I have been thinking of what to talk about when I next speak at the Unitarian Fellowship, which occasion is coming up in about 5 weeks. Dodie suggested Chet Raymo or William Hamilton, so I looked them up on Wikipedia and found Raymo to be associated with the “Religious Naturalism” movement and Hamilton with the “God is Dead” movement. The latter seemed on cursory reading to be a strident, updated version of Nietzsche but emphasizing that God has died “in our time,” whatever that means. I’m not into stridency these days anyway, so I declined to pursue that topic further. I read a fair amount about religious naturalism, and its striking feature seems to me to be the synthesis of the two, generally thought to be opposing, ideas that nature is real and that nature–not the supernatural–is sacred. The implication is that in modern society, maybe even ever since the rise of monotheism, the sacred has been posited as supernatural–above nature–rather than as part of it. That seemed to have potential though the religious naturalism website seemed a combination of obvious and vague. I moved to reading Raymo’s blog, which contained some very interesting posts, none of which were obviously connected to religious naturalism.
So, I started thinking on my own about the connection between religion and science. I am intrigued by how much they have in common. Both purport to explain the world, the seen in terms of the unseen. Both posit an essential ineffability underneath or beyond the world of human ken. Both give primacy to the unseen over the seen. Both posit human complexity, even self-contradiction.
To me their essential distinction is that religions of various kinds give us ends: God wants you to behave like this. Science gives us means: If you want to accomplish this better or more easily, you should do it that way. They are, in a very erudite piece of jargon, non-overlapping magisteria: they are concerned with different aspects of the human experience. But to me, it’s fairly simple: religion (Western, at least) will dictate for you your goals, and science will help you try to achieve them. For example, science will equally well help you discover and construct antibiotics to save lives and guns to cut them short. It’s ultimately religion, or its cousin faith, at least, that you adopt to decide whether it’s better to cure people or kill them–and which ones.
(Part of the oversimplified nature of this comparison is that each Western religion embodies contradictions, so that in the Old Testament, for instance, God tells the Israelites to slaughter Canaanites just for taking up space in the Promised Land, whereas God also says, “Thou shalt not kill.”)