| Science | / | Religion |
Yesterday I'd thought I'd capture both essence and scope of what I meant in one post; now I see a complex of posts, their potential much richer than the already profound point I was aiming for.
Science and religion are both human epistemologies. Both try to explain complex patterns, both try to predict future patterns. Both employ "reason." Both demand faith beyond reason: though science downplays that aspect, while religion sometimes makes the faith part a keystone.
I'd started with this wise-ass statement:
Science may be wrong as a matter of fact but
religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle!
religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle!
First I wanted the rhetoric to startle, then I wanted to illustrate: and explain. A religion like Christianity starts off with the idea that God knows our future, but winds up with a result that because God wants to forgive us, and because he instructs us, and confides in us, therefore, we know our future. And notice: God May Not Change His Mind! (Or we'll offer his sacrifices toward feeding some other God who will comply with our wishes for a future! particularly the part where God makes our enemies hold still while we shit down their throat.)
Yesterday science, as a quasi-religion, said "it will probably rain on Friday": with an approximately random chance that it would be so. Today science predicts a 40% probability that it will rain on Friday, with an approximate of 39-41% probability that it will be so. Whereas religion has long guaranteed punishment, forgiveness, reward, triumph over your enemies ... that the seas will turn to blood, the water to wine, and that your precious Garden of Eden will run like a sewer.
I'd wanted to point out that religion typically starts off with a modest claim to authority, but winds up insisting on it with the whole panoply of fascist behavior: the Nazis had little to teach the Spanish Inquisition. The Protestants have only begun to discover their evil. (And the professors at MIT have yet to discover theirs.)
Human Epistemologies
But better, today I want to argue, before getting to any of those other arguments, that religion and science are both stages in the development of human epistemology. They're siblings, with a common origin: and they will always remain siblings. Religion was never 100% without reason; science will never attain reason 100%. Could there be a stage ahead of us beyond science? where reason could attain 100%? No, no: I'm not in the prediction business (except as a joke): but I doubt it. In fact I see human science as already having slipped back into the religion section of human epistemology: it's funded by government, some portion of the moderately talented are compelled to study it (on pain of no Christmas presents), progress is planned by a bureaucracy ... Individual reason, independent argument has no chance. SRI would never discover a Faraday today. Novelty is invisible: the species is back to normal after a temporary aberration of reasonableness. And, prediction again, I don't believe we'll endure as a species long enough to go through another cycle of honest discovery. Just see how we've treated theories of "global warming," for example, over the years and decades since I taught it in college in 1968.
Notice this difference too between science and religion. In science there's an idea, not always respected, that new information should update old information; whereas in religion (and most social endeavors such as politics) it's typically the old information that updates the new information. The Temple interrupted Jesus' new interpretations of scripture as well as Jesus' new messages from God. The Church interrupted Galileo's new information about the universe: trumped new knowledge with old ignorance. Imagine if the phone company replaced all current phone numbers and names and addresses with phone numbers, names and addresses from fifty years ago!
I now hope this will develop into a series of modules, and that I'll edit them better and better, into still another pk masterpiece.
This post first appeared at IonaArc.
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