Religion and Science

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and desire are the motive forces behind all human endeavour and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present itself to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words?

A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions--fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connexions is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates for itself more or less analogous beings on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. One's object now is to secure the favour of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed towards a mortal.

I am speaking now of the religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases the leader or ruler whose position depends on other factors, or a privileged class, combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), January 31, 2001

Answers

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The social feelings are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes, the God who, according to the width of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even life as such, the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing, who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God.

The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, which is continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in a nation's life. That primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that they are all intermediate types, with this reservation, that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. Only individuals of exceptional endowments and exceptionally high-minded communities, as a general rule, get in any real sense beyond this level. But there is a third state of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form, and which I will call cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), January 31, 2001.

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The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear in earlier stages of development--e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learnt from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer especially, contains a much stronger element of it.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no Church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as Atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it.

We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events--that is, if he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion.

A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it goes through. Hence science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of reward after death.

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), January 31, 2001.

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It is therefore easy to see why the Churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees. On the other hand, I maintain that cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion which pioneer work in theoretical science demands, can grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labour in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a sceptical world, have shown the way to those like-minded with themselves, scattered through the earth and the centuries.

Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man strength of this sort. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.

The World As I See It

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), January 31, 2001.

"Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of reward after death."

I have said exactly this a number of times in the past. While I am no Einstein, I do believe this is true. I had a dialogue about this with either Lars or possibly Frank some time ago. It opened up a can of worms!

-- FutureShock (gray@matter.think), January 31, 2001.

Not me FS, I don't like worms

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), January 31, 2001.

Your dislike of worms, Lars, stems from faded memories of watching your body slowly consumed by them after its death. I've long suspected man's attraction to fishing is in fact founded in retribution. Baiting a hook with a worm, watching it wiggle as its neuron net is inundated with rudimentary signals of pain is sweet revenge.

Amazing what a quadruple shot of espresso will result in, eh?

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), January 31, 2001.

Amazing what a quadruple shot of espresso will result in, eh?

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), January 31, 2001.

Roflmao.....um, damn!!!!

Sounds GREAT bout now....

dayz a draggin?

-- sumer (shh@aol.con), January 31, 2001.

Rich -- great piece. You should get the book, "Einstein and Religion" by Max Jammer. It's fantastic -- includes the role religion had in Einstein's personal life, his philosophy of religion in great detail -- gleaned from practically every source -- and the effect of his physics on theology, which, IMO, is the best part, and absolutely riveting.

I'm still working my way through it (bought three books on relativity to help), but I keep it on or near the top of one of the two stacks of books on my nightstand. (hey, Ken -- if you're reading this -- you were right -- lol -- I DO have a big stack of books there.:)

-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), February 01, 2001.

Sumer, I was hoping *somebody* would know I was just being silly about the worms. I don't fish, hunt or seek revenge (anymore). ;)

Thanks for the recommendation, Eve. I'll check the local library for a copy. In case anyone's interested: Einstein and Religion

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), February 01, 2001.

I like the "God doesn't play dice" part

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), February 02, 2001.

I like the "God doesn't play dice" part

Actually, recent propononts of Chaos Theory in the physics world are suggesting that random chance plays a vital and interesting role in the Universe. I remember an article in Scientific American where a physicist actually brought up this quote from Einstein.

In the CSCI world we have a programming idea called a "random number generator". It's useful for a lot of things. If you want to take a theological view of the universe, you can say that it's looking like God embedded a Random Number Generator into many subsystems in the Universe to keep things "running".

-- Bemused (and_amazed@you.people), February 02, 2001.