Finding a different approach to Religion and Science

Any attempt to develop some kind of cooperative framework between science and religion needs to start out by acknowledging the issues these two topics have had with each other, both in the past and in modern times. There wouldn’t, after all, be any need to develop a cooperative framework if the two hadn’t come to odds so often and so dramatically over the years. So, that’s where this handy guide to nearly everything is going to begin. There have been a couple different ways people have tried to reconcile the two, so I think it would be handy to start out by reviewing those, and how useful they seem to be on the whole.

• I'm right, you're wrong and also stupid and/or damned
• This is pretty straightforward. Many people believe that the only true choice between science and religion is science OR religion. It has to be one or the other because they seem to make contradictory claims about the nature of the universe. So, people raise the banner for their chosen side and spend a great deal of time sounding very angry at people on the other side. For example, on the religious side you have Young-Earth Creationists who absolutely insist on the literal truth of every word in the Bible, including the 7-day creation story. About thirty percent of Americans fall somewhere in this category, or at least claim to. Young-Earth Creationists routinely insist that any attempt to explain the origins of Earth and life that doesn’t involve a garden, forbidden fruit, and a talking snake are devil-inspired trickery to lure people to hell. On the science side, you have the “New Atheists,” of whom Richard Dawkins is likely the most famous member, insisting that all religious belief is silly backwards superstition that causes only harm to society and should be snuffed out as thoroughly as the belief that bloodletting is a valid medical treatment.  These two sides tend not to get along very well. Unfortunately, they also tend to get a LOT of press coverage, because they are typically loud, confrontational, and entertaining. 
• Non-Overlapping Magisteria
• This is an idea named and given shape originally by Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist. Gould felt that science and religion both had legitimate areas of expertise and authority, but that those areas were distinct from each other. According to this idea, there are certain things science is qualified to tell us, and there are certain things religion is qualified to tell us, but those things concern different aspects of our lives. For example, it is science’s job, not religion’s, to tell us how Earth was formed and how life arose, because these are questions that can be explored and evaluated using direct physical evidence and critically evaluated reasoning. On the other hand, it is religion’s job to tell us why we are here, because scientific inquiry can only tell us about the immediate physical universe.
• Divine Guidance, Physical Process
• You can find a growing number of both scientists and theologians who plant themselves firmly on a middle ground between the two fields. They are unwilling to reject either field, but seek instead to find ways that the two might overlap. This framework requires taking a somewhat more relaxed view of the literal truth of scripture, instead asserting that some things written in the bible are metaphorical rather than literal. This framework commonly promotes ideas like “guided evolution,” in which life arose and evolved over billions of years, but in that time was directed by God’s will. In some ways, the theory of Intelligent Design fits into this category as well, given its assertion that life is too complicated to have arisen through random processes and must have been designed by some intentional agent.
   

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but I think it provides a decent overview of some of the major ideas, enough to give you a sense of how people have approached this problem. Now then, let’s talk about the framework I’m planning on using.

If you ask any anthropologist, they’ll probably tell you that storytelling is a BIG part of just about every human culture. It’s not really that surprising; just look at how much money we pump into movies, television, and books. Even music tends to tell stories. It’s just how we are. But anthropologists know that stories are often how we try to understand the world. There are a couple people who did some extensive work in understanding how we use stories to communicate whose work has been very helpful to me – Claude Levi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell. Levi-Strauss proposed way back in the 1950s that we could learn a lot about how a culture functions by looking at the structure of that culture’s myths and stories – and we can find common relationships between cultures in the common structures of their stories. Campbell, meanwhile, proposed that many entirely separate myths are really the same story, or at least share a lot of common themes and ideas, and that these themes and ideas can suggest something deeper about human nature. 

At this point, you’re probably wondering just what this method I’ve been talking about is, so it’s probably a good time for the payoff here. Basically, what I’m hoping to do is to try to understand both religion and science as different ways of telling stories. I’m not trying to diminish either field, or suggest that either one is somehow frivolous or untruthful. Rather, what I’m trying to do is look at how the human predisposition towards storytelling plays into our notions of what religion and science are trying to tell us. When we break it down, most of the big theories in science and most of the big beliefs in religion are really stories, or at least we understand them as stories. I think a lot of the conflict between religion and science, at least at the non-academic levels, comes from people not knowing what to do with conflicting stories, and the academics leading the argument don’t really know what to do with conflicting stories either.

So, we’re going to try to use this notion of looking at the stories, and looking at the structures beneath the surface of the stories, to try to understand how religion and science can coexist and cooperate. In my next entry, I’ll go more in detail and provide a few examples of both religious and scientific stories, specifically looking at how stories that seem totally different on the surface in fact share a lot of common structure. Stay tuned!