Science: Collateral Damage in the Culture War

The world is a scary place, mostly because of some of the people who inhabit it. Then there is accident, famine, sickness and natural disaster.

The world is a fabulous place, full of grandeur, amazing and intricate beauty, love, friendship, simple delights and heart-breaking sorrow. The future defies our every attempt to understand or predict it, and the simplest experiences can be interpreted widely differently, even by folks with similar backgrounds and viewpoints.

There are any number of systems that attempt to make sense of this life we find ourselves in. Many, perhaps most of them ascribe the mystery and chaos of the life we live to unseen forces. We don't understand because we don't see the "big picture." We don't understand because unseen players are introducing cause and effect that we know nothing about.

This conjecture forms a working hypothesis about how the world works. Some explanations involve one God, others many. Some have spirits animating everyday objects, others hosts of angels and devils constantly at work on unseen, unfathomable tasks. In some systems, we are working towards the embodiment of moral principles in life after life. For most of human history, one conjecture was as good as another, and there was no real way to tell which system was right, and which system was not.

Along comes the the scientific method, with its assumption of methodological naturalism. Actually, implicit in this approach to science is a hypothesis: the natural world can be explained without reference to supernatural causes or teleological assumptions. Several hundred years later, this hypothesis has been borne out over and over.

Though the results of science have generally been welcomed (even if all the technology that has come of it has been a mixed bag), it has necessitated a sea-change in how we view the world. Rather than an mysterious interplay of benign and malign unseen supernatural forces, the world is a chaotic interplay of natural forces.

This is seen as a direct affront to those who take a literally a spiritual tradition that ascribes events in this world (private and public, intimate and cosmic) to the action of unseen spiritual forces. Even though the evidence is pretty clear, that our early conjectures about the supernatural world is wrong, we are still act as if the old explanations (soul, spirit, gods, angels) are accurate, and the evidence before us (the fruit of science) is somehow wrong, or irrelevant.

Why? Because we are built to find significance. Because we experience coincidence (and intermittent re-enforcement is a powerful teacher). Because we want to believe that we matter, that what we do matters, that we are right and others are wrong. Don't get me wrong. I think that we are significant, that we do matter, and that there is a way to live (loosely speaking) that is better than others. And I believe that, in most of the world's religions, we have recapitulated that truth. But I also believe that most religions reflect these facts, rather than form the basis for moral and ethical action, community and purpose.

So the experience comes first, then the rejection of science. A person who holds that God personally intervenes in the day-to-day life of the believer, when faced with the fact that this is just not the way the world works, is forced to suspend belief in science (at least while they are acting as a person of faith). This is a small price to pay for certainty and a feeling of personal significance, they think.

I think they are wrong. It turns out to be a huge price to pay - and we see it in the religious and sectarian strife, the racial hatred, the destruction of our planet's atmosphere, the way we ignore authentic community and focus on purely personal issues of behavior.

The world is a chaotic system of natural cause and effect. This is evidently the way God made it, or God did not make it - there is not a third viable option. Just like we have had to give up the notion of sickness as caused by our neighbor's curse, or an eclipse as a struggle between good and evil, we need to base the way we view our search for significance and right action on the world as it is - not the world as we wish it were.