Charters and DAK read this-best article ever written on science and religion.
FYI ... #1
The trouble with religion
1) It is antagonistic to science and reason, captive to the fantasies
of a prior age
Sam Harris
Special to the Sun
Saturday, April 01, 2006
NEW YORK - Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote
(or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that
pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how
we all must live.
Despite the ecumenical efforts of many well-intentioned people, these
irreconcilable religious commitments still inspire an appalling amount of
human conflict.
In response to this situation, most sensible people advocate something
called "religious tolerance." While religious tolerance is surely better
than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities.
Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of
criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive.
It has also obliged us to lie to ourselves -- repeatedly and at the highest
levels -- about the compatibility between religious faith and scientific
rationality.
The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very
nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of
religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the
expense of science.
It is time we conceded a basic fact of human discourse: either a
person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not. When a person
has good reasons, his beliefs contribute to our growing understanding of the
world. We need not distinguish between "hard" and "soft" science here, or
between science and other evidence-based disciplines like history.
There happen to be very good reasons to believe that the Japanese
bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Consequently, the idea that the
Egyptians did it lacks credibility.
Every sane human being recognizes that to rely merely upon "faith" to
decide specific questions of historical fact would be both idiotic and
grotesque -- that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books
like the Bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad's
conversation with the angel Gabriel, or to any of the other hallowed
travesties that still crowd the altar of human ignorance.
Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to
knowledge about ourselves and the world. If there were good reasons to
believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on
a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational
description of the universe. Faith is nothing more than the licence that
religious people give one another to believe such propositions when reasons
fail.
The difference between science and religion is the difference between
a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments,
and a passionate unwillingness to do so. The distinction could not be more
obvious, or more consequential, and yet it is everywhere elided, even in the
ivory tower.
Religion is fast growing incompatible with the emergence of a global,
civil society. Religious faith -- faith that there is a God who cares what
name he is called, that one of our books is infallible, that Jesus is coming
back to earth to judge the living and the dead, that Muslim martyrs go
straight to Paradise, etc. -- is on the wrong side of an escalating war of
ideas. The difference between science and religion is the difference between
a genuine openness to fruits of human inquiry in the 21st century, and a
premature closure to such inquiry as a matter of principle.
I believe that the antagonism between reason and faith will only grow
more pervasive and intractable in the coming years. Iron Age beliefs --
about God, the soul, sin, free will, etc. -- continue to impede medical
research and distort public policy.
The possibility that we could elect a U.S. president who takes
biblical prophesy seriously is real and terrifying; the likelihood that we
will one day confront Islamists armed with nuclear or biological weapons is
also terrifying, and it is increasing by the day. We are doing very little,
at the level of our intellectual discourse, to prevent such possibilities.
In the spirit of religious tolerance, most scientists are keeping
silent when they should be blasting the hideous fantasies of a prior age
with all the facts at their disposal.
To win this war of ideas, scientists and other rational people will
need to find new ways of talking about ethics and spiritual experience.
The distinction between science and religion is not a matter of
excluding our ethical intuitions and non-ordinary states of consciousness
from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being rigorous
about what is reasonable to conclude on their basis.
We must find ways of meeting our emotional needs that do not require
the abject embrace of the preposterous. We must learn to invoke the power of
ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand
profundity -- birth, marriage, death, etc. -- without lying to ourselves
about the nature of reality.
I am hopeful that the necessary transformation in our thinking will
come about as our scientific understanding of ourselves matures.
When we find reliable ways to make human beings more loving, less
fearful, and genuinely enraptured by the fact of our appearance in the
cosmos, we will have no need for divisive religious myths.
Sam Harris is the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and
the Future of Reason.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
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