Faith's War Against Science

As the discussion about faiths' objections to the science of evolution heats up, it is becoming apparent this dispute is really being perceived by the faith community as a fight for survival. And few recognized that it is a false fight because faith's place in society is not at all threatened by science, regardless of its discoveries and understandings. Few seem to recognize there are plenty of areas in which science has little or no data, let alone meaningful models. This is most obvious regarding how consciousness arises from brain function, how a self-aware self forms from brain activity, and most importantly what these descriptions imply about how we should (to be accurate, honest and forthright) view ourselves.

Faith has had a centuries-long reliance on man's bewilderment about just what sort of creature he is. Faith has also recognized people are quite ignorant about how man and the larger natural world functions. These have provided the faith community with an opportunity, if not a temptation, to offer people some tangible connections between those spiritual abstractions the religiously-learned have accepted and what the common person knows from day-to-day experience. In former times and prior to receiving religious conversion by a representative of whichever faith was active in the community, ordinary people explained everyday experiences by various superstitions. This led to the plethora of gods and demons known to history as well as a need for everyday people to supplicate or entice favor from these perceived entities, lest they become victims of some transgression.

Now to be fair, the faith community has not really been all that much more advanced in its thinking than its constituency. The faith community has suffered greatly from its own superstitions, putting aside how its core ideas and premises might be categorized. This situation led to cathedrals being covered by gargoyles, to strange incantations and rituals melding local folklore with some central religious ideology, and more. Because the faith community has been in nearly the same boat of ignorance as its congregations, it should be no surprise the community of faith also could make some missteps. (No one would deny the common man has made many missteps, would they?) And among these has be one not much acknowledged to date: a reliance upon the material world to provide support for its religious assertions.

Meanwhile science has arisen and advanced, now sufficiently that it is at every turn stepping on faith's supports in the material world. Science has begun to assemble a robust and compelling explanation for things faith has relied upon across the centuries as demonstrations of the correctness of its assertions. Thus it should be no surprise that faith is feeling squeezed by the advances of science. And that squeeze is being felt in no place greater than science's sophisticated understanding of how man formed and manifested in this world.

Faith recognized millennia ago any convincing belief system has to provide its constituency with an explanation of man's origins if it is to be taken seriously. Most every system of faith has such an explanation. As well, enduring systems have offered a description of man's destiny and by all this some glimpse of what man is. These developments have led to the fundamentals of faith known around the world: soul and afterlife and God (the source -- origin -- of man).

Now science has come along with an alternative explanation complete with considerable evidence. Today we see faith reacting as if its authority is being threatened by these developments. So faith is attacking science.

Some will insist science is not the target, that the target is only one idea from science -- evolution. But this claim obscures the fact evolution arose as an idea in exactly the same way as have all other developments in science -- by inquiry, exploration, examination of what is known, the development of inferences from the data, and the devising of tests or predictions by which those inferences can be proven and extended. So for faith to suggest science has missed in the realm of evolution while performing well in all the other spheres of its interests rings hollow.

Basically faith's efforts to deny the understandings of science will only extend the suffering of the very people they claim to be serving. Faith's efforts to spread disinformation about science, faith's agenda to erode politically public support for science, faith's insistence its justification and purpose relies upon discarding the findings of science -- all these will eventually make a pariah of faith, and at a time when faith could provide a valuable function for society.

Mankind is faced with some major issues as it becomes an aware world presence. How to integrate various cultures in ways that honor all cultures yet allow people to share in the abundance that is now possible? How to understand and explain who we are in light of the discoveries of science, psychology, neurology? How to find a basis for morality? How to treat our world sustainably?

Instead we see efforts to defend old turf, and further, we see efforts to sustain by force ideas so archaic they require ever more repressive child-rearing practices lest the new ones (the children) coming into our world point out to one and all that "the emperor has no clothes".

People are being asked to grow up. Mankind is entering a sort of puberty. (One wonders what will manifest out of mankind's emerging "fertility".) Like any other adolescent, we are having a fit, and trying some pretty wild stuff. But it is quite clear, if mankind's adolescence has any commonality with the adolescence we all must transverse individually, then who we are to become will only remotely reflect who we were in our childhood.

It's all very exciting and a time to be extra alert! Remember: Adolescents are a bit accident-prone.