Science, Religion and Morality

As I have said many times before, I love Luther college's lecture program. I have been to so many good ones in my four months here that I cannot wait to return this fall to hear even more. I attended a lecture Wednesday this week that was hosted by the Secular Society here on campus that had recruited two philosophy professors (one that teaches in the religion department as well), one professor from the religion department, and an evolutionary biologist. As I settled into my seat, there was a professor of religion acting as moderator in this discussion and he explained to us how this was going to work. All of the professors had been given specific quotes from various individuals that they were going to respond to. They were to provide their own personal beliefs on the subjects presented in the quotes and then provide some reasoning behind their thinking.

Rather than walking through the entire lecture, which I was silly enough not to bring pen and paper to, I am going to pull out specific points that I found interesting and thought provoking. After I got to the lecture, as a side note, I realized how silly it was of me to not bring paper and pen: there were philosophers here, which are individuals that provide society with thoughtful reflections all the time. Anyhow, rather than dwelling on my forgetfulness, on to the topics presented.

As I mentioned in the title of this post, all of the quotes in this two hour discussion were concerning either the role of science, the role of religion, or morality. I found that most of the quotes were quite heavily loaded with anti-religious sentiment, however. Nonetheless, we had fairly religious people up on stage to provide some counterarguments to these positions.

One of the philosophers made an astute observation concerning the dichotomy or duel between religion and science. As this is a hotly contested subject with varying opinions and viewpoints, I thought that it was quite brave of him to even bring up, not to mention openly criticize. He made the bold claim that this whole religion vs. science debate in our society today is not actually science vs. religion. Rather, he claimed, it was science vs. science. After making this claim, he paused and the entire audience was silent, to use a cliche, you could have heard a pin drop it was so silent. This was a completely different spin on this issue that many members of the audience, I am sure, had not heard before. I, for one, was completely astounded, and I even talked to one of my friends about this claim and he was equally astounded.

The professor backed up his claim and seemed to define what he meant by this assertion. What he meant by saying that it was a debate of science vs. science was that it was a belief/adherence to science of the first century in the common era vs. science of the twenty-first century of the common era. I believe he made some more in-depth arguments and astute observations concerning this, but the overall idea that I began to think about was the validity of such a claim. As a side note, he did mention two individuals, whose names I cannot remember, that adhered to either first century or twenty-first century science. Nonetheless, the fact of the matter, the main idea presented in this declaration was that there were those individuals that see legitimacy in contemporary science while others are a bit more skeptical and tend to disagree with science in the modern age.

I talked to one of my friends about this assertion, as I mentioned before, and after I explained what the professor had said, he made the counter-argument that it was still religion vs. science. However, I do not tend to agree with his position, as even though the science of the first century may have been heavily influenced by religion, it was still science in its day. It was as cutting-edge as science is today. The people back then did not understand that cutting people's veins open in the hopes that he would feel better seemed like a foolish idea. They were of the mind that this was what you were supposed to do. I used an example of more modern times with cancer and chemotherapy. I pointed out that what if, in a hundred years, we had advanced to a stage in our development wherein we had found the cure for cancer. (I suppose my argument assumes the end of the world will not come this may nor in December of 2012. Therefore, if you do truly believe that we are going to die within a few years, you can completely disregard and skip this portion of my post.) I pointed out to him that if we had found a cure for cancer in one hundred years, that the scientists then may find it quite silly that we had ever used chemotherapy in the first place, I mean, look at all the nasty side effects of this treatment.

That was basically where the argument ended, but getting back to the professor's original comment, it does sort of seem to me that what we are fighting over is not whether religion is right or science is right, but whether my version of science is right or your version of science is right. Which leads me to my next point of the role of religion and science.

I believe it was the same sage professor that pointed out our erroneous assumption that there is a debate between religion and science that spoke about the role of religion and science. He claimed that if you are looking for a description of how the world is, then look to science, if you are looking for something more, something deeper that science cannot tell you about, about what is most important in life, then look to religion. I found this statement to be profoundly true. If you are wondering how the brain works, how muscles function, what food is healthy for you, what the circumference of the earth is, you better go ask a scientist, because they are the ones that can tell you about that. However, if you are searching for something deeper and less quantitative than science, then go to a religion and ask those questions, because that is the proper role of religious institutions.

A question that was not sequentially near this question, but is linked to this question, is whether there is a right or wrong religion. And contrary to what seems to me to be mostly popular belief, there is no "right" or "wrong" religion...at least in moderate eyes. Of course there are extremists that will kill you because their religion is most definitely right and yours is wrong, but in many people's estimation, religion is subjective to the personal experience. It has been my experience that most good natured individuals do not tend to push one religious creed upon others as being the only, true way. However, the professor said that there was a better religion than another, to which the audience chuckled because hitherto this man had not espoused radical or extremist views. He again backed up this claim by saying that the correct religion is the one that you choose. He said that if Islam does not work for you, go try Christianity, and if that does not work, go ahead and try Buddhism. Keep searching for a religious tradition that makes you realize that there is something deeper, something that science cannot tell you about. There is more to life than being able to determine which foods are healthy, how muscles function and the circumference of the earth, which is the question of what is most important in life. So, I guess that the whole dichotomy of science and religion ought not look like how we represent it, but rather, their functions are completely different. Religion has this this area to deal with while science deals with this area.

The other philosophy professor made a completely unrelated statement when confronted with the question of whether morality and moral people can exist outside of a religious tradition, to which he said yes. He described religion and morality as two distinct areas of thinking (or something like that. A better phrasing is not coming to me at this moment). He also said that religion relies on morality rather than the other way around. I think the question he was getting at answering here was which came first: the chicken or the egg? Which came first religion or morality? He claimed that morality came first and that religion was a response to how to behave morally. Religion offers a codification of how to behave in a moral way.

One last observation that I remembered from this discussion was that religion is not God. Yes, as wild a claim as that sounds, it seems to be an accurate statement. Religion does not automatically equal God, rather religion is our interpretation of this world/God. The question of whether our sacred texts (in this example, the Bible) were directly written by God seems to me to be quite contrary to what has made it into the Bible. There are so many different stories depicting one even, such as the two creation stories in Genesis, the three stories of how David came to the throne in 1 Samuel, and countless others. However, just because there are multiple accounts of the same event does not mean that God does not exist. It does mean that the Bible was written by previous humans, how were just as malleable and fallible as we are today, so we have to take that into account. I suppose, thinking about it now, that the different interpretations or accounts found in the Bible depicting the same scene are in a sense different experiences felt by different individuals. I think that this means that we cannot discount them because since there are multiple versions that gives us the freedom to choose which we think is more closely related to our own beliefs. Maybe I am wildly wrong on this, but nonetheless, religion is not God, rather religion is our interpretation of the divine/this world.

Just a few more things to talk about and then I will end this insanely long post. First of all, my dad and aunt were talking and they came to the conclusion that, in response to my previous post, desire is the root of violence, and if we were to get rid of all desire, then there would be no violence in the world. I do not think that a whole lot of explanation is going to go into that comment, but you might want to look at my previous post and then put it into context, because otherwise, that statement standing along pretty much explains itself. I think that this is a particularly good observation that I had not thought about before, so thank you dad and Auntie Sue for bringing this to the forefront.

Additionally, I had an interview on Tuesday for a job this next year in the history department. I got an email back on Friday (I was astounded by how rapid the response was) saying that I got the job. I was quite ecstatic the rest of the day and wanted to tell everyone about my great triumph. That means that this fall, I will no longer be working in the dishroom or any other part of the caf, but rather I will be an administrative assistant in the history department and will have another job in the Language Learning Center either helping students in need of help or assisting professors if they need help. I am pretty excited to start next fall.

I think that is it... So...until next post...