THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
"Is Science a Religion?"
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
(Preached at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu February 9, 1997)The 1996 winner of the Humanist of the Year Award presented by the American Humanist Association was Richard Dawkins. A copy of his speech accepting the award was in a recent issue of Humanist Magazine . The speech is entitled "Is Science a Religion?" and I was very disappointed to find that Richard Dawkins insists upon saying no, that science is not a religion.
In science class, when I was in high school, we did the classic experiment where you take a piece of meat and leave it out and see what happens to it. Of course, it gets maggots. Now, the question is, where did those little crawly things come from? There was a time when people believed that they spontaneously generated on the meat. So, in classical fashion, we took one batch of meat and just left it out. We took another batch of meat and put it in a container with gauze over the top so air could get to it. A third container we closed and sealed.
Unfortunately, the experiment took a little longer than we expected it to. There was one item missing. The custodians had been too efficient about our high school and we didn't have enough flies. After a couple of weeks our experiment finally acquired its necessary fly visits and it became a wonderful mass of maggots. That is to say, the one that was left open. The one covered with the gauze, of course, had no maggots. I suspect it must have been, by the end of our experiment, a wonderfully aged piece of steak. The third piece, the one in the closed container, was dried out; but otherwise about the way we had put it in. We proved that the maggots do not spontaneously generate. The one thing kept away from our meat that turned out to be critical was the flies; and the shortage of flies merely underscored our conclusion.
One of the things that fascinates me in looking around at our society today is what a strange notion far too many of us have about what it takes to prove something, about what proof is, about what evidence is. Otherwise educated people seem willing and able to believe the most amazing things.
We're in the midst of an interesting exercise about the nature of proof within science itself right now. It has to do with those pieces of rock found in the ice in the Antarctic that apparently did indeed come from a hunk of rock blown off the surface of Mars a long, long, long time ago. That piece of Mars, after wandering around, fell on the earth. In it have been found substances and formations that have led some scientists to insist that this may be evidence for life on Mars a couple of billion years ago. It interesting to watch that debate as it unfolds. It is a wonderful example of both the mistakes that science makes and the process that science uses to keep those mistakes under reasonable control. None of the arguments offered by the scientists who have found "stuff" in those rocks prove that there was life there. They are consistent with the hypothesis that life was there, but there are other mechanisms that could have put the same substances and formations in the rocks that are dependent on perfectly ordinary, non-biological processes.
Those findings are going to be subjected to very careful scrutiny. Those scientists are going to have to defend their thesis. They're going to have to continue to come up with more and better evidence before the hypothesis will ever be accepted as a serious hypothesis. And bear in mind, all it will take is one piece of data contradicting what they are presenting now to toss the whole hypothesis out. Every scientific law, everything that science says -- of course, science doesn't say anything; scientists say things -- is tentative. In every case, we wait only for one piece of evidence not yet in that could, hypothetically, overturn the whole case and force us to rethink the whole process.
Dawkins complains that religion bears no relationship to this way of approaching human knowledge and understanding. The line with which he opens the second paragraph of his article is: Faith, being belief that isn't based on evidence, is the principal vice of religion.
Is that, in fact, what faith is ? Oh, I agree with him that this notion of faith is a major feature of bad religion. However, in science, would we let the common understanding of science of the populace at large define what the enterprise of science shall be? Of course not. Yet we have done precisely this with religion and Dawkins buys into it hook, line and sinker. He lets those who have been the most credulous define the boundaries of the territory. He lets those most willing to believe and accept what was familiar, or what appeals to their particular biases and prejudices, or what they were raised to assume must, of course, be so; these he lets decide what religion is. We would not accept this understanding of what the enterprise is about in any other field, yet we accept this dumbed down notion of what religion is about.
I have sometimes said that the only thing that you get in return for belief (in Dawkins's sense of accepting stuff without evidence) is fraudulent certainty. The certainty is always fraudulent. The one thing that we know about human knowing is that it is always incomplete because of the way we are wired. Indeed, to say that you believe something, that you have faith the way Dawkins has defined it, is to say, "Neither God nor life has anything further to teach me." It is to confess that you have decided to stop growing spiritually. That's an interesting confession. It's to confess that even if, by some miracle, what the religious authorities have taught you happens to be true, that you have no expectation of growing in insight about its implications, that you have no expectation that your opinion might change in the light of your own experience.
Again and again I hear people say, "Well, if they believe it, it's true for them," as if somehow they had said something very profound. Believing makes it so. Yes, if you truly behave as if what you believe were so it can make it, as we say, so for you. But all that really says is that faith has the possible effect of causing you to ignore contradictory information. Unfortunately, that includes additional information whose modification might improve, make more true and more effective what you believe. Unfortunately, also, such faith can kill you since such things as gravity and bacteria are not easily repealed by religious belief.
For Dawkins, the notion that science is a religion is unacceptable because he has bought the narrow and wrong popular notion of what religion is about. I want to insist this morning that indeed science is or can be a religion. As Woody Allen said about whether or not sex is dirty, "It is if you do it right."
Dawkins goes on in the article to rehearse, among other things, what it would be like if all religious education were done from the point of view of science. It's an interesting section of the article because what he is essentially doing is rehearsing the Unitarian Universalist religious education curriculum, as if somehow this never had occurred to anybody before. Now you have to forgive him -- he's a Brit, you know -- and the Unitarians in England are kind of quiet. But there is a very deep issue at stake for religion here.
Ronald Reagan once commented that he didn't think that legislatures were going to be able to improve on the Ten Commandments. The first of those commandments says: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind and strength. The second of those commandments says: You shall make no graven images.
This is that interesting ancient Hebrew notion of idolatry. Now, we human beings are wonderfully subtle, if nothing else. We have been able to come up with an incredible array of ways of being idolatrous that have nothing to do with making statues and claiming that praying to them makes the rain go away or come on cue. One of those idols, those pieces of idolatry, for many religious traditions, is their particular sacred literature. There's a wonderful story in Zen Buddhism about the Zen master tearing up the Sutras. This is applauded ! It is a reminder that the sacred literature is not what Zen Buddhism about. Religion has to do with the human experience, not merely the acquisition of some information from the heritage even if the information is valuable and worthy of significant attention. It's not the Bible, the Koran, the Sutras, the Bhagavad-Gita -- the list goes on and on -- it's not the sacred literature of the species that religion is about. They are about religion, about insights, some of them true and some untrue, some valuable and some long since having worn out what value they may have had. All of them have a history, a context, a people out of whose lives they came. The only place to really begin to understand them is in that context.
Idolatry is treating anything as absolute that, in fact, is not. Historically, western Christianity has treated its creeds that way. Fundamentalists of all religions tend to treat their sacred books that way. I've even had a few Secular Humanists in my Unitarian Universalist congregations over the years that have engaged in a little idolatry themselves. But the core mistaken notion about religion is Dawkins' characterization: faith being belief that isn't based on evidence. That's that old human desire for certainty, a commodity that our religious teachers of all of the traditions have continued to remind us is a commodity not available to human beings. It produces flawed religion just as efficiently as it produces flawed science.
I'm amused with the flap that's been in the newspapers of late bemoaning the fact that the scientists can't decide whether women in their 40's should or should not have their mammograms. Somehow we expect "the scientists" to be able to give us a definitive answer. Maybe one of the good things that's happening in our society is that the experts are in fact finally beginning to be discovered to have feet of clay and to disagree amongst themselves. Maybe we will begin to understand, out of the feet of clay of our alleged experts, what the human enterprise of knowing and understanding is about. It is about expanding human knowledge, about increasing human understanding, not just in science but in the religious realm as well.
The only way in which that expanding of human knowledge and understanding can happen is when we come at the enterprise with that acute sense of our own humanness. We must come at it aware of our own need/want for certainty, and aware that it will not be met. We must be aware that even in the most deep things of the human spirit tentativeness must still be there, else we have volunteered for death long before our bodies have worn out. As long as we are alive, as long as new experience makes its dents in our tough human hide, there remains the possibility of a new insight, a changed self-understanding, a clearer sense of what it means to be a consciousness wrapped in this wonderful soft tissue called "skin." As long as that sense of being alive to new possibility is there, we stay spiritually alive and growing. In just that way the enterprise we call science insists upon keeping the answers tentative. Only in that way is there the opportunity to pay attention to new information. In the case of both religion and science you are asked to maintain that tentativeness; and yet, at the same time, you have to make decisions before the last piece of information has come in.
Faith is not about believing what you know ain't so, and it's not about believing despite a lack of evidence or in the face of contradictory evidence. Faith is the courage to go ahead and, by golly, make the decisions even though you know perfectly well that the last word is not in and that you may be making a mistake. It is that act of trust in the face of uncertainty. Every time faith devolves into something like what Dawkins caricatures in his article we end up with religion that begins undoing the very things its ideas and insights hold it to. We end up with people in the name of religion running destructive and self-destructive games on one another. The moment we let go of that wonderful necessity for the suspension of certainty -- whether its science, technology, politics or religion -- we become just plain dangerous to one another.