Thursday, June 9, 2011

Scientific Religion?

The planarian is a simple animal with eye
spots set into shallow pits, that allow it to
distinguish light and dark and some direction.
Image by Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado
Can science study religion? A recent issue of the Economist contained an article about what it described as scientific investigation into religious beliefs. It basically discussed some experiments dealing with religious-related psychology, such as whether a bad thing that happened to someone represented supernatural judgment for previous wrong behavior. I have no problem with such studies; what bothered me the most was how the journalist writing the article (and probably many scientists involved in the project) implied that science had finally turned its sights on religion and was making progress towards developing a scientific explanation. First, it over stated the case—there is a long way from someone considering another's misfortune might be just desserts to providing a rational explanation of one of the most powerful forces in human society. But second, it and a host of similar claims are making a huge, unjustified and invalid assumption.
Religion has been an enigma for those who seek to construct a rational, scientific view of the world and human existence. We no longer need to invoke any sort of supernatural activity to account for the motion of the sun and stars, variety of species and mental illness. Yet the overwhelming majority of people that have ever walked on the face of this planet firmly believe in the existence of something more than what can be seen and touched, that there are gods, or spirits, or unseen forces, that can help or hinder, bring hope or judgment, that we may be able to influence but not control. Even among people who consider themselves not religious, one can find belief in astrology, UFOs, good luck charms, etc. In fact, evidence of religious belief in burial customs (such as inclusion of artifacts for the afterlife) is one of the criteria often used for when hominoids became truly human. But if all there exists is the material world, religious belief doesn’t make a lot of sense.
There are many suggested explanations for this apparent conundrum, most of which fall into a few categories. One common one is that it is a psychological cooping mechanism—"the opiate of the people" was Marx’s quip. Another category focuses on religion’s role in explaining the physical origins world around us; from this view, religion no longer has a purpose. A third, more subtle and a little more respectful, focuses on religion’s role in supporting social order. Specifically, it suggests that religious belief evolved with humans because of the side effects of shaping a cooperative, interdependent social order. This is the basic idea behind the article I am referring to.
While there is some truth in those ideas, they are far from the whole thing. There is a long history of downtrodden and oppressed people turning to religion to find meaning and hope in a harsh world, but has also lead to heroic action and personal sacrifice. African-American Christianity not only ministered hope to slaves and Jim Crow victims, but also a major force in the civil rights movement. Most religions contain stories about how the world came to be, but that is often only a small portion of their teaching, and the focus is not so much on satisfying curiosity as understanding one’s place in the universe. Morality and right living is a major theme of many religions, but there is real variety in how much emphasis is given, and even what those morals are. Consider the stories of the affairs and infighting of the Greek gods, or religions such as Vodou that don’t address morality, at least as it is understood in western thought. What they all do is teach about of the supernatural and how one should relate to it. This, however, is not the deepest flaw in the idea that religion evolved simply due to its social benefits.
The suggestion that any other significant aspect of human beings evolved simply for a side effect would be met with incredibility. No one would seriously suggest that ears evolved merely because of the structures that give us our sense of balance, or that the only real purpose of eyes was to help the body maintain its sleep/wake cycle. Ears and eyes are sensory organs that evolved in response to auditory and visual realities, respectively, because they provide the individual useful information carried by sound and light that could provide an advantage. Maybe, just maybe, religiosity evolved in response to a spiritual reality; information from and requests to real supernatural beings would certainly provide an advantage to an individual. Common features in different religions are encounters with supernatural beings, at least for select individuals. Neuroscientists have discovered regions of our brains connected with religious sensations, just like there are regions connected with hearing and vision. One could legitimately raise the objection that, unlike vision where we all would more or less agree on what is seen, spiritual encounters demonstrate inconsistency in their nature and who experiences them. But remember that eyes have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years, so are pretty well develop organs. In contrast, a human "spiritual sense" is most likely less than hundred thousand years old, so if such an organ exists, it is likely to still be quite primitive, perhaps more akin to the eye spots and eye pits, the most primitive forms of eyes, which only perceive generalized shadows.
Whether or not humans have evolved a "spiritual" organ that is unique among the animal kingdom, the biggest problem with this “scientific” explanation of religion is a serious logical fallacy. Natural science uses methodological naturalism, meaning that it only considers explanations that can be attributed to the physical world. That is fine if one is studying semiconductors or meteorites; those are physical phenomena and so it is preferable that one look for a physical explanation. However, the attempt to explain religion "scientifically" then starts by making a major, unjustified assumption, that religion is best explained strictly as a natural phenomena. It would be legitimate for one to try to make the argument that human psychology is a better explanation for the phenomena called religion than that the existence of a supernatural reality. That would be normal practice in science; proponents of one theory seek to demonstrate that it better matches the phenomena studied than a competing theory. However, simply ignoring or dismissing the most widely held theory (that there exists a supernatural reality) and evidence put forth to support it without any justification just because it clashes with one’s beliefs/dogma (science can explain everything) is not intellectually honest. One might go as far as calling it blind faith; it is not all that different from those who would reject entire scientific disciplines simply because they contradict a particular interpretation of scripture. I don’t have a problem with scientists investigating realms that overlap with faith, but there must be an openness to the possibility that there is more to our world than the physical reality. Natural science is a powerful tool for understanding our world, but it is not the only means, and it has its limits.