Monday, October 12, 2009

On Science and Religion

Too many Christians these days are trying to reconcile their faith with science. “Maybe science is the how, and God is the why,” they will say. Unfortunately this makes them very poor Christians and even worse scientists, for religion and science are mutually exclusive.

Science requires a complete lack of passion and attachment. A theory is a good theory while it explains current observations and continues to predict future observations accurately. Even atomic theory, with its reams of repeatable observations and new observations being made daily as it predicted, is neither true nor false. In a sense it is both and it is neither. It might be hard for some scientists to ever accept that the atom doesn’t really exist, but as we delve further into quantum mechanics they may have to do just that.

Religion, on the other hand, demands both passion and absolute attachment. Religion is a matter of faith, and should not waiver regardless of observation. Religion need not justify itself with repeatable observations, and must in fact hold steady in the light of contradictory evidence. Religion is not based on personal observation, but rather folklore of previous observations which must be believed.

This isn’t to say that a religious person cannot be a good scientist, nor vice versa. For science and religion to co-exist within a single mind, however, they must be mutually exclusive. Where observation contradicts religion, it must be accepted dispassionately as the way the world works, which is independent of any concept of God. Where dogma contradicts observation, it must be taken on faith that it is so, regardless of the evidence at hand.

Personally I have no religion because I have seen too much contradiction within religion itself – but I have not abandoned it, nor would I abandon it, based on any contradiction with science for the two are, and should be, mutually exclusive.

Atheism

My ThinkAthiest page

Atheism is not the absence of belief in a god, it is the belief that there is no god. The difference is very significant. If you are a theist in a crisis of faith, you may have lost your belief, but you are not an atheist, otherwise you would have no crisis. I know this, because I grew up as a theist, and was fully immersed in the cannon of not one, but two religions. That, in fact, was likely the start of my crisis of faith.

One of my grandmothers was Catholic, and the other was Pentecostal. They alternated taking me to church on Sunday. Needless to say this was very confusing. Aside from the conflicts in dogma, the difference in the ceremony was difficult to keep in sync. I had to really focus to remember whether I was to jump, holler, and wave my arms emphatically or just stand still and hang my head in guilt. The real problem came when it was time for 'confirmation' in the Catholic church. My pentecostal grandmother said becoming a full fledged Catholic would mean burning in hell for eternity, because they worship idols (the saints). She insisted that I be baptized in the pentecostal church, but my Catholic grandmother said that would result in me burning in hell forever because the pentecostal religion didn't follow the Pope and was therefore not descended from Christ. Fuck, that was a hell of a conundrum for an eleven year old.

Then I had an epiphany. Both religions told me that Jesus would tell me what to do when facing difficult decisions. All I had to do was pray and believe. I prayed, and I prayed. I would stay up half the night praying, trying a catholic prayer with my head hung in guilt, and pentecostal prayers where I rolled around on the floor in a mock seizure. No luck. It made no sense whatsoever to me, because I truly believed that Jesus would talk to me, and most of my family claimed to have heard from him on a number of issues. Finally I asked one grandmother what the voice of Jesus sounded like. That's when her story got shaky. She said that you don't actually hear his voice, contrary to everything I had been told up to this point, but that I would 'feel' what he wanted me to do. Thing was, I was getting no good vibes one way or the other, I was just filled with a horror of burning forever in a pit of fire because God loved me so much.

That's when I decided to put off confirmation and baptism. I felt I had made a responsible decision, but the reactions of my grandmothers were less than encouraging. While at one grandmothers house I told her that I had decided to read the bible, because if that was the word of God then it should be clear what being a Christian means, and from that I could chose my path. She was horribly upset, and asked why I couldn't just believe her, and she told me how much it hurt that I thought she would ever lie to me. When I told her that she had already lied to me about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny she slapped me across the face. My other grandmother hit me on the head with a wooden spoon.

I did read the bible, but at that age it took me almost 2 years. It was especially difficult because as I read it I wasn't finding any references to most of what either religion seemed to be about. The worst part was that there was no real dogma to 'worship' Jesus, in fact it seemed that we were supposed to 'follow' rather than worship. This did not sit well with any Christians I met.

Slowly I came to realize that if a god did exist, he didn't communicate with us - any of us. Furthermore, he offered no recognizable set of rules for us to follow, and really didn't seem to mind that most religions claiming to worship him seemed to make up their own set. So if there is a god, then he has completely hidden himself from us, covered up any trace of 'creation' with evidence to the contrary, and has no expectations of us whatsoever. With this in mind, he is not the god professed by modern religion in any way, and therefore the god they proclaim to exist does not.

I read the bible again, and partly read some English translations of the Koran, but eventually gave up looking. My crisis of faith was over, and I finally found confidence in myself as an Atheist.

UFOs

I believe that there are people who have seen unidentified flying objects which cannot be readily explained by documented natural phenomena or publicly known man made aerial vehicles. That being said, there is no good reason to attribute these flying objects to creatures from another galaxy. One might was well attribute them to angels, demons, elves from middle earth, or Morgrets from Mibbia under the sea.

It is an unrelenting compulsion of humankind to demand an explanation for everything, even if that means creating an explanation completely outside the bounds of reason. Why can't we, at least sometimes, just admit we don't know?

When someone asks me if I believe in aliens, all I can say is, "What's the difference?" What they are really asking is whether or not I believe that aliens are visiting our planet in stealth, abducting people, killing livestock, and conducting secret negotiations with the United States military-industrial complex. Now, if I choose to believe all these things, what am I to do? Unlike god based religious systems, ufology dogma offers no protection from alien abductions or livestock destruction. Of what use then is such belief? Show me how I might communicate with these beings (a repeatable experiment) and then I might be able to use the theory to some end.

Aside from being of no use, ufology lacks continuity. Why would beings with the technology to move from point to point in spacetime faster than the speed of light bother to kidnap us and look in our bums? They have interstellar trans-dimensional warp drives but they lack MRI technology and thus have to resort to an endoscope? Even if I do believe in aliens, I just can't believe this level of incongruity.

To Blog or not to Blog

Why do it? Why excrete reams of amateur philosophy and personal anecdotes into cyberspace? Is it the epitome of megalomania? I suppose it is - if you are deluded enough to believe your views are going to have any impact on the world. On the other hand, if you are just looking for an opportunity to vent in a world where dialogue has become an endangered species, perhaps blogging is just a good way of clarifying your thoughts.

With that in mind, I make my first blog entry, recursively. Hopefully my words will not go completely unnoticed, even if they fail to change a single life, let alone the world.