OUR EVOLVING VIEWS OF RELIGION

When I was in fifth grade in Brooklyn, I recall reading books in the school library on mythology. I was engrossed by the ancient Egyptian and Greek deities.  At the time I had no religion because both of my parents had abandoned their religious beliefs before I was born. This gave me the freedom to think about religion without feelings of guilt.  One thought I had was almost astounding to me.  No one in 1942 believed that Zeus, Hercules, Athena, Aeolus, Medusa, and dozens of other Greek gods were actual gods.  We referred to them as myths of the past.  But at their time (and for many centuries) virtually all of those living in the Greek civilization from Homer to the rise of the Roman empire believed in those deities, worshipped them, prayed to them, and made sacrifices to them.  If gods come and go over the millennia, why do we believe any religion is the one true religion and all others are mistaken? Later, in high school, I took a somewhat different view of religion as an attempt to make sense of the universe, especially our own lives at a time when science was non-existent or knew very little about the universe and how it works and its past history.  

About 1960 I took an interest in Unitarians because it was a creedless religion and Nedra and i sought a place where both of us would be comfortable. Some of the Unitarian ministers over the years have considered themselves atheists or agnostics. Like me, they thought religion provided something valuable but it wasn’t the supernatural.  What attracted me to them was their belief that humans form and need communities.  A religion that does not offer a creed, but instead offers humans a chance to think about questions that are important—like why there is existence, how life began, what meaning do we create for the one life we have on earth, and why we have so many diverse answers to these questions, I found immensely appealing.  Despite efforts of religious leaders to make religion permanently fixed in its creed, rituals, and status among hundreds of other contending religions, religions undergo change. There are hundreds of Christian denominations ranging from liberal to rigid (“fundamentalist”) in their interpretations.  A similar spectrum (but with fewer denominations) exist for Jews. There are many forms of Buddhism. There are different Muslim traditions; the most familiar to those who are not Muslims are the Shiite and Sunni branches in the Middle East. 

Everything changes.  I expect many religions will be demoted to the status of myths and new ones will arise to meet the needs of cultures that may not arise for hundreds of years.  They will have different views of life and society we cannot predict.  If humans can extend life so that most people could live reasonably healthy lives for 100 to 120 years, I expect those with 50 years of retirement will have different needs from those who are considered old today in their 70s.  If we do colonize the moon or Mars in the next two or three centuries, I would not be surprised that their religious views will show the same tendency to diversity as those that have evolved on earth. 

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HOW SCIENCE AND RELIGION DIFFER IN THEIR METHODS AND OBJECTIVES


Science tries to understand the universe from the very tiny (atoms and their particles) to the very large (galaxies and their formation). It limits itself to the material world (the world that consists of matter and energy) and it uses reductionism as its methodology. This means it assumes complex objects can be taken apart into their components and reassembled to show that all of the components are accounted for. It works by a process called incrementalism – knowledge is built up bit by bit over generations to work things out that are very complicated like cells or macromolecules, or the means by which stars generate light and energy. It relies on technology because as humans we are limited to our senses and our eyes do not see as far as telescopes or distinguish the minuscule as effectively as microscopes. Nor can our unaided senses separate out molecules from one another as effectively as chromatography. Where possible scientists test things by designing experiments. They use reason as a tool to look for contradictions and construct theories from myriads of facts.

Religions attempt to relate how humans should live with each other and find meaning in the universe. Most religions invoke the existence of a God to justify that meaning or purpose in life. This requires a reliance on authority, sometimes scriptural (like a Bible or Koran) or the hierarchy of the religion (as in the primacy of the Pope for Roman Catholics). It also relies on tradition especially for the practice of rites or other obligations associated with the religion from clothing to foods to rituals. Those involved in a religious community accept these aspects through faith. Some features of the components of a religion are derived from revelation, a supernatural source of knowledge transmitted by conversation with the divine or from dreams and other sources. The totality of shared beliefs in any one of hundreds of different religions can be described as its creed or set of faith-based beliefs.

Religions and science collide when they discuss the origins of the universe, our galaxy, our sun, our earth, life on this earth, and human life. Most religions have some form of narrative of how these components of the universe arose. We call those narratives myths when referring to dead religions like those of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. They also collide when natural events (such as evolution or the individual life cycle) are interpreted by religions as being guided or drawn to some ultimate purpose. Science also interprets disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and volcanic eruptions by relying on factors such as temperature changes in the ocean, plate tectonic dynamics, the melting of a winter’s mass of snow and ice, and the erosion of rock by molten lava under pressure. Some religions prefer to look upon these as punishments meted out by God to chasten the unfaithful. All natural processes, to them, are reflections of a divine will. Science also does not invoke the miraculous or supernatural processes of any kind. Most of humanity can keep these two different systems as meeting different needs, which is one reason science continues to flourish and its practitioners are not rounded up to be burned at a stake. A small portion of humanity, alas, sees science as a threat to the faith of its future generations, a view that reflects its insecurity.