Plasma Pool

cowritten with Kevin Hilke

***

We live in a world in which nearly everything can be explained by science. Religious answers to questions sophisticated enough to evade scientific explanation appear limited or even primitive to a worldly contemporary thinker. There are so many discrete religious faiths, and their doctrines are so diverse and divergent, that anyone claiming a secular objectivity could not possibly invest his sincere, unironic faith in any particular one. Such was the experience of Elliott Callahan, who recently published an essay in which he parallels his personal transformation from devout Christian to militant atheist with the gradual diversification of his interpersonal sphere. Callahan tells us that as he learned more about the world, “[God] retreated farther and farther into the dark recesses of improbability, until ultimately, the alternatives to the Unmoved Mover were sufficiently plausible” that he was forced to jettison his faith. Our own respective drifts from religious faith paralleled Callahan’s in many ways, but had less to do with faith’s deficits than science’s benefits, and ultimately has instilled in us a deep and abiding appreciation for the positive individual and social potential of organized religion.

...except when it doesn't.*

Like Callahan, as our worldviews broadened to include more than a devout Christian environment (in Jason’s case) and a lapsed Catholicism (in Kevin’s), each of us gradually found maintaining an unironic religious faith impossible. As Callahan reminds us, science seeks to vet, improve, and expand upon its collection of theories, its body of knowledge; science is able, willing, and even eager to augment or uproot its conceptions of phenomena. Religions, in contrast, are singular and relatively immutable, relying for their authority on the consistency of their metaphysical convictions and the symbols and rituals taken to express these convictions, and an investment of faith in particular physical rituals and symbols. Like a body of scientific knowledge, these symbols and rituals may change over time. But whereas in science new ideas and information change the edifice of science itself, in religion, new ideas and information tend to produce more religions, rupturing repeatedly from one another, each absolutely convicted to the righteousness of its particularisms. Each individual system of religious belief is strictly self-affirmative, seeking to square the world with itself. Science, in contrast, seeks to be self-corrective, to square itself with the world.

But this does not mean, as Callahan seems to think, that science and religion cannot coexist as productive and exclusive counterpoints to each other. Even when the edifice of rational western thought is brought to the ground, these apparent opposites can be kept coherent; one picks up perfectly where the other falls short, for the essence of one is the discovery of what is, and the other what ought to be, or what cannot be discovered empirically. A surprising number of contemporary Christians have, due to the influence of science and rationality in modern society, followed science’s skeptical example, acknowledging that biblical parables cannot be taken literally; that creationism is problematic (or an unnecessary sham); that the divinity of the historical human being Jesus Christ—even the existence of God as Christianity has traditionally conceived him—are highly improbable. For all the difficulty science and religion have reconciling themselves in theory and in public discourse, they reconcile themselves within the minds of individuals with incredible frequency and ease. This fact alone—that there are so many “otherwise rational” Christians—indicates that religion can be, and in the minds of many is, more often benign than hegemonic; that individuals really do tend to pick and choose from what they want of both, forging a unique and deeply personal way of making their scientific and religious selves hang together. For some within religious communities who pride themselves on their rationality, religion can become a set of symbols and customs whose community strengthening and personally fortifying effects are sufficiently powerful for a measured suspension of rational disbelief.

Callahan would likely say that this amounts to self-delusion. But what, precisely, do we sacrifice in this bargain? Are there issues on which both science and religion speak that a rational believer is inhibited from properly conceiving or approaching? Not if he is indeed rational, for there is much within the sphere of religion that science should, by its own principles, simply exclude from its purview—for instance, the claim to have definitive knowledge of an afterlife. Science might be able to explain the physical and cognitive processes that accompany end-of-life experiences, but it cannot speak one way or another to the “authenticity” of those experiences, nor to the “reality” of patients glimpses of the beyond. Science, again, seeks by definition to study and understand only measurable natural phenomena; and so it is entirely possible for an individual to both thoroughly understand and endorse the complete body of facts and theories that science has to offer and believe. What harm can come of this, if a person does not force his religion on others, but uses it only for himself? What if he is happier with those beliefs? We can understand why some might not want this arrangement for themselves, but why should the psychic foundation of another individual’s belief trouble them? What tangible harm does it do?

Whatever the answers to that question, it does much good. Though fundamentally irrational, religion both acts as a moralizing force for the non-rational and reinforces the morality of those who came to their beliefs through rigorous discourse and reflection by providing symbols and figures who set powerful and useful examples often lacking in a modern pluralistic society. Religion can both inculcate us with the basic moral rules of idealized polite society (such as being a good Samaritan) and, for the rational contemplative, provide entire philosophies for progressive social change. Take that of Jesus Christ, whose emphasis on charity is undeniable and yet today goes largely unspoken in American public discourse. Religion, in acting as both a source of simple but crucial rules for societal interaction and a (potential; today largely untapped) source of progressive philosophical inspiration, also provides the devout literalist Christian and the rational Christian—provides the strictly faithful and the scientifically faithful—with a common popular vocabulary with which to articulate mutual hopes, fears, dreams, and desires.

This vocabulary, as a matter of practical social equilibrium and stability, cannot be easily or abruptly liquidated or replaced in either a society or an individual. We are not prepared, structurally or psychically, for a wholesale abandonment of religion. As more literalist forms of religious belief continue to shrink with the advance of science, the positive and transformative potential of belief, the tangible good that it can engender, will and should prevent the extinction of belief as a whole. Rather than marginalize devout believers—rather than engage in a dubious crusade to force individuals to disavow the beliefs on which they have founded their very lives—we must work deliberately to bring all religious groups into the scientific and cultural mainstream, our best bet for attaining a unified society whose religious elements are wholly more rational and whose irrational religious elements are more effectively contained and usefully directed.

Devout individuals are, obviously, even less prepared than religious societies to abandon belief. Most still require the stability of a system of supernatural beliefs simply to live their day-to-day lives. They are by far the majority throughout human history. Rational or irrational, they are the reality. We are not all equally rational. Though some of us may be able to lead happy, fulfilled lives with only an awe of the natural universe, a love of the freedom we have within it to make ourselves and others happy, and the self-confidence to do all of those things without crippling self-consciousness, this is not a realistic vision for everyone. Devout individuals who become ready to question their beliefs, whether thanks to encounters with science or encounters with competing religious systems, will do so on their own. Neither Callahan nor we can prod them along.

***

*Image borrowed from xkcdstore.