ego versus truth?

There are of course plenty of other clashes of this kind between science and religious teachings about the origins of life and the world and their implications for how we are supposed to live in the present, so I don’t believe that attempts, however well-intentioned, to separate science and religion into mutually exclusive spheres will ever succeed. I recall that certain philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century, the logical positivists as they called themselves, tried to eliminate, or at least to drastically limit religious speculation by declaring that why questions had no logical validity, that only how questions were really permissible. I’m probably hugely misrepresenting some of these philosophers here, but my intuitive feeling is that there’s a more fuzzy logic behind the scientific quest for understanding, and that this quest springs from motives that have much in common with religious speculation. The how and the why are messily implicated in each other.

So I think there’s plenty of competition between science and religion still. Religion will continue to begrudgingly accept the necessity of scientific endeavour while relegating it to being an examination of the mere how of things, while science will continue to begrudgingly accept, or blithely ignore, religious thought, relegating it to more or less irrelevant and unanswerable why questions.

The how questions are certainly easier to tackle, and science has been much more impressive in tackling them than religion has been in achieving clarity or ‘truth’ in its particular sphere. Scientific theory has also been without doubt a major influence on modern religion. Ancient religious beliefs about heaven, hell and the hereafter, as well as about the origins of life and the world, have been pushed more and more into the realm of the metaphysical by the unqualified success of science’s accounts of every aspect of the material universe, past present and future. What has been particularly remarkable about this, to me at any rate, is the fact that such delimiting and marginalising of religion’s account of our material being has not diminished the human hunger for religious belief.

Can this be entirely accounted for by scientific ignorance? Well, I do believe that scientific ignorance is an appalling thing that should be rectified as much as possible, and that such a rectifying will undermine some of the more egregious religious dogmas, but I think that the human will to believe in its own superhuman destiny, the human refusal to accept that all its sophistication, its suffering and its genius will be snuffed out and turned to dust, the human refusal to accept its own contingency and animality, is too powerful to ever be extinguished. The ego hasn’t landed, and it probably never will.

I do get a bit high-flown myself sometimes. The weather has turned v hot and I’m not always keeping up my steps, or even my housework. A chance to go out last night was not taken up due to sluggishness. I worry about isolation. Having surfed a few blogs in recent days I realise how awful isolation can be for a person’s thinking. There’s some worrisome stuff out there, but also great things like Rhea’s fantastic blog, etc etc.