Druyan, The Evils of Religion

I was forwarded a link http://www.csicop.org/si/2003-11/ann-druyan.html to an article by Ann Druyan, Karl Sagan’s second wife, on the evils of religion. It reminded me of a book that I read before Christmas; “The End of Faith”, by Sam Harris. A few quotes from Ann;

“I think we still have an acute case of post-Copernican-stress syndrome. We have not resolved the trauma of losing our infantile sense of centrality in the universe. And so as a society we lie to our children. We tell them a palliative story, almost to ensure that they will be infantile for all of their lives. Why? Is the notion that we die so unacceptable? Is the notion that we are tiny and the universe is vast too much of a blow to our shaky self-esteem?”

“The Bible says that the Earth is flat. The Bible says that we were created separately from the rest of life. If you look at it honestly, you have to give up these basic ideas, you have to admit that the Bible is not infallible, it's not the gospel truth of the creator of the universe. So what did we do? We made a corrupt treaty that resulted in a troubled peace: We built a wall inside ourselves. It made us sick. In our souls we cherished a myth that was rootless in nature. What we actually knew of nature we compartmentalized into a place that could not touch our souls. The churches agreed to stop torturing and murdering scientists. The scientists pretended that knowledge of the universe has no spiritual implications.”

“What I find disappointing about most religious beliefs is that they are a kind of statement of contempt for nature and reality. It's absurdly hubristic. It holds the myths of a few thousand years above nature's many billion-yeared journey. It says reality is inferior and less satisfying than the stories we make up.”

I won’t quote from Harris at this point, only point out that he is generally more militant. So what does an “infantile Christian” have to say about this?

First of all Gödel's first incompleteness theorem says that:

For any formal theory in which basic arithmetical facts are provable, it's possible to construct an arithmetical statement which, if the theory is consistent, is true but not provable or refutable in the theory

In other words, “no complete formal theory of the universe from within the universe”. We are in a box, a box which seems to us to be a very big box, but there will never be any formal system (science) that completely describes the box, let alone describes the meaning of the box.

Second, Ann (and Harris) seem to want to have “souls”. They somehow “believe there is more”, they are just certain that they know what that “more” ISN’T. It ISN’T “God” in any of the senses of any of the existing Religions (well maybe Buddhism for Harris), but it clearly isn’t the Christian / Biblical description. They may claim to not have faith, but they actually have quite a lot of faith:

1. They have a strong faith that there isn’t an afterlife that would have a penalty for unbelief. Pascal’s wager essentially says that if you want to “withhold judgment”, what you really need to do is all you can to be a believer. If you are wrong, you potentially forgo some questionable earthy pleasures of sin, but if right, you obtain eternal bliss. If you take the other choice, one had better be VERY sure (which you can’t be, scientifically), because failure to believe will earn eternal punishment.
   
2. They have faith that what they think they observe is what they are actually observing. Movies like The Matrix or items from science fiction like the holodeck on Star Trek give clues that reality may or may not be what we think it is. Quantum mechanics tells us that “we can’t know what it is”. Is it energy (wave) or matter (particle) … apparently “both”, but potentially neither. A lot of the smugness of science comes from its success at making predictions of how things operate in “human scale”. At very small sizes, and very high speeds, the smugness becomes “uncertainty”. There is a lot of difference between being happy with the information science provides where it can provide, and making the jump to it being “ultimate knowledge”.
   
3. They have faith that in their intellect and experience as superior to thousands of years of Judaic-Christian and other religious teaching, and their individual reality is superior to the experience of billions. They see their experience and knowledge as valid and one supposes “adult”, while the experience and knowledge of billions is “infantile”. It is the billions over thousands of years who are guilty of “hubris”? Could there be any emotion involved in that sort of judgement? 

Humans can live without faith about as well as they live without oxygen. We may not know a lot, but we ought to be aware that we are very limited finite beings living in either an infinite, or effectively infinite from our perspective, universe. The “bridge” is faith … in our senses, in our minds, in the physics we think we see, and basically in “order”.

Science believers and religious believers have that core belief in “order” in common. If there is no order in the universe then there are no principals for science to discover. A core matter of faith is where that order came from. The complete materialist scientists like Druyan choose to believe that order was created by random accident, people with religious beliefs believe that order was created by purposeful intelligence (God).

Either position is in the final analysis a “leap of faith”, but much as Ann talks about what religious people “have to admit”, she may not quite be facing what she would “have to admit”. If all that we see springs from randomness. 

Then what would a “value”, or “right and wrong” be? Nothing but a “myth”, or a “story we make up”. The only “moral principle” in that universe is the fittest survive, or might makes right. We have the freedom to pick which universe we live in, but don’t expect those that believe in a universe with no morals to advertise what the wages of picking their approach really are.