AN ARGUMENT AGAINST COMPATIBILITY
As you are aware, virtually everything we take for granted as common knowledge today was at some point prior considered dangerous heterodoxy. Writing or speaking such ideas (like “the Sun does not move” or “the Earth isn’t the center of the universe”) would have put you in opposition to an intolerant authority whose preferred methods of censorship were exile and murder.
Additionally, it’s also easy to ignore or fail to see that what remains of faith today, certainly in the “moderate” West, is that which was exceptionally vague to start or was otherwise conducive to being reshaped into something compatible with modern thinking. Even just look at the Catholic Church (hardly a progressive organization.) It has formally rejected nearly everything it once stood for. How is this so commonly ignored? Everything it once excommunicated, jailed, and killed people for (from the condemnation of dissonant sounds “diabolus in musica”, or polyphony in religious music, to the whole notion of purgatory, and even the renunciation of Darwin’s ideas) have all been repealed. The rejection of these old ideas, just like their initial foundation, is hugely dishonest and unreasonable – entirely whimsical and wicked and everything we’ve come to expect of institutions of this sort. As evidenced in their copious writings (from descriptions of our world and the universe beyond, to ideas surrounding our origins; from the causes of illness and the division of humanity into races, to where babies come from; from justifications for violence, slavery, and genocide to simple notions of justice and well-being) these texts are essentially a historical record of our confusion as a species.
These fictions may be seen as legitimate intellectual attempts to explain the universe (but with a near-total lack of information and very clearly not, as is claimed, with the privileged insights of an omniscient, omnibenevolent creator.) And, given just how far off we were on so very many fronts, like many of our first attempts in other arenas (cell phones, flight, democracy…) our first serious attempt at explaining ourselves and our world, through religion, was pretty crude and awkward too.
Which isn’t to suggest for a second that we’ve got anything at all figured out. (New discoveries are made daily that change our understanding of where we are and what’s here.) But it’s clear to everyone that we’re aware of infinitely more details, connections, and parameters than could have even been imagined mere generations ago. We also know that all religions, in light of more recent revelations, are works-in-progress that remain excruciatingly resistant to new information. People still are imprisoned, enslaved, tortured, and killed for their failure to commit to certain prescriptions. And this is something that religious moderates, particularly in the West, like to ignore. In my mind, disregarding this reality suggests not just a lack of understanding but also a lack of sympathy and humanity.
With any historical perspective, it is crystal clear that science is inherently disruptive/corruptive/corrosive of faith; and yet many would try and hang on to both: accept our rapidly, and increasingly rapidly, expanding vision of the universe while attempting to maintain an Iron Age worldview. It’s quite common, for instance, to find scientists who go to church and church-goers that appear to accept modern science. However, this doesn’t mean that faith and science are compatible in any real sense. No. All it means is that some folks are capable of doublethink, better able than others to wall off parts of their brain and hold incompatible ideas simultaneously. (Just to appear pompous, I like to call this cognitive bifurcation.) So, as my philosophy prof frequently suggested, the real question is whether or not there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science? Is the gulf that divides them so deep and wide that they must be considered intrinsically antagonistic, or could we build a some kind of bridge?
The easiest way to ease tensions and bridge the gap is to redefine one to include the other. And people attempt this all the time; as any rational person must, given what we’ve learned over the last few centuries. One such attempted work-around is the renunciation of literal interpretations of religious texts. This popular stance for modern religious moderates claims, for example, that these ancient texts disguise their true essence in metaphor. The trouble with this is no less than fivefold.
One: given that nobody knew anything of continents, planets, or solar systems; nothing of bacteria, viruses, or genetics; and nothing of gravity, thermodynamics, or electromagnetism; you can’t rewrite the past to include these things – however desirable that may be. Not only is it dishonest to do this but it doesn’t happen in other contexts either. No one would be taken seriously if they suggested Shakespeare was hinting at a recipe for penicillin or nuclear fusion or that Plato was really trying to get us to think about gravitational lensing or the double helix.
Two: there are remarkably few passages, in any religious text, that can reasonably claimed to be metaphorical – even if you apply hindsight and current information and understanding. And, of course, not only do many of these texts themselves state emphatically that they are “truth” but a cipher has never been discovered or developed to reliably distinguish that which is to be read as metaphor from that which is to be taken as literal. (And part of the reason for this is that almost every major statement in the Bible, for example – most descriptions or explanations or recommendations for proper conduct – contains an unresolved contradiction elsewhere in the text.)
Three: if our holy books were meant to be read as fiction or metaphor, the authors’ contemporaries – those much closer to them in time, space, language, culture, and worldview – would most certainly have a more accurate understanding of these texts than people such as ourselves (extremely far removed in every conceivable way.) And yet literal translations and ancient readings are considered by most folks to be the most aberrant.
Four: it’s not just thousands of years of history but also the very real convictions of the faithful that the religious moderate chooses to disregard when they attempt such a “fix.” Notice that, while seeming to resolve a hugely problematic schism, this kind of work-around denies the very spiritual basis of most popular faiths: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and much of Buddhism. Such a fix immediately eliminates miracles, virgin births, answered prayers, and resurrections, for example – all in one clean sweep. BLAMO!
Five: without the literally-translated differences of these texts you don’t have different faiths. A Catholic may as well refer to her/himself as Hindu (or vice-versa) if there’s no Jesus or Devas, no transubstantiation or karma, and only a globally accessible, numinous feeling of oneness with the universe. And yet you’ll notice the religious moderate doesn’t do this. They don’t claim another faith, give it a different name, or disassociate altogether. They don’t become agnostic or atheist, despite having (in all meaningful senses) killed off their own God, everyone else’s, and every literal and/or metaphorical description passed down through the generations that conflict with their modern assertions. This intellectual and philosophical sleight-of-hand, however humane and reasonable, is, in my mind, as serious an over-simplification as that made by the fanatical fundamentalists who would insist upon literal interpretation of every easily refuted and impractical word.
Another work-around people use to maintain the faith (despite all the overwhelming experience and counter-documentation) is to claim that egregious barbaric stupidity was justified, or perhaps explainable at least, given the times in which these texts were written. (Please note that this sort of relativism is another example of cognitive bifurcation: “They were ignorant, amoral barbarians but their near-psychotic rantings and scribblings are – if you squint your eyes and tilt your head just so and employ the services of an English literature major – the most deeply inspired works ever, demanding our study and devotion for all time.”) This bit of sense-making works particularly well if you have no knowledge of history, other cultures, or other belief systems. (And you’d be right to observe that religious communities tend to be the most insular and under-educated – particularly with regard to other religions and cultures.) For example, the same people who make this sort of claim, that it’s all relative, know very well that Buddhism and Jainism, for instance, predate Christianity and Islam by many centuries. Buddhism came into being around 600 BCE, and brought with it a renunciation of violence and focus on our common humanity. Jainism, which emerged shortly after Buddhism, takes this even further, inculcating an almost fanatical commitment to ahimsa (non-violence toward all living things: human, goat mosquito, grass, or mold.) These institutions, Jainism and Buddhism, and their non-violent intuitions couldn’t be more of a contrast to the prescriptions and preoccupations associated with the Abrahamic religions (or nearly any contemporary you care to name: the Norse, Greeks, Egyptians, Aztecs...) And yet we must assume the authors and followers of those texts had similar experiences and a similar set of intellectual and emotional tools to that of their South Asian cousins.
Another proposed route to conjoining faith and science is similar to the claim that it’s all just deep, wisdom-imbued metaphor. Many religious moderates like to pronounce that “God”, of any description, is simply the name we give to the ineffable universe. (And there are many equally intangible and indefensible variants of this.) While it’s nice to notice that the notion of God(s) is common, the problem with reworkings and reconciliations of this sort is that they leave out so much reality that they’re hardly better than a literal interpretation of those texts. Denying the notion of a Creator, a “Master” or “Lord” or “Divine Warrior”, denies the very foundational principles of many faiths, without which these religions would not only be devoid of almost all of their content but they would never have been established in the first place. Meaning, of course, that you’d have no “metaphor” to (mis)interpret. Yes, it is very easy, living in any number of modern Western metropolises, to ignore or even erase Yahweh or Ganesha or any other gods too numerous to name; but, doing so ignores the very ideas that most people on the planet, today and in the past (billions and billions), happily admit to believing in so very deeply.
And, if there is any doubt and you would deny that people actually believe such things, well, we don’t have to poll anyone or do any exhaustive research. We don’t need to because, of course, the faithful go on record daily proclaiming the specifics of their faith and how human actions, their own and others, meet or fail to meet what they understand to be divine expectations. And you can look far and wide or you can look here at home for examples.
For instance, Chiheb Esseghaier, the would-be “VIA rail bomber” who was stopped by authorities. He tells us that he cannot be judged by the Criminal Code of Canada because it “is not a holy book, it’s just written by a set of creations and the creations they are not perfect because only the creator is perfect.” He insisted he “would be judged only by God’s law as spelled out in the Qur’an.” And when a reporter suggested there were a variety of interpretations of God’s will (undoubtedly the words of a religious moderate), Esseghaier replied that there was “only one God and He gave His last revelations to the prophet Muhammad.”
So you can’t tell me Esseghaier has no notion of God. And you can’t tell me you know his mind better than he. Nor can you claim that his concept of God is not actually as he stated but is instead calibrated to some sort of funky, new-age, quantum mysticism. And you also can’t say that it’s his failure to read the text or that he misinterpreted things. Why? Because he quotes what is very clear and unequivocal scripture directly!
Esseghaier is just simple-minded and confused, you say. He’s backward in his beliefs, lacking in understanding of the modern world, somehow incapable of the more complex and nuanced thinking of many millions of his more religiously moderate counterparts. And I would be willing to assume so as well if only it hadn’t been revealed that his entire family are lawyers, doctors, and engineers; and that, before his run-in with the law (and reality), he hadn’t nearly completed his PhD in nanotechnology from the prestigious National Institute of Scientific Research, at the University of Quebec, in Montreal. Of course we don’t have to pick on Esseghaier. Instead we could cite any of a countless number of pastors, priests, holy men, televangelists, or their subscribers. And we could pull up their broadcasts, websites and blogs, YouTube channels, books, op-eds, or suicide letters...
No, a meaningful effort to reconcile faith and science must recognize both as they are actually understood and practised by billions of people across the globe, even the disturbed Mr Esseghaier. And you can’t – as the Board of Education in Kansas managed to pull off in 2005 – simply redefine science to include miracles and other supernatural phenomena. A solution must harmonize science as it actually exists AND theism as it’s actually practised.
Despite at least two centuries of continuous effort, no one has ever come close to doing this; but don’t let that stop you from trying.
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