From so simple a beginning…

While acrimonious spats continue to happen over science and religion in the United States, one of the saddest side effects of these in my opinion is the increasing tendency for some people to regard science as “just another point of view”. This is apparent in the way athesists for example are regarded as a group almost akin to some religious group, with their own philosophy, camp, and most importantly, their ‘God’, namely science. Reading some of the arguments on blogs and even book reviews (to which I gratefully don’t usually contribute any further) gives one an impression that religious people probably think that biologists for example have some ‘Darwin temple’, where they go and pray to an idol of a bearded saint. They probably have some secret society where they come with new ‘rules’ about evolution. For religious people, biologists are just another group rallied together in formation against religion and faith.

As we know, nothing can be further from the truth. What religious people remarkably continue to often miss, is that they can potentially check up on all the evidence that scientists assert. Where they see the emphasis as being laid on the people presenting arguments, the emphasis really is on the evidence supporting the arguments; the people are just messengers, and the evidence would exist even if not a single one of them existed. Charles Darwin is a much and rightly admired figure, and it is not surprising for scientists to talk of him with awe, respect, and affection. But this apparent idol worship hides a simple truth which all of them realise; evolution and natural selection would have existed if Darwin never had. But religious people curiously don’t care as much for the evidence, as they do for the fact that a certain class of intellectuals from a certain profession are trying to apparently ‘destroy their faith’ by invoking certain ‘Gods’, as if it was a personal matter between them and people of some other religion. They stop short at their own interpretation of polemic from scientists like Richard Dawkins. But they don’t bother to see if such polemic rests on facts or not.

Now here, I want to talk about a fundamental hang-up that people seem to have, which is actually not really a big deal. Tell any religious person that you don’t believe in a holy book or in God because of lack of evidence, and the first thing he or she does is get defensive and contend that of course, there’s no evidence for everything, but that does not mean that it does not exist. Moreover, they accuse you of putting a premium on ’scientific evidence’. Unfortunately, there are some people of the ‘faith’ themselves who perhaps unwittingly contribute to such contentions. Much as I am a big admirer of Freeman Dyson for instance, he and some other distinguished scientists have said essentially that there are many ways of knowing the world, and science is only one of them. Philosophers like Paul Feyerabend who retorted that ’science is an anarchic enterprise’ also don’t seem to help. I don’t deny that science certainly cannot provide the answers to all questions, and the need for human understanding definitely goes beyond scientific understanding. However, religious people seem to misinterpret what those such as Dyson are saying and interpret it out of context. I am sure that Dyson or Feyerabend fully comprehend this; that just because science is ‘only’ one way of knowing the world, it does not mean that all ways of knowing the world including religious ones are equally valid, and it of course does not mean that anything goes. When I say ‘valid’ here, I essentially mean ‘believable’. Nobody believes someone who has schizophrenia and has his own world vision of spirits and communists talking to him through flowerpots and domestic cats. Surely that world vision is also a unique way of ‘knowing the world’, as are also other worldviews espoused by nihilists, postmodernists and George W. Bush. But there are shades of belief in knowledge, and somehow we quite intuitively do rank such a worldview lower down on the reality generation game.

Put more simply, the main point is that the much exalted ’scientific evidence’ simply consists of things that we can see, touch and hear. Of course, there are many things in science (such as electron waves) which we cannot see or touch in the ordinary sense. But first of all, there are ways in which we can sequentially and convincingly transform such concepts into things that we can see and touch (such as the glows given off when electrons impact on a phosphorescent screen). Secondly, there are still many things that we can touch and see, like fossils, or anatomical structures in living organisms. I personally think that one of the reasons people of faith can easily criticise scientific evidence is because sometimes it is accorded an exclusive ivory-tower status. But once we realise that “scientific evidence” is really evidence just like almost anything else in our live, I think we can understand that is not such a big deal. Naturally, the difference between ‘ordinary’ belief in evidence and ’scientific’ belief in evidence is that scientists usually perform a series of controlled experiments to make sure that the facts are reproducible. But in some ways, even this is nothing more than their way of ‘making sure’ that something exists. Part of the problem also is that scientists themselves are seen as some kind of highly specialized and exclusive group. While it is lamentably true that the methodology of science has becoming increasingly cryptic, sophisticated, and accessible to a select few, it is still true that the core conclusions and tenets of most of science can be understood and verified by anyone with an open mind. In that respect, anyone who tries to maintain an objective mindset that trusts anything based on simple evidence, is most certainly a scientist for me.

So the next time you hear from a person of faith that you are putting an exclusive premium on ’scientific evidence’, tell him or her that you are actually not doing anything much different from what that person usually does to believe something in his daily life. Does he believe that hundreds have been killed in a train accident unless he sees the pictures streaming in on TV? Does he believe that his wife is having an affair unless he has evidence (and one can be sure that he will need absolutely irrefutable evidence to believe this)?. Would he even believe that prices of potatoes have skyrocketed until he actually goes to the grocer to buy them, or has someone close to him buy them? Now notice here that most of us don’t even demand completely foolproof evidence for believing such things in life. And yet we do believe them based on good sense and sufficient evidence. So why not believe science, which after all claims massive evidence in so many cases? The most interesting paradox for me is that religious people have no problem and rightly so, believing even mundane things unless they see the simplest of evidence for them. And yet they believe in a heartbeat that God created the earth in seven days and whetever else. If they don’t trust ordinary and daily things in the absence of evidence, how can they not trust evolution for example, something that they can check up on simply by walking into a museum of natural history and taking a look at the kind of simple (and in this case, overwhelming) evidence. It’s not ’science’ really. It’s just things which you can mostly see, touch and hear.

Science is not a cult, is is simply a refinement of what we usually do in order to believe something. Scientists are not an exclusive class, they constitute anyone who would not believe things if there is insufficient evidence for them, and who would certainly not in their lifetime kill for such things.