Last Wednesday, I explored Mystery and Evidence, one articulation of the contrast between Religion and Science. Another topic stemming from Tim Crane’s NY Times Article which I found of interest was his claim:
… most people aren’t deeply interested in science, even when they have the opportunity and the basic intellectual capacity to learn about it. Of course, educated people who know about science know roughly what Einstein, Newton and Darwin said. Many educated people accept the modern scientific view of the world and understand its main outlines. But this is not the same as being interested in the details of science, or being immersed in scientific thinking. …
I have suggested that while religious thinking is widespread in the world, scientific thinking is not. I don’t think that this can be accounted for merely in terms of the ignorance or irrationality of human beings. Rather, it is because of the kind of intellectual, emotional and practical appeal that religion has for people, which is a very different appeal from the kind of appeal that science has.
Stephen Jay Gould on “The Simpsons”
Stephen Jay Gould once argued that religion and science are “non-overlapping magisteria.†If he meant by this that religion makes no factual claims which can be refuted by empirical investigations, then he was wrong. But if he meant that religion and science are very different kinds of attempt to understand the world, then he was certainly right. — Tim Crane. Mystery and Evidence. NY Times. 9/5/2010.
Mystery and Evidence‘s (Tim Crane. NY Times. 9/5/2010) opening paragraph immediately caught my attention.
There is a story about Bertrand Russell giving a public lecture somewhere or other, defending his atheism. A furious woman stood up at the end of the lecture and asked: “And Lord Russell, what will you say when you stand in front of the throne of God on judgment day?†Russell replied: “I will say: ‘I’m terribly sorry, but you didn’t give us enough evidence.’ â€
What do you think of Russell’s response?
By seeking to understand religion more fully, Tim Crane, Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and author of two books, “The Mechanical Mind†(1995) and “Elements of Mind†(2001), provides a more nuanced atheistic response. In particular, he investigates the significant differences between the way in which science and religion approach reality.
Science too has its share of mysteries (or rather: things that must simply be accepted without further explanation). But one aim of science is to minimize such things, to reduce the number of primitive concepts or primitive explanations. The religious attitude is very different. It does not seek to minimize mystery. Mysteries are accepted as a consequence of what, for the religious, makes the world meaningful.
This point gets to the heart of the difference between science and religion. Religion is an attempt to make sense of the world, but it does not try and do this in the way science does. Science makes sense of the world by showing how things conform to its hypotheses. The characteristic mode of scientific explanation is showing how events fit into a general pattern.
Religion, on the other hand, attempts to make sense of the world by seeing a kind of meaning or significance in things. This kind of significance does not need laws or generalizations, but just the sense that the everyday world we experience is not all there is, and that behind it all is the mystery of God’s presence. The believer is already convinced that God is present in everything, even if they cannot explain this or support it with evidence. But it makes sense of their life by suffusing it with meaning. This is the attitude (seeing God in everything) expressed in George Herbert’s poem, “The Elixir.†Equipped with this attitude, even the most miserable tasks can come to have value: Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws/ Makes that and th’ action fine.
Have you wrestled with the relationship of science and religion? How do you agree/disagree with Crane’s observations?
Note:Â Crane rejects Christianity due to what he considers the lack of factual basis for the centralChristian doctrines (e.g., Jesus’ resurrection).