The Dark Side of Science as Religion

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:50:45 +0000

A dark side can be found for anything. Certainly the Catholic Church has had its dark moments. After all, it is full of sinners. However, one can convincingly make the argument that the dark side of Catholicism is not due to its doctrine, but due to the failure of people to live up to its doctrine. When science attempts to replace religion as the source of meaning in life, the dark side becomes inherent in its doctrine. After all, for a naturalist the purpose of life stops at the propagation of the species. Naturalists are confronted with personal angst when they face death. Neither are platitudes absent from such a worldview. Telling a widow that her husband will “live in on our memories” is nothing short of a naturalist platitude. There is no afterlife, but our individual lives continue in the memories of others and in the genes we managed to hand down to the next generation. What true value can an individual life have in such a philosophy?

A scientific religion would probably have few mystics. However, one who might qualify for the role would be H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s modern Gothic horror fiction carries a single message – the universe is brutally apathetic about the individual person. His horror is often grounded in secular evolutionary philosophies – the monsters in one story turn out to be de-evolved human beings. Supernatural elements tend to be alien or demonic forces, with no recourse to supernatural Goodness in sight. Horrors go on under the surface of human awareness all the time, and the universe doesn’t care.

One story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” begins with a doctrinal statement about Truth.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

In Catholic thought, the disassociation of elements of truth leads to error. We do not read the Bible as a collection of proof texts (that is why most Catholics do not memorize chapter and verse), but as a whole. We do not support science separated from philosophy, theology and divine Wisdom. The totality of Truth leads to He who is Truth, Goodness and Beauty Himself.

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A Reading from the Gospel According to Hawking . . .

Jeffrey S. Arrowood, MTS — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:26:57 +0000

When we falsely divide the Truth, we are often left with the ridiculous. Science has held a place of pride in Catholic thought as a quest to understand God’s Creation. Science has always been seen as compatible with philosophy and theology. Reason and science are used to show that belief in God is reasonable. A belief in a God of order and Truth fuels the scientific belief that the world is knowable and worth knowing. Philosophy fills in with reason the areas of worldly knowledge that science cannot know (for example, “What is love?”). Theology elevates philosophy and science beyond the pragmatic, utilitarians uses (the mistaken equivalence of science and technology). These three methods of finding truth – science, philosophy, and theology – complement each other and support each other in the Catholic mindset (and are perfected by Wisdom, intimate knowledge of the Persons of the Trinity). To separate them would be to weaken them.

But they have been separated, and they have been damaged. The French “Enlightenment” tore science away from religion and set it in opposition to faith. Since then, we have gotten to the point where philosophy barely exists as a true discipline in our culture. Theology has become secularized and humanized. Science as become the utilitarian development of technology. Attempts to reunite them in their weakened state may seem like a unique, cutting-edge thought experiment. The truth is, they should never have been separated in the first place.

Because science seems to be opposed to faith, many “scientists” now assume that faith is nothing more than unfounded superstition. While there is some recognition that religion fulfills a psychological needs for dealing with things like morality and death, for the most part this population of “scientists” would prefer to see religion die.

One current of thought even wonders if science could fulfill these psychological needs without superstition and therefore replace religion.

The article “Artist Builds Temple of Science” on the Wired Science blog tells of a thought experiment to create a “scientific religion.”

At a time when the gulf between religion and science is growing ever greater, an artist has erected a temple for scientific worship.

Jonathon Keats, designer of the petri dish God, built The Atheon to get people thinking about what a scientific religion (or religious science?) would look and feel like.

Keats’ conception of that idea took shape as a two-story building complete with stained-glass windows patterned after cosmic microwave background radiation and a liturgy based on the sounds of the Big Bang. The Atheon opened Sept. 27 at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California.

But, could science replace religion?

Asking if science can replace religion is like asking if the windshield could replace the car. True religion is an attempt to know all Truth. It uses science as one tool among many to understand Creation and the God who made it.

In his interview with Wired Science, John Keats explains,

I heard about the Beyond Belief conference in 2006. Richard Dawkins was there, and Steven Weinberg, and Neil Degrasse Tyson. They were trying to figure out what science might do to provide an alternative to religion. There wasn’t a consensus, but there was momentum towards the idea that science could do everything religion could, that it could be everything religion had been.

Of course, what they mean by “science could do everything that religion could” is that science could easily play the role of religion as they see it — an eviscerated social construction with a narrative full of platitudes to explain inexplicable things like the meaning of life in the face of death. They do not mean “religion” as an encounter with the living God.

To Keats’ credit, he does at least acknowledge the limitations of science, and he recognizes that the separation between science and religion is unnecessary.

I’m deeply sympathetic to both sides of a schism that doesn’t need to be. I hope it doesn’t widen to such a degree that we become, in intellectual terms, two different species.

When asked by Wired Science about the role religion plays in morality, Keats responds,

Maybe the first thing science can do is recognize that, parse it, and be scientific in terms of asking good questions. Why do we believe the things we do morally, or that guide us and give us comfort?

What Keats and his ilk will discover from such as “scientific” journey into morality is what Catholics call the natural law. You see, Keats is not doing anything original here. Like a young adult who cannot wait to get “out on his own” in college, to break away from his parents, only to find that he has adopted his parents’ ideals and thought processes despite himself, scientists are now “discovering” truths that have long been part of the Catholic intellectual tradition. Keats believes that science can put human beings in touch with mystery, if only it would reject the erroneous assumption that it can know all things. The Catholic Church has always seen science as part of an integrated quest to explore the mysteries of the world could draw us more deeply into the Mystery of God.

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The Dark Side of Science as Religion

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