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| Understanding
Science and Coming to Terms with Living Peacefully Alongside Other Faiths
and Peoples
by James Morrow UK
(Submitted 25th November 2005) |
| James writes: In these times of extremism and ever-present
religious fundamentalism, and given your deep commitment to reason,
truth, equality, personal responsibility and, of course, science and its
application for the betterment of society and this planet, I believe
(and hope) that you will find the following to be of interest, as it
attempts to address one of the main issues limiting societal progress
– that of how to get peoples of differing traditions and/or religions
to live and work consistently and effectively together. It also
lays bare the vital role that religious leaders from all faiths have in
dealing with extremism at its source and in moving our society forwards
for the good of all. If you do find this information to be of
value, please feel free to use it in any way you see fit in the cause of
peace, reason and tolerance. I have
carried out research in areas including recognition theory and theories
of consciousness, evidential reasoning, information theory, belief
theory, meme theory, intelligent interactive systems, hyperspectral
systems, augmented reality and telepresence, whilst in my spare time I
enjoy music, playing the guitar, photography, cycling and walking.
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Understanding , Science
and
Coming to Terms with Living Peacefully Alongside Other Faiths and
Peoples |
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Whilst I am not a religious man (I’m an agnostic), I do believe in the
essential goodness at the heart of Christianity. Further, I
recognise that other faiths – such as Judaism and Islam – also have
an essentially good heart but that, for reasons which I hope will become
apparent as you read this, their followers can at times act in
ways which may be construed as aggressive, bad and even evil.
Questions which this email tries to address include: "Why were/are some believers prepared to go to any lengths to protect the faith
from unbelievers?" "Why is the youngest major religion also
the most aggressive against unbelievers?" "Why, when reason
and learning have often been a central part of the Jewish, Christian and
Arab worlds has there been an edge of terror against what is perceived
as irrationality?" "What is the relationship between reason,
unreason, rationality, irrationality, sanity, insanity, belief, faith
and truth?" I hope that you find this information to be of
value to you.
As I’m sure you are aware, many claim that science is the new religion
– and indeed there are more than a few people “who should know
better” who treat it as such. However, what can we achieve if we
keep the two separate, but try to use science to better understand why,
despite the inherent goodness of religion – and the many positive
things that the major religions have given to this world – religion
has also at times led to bloodshed, torture and terror?
We know that, starved of reason, meaning or information, most people
will fairly quickly begin to exhibit signs of what we call mental
illness. Nowadays, science provides us with pile upon pile of
evidence, beautiful theories to explain that evidence and the universal
education to access it. Rational thinking has it easy now, yet
still there is irrationality and insanity, and the violence, and terror
that often then ensues.
Try to imagine having been a rational person thousands of years ago,
before any theory and before all our corroborating evidence, when
language was a new tool and writing was only beginning. Your tribe
has many stories handed down through the generations, through language,
of the horrors and madness of mixing with other tribes with different
sets of beliefs, even completely different languages. Of how order
and reason must always be maintained, at all costs.
As a uniquely questioning animal, with a language that has evolved
rapidly from simple family-based communication to a much more powerful,
general purpose tool, with an extremely powerful pattern recognition
system in our heads which demands a firm framework within which to
operate, all are searching for answers. However, in the absence of
a fully objective, independent, agreed and verifiable mechanism for
finding those answers it is imperative that every member of a tribe must
accept the findings of their wisest men as truth – otherwise the whole
thing will break down into chaos.
It is likely that each tribe will come up with different versions of the
“truth”, and so when the believers (of your tribe) interact with the
unbelievers (the other tribe), with no way of combining their evidence,
one truth must prevail. Therefore, you must convert them, they
must convert you or you must attempt to destroy one another.
Today, we can’t even reason constructively between faiths when we have
a common language. In the absence of common language, members of
different faiths will generally appear to be completely mad, evil,
dangerous, irrational, barbaric, devilish, unreasonable, etc. – and of
course, they will be thinking exactly the same about you.
In a terrifying parallel to natural selection, over thousands of years,
the original rational heart of each religion will, by necessity, be
surrounded by a protective structure designed to maximise the chances of
survival. Thus, whilst the core beliefs might include “love your
neighbour as yourself” and “love your enemies,” the survival
mechanism majors on propagation, strength, developing the technology of
war, totally denying the validity of the beliefs of others, trying to
convert where possible but otherwise destroying, etc., and any internal
dissent – even the slightest risk of dissent – must be annihilated.
When it comes down to it, individuals don’t matter, only the growth
and preservation of the religion matters, so structures which encourage
members to fight to the death if required, and to fight no matter what
might be the personal risk to themselves, can only be good.
Whether there is only one G-d or not, all members of each religion must
worship “him” in exactly the same way, because dissent is too
dangerous. Similarly, even if all the religions are worshipping
exactly the same G-d but in different ways (dictated by how they came to
know “him”), they cannot come together and agree because the precise
way of worshipping is vital rather than the fact that “he” may be
the same, one, G-d.
Natural selection forces the most successful cults to use their wisest
members to develop many positive things - more powerful language,
writing, technology, world models, and so on, at the same time as many
things that we would consider barbaric and even insane. Yet just
as some things in nature can seem unbelievably cruel to us, the
necessity for survival has crafted much that could be viewed as evil and
cruel into religion. The rational heart is still there but the
protection mechanisms which have been honed for maximum efficiency over
millennia are there also. If religions had labelled these two
parts accordingly perhaps we would be getting further ahead now, but
unfortunately it’s all just an amorphous lump at present.
Achieving an agreement from the major religions to work at disentangling
the two would be a major step forward – not least because it is likely
that the positive, rational hearts of most effective religions will be
quite similar when separated from their protection mechanisms. …
and I guess that it would also be discovered that the heart came first
…
Looking at the Spanish Inquisition within this context, for example, we
might see that it was not about the guilt or innocence of the individual
but the perceived risk of dissent. Identify potential dissenters,
use all means possible to get them to expose any collaborators and then
make sure that nobody else even thinks of wavering from the truth.
It doesn’t matter whether you are guilty or whether you are innocent;
if there is the slightest hint of dissent it has to be cut out. If
you are dead you cannot attack the faith. Similarly, it doesn’t
matter whether or not the people you might name under extreme torture as
collaborators are innocent or guilty, because the risk of dissent is so
great. All risk must be eradicated. Of course, in this
context, maximising agony in the pursuit of eradicating dissent makes
sense, because the lesson that has been learned through century after
century is that dissent risks the descent into hell on earth – and
having tortured numerous people in the defence of faith the men of
religion have a fair idea of the kind of things that that might involve
…
The positive part of religion is all about reason, making sense of the
world, etc., but in a world without modern science, instant
communication, universal literacy, numeracy and training in rational
thinking, etc., the negative, protective parts were, unfortunately,
necessary - or we would have never got to the science and technologies
we have today. Of course there are questions which science cannot
answer, but probably its greatest strength is in explaining things –
that is what gives the theory of evolution its power, for example.
Instead of judging religions I believe that we will get much further if
we explain them. If we can show that there is reason behind the
apparently irrational parts of religion, recognise the worth of the
positive parts of each – their place to play in modern science and
literature, etc. and that belief in G-d or otherwise does not have to be
a sticking point (after all, science can never prove that there isn’t
a G-d, and there are questions that it may never be able to answer,
anyway). Hell can, at last, freeze over. Imagine that.
Currently, those of religious beliefs have a schism in their world
models (the model that the mind uses to make sense of and interact with
the world) and so they see that division in the world around them.
Those who truly belong to one of the major faiths and simultaneously
claim to be scientists, ironically, have an even more fragmented mind
– which could be one of the reasons why they have often bought into
new religions so enthusiastically. It is possible to be both
rational and believe that there is some sort of higher being, and if we
can find a convincing, non-threatening, non-disrespectful path from all
current faiths to that we will have achieved a great deal for mankind
and the world in general.
Anyway, these are some initial thoughts for you. Please don’t
hesitate to get in touch if you have any comments or questions.
… and keep up the good work!
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FEEDBACK + JAMES'
COMMENTS
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From: D W Thompson [mailto:dothomps@leo.gov]
Sent: 01 August 2005 15:36
To: jc.morrow@btopenworld.com
Subject: Understanding Science...
Mr. Morrow, I found your commentary interesting and would ask what your
take is on Muslim extremism and its implications for mainstream Islam as
well as the Western World. Do you view the
"protection" barriers erected by the major world religions,
particularly Christianity and Islam, as being prohibitive to same
coexisting peacefully and being respectful of each other? Is
Western thought and the principles of democracy compatible with Islam,
especially the more extremist factions? Do these
mechanisms you speak about relegate us to a continuing and perhaps
worsening terrorism problem?
JAMES' REPLY:
The “protection” barriers developed over many thousands of years, to
protect “us” from “them,” where “we” were assumed to be
right, sane, rational, good, etc. and “they” were assumed to be
wrong, insane, irrational, evil, and so on. Each religion has
continually developed and exploited its knowledge of the world to feed
its people, defend itself and fight the “other.” Yet for
reasons already explained, the majority of the people have been taught
that G-d’s word is eternal and unchanging. As science,
engineering and technology continually make new discoveries about the
world, religion has always had a difficult relationship with
evidence-based knowledge.
One strategy to deal with this has been to restrict such knowledge to
men of wisdom and of G-d, and in the past, with only the chosen few
taught to read and write, and little of practical use coming out of
science that could not have been achieved directly through engineering
and invention, this was feasible. Even so, when scientific
evidence led some to postulate that the world was round, or that the
earth moved around the sun, the threat to the religion and the church of
having to rewrite the word of G-d was perceived as being so great that
such theories had to be buried and denounced.
Whilst the Arabic world has given much to science and technology in the
past, all religions which restrict access to knowledge suffer an
increasing tension in the face of an ever accelerating rate of
scientific and technological progress. Further, whilst scientific
knowledge can be constrained, the commercial exploitation of technology
can spread knowledge of products much further and wider, in direct
confrontation with the perceived word of G-d.
As science and technology continue to develop and as the industrial
revolution approaches, with its automation and machinery, factories and
slaves to the machine, the tension between religions the practical
manifestations of science increase rapidly. Some, such as the
Islamic faith, largely reject the technology of automation and the
machine – whilst allowing men of science to continue in their
learning. Others, such as the Amish, stop both their science and
the related technology in its tracks – identifying all further
progress as ungodly, and freezing time for all eternity. Still
others believe in the ultimate good of science and technology for
mankind, creating “model” villages in which factory workers are
housed and fed, entertained and saved.
As science continues to develop more and more complete explanations for
the abundant evidence of so many natural phenomena, and as technology,
and the industrial revolution and its aftermath, permeates more and more
of many western societies, some see the uniting force of science as
allowing mankind to abandon religion (even though there are questions
that even science can probably never answer); others see science and
technology as belonging to them and as evidence that their religion is
the right one, further giving them the right to exploit it and enjoy the
material wealth that it affords them; still more focus almost
exclusively upon the material goods that technology allows them to make
and the material wealth that they, as the people who have selected the
right way, can gather. Ironically, many non-western states find
that they have been blessed with large amounts of the “black gold”
which the industrialised world currently relies upon to drive itself
forward, and their leaders often similarly view this resource as a gift
from G-d.
Many in the industrialised countries have been born into a life of more
and more visible technological miracles, from cinema, radios and
televisions to hi-fi, personal audio, personal computers, mobile phones,
portable games consoles, personal video and HDTV. Whilst in an
earlier age these would have been recognised as technological miracles,
children just take them for granted. Further, the vast majority of
the population have little interest in how they work, merely that they
work. For many, it is not science that it the new G-d, but its
technological manifestation; the latest gadgets. Consequently,
they often happily consume what technology provides without considering
the longer term impact, flying fresh exotic produce across the world,
enjoying “all-year ‘round” seasons, transporting good thousands of
miles across countries to save a few cents. Accepting what
technology can give – no matter what the cost. – and expecting more
and more for less and less. The real cost seems irrelevant, and instead of real life concerns,
fashions concerns such as “keeping up with the neighbours,” having
the latest electronic “toy” at school, driving a large 4x4, keeping
up with the in-crowd, assuming no cost in a costless society, where the
cost is its price, not the consequences. The desire to stay in
with the crowd, honed over thousands of years by the drastic
consequences of being labelled different, live on in fashion, smoking,
drinking to excess; even “whistle-blowers” who try to expose
malpractice in organisations and industry are often shunned by the herd
they are trying to help. With an unwavering belief in technology
– after all, it’s technology that delivers, not science. The
effects of unhealthy living don’t matter, because technology will fix
it, but smoking, overeating, etc., cause permanent and often fatal
damage, but the almost religious belief in technology and their own
mortality leads many to ignore the dire warnings until serious damage
has been done or it is even too late!
Like the environmental warnings we hear more and more frequently, many
seem to believe that technology can cure all, will sort it out.
But with an ever increasing population this simply ignores the laws of
physics, thermodynamics, etc. – there is always a limit, the earth is
finite, technology can only do so much, life on earth must ultimately be
based upon sustainable and renewable resources or it will cease to
exist. Of course, the earth is half-way through its life. In
four billion years or so all life on earth will be consumed by fire as
our sun swells in its deathroes to become a red giant. We have
this long to develop practical technology to get all the diversity of
life off this planet and out of this solar system and on to pastures
new. But mankind will not take part in that voyage if it has
consumed all the resources it needs to sustain itself within a few tens
of hundreds of years from now. Just as man evolved from the apes
and developed language, science and technology, so there is plenty of
time for others to take our place, if required.
Our defence requirements and consumer society have given us space-race
technology and a way to the future, but with it comes responsibility,
individual responsibility. We cannot continue to enjoy pleasure
with no pain of thought. The childish thoughts of sociologists who
hate engineers because they make things – yet who themselves enjoy the
fruits of that labour, of environmentalists who want progress to stop,
or for us to live as we used to, ignoring the issue of the vast human
population and its continuing growth, or of how we will ultimately need
technology to get us off this planet. Religious evangelists and
politicians who see the signs and predict Armageddon and apocalypse
ignore the fact that such an end-state is hardly surprising, given our
profligacy, that a DIY apocalyptic doom is there for us if we simply go
on consuming all we can. Just waiting for the day, they are
selling out human survival upon an easily predictable consequence of
sustained unbridled consumption and an ever growing human population.
With our current lifestyle non-sustainable and non-responsible, we need
to take responsibility and grow up after all these millennia!
It’s time to wake up…
Technologies such as nuclear power are needed to supply the vast
quantities of energy modern society demands – even when it is being
efficient, renewable sources such as wind, wave and solar must continue
to be developed and will play a greater and greater role in the longer
term, but we cannot afford to keep burning fossil fuel, fast breeder
nuclear fission reactors are available now and fusion will arrive this
century, the hydrogen economy, using predominantly nuclear power to
generate electricity and hydrogen, with hydrogen burnt cleanly in cars,
train, boats and planes. As more and more evidence builds for
global warming and global dimming (it is very likely that the 1980s
droughts that led to the starvation of millions in Africa and Live Aid
were caused by pollution produced by the western world burning fossil
fuels, and the same process is now threatening the lives of billions of
people in Asia), with the consequences of more extreme and unpredictable
weather, floods, the switching off of the Atlantic conveyor and the
melting of the polar icecaps, the time has come to stop burning fossil
fuel – notwithstanding the fact that even if burning oil was not
environmentally damaging oil reserves are limited and dwindling and we
need a viable alternative to oil reserves and gas “production”,
falling supply and rising demand for inherently limited resources on a
finite earth.
Increasing efficiency and minimising energy consumption is obviously
important, but as many developing countries demand more and more of the
goods and services that we in the west take as our right, energy demands
will tend to rise inexorably – just when supplies are faltering and
the environmental cost of using those supplies is becoming ever more
obvious. Ultimately we must have a sustainable, renewable energy
economy, but even now nuclear power can provide the space we need to
fully develop the required technologies of the future to maturity.
It’s time that we woke up to the fact that we no longer have a
choice…
With the apparently almost magical abilities of technology, and the fact
that advertising is allowed to claim many things which are not,
strictly, true, dream solutions appear to energy and pollution problems
– such as the running cars on hydrogen fuel cells, with the only
exhaust produced (apart from heat) being water.
Problem solved,
cars, trains, boats and planes can now run on a fuel for which the only
material emission is pure water. However, in the rush to promote
this and similar solutions no-one seems to ask where the hydrogen fuel
comes from. Electricity is required to make it, and owing to the
laws of thermodynamics around a third, at best, of the energy contained
within the primary fuel used to make the electricity ends up in the
hydrogen. Therefore, if the power station is oil-fired, switching
from petrol and diesel to hydrogen fuels cells will roughly triple the
energy consumption and the amount of greenhouse gas emitted – hardly a
step forward, as then much more energy will be used in transport than is
currently used in industry and domestic electricity supply - and then,
of course, there’s central heating and air-conditioning to consider.
Using nuclear fuel as the dominant primary fuel source for the next few
hundred years makes sense because, being a million times more powerful
than chemical combustion (burning fossil or similar fuel) it also
produces a million times less toxic exhaust material, and fusion can be
cleaner again, giving us the breathing space we need to make the more
advanced renewable and other energy sources that we will need to drive
us forward in the future.
Extremists and terrorists believe that they have the solution to the
profligacy of the west, through ancient religion and looking back.
Certainly we must take responsibility and be responsible, we must make
difficult choices as they are the only ones we have. Yet we must
also move forward, not back. We must somehow tame this monster the
consumer economy which we have created, tame it and focus it, honed upon
the skills required survival of the fittest, but we must choose what
that it to be. It is also important that we differentiate between
science and technology. Science describes the world, whilst
technology exploits it. It is when that exploitation is
irresponsible that extremists talk of the evil west and
environmentalists of consumption run wild. When religious ideology
is combined with anger at rampant and unsustainable exploitation that
the hearts and minds of the young are most at risk of buying into a
dream – a way out - which is what all religions ultimately offer at
this time. In the nations that are heavily exploiting technology,
many religious, evangelical and political leaders buy into the wealth
and comfort afforded them as being rewards from their G-ds.
In contrast, science does not consume; at its heart science is pure, and
many religious people recognise this facet of our drive forward into the
future. Science can be and often is a unifying force, and as
scientific theories encompass more and more evidence and explain more
and more of how and why religions have developed and how they are
constructed, it has the potential to tie us together in truth rather
than the bindings of fear that religion has hitherto offered.
Science can unify us all without destroying the heart of belief in so
many of our religions. Yet although science is pure, scientists
may not always be. Sometimes they try to turn science into a new
religion, believing that they know what is right and wrong, acting as G-ds.
For example, whilst, as you know, science can be wonderful – such as
the recent Deep Impact research ultimately aimed at better understanding
the universe as well as identifying potential ways that we can protect
our world from impacts – scientists can also become overconfident in
the power of their world models to the detriment of their research and
potentially the environment in general.
For example, further to recent articles on screening embryos for cancer
genes, it’s probably also worth noting that Jim Watson of DNA fame has
advocated screening and termination for genes that flag a tendency
towards “severe mental illness.” Along with his own son,
persons who would probably not have made it past the womb if such
technology had been available and implemented in the past include: B
Aldrin, H C Andersen, J Barrie, I Berlin, R Burns, W Churchill, S
Clemens, F F Coppola, N Coward, R Davies, C Dickens, E Elgar, A
Einstein, S Fry, P Gabriel, P Gauguin, V van Gogh, K Graham, G Greene, E
Hemingway, G Holst, J Keats, E Leer, V Leigh, S Milligan, Michelangelo,
E Munch, M Mussorgsky, I Nastase, I Newton, C Parker, N Pagett, J
Pollock, C Porter, C Pride, S Rachmaninoff, A Rose, M Rothko, R L
Stevenson, G Sumner, A Tennyson, L Tolstoy, T Waits, G F Watts, V Woolf,
B Wilson and E Zola amongst many others (based upon an analysis of
bibliographical and medical data performed by K R Jamison, an expert on
severe mental illness). In Memory of Douglas N. Adams …
Scientist and engineers can even get caught up in the technological hype
surroundings technologies such as digital audio and MP3 audio
compression, etc., for example. When CD was first released
in the early eighties, the primary marketing hype from Philips (who
developed it in conjunction with Sony) was “perfect sound forever.”
Unfortunately, many scientists and engineers translated this as
“subjectively perfect sound” and insisted that CD obeyed all the
requirements of information theory that would potentially allow this to
be true, although many complained about the poor sound quality of CDs.
In the late nineties, Sony and Philips launched what they hoped would be
the next generation CD – Super-Audio CD [SACD], claiming that it
sounded much more natural and emotional than CD – more real.
They even made hybrid discs available, with two layers, a CD layer and
an SACD layer, so that consumers could play the CD layer on standard CD
players and directly compare the sound quality of CD and SACD on an SACD
or universal player. On high quality music systems with well
recorded sound the improvement in sound quality of the SACD layer over
the CD layer is obvious, yet the vast majority of scientists and
engineers are still silent on this, as they have bought into the “CD
is capable of subjectively perfect sound” myth. Many even refuse
to listen to SACDs. Similarly, MP3 audio compression at
compression ratios of around 10:1 has been claimed to offer CD quality
sound, and near CD quality sound, but on a high quality music system the
major breakdown in quality during more complex musical passages is
highly obvious. Modern digital audio can offer high quality sound,
but only if it meets the requirements laid down within information
theory. With Kind Regards, James.
All feedback gratefully
received. One book that you might like to read (if you haven’t
read it already) is Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve
the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C Scott.
Some time ago, I wrote a piece of poetry, inspired by Sir David
Attenborough’s theory of how the statues had come to be left on Easter
Island, and why there were no longer any people on it. The earth
might be a little bigger, but it’s still finite… I hope that
you enjoy it.
With Kind Regards,
James (Morrow)
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