or integrating God into a mind informed by science
When I see an article like the one sent by Udhay a few days ago, I sigh
and think that the author has never really thought much about God and
religion. I settle back and read a series of knee-jerk reactions to the
more absurd religious tropes. I watch them build a strawman of religious
stupidity and then have the fun of knocking it down. Yay. Science wins
in its own tiltyard.
Religion is big enough, old enough, and varied enough that there are
plenty of easy targets for anyone who wants to dismiss the whole vast
topic. You can show that religion is stupid, venal, cruel, murderous,
and plays into the hands of the power elite. You can build an image of
God from the most ludicrous bits of any theology and hold it up for
ridicule.
I played this game myself up until age 25 or so. Then I got bored. The
game wasn't challenging nor was it particularly interesting any more.
From time to time, I would explore a different area of the world, read
their mythology, explore religious philosophy in their system if it
existed. The various ideas and metaphors were interesting and varied,
but I always ended up feeling like I'd eaten a bowl of paleolithic mush.
A lot of the paleolithic mush is in the religious texts, but quite a lot
of it was in me. I was sitting smugly atop the mountain of Scientific
Truth, judging religion with my thumb on the scale.
One little realization plucked me off the mountaintop and pulled me back
down to earth. Someone quoted a medieval mystic to me. The words
contained beauty, truth, humor, and deep wisdom about the human
condition. Suddenly I saw that the humans of earlier times were no less
intelligent than we are, no less thoughtful, no less engaged with the
great business of trying to understand the universe. I also saw that
most of the greatest thinkers who had ever put pen to paper wrote in the
religious mode. If I wanted to have any hope of understanding what they
were writing about, I needed to have some way of dealing with religious
terms (like “God”).
So I set about making my peace with the concept of God. The first thing
that helped was remembering that the gods were created by human beings
to serve deep human needs. God is not a concrete entity sitting
somewhere up in the sky. God is an abstract concept sitting between the
ears of a human being. God is like a point or a number or any of the
basic elements of mathematics. All of the people who argue about the
concrete existence of God are missing the point. The point of God is not
whether She exists, but what you can do with Her once you posit Her.
When I started looking at religion as just another form of mathematics,
like the calculus, it became easier for me to relate to. I don't have to
believe anything at all. All I need to do is to come up with a concept
of God through which I can view and understand the religious utterances
of others.
This immediately made it easier to connect with the thoughts of those
who had written in the religious mode. I might still think that much of
what they wrote was claptrap, but I was able to appreciate the
underlying truths that they were trying to express. I was able to glean
a lot more from their experience once I had a working model of God to
hang their thoughts from.
What happened next shocked me. Various religious practices, which I had
dismissed as superstitious nonsense, turned out to be very useful to me
in daily life. Prayer, for example, turns out to have all sorts of
practical functions that can make my life better. When I don't know what
to do, I can pray for guidance. Quite often, I receive useful guidance
in return, even if I address my prayers to “Figment of my Imagination.”
There is something in the process of prayer that allows my busy monkey
mind to get out of the way so I can access to whatever deeper wisdom I
might possess about the situation. When I find myself fretting about a
situation that is beyond my control, I can hand the situation off to my
Imaginary Friend and get on with my life. I can pray for those who
irritate me and feel better about them.
It turns out that there's a big God-shaped spot in the human psyche. I
am happier, more centered, and more stable when that spot is filled,
even though I firmly believe that most of the effects are psychological.
In my mind, and the minds of most of the religious people I know, there
is no conflict between science and religion. They are in different
realms and for different purposes. Science explains how things work, and
exposes the mechanisms of the physical universe. Religion has many
functions for human animals who huddle together in the dark of a vast
and dangerous universe. Science serves the rational mind, while religion
functions on the vast animal parts of our minds that are pre-rational.
It's a completely different map of the same territory, with different
contours and different landmarks and serving different purposes.
You can poke fun at the Just-So Stories of religious mythology, sure.
You can also poke fun at the Just-So Stories of evolutionary biology.
Oh, and I don't believe in evolution, either. What is there to believe
in? The mechanisms of evolution are apparent all around us, all the
time. There's partial speciation all over the place. Evolution has left
its fingerprints in every process in every organism. I don't need to
believe in evolution any more than I need to believe in computers.
Evolution is not a matter of faith; it's a matter of fact.
--hmm
