Science as the new religion

In the initial entry on the announcement of the “missing link” earlier this week, I commented:

Note … the inappropriate emotionalism and enthusiasm of these supposed scientists when expressing their feelings about evolution, giving away that Darwinism is not for them a search for scientific truth, but a means of emotional fulfillment, indeed a religion.

This religion is not just a vague, inarticulate tendency shared by various individuals. It was specifically described and proposed by biologist E.O. Wilson in his 1998 essay, “The Biological Basis of Morality,” quoted below. (The same text, with slight modifications, is found on pp. 264-265 of Wilson’s 1998 book Consilience.) Wilson envisions the replacement of ever more discredited religion by ever more complete and elegant science, and the instauration of a new religion and ethical code based solely on biological knowledge.

As wild as that sounds, Wilson’s ambitions don’t stop at making Darwinian evolution the organizing truth of the universe and even the source of ethics. He recognizes that man needs a “transcendentalist belief,” a “sacred narrative” to touch his inmost feelings, and he thinks that knowledge of science, particularly of evolution, can provide it. “The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry,” he writes, “is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic. Material reality discovered by science already possesses more content and grandeur than all religious cosmologies combined.” [Italics added.] Wilson literally wants to turn the story of biological evolution into a scripture, one that will provide the same emotional experiences of connectedness and meaning that traditional religion provides. In Wilson’s secular religion, moreover, the “single gene pool” of humanity becomes our ultimate god, from which we as individuals emerge, and into which we are dissolved, like the Hindu Oversoul, the source and destiny of all things.

Wilson writes:

THE essence of humanity’s spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Can we find a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and empiricist world views?

Unfortunately, in my view, the answer is no. Furthermore, the choice between the two is unlikely to remain arbitrary forever. The assumptions underlying these world views are being tested with increasing severity by cumulative verifiable knowledge about how the universe works, from atom to brain to galaxy. In addition, the harsh lessons of history have taught us that one code of ethics is not always as good—or at least not as durable—as another. The same is true of religions. Some cosmologies are factually less correct than others, and some ethical precepts are less workable.

Human nature is biologically based, and it is relevant to ethics and religion. The evidence shows that because of its influence, people can readily be educated to only a narrow range of ethical precepts. They flourish within certain belief systems and wither in others. We need to know exactly why.

To that end I will be so presumptuous as to suggest how the conflict between the world views will most likely be settled. The idea of a genetic, evolutionary origin of moral and religious beliefs will continue to be tested by biological studies of complex human behavior. To the extent that the sensory and nervous systems appear to have evolved by natural selection, or at least some other purely material process, the empiricist interpretation will be supported. It will be further supported by verification of gene-culture coevolution, the essential process postulated by scientists to underlie human nature by linking changes in genes to changes in culture.

Now consider the alternative. To the extent that ethical and religious phenomena do not appear to have evolved in a manner congenial to biology, and especially to the extent that such complex behavior cannot be linked to physical events in the sensory and nervous systems, the empiricist position will have to be abandoned and a transcendentalist explanation accepted.

For centuries the writ of empiricism has been spreading into the ancient domain of transcendentalist belief, slowly at the start but quickening in the scientific age. The spirits our ancestors knew intimately fled first the rocks and trees and then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars, where their final extinction is possible. But we cannot live without them. People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will refuse to yield to the despair of animal mortality. They will continue to plead, in company with the psalmist, Now Lord, what is my comfort? They will find a way to keep the ancestral spirits alive.

If the sacred narrative cannot be in the form of a religious cosmology, it will be taken from the material history of the universe and the human species. That trend is in no way debasing. The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic. Material reality discovered by science already possesses more content and grandeur than all religious cosmologies combined. The continuity of the human line has been traced through a period of deep history a thousand times as old as that conceived by the Western religions. Its study has brought new revelations of great moral importance. It has made us realize that Homo sapiens is far more than an assortment of tribes and races. We are a single gene pool from which individuals are drawn in each generation and into which they are dissolved the next generation, forever united as a species by heritage and a common future. Such are the conceptions, based on fact, from which new intimations of immortality can be drawn and a new mythos evolved.

Which world view prevails, religious transcendentalism or scientific empiricism, will make a great difference in the way humanity claims the future. While the matter is under advisement, an accommodation can be reached if the following overriding facts are realized. Ethics and religion are still too complex for present-day science to explain in depth. They are, however, far more a product of autonomous evolution than has hitherto been conceded by most theologians. Science faces in ethics and religion its most interesting and possibly most humbling challenge, while religion must somehow find the way to incorporate the discoveries of science in order to retain credibility. Religion will possess strength to the extent that it codifies and puts into enduring, poetic form the highest values of humanity consistent with empirical knowledge. That is the only way to provide compelling moral leadership. Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science, for its part, will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition and in time uncover the bedrock of moral and religious sentiments.

The eventual result of the competition between the two world views, I believe, will be the secularization of the human epic and of religion itself. However the process plays out, it demands open discussion and unwavering intellectual rigor in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

[end of Wilson excerpt]

It has often been pointed out that liberals, having rejected God and the transcendent, but still needing the transcendent (and Wilson doesn’t stop telling us how much he needs it), manufacture substitute gods for themselves, this-worldly deities to which they think they can relate more easily than to the God of the Bible. But the effort to inject religious meaning into material facts and scientific laws, to squeeze the transcendent into the immanent, to load the infinite onto the finite, is an intrinsically distorted, even mad, enterprise. Very simply, religion and science are different things, different ways of seeking and experiencing truth. Religion is about the truth of God. Science is about the truth of nature. A 47 million year old skeleton of a monkey the size of a cat cannot properly be an object of religious awe, and treating it as one is the mark of a perverted mind, perversion being defined as the joining together of things that by their nature do not belong together. In its escalating war on Christianity, and its ever more aggressive and desperate search for a secular religion to replace it, liberal society will be increasingly worshipping at the altar of such perverted gods.

—end of initial entry—

A reader comments:

Wilson writes:

“The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic. Material reality discovered by science already possesses more content and grandeur than all religious cosmologies combined.”

To you, you dried up twig, not to most people.

Mark P. writes:

Something just occurred to me. Maybe I read it somewhere … I don’t know.

For all of the Darwinian supporters’ knowledge of Darwinism, evolution, DNA, and other such trappings of science, when it comes to the simple Darwinian task of reproducing oneself, it is the religious people who have the biggest families. It is, therefore, unlikely that the janissary effect of popular culture will lead to Darwinism replacing religion, since the people who would carry such a struggle are not even being born.

Has E.O. Wilson examined the fertility rate of white, liberal women in blue-state cities lately? Or, has he spent too much time examining the demographics of insects instead of the demographics of his own sub-group?

Who is going to carry the Gospel of Ida up the Mountain? Pixies and fairies?

Hannon writes:

Wilson said

Can we find a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and empiricist world views? Unfortunately, in my view, the answer is no.

You wrote

Very simply, religion and science are different things, different ways of seeking and experiencing truth.

This artificial, so-called problem is nicely addressed in the original Star Trek episodes, where Captain Kirk represents the traditional and transcendental, using his mind, heart and soul to solve problems. Spock meanwhile serves as science officer. This arrangement worked out rather well as we all know.

Sadly, this powerful ethos is either absent or has been neutered in newer versions of the show.

Dimitri K. writes:

“…instauration of a new religion and ethical code based solely on biological knowledge”

I believe, there is much more coded in biology and can be extracted by scientific method, than we know. The problem is, however, that currently we can only extract very simple and primitive results, like conditional reflex. Everything that we don’t know, is replaced by “scientific world view”, which is actually a religion and is not based on any real science. To put it shortly, scientists know too few but claim too much.

LA replies:

Dimitri’s point is very well put, that we have at present a “scientific world view,” really an ideology, parading itself as science. But I would ask Dimitri this question: suppose that science could extract far more of what is biologically coded in human behavior than is at present possible. Could this biological information serve as an ethical guide? If so, could you give specific, hypothetical examples of how knowledge of the biological coding of human behavior could become the practical basis of an ethical code?

Hannon writes:

Mark P.’s comment reminded me of something that came to me many years ago in conversations with friends, undoubtedly all very liberal and highly intelligent, mostly phDs. Most unlikely to have kids and in fact most never have. This was before I had even thought about what a liberal was really.

I told them *If you want more people in the world who think and believe as you do, you had better start making them.*

Sheepish grins…

Gintas writes:

Mark P asks,

“Who is going to carry the Gospel of Ida up the Mountain? Pixies and fairies?”

The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

May 24

Pentheus writes:

The view expressed by Prof. Wilson and others like him is mere wishful thinking. It is, to me, axiomatic that most atheists / secularists / materialists are in their moral standards merely parasitic upon the Judeo-Christian morality that they seek to undermine and destroy.

Note, for example, that their vehemence in asserting Darwinian / evolutionist / genetic explanations is matched by their vehemence in opposing and condemning all views that would actually put those explanations into practice in human life. So, you must be a Darwinian, but don’t you dare be a “social Darwinist,” or apply evolutionist explanations to differences amongst the races.

(Steve Sailer has written a pair of essays about Darwinism and anti-Darwinism on the right and on the left.)

Prof. Wilson asserts that “The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.” He fails to apply his own vaunted empiricist outlook to this claim, in that he cannot muster a single example of such poetry, whether in epic form or even as a minor lyric.

And it is not merely that such a poem could not possibly be as ennobling (I shall leave aside the question of what materialist basis there could be for the concept of “nobility”), but that the subject matter itself is incapable of producing such inspired sublimity. Perhaps the closest example might be found in Lucretius’ De Rerum Naturae (On the Nature of Things), but such a feat is far beyond the abilities of any modern man.

(Materialist liberals and “progressives” are incapable of understanding the idea that man has not, in fact, “progressed” over time, but has rather become smaller and less in modern times, notwithstanding various improvements in the average or mass. There is no one alive today who is anything remotely like a Julius Caesar or other ancient great men we read about in Plutarch, or who could produce Milton’s Paradise Lost or Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.)

LA replies:

You wrote:

“And it is not merely that such a poem could not possibly be as ennobling, … but that the subject matter itself is incapable of producing such inspired sublimity.”

I would put it somewhat different. I would say that there are many things about evolution are that ennobling and inspiring—but those are the very things that point to the guiding hand of a divine purpose. For example, in Jerry Coyne’s book where he’s discussing the differences between chimpanzees and humans, there is a drawing of a frontal view of a chimpanzee skeleton standing next to a human skeleton. He talks about something I had never focused on before, that the femur or thigh bone of the ape as it extends downward from the pelvis goes outward from the body, with the result that when apes walk, they waddle, while the human femur as it extends downward goes inward, allowing humans to maintain a center of gravity and fully upright posture as they walk. Coyne, as I’ve said previously, doesn’t even pretend to have an explanation of why and how this evolutionary innovation came about. Anyway, as I was looking at those two drawings, it was clear to me that the changes from ape to human did not happen as a result of some chance mutations adopted in response to chance environmental changes, but that the human form in its nobility is the very goal of evolution. Apes with their knuckle walking, are half way between four legged walking of most mammals and the two legged, upright walking of man; they are a stage in a process leading to man. This is obvious to anyone who looks with his eyes at what is there. To believe in Darwinian evolution, you have to believe that one long series of genetic accidents naturally selected led to the apes, who are strikingly manlike in some ways but still beasts, and then another long series of genetic accidents naturally selected led to man. But what we actually see with our eyes, unburdened from the reductive Darwinian ideology, is that the great apes are a half-way stage in a process leading purposefully to man.

Pentheus writes:

You ask, in response to reader Dimitri K., “[S]uppose that science could extract far more of what is biologically coded in human behavior than is at present possible. Could this biological information serve as an ethical guide?”

The answer is, clearly, No. To the extent that human morality and ethics is based upon man’s biological realities, it has already been incorporated into our standards; and additional, more hidden truths would not make any difference. We already know, for example, that if you stab or shoot someone he will be injured or die. We already make allowances for such biologically/chemically-based realities as passion and insanity. There is nothing new to be discovered that would ground any moral/ethical system. Or, more to the point, none that would be desired or acceptable to a liberal/secularist.

I am reminded of a conversation I had with a UFO enthusiast friend. I asked him, “What does it really matter if there are people on other planets?” He asserted enthusiastically, “If someone came down here from outer space, why, that would change everything!” (his implied meaning was, for the better).

My reply to him was, “The Europeans used not to know of the existence of the Americas or the people in them. When the Europeans discovered them, did that make any difference in how mankind behaves?”

And so it is with evolutionist and genetic explain-it-alls.

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a Gem,
Reflected in the beam divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And the Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

- William Blake

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 21, 2009 03:44 PM | Send