Thought of the Day 05.20.09

We often hear that public policy must not be based on religion because religion is a private matter and therefore must not be imposed on other people. Instead, we should look to science for guidance about what we should do because science is a superior epistemological alternative to religion. But let’s investigate a bit more.

Logically, there are three possibilities about the relationship between science and religion: they’re redundant to each other, they’re compatible, or they’re incompatible. Obviously, if they are redundant or compatible, then there is no reason to exclude religion from the discussion. But if they’re incompatible, now we suddenly have a different problem.

See, incompatibility is just a nice word for hostility, and if science is hostile to religion, then science is actually an anti-religion. But the only way something can be an anti-religion is if it’s a competing religion. And if science is an alternative religion, then the argument that our public policy discussions must be religion-free would entail that they also be science-free.

This might sound absurd, but at least it’s no more absurd than the idea that science can displace religion without being a religion itself.
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3 comments:

Stan said...

I was right there with you, Andrew, and then I collided with logic. For science to be opposed to religion, it doesn't have to be a religion. If religion is a "metanarrative", a way of viewing the world, that includes God, for science to be a competing entity it would only need to be a metanarrative, a way of viewing the world ... without God.

What's that called ... "false dilemma"?

May 20, 2009 at 7:01 AM
Andrew Tallman said...

But then the question becomes, "What is a meta-narrative," and why are those which make reference to a God considered illegitimate whereas those which reference no particular explanation at all for the other claims they make considered acceptable? Your shift moves the question back one step, but it doesn't solve anything for science when it presumes to displace religion as meta-narrative.

"Well, there's nothing about meta-narratives in the Constitution." Sure, but explain (he repeated patiently) why meta-narratives which make no appeal to God are epistemologically acceptable in the publica arena while those that do make such an appeal are not?

If I say that abortion should be an individual's choice because my pet rock told me so, this would not indicate a religion per se, but it would certainly indicate that I have a faith-based meta-narrative which is relatively unusual. And if I then said, "Well, at least my reasons aren't religious. Therefore you shoudl listen to them and ignore all these flimsy religious arguments of my opponents," I'd be making no more illegitimate a move than anti-religionists (and that's the key) make when saying that religious reasons in the public arena are inherently unacceptable.

The simple fact is that if a viewpoint can conflict with religion (as the third alternative and many public figures suggest), then it is a competing religion. Saying otherwise is deliberately using a linguistic distinction (between religion as only a God-referential meta-narrative and other meta-narratives) that can't be conceptually justified to bar religion from the discussion.

May 20, 2009 at 3:27 PM
Stan said...

Oh, no, I wasn't disagreeing with that. Christianity as a metanarrative explains essentially everything, while science as a metanarrative explains nearly nothing. Oh, we might know why the Earth revolves around the Sun just fine, but that doesn't explain interpersonal relationships, what should and should not be moral (science specifically cannot address that), or why it is that most humans naturally believe in a God of some sort. In other words, replacing a religious metanarrative with a scientific metanarrative is anemic and inadequate.

But it's not a religion ;).

May 20, 2009 at 4:42 PM

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