Submitted by Julius Barber, Nov 8, 2006 18:00

Religion and science share a few characteristics that ought to make anyone with a toe-hold in either science or religion blush a little; not least the vehemence with which adherents support theories on the basis of flimsy evidence, and the arrogance with with some who identify firmly with one or other camp deride the perspective of those in the other. But what makes them most similar is their core functions: to provide an explanation for why things are the way they are, and a sense of what they ought to be (as David Suzuki has put it, "humans invented the future"). Humans are adaptive because we are inventive; we are inventive because we can achieve an understanding of how things work in the world; we gain understanding by turning what we observe into concepts and making conceptual links, to give us explanations, so that we can come to 'know' what we ought to do, physically and socially.

Sometimes our explanations are wrong, so wrong that we end up dead (or destroying something or someone else to no useful purpose); sometimes we are wrong without sufficience consequence in sufficiently short a space of time to make us realise we are wrong, and so keep on being wrong; but on the whole we have been right by just enough of a margin, and just often enough in enough areas, to do a bit better than merely survive. Religion and science jointly emerged from this explanation-seeking. Modern science and technology can be traced to primitive activities that involved a very small, and very pactical, understanding of how things work in the natural world, such flint-knapping, fire-making, and more recently, cropping. Modern theistic religion can be traced to the sort of religion that explained natural events as the consequence of the activities of gods and spirits. Both depended on acknowledging that there were unseen forces at work, and a belief that these forces could be made to work for us. Primitive religions and primitive technological activities were typically incorporated within the one belief system, and the technologies were part of religious ceremonies. (Traces of this habit remain in the use of incense in some modern religious ceremonies.)

Modern science, with its formalised methodologies and advanced measuring techniques and instruments is a much more recent development than modern religion. Because of its clearly superior explanatory power when it comes to natural phenomena, and the undeniable workability of the technology it has spawned, science has in just a few hundred years effectively demolished the rational basis of religion as an adaptive activity, yet ironically has also made life much more comfortable for the purveyors of false knowledge. American televangelists can get rich and serve as 'proof positive of the power of faith', thanks to television. Saudi muftis can swank about and preach in delirious arrogance, thanks to the oil economy. People can believe what they will and follow who they will, and still get a weekly paycheck.

So religion, and stupidity, are getting a free ride on science? Not quite, since science cannot continue to do us a service without a sense of responsibility, without morality. And morality is 'the other side' of religion (science lost its moral imperative when it became separated from the art-and-craft aspect of technology). We need a sense of what is right, what is "good", if we accept that we are beings living, acting and interacting in a community with a future. Otherwise, we are psychopaths, tyrants or automotons, all of which types tend to do well when both science (the "scientific historicism" of Marxism, the racist fantasies of Nazism) and religion (suicide terrorism, anti-birth control mania) go wrong.

So I look forward to a re-convergence, when scientists accept that science is a service activity and not a competition with anybody's god for universal domination (in understanding or deed), and priests accept that God is but an abstraction for "good", that anyone, living or dead, who envisages (or claims to be) an embodied god or to hear the Voice of God is either excessively imaginitive or mad. Of course, at least 30% of the general population will likely remain stupid, 3% bad, and 0.3% downright dangerous, unless we manage to redesign ourselves as a species. Or die trying.

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