth and metaphor. Where does this put him? The historical Buddha made no claims whatsoever about God or the Soul. He was one among many non-theist religious thinkers of that time.
When all is stripped away, religion is about neurology producing a change in consciousness – in a living human, in a social context. Anyone who has experienced an altered state, howsoever caused, knows this. The rest is culture and commerce.
I placed my response on my blog: http://thegourd.blogspot.com/2009/06/religion-is-not-failed-science.html
” we find religion making all sorts of claims about the natural world, including ….. Jesus died and was resurrected, etc. ……. But the progress of science over the last few centuries has increasingly shown these claims to be straightforwardly incorrect. We know more about the natural world now than we did two millennia ago, and we know enough to say that people don’t come back from the dead.”
They knew quite well enough back then that people don’t come back from the dead in the natural cause of events. We just understand the physiology better now. And that’s where I believe the author here is mistaken.
Christians who believe in the resurrection don’t believe such things can happen naturally any more than non-believers do –we simply believe there is a supernatural God who interferes in what would otherwise be a closed natural system. And I don’t see how that claim is incompatible with science, or contrary to science. Science has no way to test by its usual methods either the claim that God exists or that Jesus was resurrected.
Here is my take, which is a variation of much of the above:
The problem with your transportation analogy to clarify compatibility is that the trip we are really on is multigenerational and has many phases. It’s more like migration than a single trip. And to complicate matters, we have some idea where we’ve come from (although religion seems to cloud even this) but we still really don’t know where we are going, except, it is hoped, away from where we’ve been. So I see religion and science as two legs of the journey. Science takes you where religion can’t, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that religion is no longer entirely relevant. It remains to be seen whether religion (understood broadly) can evolve into something that compliments science. It does for some (it seemed to for Einstein and Oppenheimer, but they were not your classic bible thumpers), even if the absurd national debate largely fails to take this into account. If religion can do this, it can be compatible with science.
To switch metaphors, science is better than religion at collapsing the wave function of truth. When people had only religion, they kept trying to use it to back their behavior with certainty. In that respect, science and religion are incompatible. But as we know, the results you get from collapsing the wave function are of statistical value. Statistics point you toward possibilities and the recognition of new possibilities establishes new wave functions to probe. For anyone with a religious turn of mind but who doesn’t need to read scripture literally, science can be extremely useful as a means of contemplating divinity (infinity/limits) and looking down the road. If you believe that the world you inhabit is a reflection of God, then understanding that reflection gives you some insight into the kind of God you have.
What we have learned from science and religion in each leg of the journey is that you can’t necessarily take what you find there at face value. So the question of compatibility between science and religion at this point is really a question of perspective.
Truth is, we’re all so many Flatlanders, some certain that there’s no such thing as a third dimension, others equally certain about its nature, a few who may be brilliant enough to see a glimpse beyond the limitations of their environment. The latter, I suspect, include some of those very same quantum physicists who Sean is so equally certain are mistaken. Surf the wave; Aristotle’s point has been proven, and he couldn’t have been more wrong.
To measure the compatibility between “religion” and science I think you need to go beyond the Abranamic beliefs. Just as there are many branches of “scence” there are many types of religious thought. It really boils down to a belief in what started the universe as we see it – and in reality we simply don’t know – YET.
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Yawn…looking forward to tomorrow’s Sunday mass and going to my university research institute afterward. This discussion will not change the mind of a single person.
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Sean: “What science does is put forward hypotheses, and use them to make predictions, and test those predictions against empirical evidence. Then the scientists make judgments about which hypotheses are more likely, given the data.”
Well let us take the central tenet of Christianity, which you mention in your blog (and you weren’t making it up):
Sean: “Jesus died and was resurrected”
This happened once, and only once according to those same Scriptures and by way of a supernatural, omnipotent being, The One Most High God, intervening in the ‘natural order of things.’
To this claim you say, “[…] science says: none of that is true.” As the first quote of yours correctly states, “What science does is put forward hypotheses, and use them to make predictions, and test those predictions against empirical evidence.
How is it that you reached this (scientific) conclusion [“none of this is true”] without the prediction, testing and emperical evidence you say is necessary? I get that you do not believe in such things but don’t pretend that it’s because “science says.” It says no such thing, because it can’t, by defintion. Gould was right.
That’s why it’s important to get it right.
Science, you’re doing it wrong. You want philosophy or theology [101]… or stick with debunking specific ‘creation science’ claims.
I’m sure this has, more than likely, already been brought up in the ~150 comments… but, I’m always reading CV but have never posted… (you’re welcome 😀 ) All that being said, I really enjoy your blog.
Regards.
Addressing the essay and some of the comments:
All of the world’s religions have one thing in common, Spiritualism. I can best describe it, through my research, as individuals who have experienced a personal, spiritual awareness, to differing degrees, at some time, many times, or continually in their lives.
There is significant data proving that the majority of people in the world are “religious”, not only today, but always have been, as far back as recorded history began. The only changing factor is the type of religions practiced by varying groups. And the common denominator is the Spiritual experience. Social studies like all sciences, is quantitative and relevant.
The majority of people in the world are not inferior (mathematical improbability). It is true, that those with the highest IQ’s account for less than 3% of the population. And it is also true, that the majority of these gifted individuals believe in some form of Spiritualism. Added, the majority of these gifted individuals do not succeed at higher levels than average IQ individuals. For the most part, they lead “average” lives.
Almost all people in the world rationalize, and make decisions/choices that are fueled by free-will. It is true that life experiences influence decisions. But, the dominating factor in every choice is free-will. It is rare that individuals don’t think, or exercise free-will past the reasoning age (varies by individual, but generally occurs some time in adolescence). In the US, we have based our court systems, and age requirements on this fact.
There are studies that have defined a process more susceptible to “brainwashing” as being most likely to effect results, if begun prior to age five, and consistently continued through adolescence. However, these studies indicate that although this practice may achieve the initial desired results, it generally only prolongs adherence, past the teen years, by two to five years.
On this note, it is unreasonable to conclude that the majority of humans in the world today are blindly following any set of imposed religious theories. It is improbable that the majority of adults would continue a time-consuming practice in which they have experienced no personal, benefiting results. It is most common for young adults to define themselves, based on personal experience, and thought, in self-serving terms, in early adulthood.
One also should not assume that the majority are swayed to Spiritualism solely in response to difficult times, or events in their lives. Although personal difficulties and traumatic events may initially cause some individuals to seek Spiritualism, if a reasonable personal impression is not made, the effect will be temporary, and the Spiritualism unlikely to pervade.
It is important to study all of the puzzle pieces, with an open mind, in order to advance. Important details are missed, when focus on specific fields only, are pursued. “A Scientific mind is an Open Mind”. The closed mindedness can be likened to our FBI/Police systems, who don’t share relative information, and therefore never can achieve at the highest levels.
Why not pursue the scientific aspects of religions’ common denominator, Spiritualism, in conjunction with science, in terms of relative issues. Such as finding a way to track the energy that leaves a dying body. Where does it go? It doesn’t die. Can we develop a tool to track its travel via its frequencies? And if so, how far can we track it? Does it disperse, remain somewhat intact, is it recycled, does it vary by individual, etc?
Or even easier, what about detailed studies into human energy frequencies emitted, in terms of various emotional states, such as those “spiritual” states, the majority attest to? Are there traceable similarities among individuals? How do the frequencies compare to other emotional energy frequencies, such as anger, or joy? Which of the emotional energy frequencies created by thought is most beneficial to a human, and in what way? What physical processes occur in individuals who are in “higher states of consciousness”.Once emotional energy frequencies have been emitted by a human, can they be received by another? If so, what is the measurable and perceived reaction of the receiving party, if there is any?
There are many avenues regarding Spiritualism that can be pursued through the application of combined sciences with open minds. To disregard one or another is defeating the purpose of progress. These may seem like unattainable pursuits today. But, they all aren’t. It seems so senseless to waste time closing doors, in pursuit of disproving religion, or its compatibility, when you will never defeat its foundation, Spiritualism.
Spiritualism is compatible with Science, and studies should be pursued.
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So when, as a result of hundreds of years of empirical observation coming out of eastern religious traditions- meditators claim health benefits from their practice and then this is subsequently verified by western science, the two are incompatible! To begin with the categories of science and religion are western demarcations and do not map easily onto other cultures – all that we’re left via Carroll is the revelation of an ethnocentric bias in how he defines his terms.