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Is Science a Religion?
This is another one of those questions that I’ve taken for granted for a long time: whether science is really just another religion. I tend to think it is but readers such as Arizona of AlchemiZade have been making arguments to the contrary. So I thought I’d open it up to a larger discussion.
My perspective on the question goes something like this: there’s a difference between actual experience and how we describe experience. To describe experience, we create models or representations which are linguistic on the most base level. I see science as a descriptive model of reality, rather than as reality itself. As a descriptive model or story-system, science is fundamentally no different from religion. Both act as representations which allow us to share meaning culturally. But they are both maps rather than the territory, which means they are both subject to the inaccuracies and distortions of representation.
The reason science has so much sway is that it’s a very useful model for manifesting thought into reality, and in observing and predicting actual experience. Some would claim it’s “more” useful than religious models, and thus is more accurate or closer to the true nature of reality. I guess one of my questions is: what is it more useful for?
The biggest difference between science and other formal religions is that science operates around the myth of progress. At it’s core, it says that one idea or model is better than another, and that the better one will win out eventually in the marketplace of ideas. Evolution. The survival of the fittest - that which fits actual experience the best.
But does it fit everyday experience the best? Do black holes or quantum particles have any relation to my every day life? Does knowing how to make a bigger building or a smarter bomb or prolong my life artificially really benefit me? We take it as an article of faith that it does. Progress = better + happier + more productive. But is that always the case - does that always fit the available data? It certainly does not. Here’s a simple real-life example: do you have a favorite computer program that when the next version of it was released, they got rid of some of your favorite features? That happens all the time.
The thing I do like about science though is exactly this openness to change. Most religions are closed systems which only grudgingly admit doctrinal changes over generations of time. Oh whoops! That describes science too, doesn’t it? My bad! But in all seriousness though, this ability to revise itself (at least on an idealistic level) is the best thing about the scientific religion. It recognizes that times change and people change (though they don’t necessarily get better), and that the ideas that we live according to must change accordingly.
I know some of you are probably sitting there still after reading all this and screaming: but science just IS true! You can’t argue it! Why not? Because you’re emotionally invested in it? Science is just a collection of ideas about reality, not reality itself. That said though, I think we have a pretty distorted view of how other cultures and time periods viewed their religion. For us, religious faith is generally a private matter - by that, I mean it’s something we believe in no matter what. Our belief goes out first as a pathfinder for our experience, helping us to sort and categorize. But belief for us is in a lot of ways a consumerist pursuit. We get to dine at the buffet of ideas and choose which most closely match our own inner sense of spirituality. People in other times didn’t run around picking and choosing though. For them, the way they interacted with religion was how we interact with science. It just was. There wasn’t any arguing except over minor theological differences (PS. theology used to be considered the “queen” of the sciences), and it didn’t make any sense to question it, because doing so would take you outside the conceptual orbit of the society into a slippery world of heresy and persecution. People often laugh about how anyone could have been stupid enough to believe that the Sun orbited the Earth or that the Earth was flat. It’s easy. Just look at the things that you believe about science. These erroneous assumptions are as invisible to you as those things were to people then.
Anyway, that’s my argument as best as I can give it right now. I’m happy to hear all the counter-arguments, loopholes and disagreements that are certain to arise over this. That’s the whole reason I tried to articulate my perspective in as strong a way as possible. My ideas are just as much a model as everybody else’s. I think one of things we ought to focus on is how do you choose models that work best for you, and how do you let other people choose models that work best for them. The fact is that none of us are synonymous with our ideas. And even if our ideas don’t agree with each other, that doesn’t mean you and I personally have to.
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July 11th, 2005 at 6:41 pm
As a priest for the religion of science, I have to say that I agree with Tim: “Science”, as it is practiced in the research facilities of academia and industry and reported by mainstream news, is without a doubt the dominant religion of the 19th through 21st Centuries. (So I have a wee bit of sympathy for the Christian fundamentalists, as much as I loathe their theology, when they attack modern Science.)
The problem isn’t that I disagree with the very detailed descriptions of how things work in the physical world. It’s that “Science” has completely lost touch with why things exist the way they do. The scientific method is not set up to examine questions of meaning and purpose, and that’s fine. But instead of admitting to the fact, the dominant attitude of the “Scientist” is one of denial: because I can’t quantify meaning and subject it to a controlled experiment, it must therefore not exist.
Also the motives of “Science” are often suspect, as Tim (and Ran) so eloquently describe.
A couple of points not explicitly made by Tim or Ran: (1) science funding is very highly politicized. If I could study what I wanted to study, it certainly wouldn’t be what I do to pay the bills. (2) The evangelicals of “Science” claim empirical supremacy, that the observations reported by scientific experiments are repeatable. This is true, provided you have the necessary training and equipment, the former being quite lengthy and the latter often being quite expensive. How many of us are in a position to directly verify the claims made in the latest science news article? (As an aside, the claims made in most journal articles are substantially less provocative than their mainstream media hyped-up interpretation.) On the other hand, mystics claim that if you go through the lengthy training required for direct mystical experience, you will be able to directly verify those for yourself as well.
July 11th, 2005 at 6:54 pm
As a supplement to my previous little rant, I should share a thought I had the other day about Christian fundies vs. Science fundies. Science evangelicals (a term that I just made up, but you get what I mean) are so accustomed to analytic reductionism that they cannot see the spirit behind the processes they (we?) study. So they deny the existence of such a spirit. On the other hand, the Christians are so sure that there is a spirit, that there is a larger story into which human lives fit meaningfully, that they experience a disconnect between what they “know” and what evangelical Science tells them. So they reject not only the theology/ontology of Science, but its descriptions as well.
Neither is able to see the spirit that lives and moves in the world around us.
Lest you think I’m setting up a strawman “Scientific evangelist”: Try defending intelligent design (ID) on a mainstream liberal blog. Not the manipulative stealth-Creationist form of ID that Christian fundamentalist are trying to sneak into grade-school curricula, but a simple belief that some form of superior intelligent being (ranging from Yahweh to Brahma to Gaia) directs or lives through the the process of evolution so eloquently described by modern Science. I guarantee you’ll have an unpleasant experience. When I did it, I (or rather my online personality) was attacked by many, including a woman who describes herself as a Wiccan. Go figure…
July 11th, 2005 at 6:56 pm
This is a great point. Do you have a simple example for us laymen?
I guess what I’m looking for is a way to apply this same spirit to the why. Cause I think the spirit itself is right on!
July 11th, 2005 at 8:42 pm
Well, I wanted to find more specific examples, but as an individual I’m not a big player so the subjects I know best are not exactly headline NY Times news.
This will do for now. Here are some old CNN stories about how promising the human genome project would be for medical research:
On the threshold of a brave new world
Sequencing of human genome is a first step to many answers
Well, OK, they are not as irresponsibly hyperbolic as I remember them being. But the fact is that the progress in the last 4 years has been quite slow from an applied, medical perspective. (Quite fast, however, in the rate at which we are learning about the underlying biological processes.) It turns out that the biological processes that determine disease are often much more complex than just the genetic code: there are gene expression issues, interactions in expression between different genes, and “epigenetic factors”. The whole thing is very complex. Which should come as no surprise to even the thoughtful lay person, really. Think of it this way: Would an alien be able to reconstruct Western Civilization simply by reading every book in the Library of Congress?
The problem is that the way I remember genome science being sold in the media is that the human genome would “unlock the secrets of life”, leading to immediate medical benefit. Googling through various articles, I see now that the mainstream media news articles are careful to remind us that all the medical benefits are still firmly in the “future”. But the headlines, and the general hyped-up context of technocratic optimism, tend to overplay the benefit and diminish the many many difficult steps between the now, the subject of the article, and the future, the benefit implied in the headline.
Related to my own research, there are some epigenetic factors (in terms of certain genes that get “silenced” in one way or another) that predict success of specific chemotherapy regimens, or else the invasiveness of a particular type of tumor. While these are interesting and important steps along the way of developing specific treatment protocols or finding therapeutic agents, they do not constitute the elusive “cure for cancer”.
I’m not suggesting that science shouldn’t be reported. It’s just that the subtext of mainstream science reporting is often more about cheerleading for our technocratic way of life than for the actual scientific discovery being reported.
July 11th, 2005 at 8:58 pm
Do you mean the spirit of empiricism? Of the controlled experiment? I agree that any spiritual claim should be tested by experience. But since there is an inherent subjectivity in anything involving “meaning”, and the controlled scientific experiment is inherently about objectivity (ignorning the issue of whether any viewpoint can truly be “objective”), the methods of modern science will have to be altered quite a bit before they can be applied to spiritual phenomena. This is the problem with parapyschological research: it tries to apply objective criteria to inherently subjective phenomena. The result is that the null hypothesis is favored in every honestly reported experiment.
Now, I wholeheartedly believe that it’s worth the effort to try. In my own spiritual inquiry I make every attempt to be as empirical as possible. But ultimately there are axiomatic beliefs that one either takes on faith or does not, and much of my personal “research” is founded upon a certain set of axioms. The scientific skeptic can disagree with my findings by disagreeing with my axioms. I don’t care, since the axioms are about subjective interpretation, about which two people can always disagree.
Of course, that leaves one open to having to entertain the mental gymnastics required to justify Christian fundamentalist “Creation Science”. Fossils? Put there by the devil to deceive god-fearing Xtians. But I think one can address this by appealing to Occam’s Razor, along with some other qualifying principles that I’ve suggested here at Alchemical Braindamage.
For my own spiritual inquiry, it always boils down to what the simplest explanation is for my experience, factoring in the laws of probability and being mindful of my own biases.
In any case, I’m not invested in being “right”.
July 11th, 2005 at 9:04 pm
I’m not either, or at least not anymore. Anyway, I guess I’m not totally sure what I meant with that comment you replied to above. I guess it has to do with what I was articulating in this two post:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005...ion-will-self-destruct-in-30-seconds/
I’ll try to come back and rephrase all this at some point.
July 11th, 2005 at 9:23 pm
Check out Thomas Kuhn, his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is one of the best on the subject of science as belief system.
July 11th, 2005 at 9:50 pm
A think the scientific method — making a hypothesis based on experience and then testing it — is a technique.
Scientific Theories are full on religions. Take the Big Bang theory for example — when the calculations don’t work out, Big Bang theorists invent invisible Dark Matter to blame it on. How is this different than Creation Theorist blaming dinosaur bones on an invisible Dark Lord?
July 11th, 2005 at 9:53 pm
That’s a great distinction.
July 11th, 2005 at 10:05 pm
Yes, I very much approve of the distinction between science as technique (”scientific method”) and science as philosophy/theology/ontology.
However, I would be a little careful with “scientific theory”. If understood as a descriptive narrative, a scientific theory is congitively harmless. Indeed, science could not operate without theories. The problem occurs when different theories are sown together into an overarching system used to advance certain cultural or political agendas.
July 11th, 2005 at 10:25 pm
Again a good point. I myself have any number of crazy theories I’m following at any one point in time (as you should all be painfully aware)
July 12th, 2005 at 12:09 am
Science does not operate around the myth of progress. Scientists may. Science is just a method of investigation that depends on the reproduceability of phenomena. The beast is so amazingly useful, though, it often lumbers into our lives weighed down with the unnecessary baggage of scientists with agendas.
Quantum particles and black holes do have relevance to your everyday life. Without our understanding of the physics of the former, you’d be composing your posts on a typewriter using paper and ink; without our understanding of the physics of the latter, the Global Positioning System wouldn’t work. Is our understanding of either one complete? Is is the Truth? No, and no. We just understand enough about them to make useful gadgets.
Whether science is “more” useful than religion really depends on your priorities. What’s “more” useful to you: antibiotics, telecommunications, and electricity, or your connection with the Divine? I think it’s a silly question to ask in the first place; they don’t compete, and you don’t need to choose between one and the other.
The difference between involving dark matter in a Big Bang hypothesis and a Dark Lord in a myth is that a model of the evolution of the universe can be used to predict how it will behave in the future, and the rules by which that model works can be used at different scales for repeatable experiments. I have not seen experiments that can repeatably invoke a Dark Lord to insert fossils into an existing hunk of rock, or cause an Intelligent Designer to produce new forms of life to order. How significant is it that a model lets you produce nifty gadgets? That’s a matter of opinion.
July 12th, 2005 at 3:06 am
No one has mentioned here Karl Popper’s classic identification of science as truths that are falsifiable. Although the model breaks down in the imperfect human world (where cultural and political agendas lurk) the idea is that scientists agree on what observations will falsify a theory. In practice, this does happen pretty often. A good scientist is one who is ready to admit an error or abandon a failing pet hypothesis. Thomas Kuhn wrote about paradigm shifts and these are such large shifts of perspective that the regular gentlemanly conduct of science tends to fall down a bit.
Ask someone with a religious belief - any religious belief - to identify an observable event that would falsify that belief. They can’t do it. Creation scientists certainly can’t do it.
So, although there are glitches in the idea, Popper’s falsifiability criterion is a pretty powerful tool for separating out what is and is not science. It’s good enough for me to consider the distinction - that science is not a religion - useful.
…
PS: I’ll also respond here to Tim’s question on the private/public distinction between a truth emerging from a dream and a truth emerging from empirical observation.
I’m quite convinced that an individual can have “big dreams” that have meaning for the whole community of which he is but a part. This is amply demonstrated by the great religious leaders from the Buddha to Mohammad.
Science is generally seen to relate to consensual reality and this is evident in the general agreement in the West (at least) that the earth is not flat but spheroid, that the sun’s and the moon’s apparent journey across the sky is a result of the earth’s rotation, etc. However, science is but the grand cultural and formalised extension of everyday common sense. One man’s common sense can differ as greatly from another’s as one man’s dream from another’s. It depends so much on what experiences we each happen to be exposed to.
So, my answer would be that the public/private distinction does not separate out science from religion. It’s true that religion has sought refuge in the private as a consequence of science’s dominance but that is a pretty quirky situation when viewed against the canvas of world and historical religion.
The fact is that human beings have visions about how the world might become. It simply must be a part of our genetic or evolutionary makeup to have such grand dreams. Even the grand dream to abandon such grand dreams (that some anti-religion scientists propound) is itself a grand dream! If you read an evolutionary biologist like Richard Dawkins you definitely get this impression that we’d be better off without religion. However, to the extent that he is communicating that, he is not communicating science but sharing his own religious vision. I think this is the kind of behaviour from scientists that makes science look like “just another religion”. Dawkins is a great scientist and also a great dreamer. Science may indeed be his central value but that does not make science itself a religion.
Sorry for getting so long-winded about this.
July 12th, 2005 at 10:54 am
the observer, and the observed. inseperable. science fails.
IMO.
one
human?
July 12th, 2005 at 11:05 am
The concept of progress too fails the falsifiability test. It’s simply an article of faith. Without the idea that we can and should make things better through experimentation, then there’s no motivation for using the scientific method
July 12th, 2005 at 11:26 am
The point of experimentation isn’t necessarily to make things better; it’s just to gain an understanding. The only motivation you need is curiosity. It turns out that we can do all manner of interesting things with the understanding we gain through scientific inquiry, but they’re often two-edged swords: nuclear physics can help us destroy cancerous tumors and light homes, or cause an entire generation to grow up in fear of being wiped out in atomic explosions or fallout.
The motivation of some abstract notion of progress is separate from all this. People subscribing to the idea of progress may be more receptive to new inventions, but you don’t need some overarching concept like that to decide that you’re bored with doing the same thing over and over again and you’d like to invent something to make your life incrementally easier.
July 12th, 2005 at 11:37 am
Well then that leads me to another point: why is simple curiousity a good enough excuse to do anything?
“Hm, I’m curious what would happen if I pointed this gun at you and pulled the trigger.”
“Yes, let’s find out.”
BANG!
“Interesting. I love science.”
Anyway, how does nuclear power make your life easier? Doesn’t it make it more difficult because you have to build and maintain a nuclear plant, use complex tools and theories and highly trained staff and the whole thing is very dangerous? Why is that easier than simply throwing some logs in the fire and pulling your blanket over you at night. It’s not. It requires a myriad other inventions which all support each other, and are ultimately unsustainable
July 12th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
simple curiosity is not enough, you must have wisdom…
knowledge -> wisdom -> overstanding.
its why “Science” will go down as the bloodiest period of human history.
July 12th, 2005 at 2:24 pm
science is based on grant money, not progress. scientists do discover things that make bigger and bigger bangs. it takes engineers to build them though.
July 12th, 2005 at 5:38 pm
human? Says:
If you blame science for the Nazi holocaust, Hiroshima, etc, then I guess this statement makes sense to you. I would say that “science” itself never made any of those lethal decisions. The enterprise of science simply gave us the tools.
We need both science and religion to live well. If science is healthy and religion sickly, is that the fault of science? Science does reign supreme in the territory that is suited to it, a territory that religion once claimed as part of its own domain. There is, in my own mind, an undoubted progress in religion keeping its nose out of things it is ill equipped to handle. Although an individual scientist will state - and even should state - his position on religious issues, this doesn’t mean science is poking its nose into things that religion can best express.
…
Occult Investigator Says:
Color TV is better than B&W TV. Given the choice, no one would bother to buy the latter. That’s why TV retailers are sensible and don’t try to sell B&W sets.
The idea of progress is quite falsifiable, Tim. Just give us enough instances of people demanding to buy B&W TV sets and I’ll believe that progress is illusory.
July 12th, 2005 at 6:26 pm
Simple: check out how many more closed circuit security systems use black and white television than color.
But more importantly, why is watching television progress over not having it at all? To create a television you need a vast network of industrial processing and labor. And then you need an enormous infrastructure to provide electricity and a signal, let alone programming to watch. That’s not progress - that’s a giant trap of money, people and resources and it’s not self-sustainable to boot.
And that’s not even going into the damage that it can do to an individual person, from long hours spent totally inactive to constant cultural suggestion and relentless marketing and propaganda. Nevermind radiation.
July 12th, 2005 at 6:31 pm
When the expected value derived from the learning is greater than the cost of finding the answer. In the case of shooting someone, you learn almost nothing at the cost of a hospital visit or a human life, plus the legal repercussions: clearly not a sensible proposition. In the case of “hey, if I make a round thing to roll my loads along the ground instead of dragging them, I could save a lot of effort with this thing I’ll call a wheel, maybe I should investigate it”, clearly a sensible one for anyone with access to nearly-level ground.
If you happen to like electricity to run all your civilized comforts, for the same amount of energy, fission power emits less radiation into the environment than generating the same amount of power from coal, requires vastly less deforestation than throwing a log on the fire, and destroys fewer habitats than turning a thriving valley into a hydroelectric dam. We need to be sensible about the waste disposal, of course, and keep doing our research into fusion so we can switch to that before the uranium gets scarce. Any of those operations requires large numbers of people to build and maintain it; it either provides a livelihood for the people directly involved or becomes a minimal-effort part of the life of the other folks who benefit from it, and no one has to chop wood and bank the coals for the night. Sounds like it makes life easier to me.
July 12th, 2005 at 10:24 pm
They’re not replacing color TV sets in people’s lounge rooms, are they? Once color gets more widely used for security systems, they won’t go back to B&W either.
It’s true that there are isolated protesters of modernity that abandon one or more aspects of it, and very rarely most or all. This is what ascetics have done since Diogenes. The mass of humanity does buy the progress myth and, in that sense, it is true. I also think it’s a good thing that many, like yourself, protest it.
The statements: “progress is real” or “progress is good”, are not scientific statements. The statement: “most humans believe in and value progress”, is scientific (measurable through surveys and consumer statistics). You’re clearly one of the valuable (in my eyes) minority of human beings who question that belief.
July 12th, 2005 at 11:07 pm
In any event, I’m really just trying to run with and understand a lot of the ideas that Ran Prieur writes about a lot more elegantly than I. I’m trying to process them in my own terms and understand how it can fit in with my life. I could go on and on arguing points, but really I made all the ones I care about already, and other people have given me new stuff to think about. So I’m signing off on this topic…. for now.
PS. Max - I’m starting to reach a point in my life where I’d rather chop the wood!
July 13th, 2005 at 6:05 am
I had a read of his main essay on this, Science the Destroyer, as well as other bits and pieces. I guess it’s useful that there’s such a strong voice around saying those things and I’d agree that science, when taken as the only kind of truth, can get pretty nasty. In fact, quite chilling. Science does have that shadow side. But then, there’s a down side to every truth seeking or truth establishing method.
I guess you’ll sort out your own priorities and values with respect to science but I’d hope you wouldn’t write it off quite so completely as Ran seems to.
It’s over and out, then, for me too.
July 13th, 2005 at 11:08 am
Well, we all need to bear in mind that Ran uses the internet, runs a website, etc. I don’t think he’s anti-science. I think he’s against sloppy thinking and poor ethical decisions