This essay by biologist E.O. Wilson, published on the New Scientist site, is an excerpt from his afterword to an edition of four books by Darwin that was published a couple of years ago. The essay describes three viewpoints on humans and their place in the universe: a religious view that sees us as created by a deity; political behaviorism, which sees us as more or less perfectible blank slates that can be shaped to the culture’s needs; and scientific humanism, which is the bedrock of my own worldview. Scientific humanism sees us as products of evolution, and scientific humanism alone really sees us as what I call thinking meat—intelligent animals whose nature is a unique and complicated blend of animal necessity and mental activity. Wilson goes on to predict that religion and scientific humanism are likely to go on butting heads, finding neither agreement nor accommodation, because the differences between the two are increasing as we learn more and more about biology.
He says that there’s something about religion that “divides people and amplifies societal conflict”. This brings to mind something that a friend of mine pointed out once. Science tends to hone in on an answer to a particular question; alternatives are pared away by peer-reviewed experimentation and replication of results. At its best, scientific discoveries can not only narrow down the possible answers to a question, but unite disparate facts and observations by finding the underlying order. Religion, on the other hand, is a much more fragmented thing. I doubt there ever was a single religion or deity that everyone on the planet knew, and even religions that have dominated huge segments of the Earth’s population have been characterized by sects and divisions. I’m not sure why this is so, but I think it has to do with the purposes of religion and science. Religion is much more shaped to the needs of a particular community or mindset, whereas science is tuned to the objective facts to be observed in the world. Wilson points out that religion harms as well as benefits humankind, and closes his essay by wondering if scientific humanism might be able to provide the benefits without the social costs of religion. I guess first we have to wait and see if it ever becomes more than a minority viewpoint, and then see how it does.
If religion is different in that it is specifically responsive to society’s needs — yet it is still harmful to society — then I don’t see how we would expect science to do any better.
I’ve often seen it expressed that everyone’s gods are ultimately the same god, with many faces. It’s the same god because ultimately it’s just a culture’s way of understanding the survival equation of the world around them. If you eat rotted pig, you die, god must be trying to tell me something. If you take the land for granted, you die; if you fight amongst yourselves with no resolution, you die; if you leave the clan, you die; if you piss off the rain god, you die; if you let the Other have the fertile land, you die. Different cultures have learned different lessons from these basic interactions with That Which Decides Life And Death (TWDLAD).
Now we know that TWDLAD is essentially a pile of principles acting over time which we call evolution. That doesn’t mean that these faces don’t exist anymore, or that they aren’t useful ways to interact with TWDLAD. TWDLAD is still important, TWDLAD is still something worth respect and thanks.
So what I’m getting at is that the underlying god that all religious worldviews have in common, the only possible key to world peace (besides armageddon), is exactly what is termed here “scientific humanism.” It is not in conflict with religion, it is the common center of all religions.
That concludes this lesson in pantheism, tune in next week! 🙂
The central role of incomprehensibility in definitions of and attempts to understand god is also very important here. The basic role of god is often to serve as a means of personifying–and thus “understanding”–forces that defy analysis. How this role can be effectively preserved as more of these forces are understood mechanistically is unclear.
This also gives rise to what I tend to see as the central paradox of religion: we start with the unknown, give it a name and (sometimes) a face, and then treat it as if it were a powerful person to be placated and beseeched. But, at least in religions such as Christianity, the essential unknowability is maintained dogmatically (and used as a universal rebuttal for criticism, among other things). So we get a god that is first unknown and unknowable, but second given various attributes and assumed to be responsive to various actions.
Patrick