"Science is Good, Religion is Evil"

The provocative title to this post is a direct quote from one of the 30 participants at the Aspen Institute  symposium on Religion and Science, which I'm attending this week in Aspen, Colorado.  It is a pointed summary of the extremes to which a discussion of this sort often devolves but it reflects an important truth in the 21st century about the relationship of these two pillars of knowing (as well as diverse constellations of institutions): the conversation is fragmented and often polemical. 

On re-reading this post I have to admit that it is dry and may be boring to some, but I felt that I needed to give a quick meta-level summary of how the perspectives in the room here are being negotiated.  So rather than focus this post on the actual contents of religion and science and their relationship, per se, instead I was interested in this question: What can I learn about the very process of debate when a potentially-charged discussion occurs at multiple altitudes?  Is the possibility real and significant that some higher synthesis, some integration, can occur through a dialectic of rational people?

The symposium is moderated by Charles Harper, the Chief Visionary for the Templeton Foundation, the leading global organization funding cross-paradigmatic research at the intersection of science and faith, and Laurence Krauss, a particle physicist from Case Western and the author of many books on science.

I will try to summarize several days of discussion with the following brief executive summary of the event thus far:

1. Predictably, participants' understandings/views of religion and science are diverse and tend to be couched in the vernacular of the modern press/culture wars, including much energy around the political manifestations of the apparent divide, such as the teaching of creationism in public schools.  (40% of Americans believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and, scary, fully 1/3 of Americans believe that only creationism should be taught in school science classes and another third believe that evolution and creationism should be taught side-by-side.)
2. There seems to be only sporadic appreciation (and less understanding) of key distinctions that define a critically-minded discussion of this sort: the mind-body problem, substance dualism, emergence, and physicalism in general; that religion and science are multi-faceted affairs that have behavioral, phenomenological, cultural and systemic impacts and these co-arise; that there is a sequence of psychological development in cognitive and faith-oriented knowing and it directly impacts the knowledge claims of both traditions; that epistemology and limit questions help craft the contours of immanent versus transcendent truth claims; that the progress of philosophy since Kant includes our graduation from metaphysics (to epistemology) and a recognition of our cultural embeddedness in how we each enact a personal reality-frame in a discussion of this type.  (Harper seemed aware of all of this except developmentalism; it wasn't clear whether Krauss was familiar with some of the philosophical technicalities here.)
3. On the other hand, what has been highlighted and useful here is the way that science can inform faith for traditionally-minded believers (i.e., by updating their cosmological viewpoint), and how fundamentalists tend to reject this conformation; that the latest cosmological view of the universe (it's flat, its 400 billion galaxies are composed of 70% dark energy, 29% dark matter and 1% normal  matter and energy and light, it may be part of a multi-verse, and it is scientifically confirmed that it will end in the future); that religion is a powerful carrier of culture and meaning for much of the world; that there is an evolutionary explanation of religion and faith as promoting survival and cooperative fitness; that there are unintended consequences that arise from modernity's imposition of rationality on pre-rational cultures, such as recent aid interventions in sub-saharan Africa ($300 million, the largest grant of its kind in history, was spent to educate and promote condom-usage amongst villagers, and AIDS rates went UP, prompting the funders to seize the researchers' hard drives and deep-six the results from public view).
4. There has been conspicuously little discussion of spirituality, religious orthodoxy, orthopraxy, or comparisons of religious orientation.  Therefore no higher synthesis of a rational or even postmodern religious orientation was even possible; most of the discussion was held at a formal operational cognitive level (more below) as it analyzed a sort of generic version of "traditional religion" (with features so lacking distinction that we could be discussing 12th century Scholasticism or 21st century Wahhabism).
5. Finally, on this last point, Harper pointed out on several occasions something that didn't seem to stick: it is difficult to discuss generic versions of religion or science as they, too, are evolutionary traditions, and we have to be very specific about the frame of context that underlies our semantic relationship to the terms we discuss.  And if we are going to generalize, we have to do so at a very high level of abstraction that allows for this evolution.  So I argued that religion, in general, is a means by which humans relate to transcendent questions and that science tends to be how we relate to immanent features of reality.  And of course methodologies, behaviors, practices, philosophical underpinnings, cultural and political processes, they all change over time etc.  But for most of the participants the discussion kept coming back to very specific instances of religion or science being generalized to support a very generic view of the whole.  There was no evolutionary frame of context being discussed to handle these gross approximations and so meaningful progressive discourse was fairly rare.  Harper and Krauss both did an excellent job of skillfully navigating these waters, but it was tough going at times.

As I mentioned above, I believe that the predominant means of discourse in the room operated cognitively at the "Orange"/rational/formal operational level, which researchers Commons and Richards describe thus (italics mine):

At the systematic order [participants] discriminate the frameworks for relationships between variables within an integrated system of tendencies and relationships. The objects of the systematic actions are formal-operational relationships between variables. The actions include determining possible multivariate causes--outcomes that may be determined by many causes; the building of matrix representations of information in the form of tables or matrices; the multidimensional ordering of possibilities, including the acts of preference and prioritization. The actions generate systems. Views of systems generated have a single "true" unifying structure. Other systems of explanation or even other sets of data collected by adherents of other explanatory systems tend to be rejected. Most standard science operates at this order. At this order, science is seen as an interlocking set of relationships, with the truth of each relationship in interaction with embedded, testable relationships.

The core observation I'd make about the discussion as it occurred the past few days is that the very conceptual objects "science" and "religion" were things to be examined as objective, pre-given terms subject to analysis and therefore whose compatibility or not was open to solving.  We were obviously seeking a "single true unifying structure."  What was missing from the room, generally, in addition to important prerequisite knowledge about philosophy of mind/science, was the ability to take a higher order perspective on the transaction of this search by bearing witness to the ever-present objectification that was occurring in the room.  So when someone spoke up about what religion or science is - asserting a stance about its function, its values, its methodologies, its politics - they were stating less an objective account of religion as it really exists "out there" and more an account of their own subjective experience, personal history and semantic relationship.  And this capacity to see one's own narrative and that of other participants is immensely critical in a discussion of this polarity: without being able to self-reflect on one's own mental stance, or be able to see that the primary reality being discussed in the room is not some integration of science and religion as it exists "out there," but rather that what is being discussed is a transaction of worldview enactments in this very room - "in here" - then no integration will ever be even remotely possible.   Regardless of all of the other technical alignings, agreement can under these circumstances only occur by developmental altitude, and even then at conventional altitudes only when their is a certain agreement on philosophical pre-suppositions.  The other doesn't stand a chance in a real world of great diversity.  I may be naive but I think this explains a whole lot of mankind's struggles.

Charles Harper, who was one of the true stable integral selves in the room, pointed this out in a truly brilliant summary of the problem: he cautioned everyone upfront that the current mode of discourse around these types of issues is one of identity manipulation.  Even the brochure for the symposium suggests a clash of the titans-like spectacle that subtly reinforces the notion that we prepare our identity in advance, getting ready for a serious-minded discussion where our identity as a religious-this or scientific-that can cut through the room like a sharp sword.  "We are here to dispel religious ignorance, because this is who we are..." Or vice versa.  So the story goes with so much of what passes for serious discussion in this culture, immediately presupposing that these polarities not only exist and are interminable but that there is obviously no other option than to be for this and against that.  For Obama, against McCain.  Pro-life, against abortion.  Pro-science, against fundamentalists.  Etc. etc. And we're all guilty of this and its natural and on one level it's predictable and normal.  But on another level it is obviously the surest way to perpetuate the discord and the fragmentation.  (We're seeing a classic example of this mind-numbing process play out for us, right now, as most intelligent commentators have no idea how to find a higher synthesis in Obama's exceptional speech on the status of a perceived racial divide in the U.S.)  As someone once said, "you do not convert a man by silencing him."

And one more interesting point to note is that this experience contrasts significantly with the progress of my Conscious Capitalism Club visit from a few days ago.  At the beginning of that meeting I introduced an integral view as a potential guiding framework for 3C development.  Most participants agreed that an integral view offered them a very clear understanding of how to process the differential stances that arise when one considers core capitalism issues: stakeholder representation, culture and social structures, leadership, governance etc.  They also admitted that this was the most productive of 3 meetings that they've held and a long-awaited club inauguration was finally consummated.  Now obviously integral doesn't take credit for any of that, but there is no question that some ordering structure by which differential views can be navigated amongst social participants is critical to basic social progress.  (And with culture wars what they are, it's easy to yearn for some new way out of the fragmentation.)

So although I may add more tomorrow I come away again convinced that altitudes are real, one cannot fake an integral view of the world, and that the faster we collectively become aware of the fragmentation, that is, an integral view, the sooner we will be able to heal the deep and painful divisions that lie at the root of so much of humanity's most pressing problems.  And given that the universe will, without a doubt, end at some point, that would give all human beings more time to enjoy a life of integrated richness, freedom and fullness before we all implode in some awesome cataclysm of space-time catastrophe ...

Notable quotes ...

Lawrence Krauss: "I hope everyone at sometime in their career finds a fundamentally-held absolute truth to be 100% false.  Only science can do this."

"Theologians should care about what we have to say about science, but scientists don't give a hill of beans about what theologians have to say.  It's just not relevant to the practice of science."

"We should respect religious sensibilities except when they're wrong."

"Most scientists cannot spell logical positivism."

"Most people don't realize that science can prove nothing to be true, only that something is false."

"Most of the best ideas I've ever had have been wrong. It's a pity that nature didn't use them."

"[On a cosmic scale] we are totally insignificant, all the stars, galaxies, planets, light, us, everything that can be seen is less than 1% of the universe, it is totally insignificant, but because of that it informs how unbelievably precious we are at the same time."

"Most science popularizers take a very serious responsibility to present what we know and don't know and is in most respectable cases only a presentation of the science and largely ignores theological questions."

Charles Harper:  "There is no such thing as religion in general."

"The habits of mind in science and religion are fundamentally different and the practice of science will tend to erode traditional theism over time. Science's habit of mind goes against a herd mentality and cultural trends."

"Identity-oriented manipulation is a major business in our culture wars."

"Truth is polyphonic and dialogical."

"It is ludicrous to be censorious towards teaching kids the scientific, rational process and the creation story gives us this tool with children who were raised fundamentally ... [As one of the world's foremost experts on the age of the Earth] I have used this approach in religious schools when I have spoken with them ...

... I haven't been invited back."

"Education liberates us from the slavery of marginalization and identity."

"There is a partisanization of the pop culture conflict between science and religion and this culture of pop conflict creates academic bigotry behind the scenes against religious-minded scholars.  A higher standard of serious dialog is called for ... Everyone loses with low standards."

Comments

[Albert Klamt]

Great Panorama View, Robb!

Tkx for your summary.

Albert

[John L]

"So the story goes with so much of what passes for serious discussion in this culture, immediately presupposing that these polarities not only exist and are interminable but that there is obviously no other option than to be for this and against that."

jon haidt's ted talk (and new book) gets to the heart of this - strong polarizations born of inherited allegiances (tribal, territorial, primal-protective, even genetic) push us away from a common center. e.g., the politics of abortion.

thanks for the insightful summary. and what a great place to visit - aspen institute. i'm happy to see the templeton foundation active in so many projects.