Senior Saints: Growing Older in God's Family Book

The Religion of Science

The psychological infirmity of projection is probably the cause of more strife in the world than any other. Those who oppose or impede us are not merely wrong; they are, we are sure, misinformed, incompetent or ill-willed. We impose these judgments based on their opposition not because we actually know anything about our opponents. We do this largely because we fear our own ignorance, lack of talent, and questionable motives. Our own defects are attributed to those over whom we want to exercise power.

Marilynne Robinson does a very good line in neurotic psychological projection. She does not like science; or at least she does not like her idea of what science is, which is a clear attribution of the defects of her own religious position to those with whom she disagrees. The remarkable thing is that in order to make her slurs about science, she must disavow her own principles of religion as well as a long history of Christian theology.

Robinson starts with a self-contradiction. She believes that most people (by which she means most intellectuals, particularly sociologists and analytic philosophers) think that they think differently than did their ancestors of several hundred years ago - mainly because they no longer speak and write in terms of religion. She disagrees: "...my argument [is] that the mind as felt experience had been excluded from important fields of modern thought. I meant to restrict myself, more or less, to looking at the characteristic morphology of the otherwise very diverse schools of modern thought for which the mind/ brain is a subject. But I find that these schools are themselves engrossed with religion."

So quite apart from the extensive scientific and philosophical research into the "mind as felt experience" and the rejection in most of this research of religious terminology (has she heard of phenomenology and existentialism?), Robinson claims that not only has there been no epochal shift in thought since the Enlightenment, but also that science is a special kind of religion which is inferior to Christianity. And just to round out the contradiction, she would like us all to stop thinking the way we do about science and religion!

Oddly, however, Robinson is right. Science is a religion according to the way she would like religion to be. And it is a religion which is superior to Christianity precisely according to the criteria she uses. Her view of Christianity is that it has always been about continuous assimilation, interpretation and re-interpretations spiritual experience. I don't think any post-modernist philosopher or the most hard-bitten physicist would disagree with the value of such a religion. One can only wish that her vision of religion were shared by her fellow-Christians!

Robinson, however, projects onto science the doctrinaire character of Christianity by presuming science is defined by fixed principles. This is a characterisation of the Christian religion not science, which changes its methods and principles of proof about as often as it does its theories. There is nothing in science considered immune from learning and modification, from theory, to method, to the people engaged in debate. Science, or more generally reason, has no fixed definition. The criteria for what constitutes both are constantly shifting.

Christianity on the other hand holds that there are fundamental principles - like the existence of God, and any number of abstruse doctrines - which are not matters of investigation nor are they subject to change. This is precisely how Christian sects define themselves - as adherents of some originary doctrine. The fact that there are many interpretations of this originary doctrine tends to make them more rigid rather than more curious. Therefore, while religion as ritualistic and ethical community may indeed be compatible with science, religious faith of the kind promoted by Christianity is not - because it claims there are things which cannot be learned about further, not because of what it claims to have learned.

There may indeed be things which cannot be learned about; but we cannot possibly know what these things are. This is what might be called the principle of scientific humility: we can only investigate what we have at hand. This principle has a religious origin. It is historically derived from what is called negative theology - the idea that whatever God is, he, she, or it cannot be captured in language; God is beyond our capacity to learn about. Negative theology has a long orthodox religious history; it is accepted without exception by all Christian theologians. It is also ignored by everyone of these theologians as soon as they start to write about the divine. Only science takes negative theology seriously. It simply refrains from idolatry by being circumspect and highly conditional in its claims.

So in that sense, but only in that sense, is science an alternative religion. And it is also in that sense that science is a superior religion. It recognises the impossibility of achieving knowledge of the divine. So it avoids the presumption and blasphemy of theological speculation. Science does not condemn theology as poetry only as pretending to knowledge that it cannot attain in light of its own principles. It is this which Robinson cannot admit - that the problem she has is not with science but with her religious colleagues, and is within her own mind.