Science and religion are so different, they aren't at odds

Who worries about reconciling the deep philosophical meaning of rap music and bird watching? Or professional basketball and quantum physics? Or motorcycle maintenance and ballet dancing?

Maybe science and religion are similar to these examples, because they are so different. Not only that, perhaps all the vigorous debates over the centuries about whether science or religion is closer to ultimate truth misses the point:

There isn't any #1, alpha dog, primo, unsurpassed approach to knowing reality. All we have are various ways of dealing with reality.

This is, more or less, what the central theme of Barbara Herrnstein Smith's recently released book, "Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion," appears to be about.

I said less because I haven't read the book, the Amazon summary is full of scholar jargon, and the publisher's blurb about it isn't much more informative. What the heck does this mean?

Examining these and related efforts from the perspective of a constructivist-pragmatist epistemology, Smith argues that crucial aspects of belief—religious and other—that remain elusive or invisible under dominant rationalist and computational models are illuminated by views of human cognition that stress its dynamic, embodied, and interactive features.

But I feel OK with the more because of Stanley Fish's fascinating (and readable) review of "Natural Reflections" in the New York Times. The title of the review sums up the big question: "Must There Be a Bottom Line?"

The assumption she [Smith] challenges — or, rather, says we can do without — is that underlying it all is some foundation or nodal point or central truth or master procedure that, if identified, allows us to distinguish among ways of knowing and anoint one as the lodestar of inquiry. The desire, she explains, is to sift through the claims of those perspectives and methods that vie for “underneath-it-all status” (a wonderful phrase) and validate one of them so that we can proceed in the confidence that our measures, protocols, techniques and procedures are in harmony with the universe and perhaps with God.

It is within the context of such a desire that science and religion are seen as in conflict, in part because the claims of both are often (but not always) totalizing; they amount to saying, I am the Truth and you shall have no other truths before me. But if religion and science are not thought of as rival candidates for the title “Ultimate Arbiter,” they can be examined, in more or less evolutionary terms, as highly developed, successful and different (though not totally different, as the history of their previous union shows) ways of coping with the situations and challenges human existence presents.

Good stuff.

For a long time I considered that there was some way of understanding what the cosmos was all about. I wasn't sure what it was. I also wasn't sure that anyone knew what it was.

But it simply seemed like out there (or in here) somewhere, sometime, somehow, there was/would be an approach to grasping reality preferable to any other.

I didn't question this assumption. Now, I do.

And Smiths' book, elucidated by Fish's cogent review, helped me realize why it makes sense to look upon science, religion, art, athletics, and other ways of relating to the world as alternatives to be judged by their efficacy, not their epistemology. 

Fish says:

That is to say, we have certain problems, goals and difficulties with respect to the physical world, and of the models available to us for application and elaboration, science more often than not proves to be the most efficacious. Were our purposes otherwise — say, to deal with trauma, political hopes and fears, the project of community building — we might have recourse to other models and ideas from literature or philosophy or religion or even sports.

...Once the shift is made from asking “what is and should be the ultimate ground of our actions?” to asking “what resources are available to us for dealing with these problems and opportunities?,” the question of which model or way of conceptualizing things is true or truer becomes, Smith observes, less urgent and less interesting.

The inability of science to demonstrate its truth by standards not internal to its practices is not something to worry about because science “as a method is not the sort of thing that can be thought either true or false.” Rather, it works (with works being defined by our needs) or it doesn’t: “[L]ike using low-octane fuel or following a low-fat diet, the minimalism and self-restraint that defines it can only be thought more or less appropriate for the purposes at hand.”

Often on this blog I'll respond to someone who leaves a comment expressing skepticism about science with something like, "Then why don't you share your thoughts via ESP rather than by using a computer and the Internet?"

Scientific knowledge (using that term in its broadest sense as reflecting how to get along in the physical world) enables us to do things and understand how this relates to that.

Religious knowledge (meaning other-worldly, metaphysical, transcendental) isn't in the same practical ballpark. It is abstract, conceptual, theoretical, dogmatic, philosophical.

Thus, for example, you may have assented to an argument that calls into question the solidity of facts, but when you’re not doing meta-theory, you will experience facts as solidly as the most committed and polemical of empiricists. In doing so you will not be inconsistent or self-contradictory because the question of a belief in facts arises only in the special precincts of philosophical deliberation.

In everyday life, we neither believe nor disbelieve in facts as a general category; we just encounter particular ones in perfectly ordinary ways; and any challenge to one or more of them will also be perfectly ordinary, a matter of evidentiary adequacy or the force of counter examples or some other humdrum, non-philosophical measure of dis-confirmation. The conclusions we may have come to in the context of fancy epistemological debates (a context few will ever inhabit) will have no necessary force when we step into, and are asked to operate in, other contexts.

So Fish says that Smith says (I'm planning to buy her book to confirm this) it isn't necessary to take only one side in the Science vs. Religion Ultimate Smackdown debate. 

A person isn't obliged to give up ballroom dancing if he or she also enjoys classical literature. A boxer can also be an artist. A geologist can compose haiku.

What this means, among other things, is that the various projects we pursue and engage in may not all cohere in a single intelligible story. We may not be unified beings. In fact, Smith says, “the sets of beliefs held by each of us are fundamentally incoherent — that is, heterogeneous, fragmentary and, though often viable enough in specific contexts, potentially logically conflicting.”

...In short, if you believe this, how can you also believe that? The answer is that the realms of belief supposedly existing in a condition of opposition and conflict are, at least to some extent, discrete. What you believe in one arena of human endeavor may have no spillover into what you believe, and do, in another.

Reading some of the comments on the book review, I came across one that said the best thing about Fish's articles are the comments left by other people.

That's true. Click on the "highlights" section of the review's comment list for the best and brightest. The first one (#61) was well-written and persuasive. Here's how it ended (I've corrected some misspellings):

Ever since humans developed symbolic thought, we have been able to manipulate the world with words. We can say anything. We can think about things that are not in our immediate view, and make stones fall up instead of down, just by thinking about it. We can even convince others that our symbols are true. In this landscape people can rise from the dead, and ethereal paternalistic entities can monitor our thoughts and torture us eternally if we stray from the path. Who is to say otherwise?

Ultimately, truth is demonstrable. At some point you've got to demonstrate your stone that falls up. Science looks at the world, tries to figure out what's going on, and then, in the last crucial step, demonstrates what it finds to the rest of us. Of course, we are all individually free to demonstrate it for ourselves, if we put in a little work and a little study.

Religion makes claims about the world. There are no "separate Magisteria" when people are claimed to fly or walk on water or part seas. The foundation of religion may be symbolically interesting or compelling to some, but you can parse symbols all day long and still you wind up with symbols. When a hundred religions find a hundred different "fundamental truths," then I have my doubts about the truths they're finding.

For all its deep and fundamental claims, I can't see what religion "produces." Some nice architecture perhaps, and some art, and some curious stories. If you like, you can get a priest to bless you to prevent illness. I'll take a flu shot.

Comments

[tAo]

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[George]

They are sometimes described as different methods of insight into reality.

Seems that there will always be value judgments on which is the best or most accurate. Indeed many will argue that religion is not an insight into reality at all, rather it concerned a belief as to what reality constitutes.

Even a mystical experience remains subjective evidence, and thus will always be questioned as to its validity as a method of insight into reality - because the mystical experience cannot be objectively validated, the question remains whether it is a false creation by the mind, as opposed to reality.

Others will argue that the subjective experience of love is not objectively provable, but we know it is part of reality. However, love and other subjective emotions are experienced by most human beings, so there is more credence for they being real, than someone who believes he is the messiah or has had union with god, since such experiences are not commonplace at all.

Also, these subjective experiences are states of mind. We believe we are in love or are the messiah or have experienced union with god or the tao - whether such a subjectively experienced state reflects reality is another question altogether.

So some will maintain that science is the only insight into reality. the evidence would seem to support it, but perhaps mystical tradtions remain useful as a means of trying to enter and study the mind.

[Roger]

Yes, I liked the following,

"In everyday life, we neither believe nor disbelieve in facts as a general category; we just encounter particular ones in perfectly ordinary ways; and any challenge to one or more of them will also be perfectly ordinary, a matter of evidentiary adequacy or the force of counter examples or some other humdrum, non-philosophical measure of dis-confirmation. The conclusions we may have come to in the context of fancy epistemological debates (a context few will ever inhabit) will have no necessary force when we step into, and are asked to operate in, other contexts."

and

"...In short, if you believe this, how can you also believe that? The answer is that the realms of belief supposedly existing in a condition of opposition and conflict are, at least to some extent, discrete. What you believe in one arena of human endeavor may have no spillover into what you believe, and do, in another."

--I can see a time or situation for simple belief and simple non-belief. Then, there are those moments when one doesn't need to engage in belief and/or non-belief.

[Blogger Brian]

George, you hit on some key points that also seem to be central to Smith's book. Namely, that the human mind has all sorts of ways of relating to reality -- rational, emotional, perceptual, active (physically), and so on.

Religions serve a purpose. They must, or they wouldn't have been part of human civilization for so long. They help people to deal with fear of the unknown by providing belief systems to cling to (for example, if your house fell down in Haiti, it was God's will).

The question is how effective religion is in helping people to live more satisfying lives, and what the side effects of taking the blind faith pill are.

Like you said, religious experiences are subjective. They are founded on beliefs that themselves rest on conceptual abstractions. God isn't a concrete reality, but a thought-structure in the brain.

This is why scientific knowledge is more effective in dealing with a wide class of human problems: when these are rooted in objective reality, a system that accurately understands that reality, including cause and effect relationships, is going to usually work better.

But we're complex. As noted above, art, music, poetry, dance, imagination, fantasy, and such are also parts of the human experience. So for many people, religion is a satisfying aspect of their subjective relationships with the world.

I've got no problem with that. Religious believers just need to accept that (1) they can't make pronouncements about objective reality without demonstrable evidence, and (2) they've got no right to expect that other people should accept their dogmas on the same blind faith basis that they do.

[George]

Brian,

Neatly summed up, reality versus the human mind relating to reality.

Religion seems more about a search for meaning as opposed to reality.

It seems half religion's struggle is to convince itself that its meaning is grounded in some reality. But this surely cannot be a search for reality because it requires meaning first. Thus religion's starting point is invariably an unprovable god, from which flows different explanations of the creation of reality - whereas science starts only from what is actually known to be.

Nevertheless there remains this persistent feeling there must be something more noble than this earthly existence with all its imperfections and seemingly ephemeral temporary nature.

Its this feeling, which has prompted religion, but the question is whether its explainable as a by-product of a highly evolved brain that has developed a subjective self-consciousness perspective of the world - or whether it is something more inherent to the human condition such as a soul or what Huston Smith or the mystics might argue to be an inherent spiritual dimension common to all ppl and eras.

Science can't really explain away this feeling because science is after all an abstraction, and this feeling is a personal subjective experience. And after all, its these subjective experiences that are the most poweful and most memorable. Even for myself, the awe of the universe is breathtaking, but it will never compare to the immediate first person experience of a subjectively experience state such as love. And it is thus no wonder religions or mysticism with its emphasis on subjective experience of ecstacy is what is sought to try explain this feeling and bring meaning. Thus, people's historical attachment to their subjective experience is no surprise, but it sheds no light on reality, i.e. on an objective reality.

The mystical outlook is also contradictory. It encourages a direct seeing for yourself (albeit a mind's eye seeing), but discourages the world of direct sight and sense as an illusion. Knowing thyself may well be a very noble pursuit, but it sheds no light on everything else.

The blind faith pill is an interesting one, since it might lead to a sunnier outlook with meaning and happier societiers (all is debatable) - but it sheds no insight on reality, especially if one wants the cold hard truth.