One of the big questions of the day is whether capital “S” Science will win out against capital “R” Religion. To my mind this is a false debate: no self-respecting scientist would take religion on as a suitable opponent, and no religious person should posit their spiritual conception as factually accurate. Nevertheless they both do, and this immature conflict seems to be one that we can’t get beyond. In a more mature society, the opposition between Science and Religion, or Science and Art for that matter, would simply disappear.

You may be familiar with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel C Dennett, and Sam Harris, each currently famous for recent books denouncing religious belief. They approach the subject in various ways: from the biological basis for religion, to religion’s political implications. But these polemical attacks aren’t likely to convince (or convert) anyone who doesn’t already agree with them. They’re preaching to the choir. My guess is that more people make the move from Non- to True-Believer than the other way around, perhaps even because of the perceived pomposity of the anti-religious crusaders.

God in the universe

And, of course, there are also the scientists who not only believe in God but find Him (or Her, or It, or Whatever) in the immense precision and fragility of the universe and life. Theistic biologists and astronomers cite the delicacy and beauty of the world and conclude that a designing God must be animating the whole show. This is a step beyond the pantheistic God of Spinoza and Einstein, both of whom believed in a spiritual, if impersonal, aspect to the physical realm. Or, to oversimplify, they believed that God is the universe: hence, no conflict between Big Bang/Evolution and Creationism.

Clearly, then, Science and Religion are not just plain opposites: they overlap in a way that obscures either side’s proponents from seeing how similar they really are. It’s easy to bring together the traditional opposites of Art and Science if we oppose them to, say, ordinary speech, which has little of the organizational effort and cohesion needed to construct a decent piece of art or scientific model of any kind. And in doing so we might see them both more clearly for what they are and how they work.

Frye knew

The brilliant Canadian literary critic and humanist Northrop Frye put it this way: It’s “nonsense to think of the scientist as a cold unemotional reasoner and the artist as somebody who’s in a perpetual emotional tizzy. You can’t distinguish the arts from the sciences by the mental processes the people in them use: they both operate on a mixture of hunch and common sense. A highly developed science and a highly developed art are very close together, psychologically and otherwise.”

Religion proper does not attempt physics, and though it does precede science historically, science does not develop out of religion. It’s simply impossible for hard science to have preceded religion in any society. What does evolve from religious myths is literature, although by the time it has, it is no longer believed in literally. Religious mythology and morality form the embryo of literature and law and art, but it’s a mistake to grant modern day organized religion the dignity of those disciplines, even if religion historically led to them.

Religion should be discarded, but not because science does what religion tries to do better or proves it wrong. Certainly science does better at physics, but it hardly hints at ethics. That is, science gives us the “what is,” not the “what should be.” Religion, we know, tries to give us ethics but, ironically, it’s those who believe in the factual reality of their faith who also contradict its moral code.

Science can measure the world, but it can’t give it meaning: that’s what myth is for. Conversely, believing in the factual accuracy of any religious myth or secular fiction robs it of its true function, meaning and depth. True believers in religion actually denigrate their own culture by taking it too seriously, and scientists pick a false fight in their attacks on religious naivety. Religion will evaporate on its own under the heat of a decent education, but hostility towards faith misses the point.

Economic religion just as bad

On either side you might have close-mindedness, hatred, and violence—although with science, usually less so. Technology gave us hydrogen bombs and cluster bombs, and religion gives us suicide bombers, but the ideological “religion” of neo-liberal economic policy is just as self-assured, grotesquely justified, and destructive as any Islamic terrorist group. Forcing Third World countries to repay unserviceable and crippling debts (because they must! It’s in the contract!) to wealthy, Western powers can only be understood as religious morality, or what John Ralston Saul dubbed “crucifixion economics.” Even a science, like economics, can share in the major vice of religion: true, unquestioned, fanatical belief, to be imposed no matter what the human cost.

In this sense, Science and Religion both oppose Art, because while the first two can turn into malignant certainty to be forced violently upon others, Art stays safely on the imaginative plane. As Frye put it, “bigots and fanatics seldom have use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them as also possibilities. It’s possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.”

Tolerant religion?

It’s possible to be a bigoted scientist or a tolerant religious believer, but the latter seems more inherently contradictory. I’m never sure what to think when someone professes to believe in Christ or Allah, but in the same sentence insist, paying lip service to freedom of religious choice, that everyone else can believe whatever they want. If you really believe, well, you must want others to believe, too, for the sake of their soul. This is why I don’t buy religious relativism: my faith is my faith, yours is yours . . . but I’m the one going to Heaven, too bad for you. Bigoted scientists are, of course, pretty rare, and at least open to rational public scrutiny. Religion, on the other hand, is afforded a dignity that makes the float at Surrey's annual Vaisakhi Sikh parade, celebrating religious martyrs (some say terrorists) something that even the kids and local politicians can enjoy, with little more than a polite peep from the media.

What we need is not a serious public debate on Religion vs. Science, but rather Certainty vs. Doubt, Thinking vs. Following, Corporatism vs. Democracy. It doesn’t matter if it’s a church or a mosque or a think tank like the Fraser Institute—the point is to have an open dialogue about the public good, free of the self-interest of corporate groups, whether business, religious, or any other xenophobic, self-promoting entity. Would this not be more fruitful than the facile debate between Science and Religion?