Sunday, May 2, 2010

Chapter 8: The Science-God Wedge

Science and Religion have been at odds for as long as God has been a conscious thought in the minds of man. As I discussed in Chapter Five, it is indisputable that once, long ago, God wasn't just the answer to our questions of faith, but the answer to our questions of the world. There were Gods for every single cog in the system that makes up our unimaginably complicated planet, bringing in the rains, growing food, guiding herds of animals, granting fertility, maintaining life, setting the sun, raising the sun, creating the stars, growing trees, erecting mountains, changing the weather, and every other little thing that we as primitive man noticed about the mysterious world around us. Gods weren't an if. They just were.

As man, however, we were destined to grow in our understanding of the world. We were blessed, some would say, with a brain more powerful than any species we have ever known. And though we were not the strongest fighters, the fastest runners, or the quickest reproducers, we were by far the most intelligent species to set foot on the planet Earth. With brains that demanded intelligent thought, we developed tools and new ways of continuing our existence on this enormous rock. As we advanced, we made room for recreation, furthering our ability to advance. The plow shortened the time needed for harvesting crops. Irrigation ensured a constant flow of water in what would be otherwise inhospitable lands. Domestication of wild animals gave us a steady source of protein. Government gave a degree of order to the chaos of an uncontrolled world. And people were given a chance to relax, not needing to worry about whether or not the next crop would come or if the herd would starve out leaving us with nothing to eat. So in our new found free-time, we began to really consider the world and the way it all seemed to work.

This was the birth of our genius. It was here that our species took its first steps towards taking what we already had, and making something better. From here we sailed across oceans, learned to control electricity, invented the telephone, built the automobile, structured the internet, and all together made our lives simpler and more convenient through scientific advancement. And yet, along this road to greatness, we have constantly been bumped and beaten down by those men who claim to have a direct window to God's Will.

For many Atheists, at least the ones I have had both the pleasure and misfortune of meeting in my life, it's the science argument that pushed them down a path that has no God. For as long as I can tell, science and God have butted heads like two opposing forces, one we have seen more frequently and with more evidence than God battling his evil counterpart, be it Satan, Ravana, or any other religious antagonist. It seems to have become the mission of the church to put down scientific advancement whenever it showed even a slight threat to whatever they believed. This has happened most frequently with the Catholic faith, having spread its arms and legs so far across the globe in its youth that it had a power far stronger than any faith I know of. But it doesn't stop there. Religious dictators have also had their hand in this game. From Kings and Queens to Czars and Emperors, scientific progress has been blocked whenever a negative connotation could be gleamed towards the religious world.

Choosing where to begin with this evidence is hardly easy. Those who claim to be closest to God have often abused that power to slow our advancement. The frequency of this abuse is so common that we often don't even notice it anymore. And yet it happens so often that a wedge has been driven between the world. There are things that we know, and there are things that require faith in order to believe we know. The two have the power to exist together, because one is built on fact, as the other is built on faith. They should not be conflicting ideas. And yet, they are.

Take evolution, for example. Evolution is a fact. It has been part of our world since the dawn of time, shaping our planet with billions of different species, each evolving from the next. Without evolution, there would be no dinosaurs, no bacteria, no new infectious diseases or animals that are immune to those diseases. There would be no changing food chain. Without evolution, the world would be an empty surface, unfilled and uninteresting. And yet, despite the fact that this is scientific truth, my stating this so bluntly makes me a pusher of my "beliefs." To some, what I am saying is not true at all. It's a lie. God created Man in his own image, and therefor how could we have evolved all the way from a single-celled organism and still have been created directly by God? So, because of this idea that evolution must be wrong because the Bible or the Qur'an or the Torah says so is just one of the most recent sources of religion ramming a wedge between itself and science.

It's in situations like this that we see where Science and Religion divert. When given a chance to coordinate their efforts, of incorporating knowledge into faith, it seems to be more common to fear it rather than embrace it. Now, I'm not stating this to be true of all faiths. I have had conversations with many people who believe differently to this. I'm simply using this as one of today's most common examples. Religion has a tendency to fear change.

This fear of change, in my opinion, is one of the greatest flaws in organized religion. It is also one of the largest causes of the Believer-Atheist crossover. When something we believe fails to answer our questions, we as humans have a natural desire to go in search of something that does. When a religion chooses not accept something as a solid fact, faith goes from believing in something we can't explain to choosing not to believe something that we can explain. For the countless people who simply can't believe something blindly, a massive strain is put on their faith, and quite frequently, their faith breaks. They may continue to attend their congregation, and they may continue to follow their religious practices, but a sentence appears in their life that never has before; a precursor to their beliefs when talking to anyone about their faith. They will state: "I don't believe in everything that the (insert scripture here) says, but I do believe in God."

The problems don't end with the loss of faith, however. As I stated before, there are those who choose the other path, one which requires them to take something we know to be true and simply not accept it as a fact. It's these people that drive the Science-God Wedge even deeper into the world. In 2005 alone, there were 16 states that were part of a raging debate regarding the teaching of evolution in the classroom. This debate included everything from whether or not to even address the subject matter to how a classroom should properly address the issue in order to include the fact that the Bible doesn't agree. States like Kentucky have even go so far as to completely violate the Separation of Church and State law, one that has been part of the American system of law since the country's birth, and have chosen to allow the teaching of creationism as it is described in the Bible. States like Pennsylvania have also suffered similar controvertial positions regarding the Separation of Church and State. In 2004, however, the citizens sued to have the inclusion of intelligent design removed from schools because unlike evolution, intelligent design is just another name for creationism and therefor is a religious belief without scientific backing. It is now illegal to teach intelligent design in Pennsylvania (source material provided by NPR. Link provided at the end of the chapter).

This battle is something I don't look at with fond eyes. I understand that for many Confrontational Atheists, the battles in places like Pennsylvania are ones that could be treated with endless respect. The victory of science over religion can be looked at with fond eyes, respected and loved as the advancement of science over God. I do not see it the same way.

Organized Religion influences the decisions of almost the entire worlds population. For the most part, they follow scriptures that were written thousands of years ago, translated time and time again. The stories in these scriptures were, for the most part, hundreds of years old at the time of their publication, surviving only through word-of-mouth tales. Were this a court of law, this evidence would not only be thrown out as completely unreliable, but would be laughed at as it went flying out the window. It's faith that keeps these ideas alive, the belief in something far greater than solid evidence. But the fact that these stories are dated, unreliable, and altered from their original context doesn't change. So why are they being used as weapons to combat science?

The way I see it is this: Science is in constant battle with itself. The scientific method demands that we prove ourselves wrong, because in truth, the scientific method doesn't allow for a one-hundred percent certainty on anything. It simply states that if you gained a result once, can you make it happen again, and again, and again, and again? If not, then it's not a truth. But the sequence of repeats goes on indefinitely. It's impossible to ever prove anything to a degree of complete certainty. And so, built into the very structure of science is the desire to be wrong. A scientist can stumble across some future truth, and spend the rest of his life trying to prove himself wrong. We do this not because we want to be wrong, but because we want to be right. If we stuck with a theory after we found it, how could we ever advance? Our planet would still be the centre of the universe, we would still have a flat Earth, and we would be the first species to set foot on our planet. But we know these things not to be true because of the constant desire to know more.

So I ask you, why do we let the Science-God Wedge run so deep? Couldn't it be that science isn't the answer to why everything happens, but just how it happens? Faith shouldn't be threatened by the advancement of our species. It should embrace it. We are thousands of years older than many of the modern day religious scriptures that populate our planet. We know more now than those people could have ever dreamed, and we have come farther than their minds would allow them to the understand. We are human, and we seek answers to unanswerable questions as a part of our natural desire to live and advance. But that doesn't mean that we have to kill God in the process. The two can live together, can help one another advance. If religion were to open its doors to change, to take in the knowledge we discover through science and add it to their histories, then maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't have to struggle so hard to continue become greater than we are today. After all, nobody wants to be wrong, but it's in being wrong that we take one step closer to being right.

Source Material:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4630737

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