Nature. Otherwise we might have lacked the intellectual capacity and grasp to comprehend the world.
Of course, we may make mistakes in applying a reductionist programme to science. There may be aspects which, for all we know, are not reducible to a few comparatively simple laws. But in the light of the findings in the last few centuries, it seems foolish to complain about reductionism. It is not a deficiency but one of the chief triumphs of science. And, it seems to me, its findings are perfectly consonant with many religions (although it does not prove their validity). Why should a few simple laws of Nature explain so much and hold sway throughout this vast Universe? Isn’t this just what you might expect from a Creator of the Universe? Why should some religious people oppose the reductionist programme in science, except out of some misplaced love of mysticism?
Attempts to reconcile religion and science have been on the religious agenda for centuries – at least for those who did not insist on Biblical and Qu’ranic literalism with no room for allegory or metaphor.
The crowning achievements of Roman Catholic theology are the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles (‘Against the Gentiles’) of St Thomas Aquinas. Out of the maelstrom of sophisticated Islamic philosophy that tumbled into Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were the books of the ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle, works even on casual inspection of high accomplishment. Was this ancient learning compatible with God’s Holy Word?* In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas set himself the task of reconciling 631 questions between Christian and classical sources. But how to do this where a clear dispute arises? It cannot be accomplished without some supervening organizing principle, some superior way to know the world. Often, Aquinas appealed to common sense and the natural world, i.e., science used as an error-correcting device. With some contortion of both common sense and Nature, he managed to reconcile all 631 problems. (Although when push came to shove, the desired answer was simply assumed. Faith always got the nod over Reason.) Similar attempts at reconciliation permeate Talmudic and post-Talmudic Jewish literature and medieval Islamic philosophy.
[* This was no dilemma for many others. ‘I believe; therefore I understand’ said St Anselm in the eleventh century.]
But tenets at the heart of religion can be tested scientifically. This in itself makes some religious bureaucrats and believers wary of science. Is the Eucharist, as the Church teaches, in fact and not just as productive metaphor, the flesh of Jesus Christ, or is it, chemically, microscopically and in other ways, just a wafer handed to you by a priest?* Will the world be destroyed at the end of the 52-year Venus cycle unless humans are sacrificed to the gods?** Does the occasional uncircumcised Jewish man fare worse than his co-religionists who abide by the ancient covenant in which God demands a piece of foreskin from every male worshipper? Are there humans populating innumerable other planets, as the Latter Day Saints teach? Were whites created from blacks by a mad scientist, as the Nation of Islam asserts? Would the Sun indeed not rise if the Hindu sacrificial rite is omitted (as we are assured would be the case in the Satapatha Brahmand)!
[* There was a time when the answer to this question was a matter of life or death. Miles Phillips was an English sailor, stranded in Spanish Mexico. He and his fellows were brought up before the Inquisition in the year 1574. They were asked ‘Whether we did not believe that the Host of bread which the priest did hold up over his head, and the wine that was in the chalice, was the very true and perfect body and blood of our Saviour Christ, Yea or No? To which,’ Phillips adds, ‘if we answered not “Yea!” then there was no way but death.’]
[** Since this Mesoamerican ritual has not really been practised for five centuries, we have the perspective to reflect on the tens of thousands of willing and unwilling sacrifices to the Aztec and Mayan gods who reconciled themselves to their fates with the confident faith that they were dying to save the Universe.]
We can gain some insight into the human roots of prayer by examining those of unfamiliar religions and cultures. Here, for example, is what is written in a cuneiform inscription on a Babylonian cylinder seal from the Second Millennium BC:
Oh, Ninlil, Lady of the Lands, in your marriage bed, in the abode of your delight, intercede for me with Enlil, your beloved. [Signed] Mili-Shipak, Shatammu of Ninmah.
It’s been a long time since there’s been a Shatammu in Ninmah, or even a Ninmah. Despite the fact that Enlil and Ninlil were major gods – people all over the civilized western world had prayed to them for two thousand years – was poor Mili-Shipak in fact praying to a phantom, to a societally condoned product of his imagination? And if so, what about us? Or is this blasphemy, a forbidden question, as doubtless it was among the worshippers of Enlil?
Does prayer work at all? Which ones?
There’s a category of prayer in which God is begged to intervene in human history or just to right some real or imagined injustice or natural calamity – for example, when a bishop from the American West prays for God to intervene and end a devastating dry spell. Why is the prayer needed? Didn’t God know of the drought? Was he unaware that it threatened the bishop’s parishioners? What is implied here about the limitations of a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient deity? The bishop asked his followers to pray as well. Is God more likely to intervene when many pray for mercy or justice than when only a few do? Or consider the following request, printed in 1994 in The Prayer and Action Weekly News: Iowa’s Weekly Christian Information Source:
Can you join me in praying that God will burn down the Planned Parenthood in Des Moines in a manner no one can mistake for any human torching, which impartial investigators will have to attribute to miraculous (unexplainable) causes, and which Christians will have to attribute to the Hand of God?
We’ve discussed faith-healing. What about longevity through prayer? The Victorian statistician Francis Gallon argued that, other things being equal, British monarchs ought to be very long-lived, because millions of people all over the world daily intoned the heartfelt mantra ‘God Save the Queen’ (or King). Yet, he showed, if anything, they don’t live as long as other members of the wealthy and pampered aristocratic class. Tens of millions of people in concert publicly wished (although they did not exactly pray) that Mao Zedong would live ‘for ten thousand years’. Nearly everyone in ancient Egypt exhorted the gods to let the Pharaoh live ‘forever’. These collective prayers failed. Their failure constitutes data.
By making pronouncements that are, even if only in principle, testable, religions, however unwillingly, enter the arena of science. Religions can no longer make unchallenged assertions about reality so long as they do not seize secular power, provided they cannot coerce belief.
This, in turn, has infuriated some followers of some religions. Occasionally they threaten sceptics with the direst imaginable penalties. Consider the following high stakes alternative by William Blake in his innocuously titled Auguries of Innocence:
He who shall teach the Child to Doubt
The rotting Grave shall ne’er get out.
He who respects the Infant’s Faith
Triumphs over Hell & Death
Of course many religions, devoted to reverence, awe, ethics, ritual, community, family, charity, and political and economic justice, are in no way challenged, but rather uplifted, by the findings of science. There is no necessary conflict between science and religion. On one level, they share similar and consonant roles, and each needs the other. Open and vigorous debate, even the consecration of doubt, is a Christian tradition going back to John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644). Some of mainstream Christianity and Judaism embraces and even anticipated at least a portion of the humility, self-criticism, reasoned debate, and questioning of received wisdom that the best of science offers. But other sects, sometimes called conservative or fundamentalist – and today they seem to be in the ascendant, with the mainstream religions almost inaudible and invisible – have chosen to make a stand on matters subject to disproof, and thus have something to fear from science. The religious traditions are often so rich and multivariate that they offer ample opportunity for renewal and revision, again especially when their sacred books can be interpreted metaphorically and allegorically. There is thus a middle ground of confessing past errors, as the Roman Catholic Church did in its 1992 acknowledgement that Galileo was right after all, that the Earth does revolve around the Sun: three centuries late, but courageous and most welcome none the less. Modern Roman Catholicism has no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a Universe 15 billion or so years old, with the first living things arising from prebiological molecules, or with humans evolving from ape-like ancestors -although it has special opinions on ‘ensoulment’. Most mainstream Protestant and Jewish faiths take the same sturdy position.