The Truth about Religious “Truth”; or, Let Me Tell You Where You Can Stick Your “Different Way of Knowing”
If you follow the accommodationist debates at all, you know that one defense both religious and non-religious folk give for the compatibility of religion and science is that each is a different “way of knowing,” or a different way of “reaching truth.” So let’s talk about religion as a “way of knowing,” and about the “truths” that religion nets us.
Imagine you had never encountered a “religion” before, and someone told you that they were a member of an organization that had been founded by a benevolent, all-knowing, all-powerful being, and that this being had imparted teachings to its followers that explained certain things about the natural world and about the human condition. What would you expect to be true about this organization, and about those teachings?
- You would expect the claims this organization makes about the natural world to be more correct and more descriptive of reality than the theories and claims of mere humans, since the former claims are based on the teachings of an benevolent, all-knowing being, and the latter are based on empirical evidence at best and on guessing, lies or storytelling at worst.
- You would expect any claims this organization made about the future to come true more often than future claims made by a mere human.
- You would expect members of this organization to have a better understanding of human relationships, human happiness and human ethics than could be arrived at by a mere human.
Let’s look at how religion stacks up.
First, are the claims religions make about the natural world even minimally true? Not usually. Religion gave us creationism, after all, as well as various bizarre and often harmful theories of disease. If a religion truly were inspired by some all-knowing deity, you would expect its adherents to have known about the true age of the earth before science discovered radiometric dating, and about the germ theory of disease centuries, if not millennia, before science even imagined it.
Second, how good is religion at predicting the future? Uh, not good. All of the “true” prophecies I’m aware of can either be attributed to chance, to revision of history after the fact, or to creative reading of the prophecy.
Third, science has shown that religious people are happier in a certain sense than non-religious people, so this is potentially a point in religion’s favor. However, I remain skeptical about this, because I don’t feel there have been enough studies to control for all the variables—for instance, whether this greater feeling of well-being is due to a placebo effect of sorts (religious people often feel they are expected to be happy, after all) or to the sense of community religion fosters rather than to some ineffable blessing from god that non-religious communities cannot duplicate.
But whether or not religious people are happier themselves, I feel that religion has a terrible track record on pretty much every other aspect of the human condition. Traditional religious marriages are sexist, oppressive, and heteronormative. Religion is currently the most vocal proponent of homophobia, sexism, racism and xenophobia in the world. You’d think that organizations inspired by a benevolent being would be ahead of the love-and-tolerance curve, not behind it.
I grew up in a religion that makes some very strong claims about its own nature and about reality. I was taught that God had pronounced himself on any number of subjects, through living, inspired prophets that were alive and led his church today. God was very interested in what my family looked like, what people I was sexually attracted to and had sex with, whether I got married, whether I had kids. Furthermore, he had opinions on all those subjects, and I was promised that if I followed his advice I would be happy.
Well, guess what. The Heavenly Father I was taught about is apparently a raging homophobe, and doesn’t even believe homosexuals exist. I am gay, so you can imagine how well his advice for worked out for me. He also apparently knows a great deal about health. For instance, drinking tea, ever, is damaging to one’s health. More detrimental, apparently, than drinking cola, because he’s never mentioned that. The religion I grew up in also believes in a literal interpretation of most of the Bible, including the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (a tale that plays an integral role in the secret ceremonies that take place in Mormon temples), Noah and the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and on and on and on.
All of these truth claims are false. All of the special truth claims I’ve investigated in other religions have either turned out to be false, unverifiable, or incoherent. A couple months ago, Jerry Coyne (author of Why Evolution Is True, and one of those “strident New Atheists” accommodationists are always going on about) announced a little contest on his blog, with a signed copy of his book as a prize. Here was the solitary rule:
Using the Oxford English Dictionary definition of truth given below, please name one truth about the world and/or universe that has been arrived at by faith alone, could not be arrived at by secular reason or science, and that is true in that it is in principle verifiable by all people.
OED: Truth: Conformity with fact; agreement with reality
No one won.
I encourage you to read Coyne’s full blog post for a few addenda, and then to read the comments for all the many suggestions people made of truths they thought were revealed uniquely by religion. And then, if you think you can top all of those suggestions, I encourage you to email your contribution to Jerry Coyne. You might not get an autographed copy of Why Evolution Is True out of it, but you might get a reply, explaining why your suggestion is insufficient, and that is EDUCATION. Which is yet another thing science is better at that religion.
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July 9th, 2009 at 9:05 am
At the risk of playing..er..Devil’s advocate, science is hardly free from it’s own forms of dogma and heresy. There are also plenty of things in the natural world that science still cannot explain. That doesn’t make them any less real.
Take intuition. Whether you ascribe it to divine influence or a series of synaptic (mis?)firings that lead to an unexpected conclusion, there is currently no proof of either.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that religion is an equally valid way of knowing. Religion isn’t a way of knowing at all. It’s a way of feeling, and therein lies the problem. Evolution and divinity aren’t inherently incompatible. Some people just can’t let go of their need to be right.
“Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”
“The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.”
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
These quotes are attributed to Albert Einstein. The first two appear to come from a conference address given by Einstein in 1941. If I had more time, I’d try and find something resembling a citation for the last one. Unfortunately, I don’t at the moment.
July 9th, 2009 at 10:07 am
Except saying that science has “dogma” and “heresy” doesn’t address the point at all, because, while those are words borrowed from religion, they don’t describe the same kind of thing. Whether or not a certain scientist (or, in fact, every scientist in the world) holds on stubbornly to a theory in the face of mounting evidence, or sets forth an unfalsifiable hypothesis, that has nothing to do with science—because at the moment those scientists start ignoring evidence, or making unfalsifiable claims (as Intelligent Design does), they’ve stopped doing science. Religious heretics may step outside the bounds of orthodoxy, but they generally don’t step outside the bounds of religion itself.
Furthermore, intuition—insofar as it deals with the natural world—is in principle susceptible to scientific inquiry. We could formulate theories about its reliability, its scope, its application and its origin, and construct experiments that could verify or falsify our hypotheses. Again, this is exactly the opposite of religion, which tries to make claims about the natural world while rejecting any contrary evidence.
Religious people do tend to feel very strongly that certain things are true, and mistake this strong feeling for knowledge or revelation or spiritual confirmation. But I’m not sure what the point is of calling religion a “way of feeling.” Guessing and wishing and WANTING REALLY HARD are equally valid “ways of feeling,” and we don’t give those methods any credence at all, or invent categories to put them in.
Einstein was an atheist as far as I understand the term. Here’s the last quote as it stands in the New Scientist Space Blog (apparently quoted from his book The World as I See It):
A beautiful quote, but not an argument for any useful kind of religion, or anything I really would call “religious.” Maybe “mystical,” or “spiritual” (although I loathe both words)?
Also, on reading the address you linked to, I instantly have a problem where he starts bringing up the old “Non-overlapping magisteria” argument for the compatibility of science and religion, mostly because that argument requires you to a) radically redefine religion in a way that doesn’t actually describe the way religion works in reality (who are we to tell a Southern Baptist that they’re “doing their religion wrong”?) and b) either deny that science has anything to say about ethical determinations, or give religion a privileged position when it comes to ethics, which I think religion has in no way earned for itself. Religion-based ethics have historically been pernicious, misguided and harmful.
July 9th, 2009 at 11:54 am
I just got an email this morning telling me Why Evolution is True is ready to be picked up at the library. I love coincidences.
I think the main problem comes from ignorance of what science and scientific theory really are. Why people prefer an arbitrary god to an arbitrary universe I’ll never know.
And I’m pretty sure Einstein was pantheist (but it’s essentially indistinguishable from atheism so I don’t think it really matters).