Religion or Science? Why not Both!?

Religion, we are told,  is the domain of faith & belief, the supernatural, the "metaphysical". It seems it's way off from scientific facts. Many of us seem to believe that the two are irreconcilable. Seemingly a chasm in between.. We beg to differ. 

Some believe (upholding their religious beliefs) that Adam and Eve were the first human created by God. Science tells us that evolution as a theory is solid and has not been falsified yet. There is good evidence that humans and trees, let alone monkeys, share a common ancestor of a species, something, probably a multicellular organism, even though we don't know what exactly. There is even an older bacterium or virus that eventually led, after many many rounds of evolution, into trees and animals, chimps and homo sapiens. 

Are these seemingly contradictory opinions really so far off? Is there really a big gap? Well, not so quick. It is a small leap of interpretation. What do we mean by first human? Biology tells us that Adam had a belly button and a mother who nursed him after his birth as well as cared in her womb during his earlier state as an embryo. Similarly, Adam had a father who provided his sperm to Adam's mom. None of that really contradicts the religious belief of the first human. How so? Well, this ancient belief hints at something unique about Adam and Eve. That which differentiates Adam and Eve from their parents need not be physical, it might be cognitive. Some scientists and historians now believe that homo sapiens went through a cognitive revolution which enabled them to start to think more clearly and to speak like us, the modern version [Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari]. So, it takes only a little hypothesis to bridge the seemingly big gap between the theory of evolution and the story of Adam and Eve: they were the first kids to think and talk like us. Their parents and ancestors did walk the whole earth, but didn't speak a language similar to ours. We can imagine them grunting, gesturing, pointing, but not knowing any words to speak. Even Homo Erectus the older species of humans apparently reached far corners of the Earth after originating from Central Africa just like us, Homo Sapiens, but more than a million years ago (Sapiens are now estimated to be only as old as 200 to 400 thousand years, a lot younger than Homo Erectus). But, they couldn't string together words to make up meaningful sentences. 

But you say religions say crazy things like angels, genies (or Djinns), demons, all loving, true calling, so on and so forth. That's nonsensical and far off, isn't it? Well, let's not be quick to jump at that conclusion. Well, I know so many has done that already, so let's get back and revisit. If you want to go into "true calling", please take a quick detour here: True Calling? But, don't forget to come back. You'll really want to revisit your thoughts about angels and demons -- BTW. did you read that wonderful book by Dan Brown? Enjoy the clash of scientific and religious establishments in an action-packed page-turner thriller involving multiple murders of innocent priests amidst the wonders of Rome and Vatican. Whodunit?

Thoughts of Angels? Angels are thoughts -- and when they self-refer, we get a strange loop

Did you ever wonder what an angel is? Who would say "I saw an angel?" Or, what does one mean when they say "The devil made me do it!" Are they trying to shirk their responsibility? Now, put yourself in the shoes of early humans, barely able to think and talk. How many words would they have in their vocabulary? Remember, they are the first ones to talk, ever! Their vocabulary can't be very extensive, can it? Now, further imagine their surprise when they think a novel thought. And, it doesn't take too much of a jump of imagination to see that almost all of their thoughts must be very new and somewhat shocking to them (aren't some of our own thoughts shocking to us?). And, they wouldn't have a word for the modern words we use all the time like thought, belief, idea? Now, imagine Adam trying to convey his latest thought to Eve. What if he simply said "I saw an angel. Did you?" Can you imagine Eve's shock? :-)

I can almost feel how incredulous you are. Okay, you say, that's a wild leap. Are you sure? Isn't it wilder to imagine a human being imagining an angel with wings or a demon with horns and then going forward to start believing that such things must exist? 

But, you might say, religions divide us, don't you dare put religion in the same bucket as science. Christians killing Jews, Jews killing Muslims, Muslims killing Muslims... Yet, Hitler, Stalin and Putin are apparently non-religious people who still killed people, and at least gave the order to kill. The atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not dropped for religious reasons, but political, social, economic and presumably scientific reasons. The bottom line: humans do wrong when they don't know any better. Socrates was right. Let's not put it all on religion or science or whatever. Maybe we can put it all on our greed for more and more power. That's the topic of Power corrupts, does it? 

Here is a simple suggestion: when you seem to disagree with what someone else seemingly believes, first acknowledge whether you have the truth on your side. Do you really know, or just like the other, do you only believe, do you only assume, but in fact you are not absolutely, positively sure.

Are you wondering about those irrational people who are denoted as "flat-earthers"? They seem to be asserting that the earth is flat. But, you know, don't you, that it is actually a mostly round globe. Can those two polar opposites be reconciled? Sure, just observe that the earth is flat enough! The curvature is not readily apparent to our human senses. If you are lucky enough to encounter someone who insists that the earth is flat, agree with them, after all they are in a very exclusive and lonely club. Say, "you are right, the earth is flat enough", but, then ask "what do you think happens when we go on a straight line for a while? Would we drop off the side, or would it slowly curve back and get us to Japan, China and maybe Australia?" 

Others insist that no man ever walked on the moon. It was all a hoax. Well, I don't know, but I think it is safe to assume that Neil Armstrong and his friends did have a long trip. Just remember that when Russians announced their project to hit the moon in the 1950s many in this country of US of A, including physicists and physics teachers, didn't believe that they could do it. No need to argue too much about it. Elon Musk is planning to get some of us to Mars after all. Let's talk about that :-) (Did you hear the crown prince of England griping about that? Help the poor on earth before spending your billions on new rockets, he says. That may be due to some guilt after considering what the British empire did to the colonies and the riches they extracted from across the whole world. What was their excuse? That the Spanish started it?)

Lest we get too distracted, let us revisit some of the myths of religions and see how we can connect them to science. The first story in the Jewish/Christian bible starts with God creating the universe one "day" at a time and the whole process takes 6 days. That can't be right! protest literal minded scientists. But, religion is a set of symbols and stories that intend to impart some deep moral truth, and they do that by employing storytelling devices like metaphors, analogies, similes and some amount of simplification lest we lose our audience. So, "day" in this case means iterations or version or revision. God is imagined as a good software engineer who designs and implements his prototype piecemeal (who said the authors of the Bible were very creative or imaginative. They are human after all :-). By the way, if I remember correctly, the last revision gives us Adam, the first human we've just talked about. Earlier God first says let there be light (the first revision gives us photons, the fundamental building block of all interactions assuming we have some electrons to do the wiggling. Please don't worry if you don't get some of the references to QED: quantum electrodynamics. It is just good fun here until it gets its own page. Stay tuned!) God earlier created the heavens and said it was good. Then, came the Earth, and again God looked at it and judged it, good! Finally when God created Adam, he looked and said, not good! God judged Adam to be alone and didn't like that. So, naturally, God created Eve so Adam would have company. 

You see, I hope that the story is beautiful even though it is almost purely symbolic. Who likes to be alone and without a partner? (Apparently many as discovered by social scientists recently [Going Solo by Eric Klinenberg].) But, let us get to the key story of original sin! Sin makes things fun, it seems. For those of you who are not familiar, Garden of Eden (another name for heaven, or paradise, or to interpret it more scientifically, the best state of our soul (that by the way is direct quote from Plato's Socrates in Apologia)) is where Adam and Eve find themselves wherein they live in pure unadulterated bliss. But, the story goes, they get tempted to go against God's command (notice the obvious inconsistency in any literal interpretation of this famous story: God's creation can trump God herself??) and bite the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (another word for really really bad!). God soon finds out and gets upset and kicks them out of paradise. Religiously inclined would remember that God is believed to look after us, why would She get so upset for a minor error as in enjoying a delicious fruit? 

The answer is not too hard or too deep. I am not sure why not many more are familiar with a simple interpretation that bridges the gap between religion, ethics and science? Well, here it is: the point is that God didn't command that Adam and Eve (and therefore you and me) to never use our judgement and say this is good for me and that's bad for me. We have such value judgments all the time. Getting a job is good for me. An early retirement is even better. Wasting my time reading someone else's musings is possibly not good (but, please keep reading, this is good stuff!). The moral of the first story on morality is that using our judgment prematurely is bad for us and leads often to heartache, depression, anger, and all kinds of other upsets. Much later, another teacher told us simply: Don't judge lest you be judged. He meant of course the same thing: we suffer when we judge others (or even ourselves) to be bad or good for us. We have only partial information and limited data. How do we know that what we judge to be good for us is truly good for us? We don't know. Do we? Maybe sometimes.

The wonderful field of Ethics, one of the four core areas of study in philosophy (the others being metaphysics, logic and epistemology) is the study of good and bad. What is good? The amazing thing that I found out after much questioning, studying, taking classes and reading good books and meditation is that nobody knows! There is a new name for this ancient field of study: Axiology: the study of the nature of value. Meaning, how do we know what is valuable, and how valuable to us? Meaning what is good for us, and how good it is. Please see the other page named Good or bad? Sure you know!? for a quick overview of what Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbs, Kant (and yours truly) have to say. Here, let's stick to connecting religion and science.

A recent book, by a prominent social psychologist from Harvard describes many many experiments that show us how wrong we get when we judge a future event and prospect the emotional value we would get out of it [Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert] . Apparently, we frequently misjudge our own prospective emotions! Does this ring a bell? The story from Genesis in the bible on original sin, maybe? 

By the way, what is meant by the word sin and by the word origin? Please read about it here: Original "Sin."

PS. I hope it also strikes you that when we relate religion and science (or insist that there is a gap in between), what we are really doing is question how we think about religion and science and that's why we are really doing the Philosophy of Science and Religion. And that gets us to recurse (no offense, it just means to curve back, like a snake eating its tail):  do the Philosophy of Science, Religion and Philosophy. A strange loop, isn't it?

PPS. My friend recently told me that he's writing a book on revelation. Or, as we lovers of wisdom say he is venturing into the depths of how we know what we know. A related and fascinating topic, indeed. Then, a few days later, I stumbled upon a fascinating book on the "New Books" shelf at my local library. Reading the first chapter, I was surprised as it gives a line on Chapter 6 which focuses on the birth of science in the Sumerian culture back six thousand years ago. But, the author actually used the word "revelation", "communication with the divine" in that one line. Well, seredipity is (and happens :-). These days, it's all too easy and tempting to reach out to our artificial conversation partners on whatever is on our minds. So, click here to read the final synthesis of my conversation with the very latest incarnation of ClaudeAI (one of the most capable large-language model) on this fascinating topic.