Way of the Mind

A recent comment in Carl Sagan: little gods suggested that religion provides awe, and science doesn’t; therefore, science will never be enough, since we thirst for something more — to be awed.

The problem with that is that the awe of religion is the awe of not understanding. And you aren’t even supposed to understand, in fact. You’re supposed to “just know” (since it says so in a holy book), but never actually think too hard about it. It’s the awe of ignorance.

On the other hand, the awe of science is the awe of beginning to understand. It’s the awe of a child, when he realizes that there’s a wondrous universe out there, and that he can understand things about it - that there’s an infinity of new things to learn. It’s the awe of starting to grasp something, and realizing that it opens so many new avenues, that there’s so much out there that you can now comprehend — or begin to.

In fact, it’s religion that is resistant to awe.

Take the example in Sagan’s quote. Once, we didn’t really see much of the universe, and we understood it even less; to us, it probably appeared magical. We thought it was young, ridiculously small, and that our world (which we also believed to be much smaller than it is) was at the center of the universe. Anything we saw on the sky was close to us, and not really that big. Many things — the sun, animals, plants, etc. - were so useful. Therefore, it was natural to conclude that the universe was made just for us.

And, as that was what people believed back then, so it was included in religion.

Much later, we began to realize that the universe was much larger, much older, and that there was a lot of stuff out there. Nebulas, pulsars, stars of many sizes. Entire galaxies. And space - distances almost inconceivable to us (have you ever thought about how much a single light-year is? Try calculating it, just for fun.) And it had also been there for much longer than we first thought — indeed, for much longer than our puny little planet, or our puny little sun.

To me, that’s like being blind, and suddenly starting to see. To me, that is awe. Beginning to understand.

As Sagan says, religion could have made use of it. It could have used this newfound vast universe to show a much greater god, an infinite, complex, cosmic god, a deity that wasn’t restricted by what little was known by Bronze Age shepherds. A god who didn’t reflect the prejudices of its time, and who didn’t act much like a human, only “bigger”.

But no.

They’d rather keep their deities small and petty, our earth absurdly young (despite all the physical evidence to the contrary), our universe as an irrelevant backdrop for the real reason everything exists: to decide whether our souls are saved or not.

Can you really be awed by that, after you know the least bit about what the universe is really like?

Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible! Can it be!? The “first woman” wasn’t created from a male rib? Stop the presses!

The Bible is true in passages relating to human salvation, they say, but continue: “We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters.”
They go on to condemn fundamentalism for its “intransigent intolerance” and to warn of “significant dangers” involved in a fundamentalist approach.
“Such an approach is dangerous, for example, when people of one nation or group see in the Bible a mandate for their own superiority, and even consider themselves permitted by the Bible to use violence against others.”

Now, it only remains for the American Fundamentalists… sorry, “Religious Right”, to do the same. I don’t know, 500-1000 more years should do the trick.