In this week’s eSkeptic, Massimo Pigliucci examines the alleged parallels that religious scholar, Huston Smith, draws between science and religion.
Dr. Pigliucci has a Doctorate in Genetics from the University of Ferrara (Italy), a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut, and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Tennessee. He has done post-doctoral research in evolutionary ecology at Brown University and is currently Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. His research interests include the philosophy of biology, in particular the structure and foundations of evolutionary theory, the relationship between science and philosophy, and the relationship between science and religion.
In the area of public outreach, Prof. Pigliucci has published in national magazines such as Skeptic, Skeptical Inquirer, Philosophy Now, The Philosopher’s Magazine, Secular Nation and American Atheist magazine. Pigliucci pens the “Rationally Speaking” blog (rationallyspeaking.org), hosts the podcast by the same name, and publishes the 5-minute Philosoper videos on YouTube.
Dr. Massimo Pigliucci
The Place of Science
by Dr. Massimo Pigliucci
“SCIENCE BUMPS THE CEILING of the corporeal plane… From the metaphysical point of view its arms, lifted toward a zone of freedom that transcends coagulation, form the homing arc of the ‘love loop.’ They are science responding to Eternity’s love for the productions of time.” This grandiose bit of poetical nonsense concludes a chapter of Huston Smith’s Forgotten Truth dedicated to put science in its place. Smith is one of the world’s foremost authorities on religions, and his aim is to demonstrate that science is not an omnipotent force that can answer all questions posed by humanities. That is, science needs to be put in its place.
Fair enough, although I don’t know of any scientist who would claim otherwise. Contrary to what many anti-intellectuals maintain, science is by nature a much more humble enterprise than any religion or other ideology. This must be so given the self-correcting mechanisms that are incorporated into the scientific process, regardless of the occasional failures of individual scientists.
But what is most astounding in Smith’s essay is his attempt to develop a parallel between science and mysticism in order to “demonstrate” that the world’s great religions are capable of insights at least as powerful as science’s because they actually use similar tools. Let us then briefly examine this alleged parallelism and in the process try to understand what the proper place of both science and religion ought to be.
item of interest…
15 Myths of Science
Amazingly, science textbook writers are among the most egregious purveyors of myth and inaccuracy in science. Through time, one author after another can simply repeat inaccurate information without bothering to check its validity or utility. More…
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Smith’s first insight is that science and religion both claim that things are not as they seem. For example, you have the perception that the chair on which you are sitting is solid, but modern physics will tell you that it is made of mostly empty space. This, apparently, is analogous to the following bit from C.S. Lewis: “Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see.” Never mind, of course, that physicists can bring sophisticated empirical evidence to support their claim about the emptiness of space, while Christianity is made up of a series of fantastic and contradictory stories backed by no evidence whatsoever.
Second, according to Smith, both science and religion claim that the world is not only different from what we perceive, but that there is “more” than we can see, and that the additional part is “stupendous.” Of course, electrons, quarks and neutrinos are “more” than we can see, although they are stupendous only to those few scientists who spend their lives working on them. Well, this is apparently the same as Shankara’s “notion of the extravagance of his vision of the summum bonum when he says that it cannot be obtained except through the merits of 100 billion well-lived incarnations,” a cornerstone of some Indian sacred text. I hope you are starting to appreciate the depths of the similarities between science and religion. But wait, there is more.
The two quests for truth also share the quality that this “more” that they seek to explore cannot be known in ordinary ways (otherwise, presumably, one would need neither science nor religion to get there). Science’s ways lead to apparent contradictions, such as in the case of some aspects of quantum mechanical theory. To which Smith juxtaposes some gems from the Christian literature that he says uncannily resemble modern notions of quantum physics. For example, did not Nicholas of Cusa (De Visione Dei) write that “the wall of the Paradise in which Thou, Lord, dwellest is built of contradictories,” pretty much like the dual particle-wave nature of light? And did not Dionysius the Areopagite (The Divine Names) say “He is both at rest and in motion, and yet is in neither state,” thus anticipating Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle? I am not making the examples up—these are Smith’s very own.
Fourth, both science and religion have found other ways of knowing this “more” which cannot be accessed by our ordinary senses. The language through which science accomplishes this is mathematics; the one of religion is, of course, mysticism, which Smith describes as a “comparably specialized way of knowing reality’s highest transcorporeal reaches” (whatever that means). This, according to Smith, is “not a state to be achieved but a condition to be recognized, for God has united his divine essence with our inmost being. Tat tvan asi; That thou art. Atman is Brahman; samsara, Nirvana”. Yes, of course.
The fifth parallelism is that in both science and religion these alternative ways of knowing need to be properly cultivated. A scientist needs to dedicate a lifetime to her education and research if she wants to make a contribution. This is apparently similar to the asceticism of saints because, as Bayazid ‘correctly’ pointed out, “The knowledge of God cannot be attained by seeking, but only those who seek it find it.”
item of interest…
Postmodernism
and Science
Does cultural upbringing affect the way scientists think about the world? Pulitzer Prize nominee and physicist Dr. Tony Rothman considers such deeply meaningful questions as: Is the Universe Knowable? Is the World Symmetrical? Are Doubt and Certainty Complementary? Can We Learn Anything From Parallels Between Physics and Eastern Philosophy? What is science in a “postmodern” world?
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Finally, in both science and religion profound knowing requires instruments. In science, these are microscopes, telescopes and particle accelerators. In religion, the equivalent is provided by the Revealed Texts, “Palomar telescopes that disclose the heavens that declare God’s glory.” If gods who dictate texts are not palatable to you, there is an alternative: “Spirit (the divine in man) and the Infinite (the divine in its transpersonal finality) are identical—man’s deepest unconscious is the mountain at the bottom of the lake.” Get it?
I would not have bothered the reader with this mountain of nonsense if it came from the local televangelist screaming bloody hell against the humanists’ corruption of the world. But this is Huston Smith, one of the most respected intellectual exponents of modern religionism, one who is hailed as offering the deepest insights that not just one, but all the world’s religions can offer!
This is a maddening example of what Richard Dawkins (in Unweaving the Rainbow) called “bad poetry.” Metaphors make much of the world’s literature a pleasure to read, but they can also be exceedingly misleading. There is no parallel whatsoever between science and religion. One can practice one or the other or both, but to pretend that they yield common insights into the nature of the world is an intellectual travesty. To go further, as Smith and so many religionists do, and assert that science is arrogant because it claims to provide the best answers to a circumscribed set of questions is astonishing, especially when the alleged alternative is so obviously the result of Pindaric flights of imagination. Now, here is my modest proposal: what if religions would treat themselves to a little dose of humility? Imagine what the world would be like in that case.
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Beautiful. The problem with preachers and such is that the ignorant come to think of them as deep thinkers. This article clearly shows the difference.
Risible twaddle from a pompous gasbag. He brings to mind Extreme Distinguished Professor Jonas Elijah Klapper from Rebecca Goldstein’s Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God. Perhaps Alan Sokol can be enlisted again to spoof this fool.
Thanks, Professor Pigliucci, for this incisive description of the distinction between natural science and religion ! The fact that Mr Smith chooses to use (misunderstood) examples from quantum mechanics to represent science, on the one hand, and ancient and medieval writers to represent religion, on the other, is telling : in the case of natural science, we (H sapiens sapiens) have come a long way since Galileo Galilei laid the foundations of modern science at the beginning of the 17th century, while as regards religion, we «know» nothing more than we thought we did hundreds or even thousands of years ago. «Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens….»
Henri
I love this article, Dr. Pigliucci. Thank you for taking the time to write it. However, as someone who recently took the GRE, I feel compelled to mention one tiny thing: Your use of the word “travesty” was incorrect. A travesty is an inferior imitation of a serious work. So, to make a claim (e.g., that science and religion yield common insights) can’t be an intellectual travesty, because the claim is not trying to imitate anything. Sorry to nitpick a splendid article!
Half way through the first sentence I thought “what is this crap?” I didn’t expect to see such verbiage on this site. Fortunately I noticed the quotation marks around it and finished the article. Good article! Too many people (especially preachers) seem to think that flowery rhetoric is a brain substitute.
As far as Anoracle’s comments are concerned, I have to say that paranoid hyperbole on the part of skeptics doesn’t help matters. A few religionists fit his description, but most are just well meaning people who believe a lot of nonsense, and cause a lot of harm.
C.S. Lewis: “Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see.” Never mind, of course, that physicists can bring sophisticated empirical evidence to support their claim about the emptiness of space, while Christianity is made up of a series of fantastic and contradictory stories backed by no evidence whatsoever.
I’m extracting this passage from the article because the statement is not true. Christianity doesn’t merely create “fantastic and contradictory stories…” The gist of Christianity rests on one fact alone: Did a man walk out of a tomb after he died in order to live again? If you believe it, you can be a Christian, and if not, no matter. But to those who believe it, it matters. The “evidence” is a moment of acceptance that guides one’s life to a better state than life would be without this acceptance. Why not put a little magic in your coffee?
Keep in mind, I’m not a Christian, but love the stories. Paul the Apostle, the preserver of the Jesus-got-out-of-the-tomb experience, used this device to give people definitions of faith, love and hope in a world of despair, and created a sense of community. These definitions, for millions, hold true today.
Many Christians find solace in their definitions of faith, hope and love based on a guy who got up out of the ground and wafted into a place called Heaven. To them, this is a fact.
What I constantly question as I grow old is this: Is this such a bad fact to base life on? Science doesn’t bring us back to life. According to my understanding, if science could make me live to 700 years old, gravity would flatten me to the shape of a pancake well before that time was reached.
Give people a few “lies”, the stories of Christianity, and for some, life ain’t so bad. I fear that religion becomes quashed so much so that there will be few alive who will appreciate Milton’s Paradise Lost … Milton, by the way, was probably a creationist, though the term applied to him as understood by today’s terms is somewhat anachronistic.
I love that science pursues fact. I also love that my old grandmother, a few months before she died, in her senility, could summarize a scientific discussion with an absurd phrase: “I don’t know what you’re all talking about, it’s all mind over matter.”
There is a place for religion and its stories, “facts” to some. I hope we don’t ever become Stalinesque and quash the church and kill the beauty of the stories and what they mean to many who find faith, hope and love in them.
The preachiness of science as a new religion is just as taxing as a Jehovah witness cramming a new insight into Revelation down my throat. However, I have to admit, I love a good debate about Revelation.
Sometimes I wonder … which is more likely, a wormhole opening up somewhere just past Andromeda, or a man in a white sheet who suddenly walks up on a crowd after an accident, heals a victim with the touch of his hand, and proclaims himself the savior? Which would I rather see, and which would be more likely to send chills through my spine?
Science is great, but so are the stories of the Bible.
Here is the view of “Who Are We?”, a webbook I’ve posted at
Do religion and science provide complementary viewpoints?
… some people think of religion and science as being complementary, religion talking about things unknowable (necessarily mysterious) and science talking about things knowable.
Religion offers consolation without explanation and science offers explanation (in the form of description) without consolation. It depends on what we are looking for whether or not we see them as complementary.
Well, I guess promotion of web-based material is a no-no. Google “Who Are We?” webbook if you’re interested.
I have not read Huston Smith so cannot comment.
The tone of Dr. Massimo Pigliucci’s article sounds sarcastic and a quite a bit contemptuous of religion. This tone seems to demean the nobility of skepticism and blur it with cynicism and arrogance.
I have no love of christianity or other forms of organized religion as they have often been practiced. But I believe any skeptic could agree that humans need meaning. Religion has been an attempt to meet that real need and has even succeeded in part. Science has had some serious moral breaches in its past as well.
“There is no parallel whatsoever between science and religion.” seems like a hasty and overly broad conclusion to come to in a book review. Esteemed skeptic Carl Sagan has done a masterful job bridging the illusory gulf between our need to know and our need for transcendence. Let us get over this “science vs religion” game and honestly acknowledge the virtues and shortcomings of both. If Smiths book is pompous nonsense, then lets keep it to that and not implicate all religion as well.