Science and Religion
[Quoted from my book: Humane Physics]
We have seen how science attempts to acquire knowledge. It is a long established method that has produced tangible results: our lives depend on it every day.
When we talk about religion, first we have to ask: which religion? There have been hundreds in human history and countless people believed in each of them, convinced that their religion was the only true one and all the others were deluded. Just Google “World Religions” for a sample of dozens still practiced today by millions to billions.
I used to participate in internet forums for the discussion of scientific and philosophical ideas. On one of these forums I posted the following question:
“Would you have imagined a god if you had never heard of the concept?”
"Suppose, for argument's sake, that you grew up in a world where nobody ever talked about gods or supernatural of any kind. Suppose you had a totally secular education: you learned about nature, physics, scientific facts, technology, productive skills, social organization, project management, etc. No priests, no churches, no bibles, no superstition, no Santa Clauses, no tooth fairies - nothing but observable reality. Would you have ever thought of anything outside this? What, if anything, would have made you think that there might be something outside of your experience?"
The point I was trying to make is that ALL of our ‘knowledge’ concerning religious assertions were handed down to us by our cultures. None of us discovered it from personal experience. This question made many forum members think hard, asking themselves the same question: “What do I know from first-hand experience and what have I accepted from others, without really examining how they acquired that ‘knowledge’?”
You might be tempted to say that the same is true for science: after all, we learn it from textbooks written by others. However, there is a difference. We can find out how the authors made their discoveries, based on what experiments, and how they reached their conclusions. Interested amateurs can reproduce the simpler experiments themselves, at least in the domain of Classical Physics. You need not take anything on faith.
Obviously, there are historical reasons why religions were invented in the first place, thousands of years ago. Otherwise they would not exist today. However, religions were established before we had proper science as an alternative and superior way to explain the universe.
The reason science has not replaced religion in so many minds is that people often lie, are often deluded and, the saddest fact of all, they often use psychological manipulation to achieve their aims: wealth or power over other people. Religions have been used for both over the millennia. Many bloody wars were fought using religion as an excuse.
In view of this, how much should we trust religious assertions, handed down to us over history? Wouldn’t it be safer to rely on our own observations and our own minds? Scientific thinking offers exactly that.
I was once asked whether I ‘believed in’ electrons. My answer was: I don’t need to believe in electrons, because I have personally conducted experiments that proved to me that material particles with a definite mass, charge and spin exist, even if I can’t see them. I don’t believe – I know.
The other argument I often hear is based on lack of imagination. It goes like this: “How can you imagine that a world as complex and as perfectly interacting as ours, has evolved by chance? There had to be a creator”.
And, of course, this reply begs the question. If the world was created by a creator, then the creator had to be at least as complex as its creation. Then, using the same argument, the creator had to have a creator, so who created the creator?
The usual answer is: the creator has always existed, it was not created. Then, the question is: if we can assume that something complex and powerful always existed, then why can’t we just assume that the universe has always existed, without a creator? Whichever way we look at religion, we either run into contradictions or find ourselves inventing arbitrary and totally unnecessary concepts.
Science saves you from all these problems: it is simple, logical, available to everyone who wants to find out. You don’t have to take it on faith.
Bottom line: am I an atheist? If the word ‘atheist’ means that I am absolutely certain, beyond even a shadow of a doubt that there is no such thing as a ‘god’, then I am not an atheist. No self-respecting scientist can be 100% certain of anything in the universe. Only probabilities exist in science and I admit, for lack of evidence to the contrary, that I assign an extremely low probability to the idea of a creator.
However, nothing is proven one way or another. Yes, the universe could have been created by a god or any number of gods. Life and evolution could have been started on Earth by an alien culture of superhuman power and we would not know anything about it.
However, all the established religions with which I am familiar are so obviously man-made that I find it difficult to believe that anyone could take any of them seriously. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu said: “If triangles had a god, he would have three sides”.
We have seen how science attempts to acquire knowledge. It is a long established method that has produced tangible results: our lives depend on it every day.
When we talk about religion, first we have to ask: which religion? There have been hundreds in human history and countless people believed in each of them, convinced that their religion was the only true one and all the others were deluded. Just Google “World Religions” for a sample of dozens still practiced today by millions to billions.
I used to participate in internet forums for the discussion of scientific and philosophical ideas. On one of these forums I posted the following question:
“Would you have imagined a god if you had never heard of the concept?”
"Suppose, for argument's sake, that you grew up in a world where nobody ever talked about gods or supernatural of any kind. Suppose you had a totally secular education: you learned about nature, physics, scientific facts, technology, productive skills, social organization, project management, etc. No priests, no churches, no bibles, no superstition, no Santa Clauses, no tooth fairies - nothing but observable reality. Would you have ever thought of anything outside this? What, if anything, would have made you think that there might be something outside of your experience?"
The point I was trying to make is that ALL of our ‘knowledge’ concerning religious assertions were handed down to us by our cultures. None of us discovered it from personal experience. This question made many forum members think hard, asking themselves the same question: “What do I know from first-hand experience and what have I accepted from others, without really examining how they acquired that ‘knowledge’?”
You might be tempted to say that the same is true for science: after all, we learn it from textbooks written by others. However, there is a difference. We can find out how the authors made their discoveries, based on what experiments, and how they reached their conclusions. Interested amateurs can reproduce the simpler experiments themselves, at least in the domain of Classical Physics. You need not take anything on faith.
Obviously, there are historical reasons why religions were invented in the first place, thousands of years ago. Otherwise they would not exist today. However, religions were established before we had proper science as an alternative and superior way to explain the universe.
The reason science has not replaced religion in so many minds is that people often lie, are often deluded and, the saddest fact of all, they often use psychological manipulation to achieve their aims: wealth or power over other people. Religions have been used for both over the millennia. Many bloody wars were fought using religion as an excuse.
In view of this, how much should we trust religious assertions, handed down to us over history? Wouldn’t it be safer to rely on our own observations and our own minds? Scientific thinking offers exactly that.
I was once asked whether I ‘believed in’ electrons. My answer was: I don’t need to believe in electrons, because I have personally conducted experiments that proved to me that material particles with a definite mass, charge and spin exist, even if I can’t see them. I don’t believe – I know.
The other argument I often hear is based on lack of imagination. It goes like this: “How can you imagine that a world as complex and as perfectly interacting as ours, has evolved by chance? There had to be a creator”.
And, of course, this reply begs the question. If the world was created by a creator, then the creator had to be at least as complex as its creation. Then, using the same argument, the creator had to have a creator, so who created the creator?
The usual answer is: the creator has always existed, it was not created. Then, the question is: if we can assume that something complex and powerful always existed, then why can’t we just assume that the universe has always existed, without a creator? Whichever way we look at religion, we either run into contradictions or find ourselves inventing arbitrary and totally unnecessary concepts.
Science saves you from all these problems: it is simple, logical, available to everyone who wants to find out. You don’t have to take it on faith.
Bottom line: am I an atheist? If the word ‘atheist’ means that I am absolutely certain, beyond even a shadow of a doubt that there is no such thing as a ‘god’, then I am not an atheist. No self-respecting scientist can be 100% certain of anything in the universe. Only probabilities exist in science and I admit, for lack of evidence to the contrary, that I assign an extremely low probability to the idea of a creator.
However, nothing is proven one way or another. Yes, the universe could have been created by a god or any number of gods. Life and evolution could have been started on Earth by an alien culture of superhuman power and we would not know anything about it.
However, all the established religions with which I am familiar are so obviously man-made that I find it difficult to believe that anyone could take any of them seriously. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu said: “If triangles had a god, he would have three sides”.
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