V. How do we define "religion"?

Chris:

Though Einstein uses the word "religion" there, I still don't believe he's using what most people would recognizably call religion. Though I'm not accusing you of this, theists (and especially the intelligent design community, realizing the value of trying to synergize science and religion) have made the "Einstein was religious" argument by either vastly expanding the definition of religion essentially to "numinousness" (which I think is poor, because of the reasons I discussed in reaction to Webster's definition of "religious" - what Einstein means by "ultimate reality" is not what a religion means, and I continue to hold that exploring that "ultimate reality" takes very different forms in the realm of science (=let's try to figure it out) versus religion (=what does the book say). I may be accused of oversimplifying, but again, this comes down to the idea of ultimate truth and the supernatural that religion expresses.)

To a certain extent, I can agree with your point about "getting people onboard" from a practical standpoint, but only as a Tyson-esque backdoor way to get them to acknowledge that there is absolutely no evidence for the supernatural. Yes, I think that some people understand that there's no evidence - that's where "faith" comes in - but nearly every piece of evidence I see tells me that even more people do believe in miracles. Half of Americans believe in guardian angels, after all. And getting those people into science can show them that there is no such thing as a miracle. (Is it any surprise, by the way, that the US Air crash has been dubbed "Miracle on the Hudson?")

But I don't believe that using religion is a good way to get people into science. Dr. Tyson discusses one of those reasons in the person of Newton, who stopped thinking when he decided to invoke God tweaking the motion of the planets. As he says during his "Beyond Belief" speech (a variation on the "Perimeter of Ignorance" essay), the man who invented calculus on a dare could easily have figured out Laplace's math, but he didn't because he solved it with magic. Map this problem onto every lab in the country, and you're going to have a bunch of people who just stop after they hit a big problem or make enough money. The last chapter of all of their giant, unreadable books will be, "Well, I couldn't figure this one out and I'm retiring, so God." And then it'll take a while for the next person to pick up the work because of it.

Part and parcel of religion, in the way that it is practiced recognizably today, is a belief in the supernatural. We can correlate higher degrees of religiousity with higher belief in the supernatural, and I would argue that there is a causal link there because of the content of religion - it tells people about magic, an infallible immortal guy, and argument from authority quite literally as gospel.

Now, you or I may be able to hypothesize a version of religion that doesn't have these things. As I argued in my response to "Carl Sagan's Religion," such a religion is "indeed a set of beliefs surrounding an ultimate truth; however, they are markedly different from conventional religion because they do not proclaim to know or have a monopoly on the truth. Where traditional religions are conservative in that they are loath to consider new evidence that would suggest their fallibility, Sagan’s view of the universe is progressive, inviting new ideas about the nature of nature. If we are to call Sagan’s beliefs his religion, as we may do, we must include the caveat that those beliefs are nothing like the religions that we know." We may be able to use Einstein's "religion" in our hypothetical (again, though, most of his biographers would have huge problems with our calling Einstein "religious"). We can end up with a definition so close to Sagan's "numinousness" that it's not worth even redefining religion. But to get people to "believe" in that religion, I think, is just as difficult in getting them to "believe" nothing at all, and nothing at all comes with way less baggage.

You write of the alternative I'm proposing. I'm not proposing a specific practical alternative. It is not (nor is it virtually ever) my goal to create the world I would advocate for. Rather, I am espousing my belief (which certainly could be wrong) based on my available evidence that religion is unnecessary and incompatible with the practice of good science.

In summary, then, there is a definite advantage to getting more religious people into science. I don't think, though, that there's any chance of doing it while preserving religion in a recognizable form. My thoughts are mainly of the dangers of bringing religion into science in the same way the writers of the US Constitution feared the dangers of bringing together religion and state - the two would tend to have this awful habit of turning into some kind of scary hybrid that's just completely unproductive.

Erin:

Yeah, everyone wants to have Einstein on their side. (WWED?) I only brought him into the debate because of my fondness for “holy curiosity,” which I feel is an elegant phrasing of my belief that scientific (and social and philosophical and theological …) inquiry can indeed be a holy pursuit insofar as it can motivate us to do everything we can to push the limits of our understanding and abilities within some sor t of ethical framework (the sort of ethical framework that says “love thy neighbor” and that teaches us that secular pursuits [like science] can also be vocations that demand a full commitment of one’s intellectual energies.) Variations on the Protestant Ethic, I suppose, if I’m going to be scrupulous about citing my influences. I understand “holy” is not vocabulary you’re comfortable with, and with the intelligent design community seeking to appropriate Einstein to legitimate teaching the very definition of pseudoscience as science, it’s not hard to see why, but I’m not going to let a bunch of disingenuous anti-science activists claim that term any more than I’m going to let Republicans claim the “values voters” label. And I’m going to continue to resist your simplification of religion as a recommendation to “look to the book” (or stone tablet or papyrus scroll or whatever) for answers, when a scientific vocation would demand quite the opposite and the imperatives of liberation theology make demands which science and technology can (*can,* if religion lets them) answer.

So, clearly defining religion is a subject on which we differ at this point -- and I’ll come back to that later – but first let me address this question of getting people on board with science. I like Tyson’s methodology of education which essentially exhorts people to think skeptically and critically for themselves (instead of, say, placing antagonistic signs on public buses) – and I agree that a desirable consequence of that is likely to be a rejection of pseudoscience (though not of religion qua religion). However, those methods only work if people are listening, and the people Tyson needs to convince are probably not going to show up to a lecture at the Hayden Planetarium on rejecting the supernatural, leaving him preaching to the choir (sorry …). Thus my desire to promote some common ground between religion and science – not on an epistemological basis but on an ethical one. That is, the common ground isn’t one of “different ways of knowing about the world” – while that’s an interesting debate to have (QED), it absolutely does run the risk of confounding the two and letting people think God lies just beyond the perimeter of ignorance so they can stop asking questions. And that’s bad. Instead, I think highlighting overlapping ethical imperatives (“sometimes religion and science tell us to do the same thing”) is a much more effective means of creating the conditions of possibility for a genuine conversation that’s needed to change minds (citation: Habermas). In addition to the tangible results in terms of alleviating human suffering, such a conversation would mitigate current misunderstandings of science (as unethical) and religion (as anti-curiosity) that characterize the relationship today.

Why go through all this work rather than just marginalizing the fundamentalists and excluding them from conversations entirely? It would certainly be simpler and probably scientific progress would go faster and more smoothly. But in the final analysis, the speed of scientific progress isn’t my overriding concern. Such a line of thought is just too reminiscent of libertarians who think economic efficiency should be the ultimate goal of society. As frustrating as attempting to engage intelligent design proponents (those who seek to represent intelligent design as science, anyway) can be and as threatening as such people’s position really is to science, I don’t think science as an institution is ever important enough to justify treating people in what is essentially a dehumanizing, silencing manner. Beyond being counterproductive to skeptical project (try asking the AU Episcopalians how they feel about AURA sometime, and I think you’ll see what I mean), discourse about the faithful’s intellectual immaturity makes it all too easy to treat them as inferior. Please understand that I’m not accusing you of doing this (nor am I suggesting some sort of slippery slope leap to a mass genocide of the Methodists at the hands of the astrophysicists -- I’m aware of the shades of Godwin’s Law here), I’m simply stating my position that marginalization is not a good or right way to treat people. Too, I’m aware that “marginalize the fundamentalists” is an exaggeration -- if not outright misrepresentation – of your own position. But I do think it’s a consequence of your general orientation. It may be that science needs champions who do see it as the summum bonum of human activity, but as much as I love science and as much potential for good as I think it contains, that’s never going to be me. I’m not trying to convince you that religion is necessary -- that's never been my position; I am going to stick by my claim that religion can be compatible with the practice of good science.

As for defining religion, I don’t think you’re ever going to arrive at a definition of religion that doesn’t exclude people who consider themselves religious (me?) or include people who don’t want to be considered as such (Sagan?). Wittgenstein (guess who we studied last term for three weeks in Analytic Philosophy?) has a handy method for dealing with such hard-to-define words which involves admitting that there is no “essential” or “objective” – or dictionary – definition of a term like “religious.” (How could there be, for something that is fundamentally a human construction? We can’t even define “chair” particularly well.) Instead, he recommends looking to how a word is used to determine its meaning. “Religion” is obviously used in ordinary language as both as a means of legitimation (Einstein!) or delegitimation (Dawkins!) -- and while the claim that it means different things to different people is trite, it’s also true, and given the power of the label, relevant. Of course, what you’d end up with if you were to map out all these uses of “religion” would be a series of meanings, linked by family resemblances where Islam overlapped with Judaism on the question of (mono)theism and Judaism overlapped with Catholicism on the importance of ancient writings and Catholicism with Protestantism on the question of original sin and Protestantism with Buddhism in a conceiving of a life after this one and Buddhism with Hinduism on the matter of karma … Eventually we’d get to something that overlapped with Sagan’s numinousness (via pantheism if nothing else) with none of these criteria as a necessary or sufficient to demarcate “religion” as it is actually used. The point being, I don’t think your -- or Prof. Jackson’s (“Ultimate significance?” What does that even mean? How would that not include ethics [which are often wholly secular?]) -- attempts at defining religion are particularly useful. Given that people who consider themselves religious do – in practice – use their religious beliefs as motivation for relentless scientific enquiry, I think this is something to be championed, publicized, and celebrated, as it can generate results both in accordance with my ethical views (Further human knowledge! Help people!) and my intellectual views (Debunk pseudoscience! Show people science is a tool for good!).

Chris:

I would argue that the AURA people would seem antagonistic merely by putting "atheists" in their moniker. For many and varied reasons, people get a very negative reaction from "atheist" that they don't even get from "Muslim" in this country. Michael Shermer discusses this in his study of the horribly unsuccessful attempt to create a new label foratheists. In my opinion, this is why they should call themselves a skeptics' society.

Putting all practical concerns aside (because they're boring and insanely speculative), it should come as no surprise that I think the definition nonsense is pure crap. We're really good at defining things incredibly specifically; we're just not good at transmitting those definitions to others. I would agree, of course, that there is no Platonic essense of a word's definition, but I think it would be profoundly unproductive to leave it at, "We use words to mean different things, so the words mean different things." Each word would have an entire class of definitions. What a horrifying world this would be! Rather, we have these wonderful things called dictionaries, and if we could teach people to use them, we might be a little better off (And how do those dictionaries get their definitions, I might hear one asking? Smart people with lots of time on their hands figure them out. Experts, I think they're called.). Perhaps then we as a society could get out of this nonsense about "ooh, I want to be called this, but I'm not really, so I'll just call myself this anyway." But people suck. That's why I have no concern about the practical. To quote Dr. House (who was clearly just quoting me from my early childhood - that's actually true), "People are idiots." (And we can all find a lot of evidence to support that.)

As a sidenote, I believe that PTJ and I explored what our definitions of ultimate significance are in our back-and-forth. Ultimate=fundamental (M-W); significance=meaning/conveying meaning. If we didn't explicitly discuss it, it's because I think it was at least clear to the two of us. And despite the fact that it's posted online, our primary audiences were essentially each other. (PTJ posted his thing essentially as a response to something I was talking about in class, though he had already started writing it; I posted mine in direct response.)

TO BE CONTINUED ...