On simplistic distinctions between science and faith

On simplistic distinctions between science and faith

[I originally posted this on Facebook on May 10, 1014.]

As a human being who tries to remain aware and sensitive, as a student of psychology and a counselor, and as someone who in some contexts could aptly be termed a "religious" person, I observe that conceptually dividing the world into two categories, the religious and the irreligious, or people of faith versus people of science, and then proceeding to label one as the cause of progress and good, and the other as the source of the world's evils, is inadequate to the complexity of the universe we inhabit.

First of all, the terms themselves are oversimplifications. Those who claim to be strict materialists or strictly scientific nonetheless have aspects of their vision of reality that are driven by trust in things or ideas they have not (at least yet) been able to prove. And religious people are not devoid of reliance on evidence and their senses. The balance of reality for everybody I know includes things that are treated as truth because evidence is there to support them, things treated as truth because it is anticipated that evidence will be forthcoming, and things treated as truth because they seem fundamental to who and what we are—which is taken as being evidence enough, even if it is not sufficient to convince someone else who claims to have a fundamentally different experience of reality. In other words, in every person I have met, reliance on evidence and reliance on faith exists in a complex interrelationship and on a spectrum, rather than as a pure binary alternative.

Whether we describe ourselves as people of faith or adherents to science, the bulk of what we know we know without knowing how we know it. This is confirmed by neuroscience’s observations regarding the implicit, tacit nature of most of our knowledge, and also confirmed by philosophical and ancient religious statements about the relationship of belief and evidence in the act of knowledge. Science is a specific mode of thought that seeks, in a disciplined and consistent way, to test and articulate explanations that pertain to particular swaths of this knowledge, sometimes leading to radical revisions of our former picture of reality. None of us, though, refrain from living until all elements of our reality have been proven. Many things we feel certain of could indeed be revised in light of further testing—from the chair that looks stable (yet breaks when I sit on it), to the black holes that seem to obliterate everything (yet actually retain, in scrambled form, the information they devour)—but we are often content to let life itself be the means by which we determine these things, willing to risk a potentially failed experiment for the sake of the freedom of the relatively spontaneous life that this makes possible for us.

Secondly, though, to the extent one may nonetheless succeed in cleanly categorizing people into two clear groups, religious and non-religious, it is an oversimplification and incorrect to attribute goodness and progress to one side and evils to the other. The scientific impulse has been steered in directions that have resulted in good things, but also been employed towards things that are morally problematic or reprehensible. The same can be said of the religious impulse. Each impulse, in its own unique way, has contributed to progress at times and retrogression at others. For example, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr. demonstrate qualities, generally lauded for facilitating progress, which can be said to grow from their perspectives of faith, and Newton, Copernicus, Madame Curie, and Jonas Salk relied on materialist hypotheses to learn things that help us navigate natural phenomena in beneficial ways. On the other hand, the Inquisition and a variety of fundamentalist campaigns represent negative expressions of the religious impulse, while Joseph Stalin represents the evil potential of one who claims to represent a purely rational and materialistic approach. At the same time, it would be an oversimplification to say that Stalin's atheism caused his moral destructiveness, just as it would be an oversimplification to say that everyone who believes in a God demonstrates moral superiority. There are plenty who identify themselves as atheists who are exemplary in character and behavior, and plenty who identify as believers who are reprehensible.

Along with pointing towards how goodness and evil defy simple allocation to religious or scientific perspectives, the above examples also further illustrate how hard it is to find unmixed instances of these impulses in real people: I cannot say that Gandhi never relied on evidence any more than I can say that Stalin was not driven by a passion that seems to evince a kind of faith. Indeed, not everyone who claims faith declares war on science, anyway—and vice versa. Placing the two in absolute opposition to each other seems to be only the project of zealots on both sides. In addition, the variety of ways in which people define terms such as "God" and talk about things that are of "ultimate concern" to them, and the variety of ways in which people understand what it means to believe or not believe, adds exponentially to the complexity I have already described.

My point in this is that the simple (to the point of simplistic) way of dividing people and reality fails to account for the complexity of our actual experience. Moreover, it does not give us a compelling platform to discuss what drives us forward as people and as a species and what sets us back. To be flexible enough to do justice to this task requires us to be able to speak of healthy and unhealthy expressions of the faith/religious impulse, and healthy and unhealthy expressions of the scientific impulse—and then, further, to insist on the right to continue the debate about what constitutes health and non-health. Only then can I deal adequately with the fact that each side has unique potentials and unique shadows. Increasingly, anything less than this kind of flexibility results in statements that fall flat on listeners' ears, because they simply don’t ring true, and because they are perceived (correctly, I believe) as hiding unconscious assumptions. In other words, the simple version of reality seems out of touch with the most significant findings of both faith and science alike.