Two articles showed up in my news feed that I found particularly
interesting, especially when they appeared close together (and I needed a
subject to blog about).
The first one, “Does Religion make People Stupid?” (https://lsf.org/amherst/does-religion-make-people-stupid) caught my eye as I have tangled with people who take their
interpretation of the Bible as the last word in science, history, ethics and so
forth. It isn’t pretty.
Does religion make people stupid?
No, stupid people make religion stupid. But stupid people make everything
stupid.
One of the most common charges
laid at the door of organised religion is that it makes people stupid. As one
of the most famous of living atheists, Richard Dawkins, puts it, “One of the
things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with
answers which are not really answers at all.” Dawkins isn’t totally wrong;
religion does help some people to be satisfied with ‘answers’ that are not
really answers at all. But he misses the rather important point that these
people are already stupid or, to be slightly more charitable, they are afraid
to think properly.
Dawkins is also unquestionably
right about the fact that there are no such things as meaningful religious
answers to scientific questions. Science succeeds in making the incredible
progress it does precisely by excluding certain types of questions from its
investigations and calculations. It limits itself to finding out through
observation, hypothesis, and experiment, how the physical world works. It,
quite rightly, doesn’t bother with questions such as ‘how should I behave?’,
‘what should I hope for?’, ‘how should I feel about reality itself?’ or ‘Is it
better to exist or not to exist?’
Nor is religion particularly good
at answering specific moral and social questions. Employing religious arguments
sheds absolutely no light at all on whether I should support legalised
abortion, or which party to vote for at the next election. In fact, as a
day-to-day detailed guide in decision making, religion is more often than not
completely useless. This is evidenced by the fact that, within my own Church
(Roman Catholic), there is absolutely no consensus on most detailed political,
social, medical or ethical dilemmas.
It is a short article and there are only 6 more paragraphs,
well worth reading.
The second article from Ancient Origins, “Religion Isn’t the
Enemy of Science: It’s Been Inspiring Scientists for Centuries” ( https://www.ancient-origins.net/human-origins-science/religion-science-009507
) brings out noteworthy points about who these scientists were and why they were
inspired.
The history of scientific thought is closely linked to that
of religious thought, and with much more continuity than discontinuity. The
ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle effectively set the Western template for
studying the natural world in the 4th century BC. Most of his hugely
influential scientific works were lost to Europe after the Roman Empire
collapsed, but were developed by Muslim Arab thinkers like Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) from around 900AD to 1300AD. Early Islamic figures were
responsible for very rapid progress in a number of
scientific fields, notably maths, medicine and the study of
light (optics).
When Aristotle was reintroduced to Europe in the 12th
century, his scientific work had a great influence on medieval scholars, who
were invariably thinkers within a church, synagogue or mosque. A key example is
the 13th-century Oxford theologian and later Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste,
who was also a pioneering early scientist. He presented a vision for how we
might obtain new knowledge of the universe, the dawning of the first notions of
experiment, and even a “big bang” theory of the cosmos and a concept of multiple universes.
When 16th-century philosopher Francis Bacon argued for a new
experimental approach to science, he drew explicitly on such theological
motivations. As the historian of science Peter Harrison
argues, the scientific pioneers who followed Bacon, such as Newton
and chemist Robert Boyle, saw their task as working with God’s gifts of senses
and minds to recover a lost knowledge of nature.
In fact, science also has roots in ancient Jewish history
that are as influential as the ancient Greek precedents. Philosopher Susan
Neiman recently argued that the
Biblical Book of Job should be understood as a foundation pillar of modern
philosophy alongside Plato. This is because Job deals head-on with the problem
of an apparently chaotic and fitful world, alien to the human predicament and
unmoved in the face of suffering. And this, Neiman claims, is the starting
point for philosophy.
It might also be the starting point for science, for Job also
contains at its pivotal point the most profound nature poem of all ancient
writings. Its verse form of questions is also striking to scientists from all
ages, who know that asking the right creative questions – rather than always
having the correct answer – is what unlocks progress.
The article is quite short, and it will not take much time to
read. The important takeaway is that these people were/are thinkers, not stupid
people.