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Religion and science have one thing in common — a huge thing: they're both thought systems. That is to say they are both human thought systems.
Science may be wrong as a matter of fact but
religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle!
religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle!
We imagine, seeking evidence, that the hunters were trying to order their world: to their own advantage, with lots of fresh meat. Science tries to leave the magic out of its ordering: but still wants lots of fresh meat, a generous share of scarce resources.
Magical explanations form a big characteristic of religion. Advantage to your home group is another. Here's still another, key to what I'm here aiming at: religion (remember, a thought system!) assumes some nearly magical ability on the part of the faithful: to send or receive messages from the magical realm, for example; to be able to distinguish the holy from the ordinary: Monday is ordinary, the Sabbath is holy ... Science is much more modest in its assumption that sometimes some humans can be responsible some of the time and that that responsibility can be bequeathed to some group for preservation: a university science department, for example. (I'll share that assumption, but only to a very minor extent!) (The decay rate of intellectual integrity should itself be a major focus of science, but don't expect honest cooperation from state-funded institutions.) (And don't expect an Iona-like monastery to receive many tithes from a public.)
But here now is a characteristic distinguishing religion from science that started this ball rolling this morning, stimulating me to begin this post:
Both religion and science try to predict events, but religion repressed new thought in order to insist that it's got it right; whereas science, at least in theory, is supposed to keep doubting, keep testing, to never be sure. (But of course scientists know better by the time they are weaned than funding will not come without a great display of Certainty!) (Tell everybody, while wearing a Doom-sandwich-board, that the sky will fall tomorrow, and somebody may give you a dime; say, Of course we need fresh testing, always, and they'll take their dime back.)
There, I don't think that's bad for a first draft. It makes a couple of points. Many more could be developed at leisure, but I just want to arrive at one of the key points I'd aimed at without wanting to put it in the first sentence. I've just been through a struggle between the General and the Particular: I wanted to make universal generalization, yet get get to a few specific illustrations. Here:
Prediction
The Bible told the Jews what had happened, supposedly: what they wanted to believe was their history. (It's an unusual bit of self-hypnotism because the Jews don't merely flatter themselves in the portrait. Of course this may well have largely been an attempt by their priesthood to control the general population. (Regardless, it established a tendency which I, pk, leap on: blaming priesthoods, with precedent! for not hearing God, for failing to convey messages! Exactly what my life, my history (my mythology,) has been about!)) But then the Jews also slipped in a few imaginings about their future as well: there would a a Judgment, in which the God of the Jews would judge the other nations, the Gentile Goyim, enslaving them for the comfort and convenience of the Jews. Imagine the Babylonian Prime Minister having to buff the toenails of the humblest Jewish extra daughter.
The Christians magnified this tendency big time. The Jews' Genesis was about origins; the Jews' Exodus was about Jewish guilt as well as Jewish Chosen-ness; but Christian Revelation is about what's going to happen to everyone who doesn't swallow Jesus as their magical savior. Hence, Christianity has filled the human world with book-thumping illiterates who are Right, regardless of reason, evidence, intelligence, imagination, responsibility ...
(See? Now I'm Christian, in background, if not in specific dogma: and I'm Right! But not "regardless of reason, evidence, intelligence, imagination, responsibility ..." On the contrary. Still, the rhetorical style is Christian.)
These days though I follow Prigogine, chastising science, urging us to disabuse ourselves of "scientific" as well as religious Certainty. Quantum Thermo-Dynamics kicks the habitual hubris of Newtonian calculation into the dustbin. (Don't blame Newton! He never said that solving one or two two-body problems justified human arrogance on all possibilities!
Well, Shut Mah Mouth!
Above I "quoted" myself: "Science may be wrong as a matter of fact but religion is typically wrong as a matter of principle." I hope it's obvious that I don't mean that literally. I mean it literarily.
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