Review 2006

Gia from SunshineDNA asks:
What do you feel provides the human race with answers, closest to the truth, Science or Religion?

"You can't handle the truth." - Col. Nathan R. Jessep, A Few Good Men.

I should preface this with some notes on my own religious history because I believe this will have some baring on the opinions that will follow. I'm technically Protestant, although my mother is a Methodist and I'm not quite sure what my dad is. So any of the following will be from something akin to a Christian perspective. I didn't go to church much when I was very young, but watched Songs of Praise every week. Church only really became a regular activity when I was in the Cub Scouts although it was compulsory rather than a choice; there were hymns and prayers in primary school though.

This continued into secondary school were I experimented with Christianity in my first year attending Bible Study and Scripture Union and the rare prayer meeting. To this day I'm not sure why, standing in Garston Market during freezing cold lunch times even though I wasn't born again. That sort of ended at the beginning of the second year when the teacher who ran everything wanted me to do something and it become clear he'd simply assumed that I'd born again before I joined the school. From then on and felt like I'd been excommunicated.

Throughout the rest of school I did my best to try and find out as much as I could about the other religions available, actually trying to pay attention in RE and talking the Muslim student. I was in the school choir and the music was generally of a religious content, apart from a bizarre incident later on when we sang a Beatles medley. But the prayer continued in assemblies and the hymns.

Eventually I came to the conclusion, then note, that God and science weren't incompatible. I remember voicing the idea in one of the classroom discussions that the bible might just have been a metaphoric way of describing scientific proof, that God used the big bang to create the heavens and the earth, with 'day' being a flexible term for any great length of time. That's right - I was inadvertently advocating something akin to intelligent design, more on which later.

Since then I wouldn't say I turned my back on religion, I just haven't specifically joined any of the monotheists in a particular cause. When asked I tell people I'm a non-denominational spiritualist, which until recently didn't specifically mean anything to anyone but me, but I've noticed lately churches being set up or green witches describing themselves as such so I might have to decide upon something else. I was using in the phrase for occasions when I wanted to encapsulate my odd don'tactuallyknowwhatthehellsgoingon-type feelings and so that I can be spiritual in my own way, lighting candles in cathedrals, making wishes, singing the good hymns and enjoying Christmas carols.

Even more recently however I'm seriously beginning to see a shift in my belief system. I'm beginning to understand that religion is a human construct, its laws and acts the work of people like me, with perhaps only a slightly clearer idea of what it all means based on earlier teaching. That's obviously understating the scholarship involved and the expectation that the product is the work of God but its difficult equally for me to live with the fact that people have sometimes gone to war over whether their version of the truth is the correct one even if there is the distinct possibility that they're both wrong. In addition, are we saying that current religious thinking is any more right or sophisticated than the Greek, Roman or even Egyptian belief systems. Aren't they all just manifestations of the same thing - the need to believe in something?

Now, what I probably should do here is drop in some good quotes from people like Richard Dawkins or The Dalai Llama to cover the two sides of the argument. The fact that I'm not shouldn't in any way be thought of as a lack of research, more that I want to attempt to present my opinion unfiltered which I know presents the risk that the following will sound like the kind of pissed meanderings which I'd often spew during a pub lock-in in my early twenties. I can still hear Richard Coppell, the scientist who I'd known from school telling me I don't know what I'm talking about, not that he seemed to either.

Frankly it's difficult not to actually come to the conclusion that neither science or religion holds the answers because people are involved. In a sense, all that religion does is allow control, either benign or otherwise with the most powerful figures wielding the most influence. The New Testament, for example, is a collection of books that gained orthodoxy in the fourth century AD, banishing, with perhaps the exception of Revelations, anything really controversial. The apocrypha makes for eye raising reading but underlines how the Christian church's attitude to most things might be very different now had they not been disregarded as heresy by other religious figures way back when.

In a similar way, science cannot be considered cold and unbiased. True, science just is but scientific breakthroughs and theories are merely understandings of available evidence. If the evidence is obscured and hasn't been revealed yet the developments will be limited. But scientists are the gatekeepers of the knowledge and again it's the most powerful of these, either through magnificent thought or sponsorship from major companies seeking business opportunities who dictate the scientific truth that will be disseminated. That's why green sciences have until recently been severely under funded and are in some cases decades behind other fields. Why would anyone want to fund the development of a car that can run on water or ethanol or whatnot if their vested interests are in old?

I was shocked to discover recently, reading the local newspaper, that the same teacher I had the probable falling out with is attempting to bring the teaching of intelligent design into science lessons. Nothing too concrete, just a few videos, an attempt to open up the possibility that any science that can't be explained must be God's work. The reason I eventually rejected my version of intelligent design is that actually its not that they can't be explained - it's that they can't be explained -- yet. Fermat's Last Theorem looked impossible for three centuries until Andrew Wiles came along and found a proof.

If then it is possible to take us people out of the equation, for us to peer at science and religion in abstraction, which do I think is most likely to provide the truth? Drum roll please.

Science.

It just is. There will inevitably be a time when the current religions, no matter how complex they may be will change or even disappear just as the aforementioned Mediterranean belief systems have. They're the product of humanity (at least through my eyes) and as such perishable along with whatever the apparent truth might be that they're advocating.

Science however will continue, there will always be something to discover or rediscover after the apocalypse and whatever truth it may be will continue to exist waiting to be stumbled upon or sadly suppressed. I don't know that there's some ultimate equation that offers the answer to everything and really it also depends on what you expect the truth to be. But you know what's really scary? Somewhere in here, is something that actually gives sense to a famous quote from Donald Rumsfeld We know there is a truth, but we just don't know what that truth is.

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."