Science & Religion, Partners In Crime Updated 2-6-2011

Partners In Crime

Here is why science and religion, in spite of appearances, are partners in crime.

In recent years, scientific atheists have grown more militant, boldly taking the conflict between religion and science public. Only politicians, these days, seem reluctant to admit to being nonbelievers. The positions taken have rigidified. Even passionate, but peaceful Sam Harris was taken to task by radical atheists for allowing some transcendental possibilities to meditators in his book, The End of Faith . Sam backed down.

And check out: God or Gods?

Richard Dawkins, probably the most outspoken atheists, has published several books, such as The God Delusion , and has routinely attacked others within the scientific community like fellow bestselling author, Frans De Waal, who wrote about debating Dawkins in The Age of Empathy .

With Dawkins, I'm frequently amused that, while denying a supreme being, he usually acts as if he believes he is one.

The conflict is heated, and while seemingly unresolvable, the contesting parties have strikingly similar motives and goals once all the fancy rhetoric and smoke clears. Both share a deep discomfort with nature and are engaged in extracting humanity as much as possible from it. In a reasonable way, it looks more like a turf war.

Science and religion are not in conflict at the core of their mission. Their differences can be seen as no more than the use of different tools and methods. Both are obsessed with divorcing man from nature. One elevates man from the root of his evolutionary essence by making him a god, god-like or a special creation; the other attempts to deconstruct all of nature, including homo sapiens, into mechanistic irrelevance.

When Dawkins and his followers take roundhouse punches at believers, they ignore their own set of assumptions which, although scientific, are as soft as most religion's. Scientists, for example, believe the universe to be filled with provable facts that will eventually be discovered, explained and pieced together in describing nature and all the actions within it. These facts, scientists believe, are all within the sensory grasp of humans or their equipment. Any invisibles, such as dark matter, either will eventually be exposed or revealed as not have existed in the first place. These beliefs, based on nothing more substantial than, seem to have provided a basis for extreme militance among the atheists.

For the most part, religious systems are proud to announce faith or belief as the cornerstone of their practices. After all, what God worth His salt would stand for proof, anyway? Belief is the act of faith validating commitment.

Both domains, as religion and science have been called, rely wholly on beliefs that both claim have lead to truth and wisdom.

But the area in which these two combatants are most in agreement is in their core commitment to extracting humankind from nature and setting us aside a special. Jerry Coyne in his otherwise excellent, Why Evolution Is True , closes with an emotional spiel about homo sapiens being superior to all those other productions of nature. Cats and dogs, he explains, have never risen to the heights are culture, a claim he stakes as proof without its ever apparently dawning on him to wonder if they ever aspired to reading Shakespeare or debating Sartre. It's enough for Coyne to make the claim to superiority, just because.

I don't know about you, but I trudge reluctantly off to work on cold winter mornings only after making sure the cats have enough to eat and can safely enjoy napping and meditating until my wife and I come home to feed and play with them again. If the privilege of sitting through Fedelio means accepting the conditions of the average human work week, I firmly believe the cats would pass pretty quickly.

It wasn't always this way. Early scientific exploration and discovery was geared toward revealing the secrets of nature in a spirit of awe and wonder. For centuries, these efforts were explained as attempts to understand the glories of God's creation. As far back as religious practice can be traced, it gets closer to nature worship than the praise of an abstract being managing or overseeing the world in judgment and incidental cruelty. Old Testament stories suggest, for example, a nearby deity and one who occasionally communicated directly with people. That God involved Himself in genocides while destroying enemies with different, less powerful deities.

As Western religions developed, the initiative to distinguish humans from nature picked up momentum. The motive for this remains unclear, but humans were gradually encouraged to move away from practices that held them close to their natural beginnings. Maybe it was vulnerability or the uncontrollable dangers an increasingly aware animal witnessed in nature, but something made the world we emerged from as a species unacceptable in important aspects. Soon, we needed clothes, objects of worship and rituals that maintained an alliance with a puritanical, rigid, judging and distant God.

Once persecutions inflicted by the Catholic Church on nonconforming scientists eased, allowing science relative equality with religion, a mechanistic vision of nature quickly formed, one that did not require Gods or any magical manipulations by creators or lords outside the processes observed. God could safely be discarded as irrelevant and unnecessary, tossing aside simultaneously the natural lusts and connectedness that fostered deities as a way to bridge the painful arch of natural separation.

Adversarial positions hardened. As determinedly as scientists declared, emboldened by brilliant theories like evolution and relativity, that every mystery would eventually find a solution, religious thinkers pushed back with their certainty that no matter how far down the road of discovery we traveled, we would never realize the ineffable qualities of the perpetual creator, except through faith. The competition to most definitively divorce humans from nature accelerated.

A few have sought a resolution between the domains or to declare them different enough to be irresolvable, but no matter. The efforts of both are pulling us farther from nature. Both are fired by the same fuel. That is, we must constantly show that we are smarter, more informed, wiser, healthier, more civilized and by all means better than all those (other) animals and plants, those beings still subject to natural forces that resist control.

Religion and science are like competitive and marginally brawling teammates, but they are not true opponents. The true opponent of each on the field of reality is nature. Nature is their unacknowledged mutual enemy, and both endeavor to strike it down according the most effective methods buried in their toolkits.