Magisterial Extirpation

When Stephen Jay Gould wrote that science and religion were non-overlapping magisteria, in that they were uniquely capable of answering questions inside their individual spheres and had no bearing on each other, he was never more wrong. The argument that all forms of reasoning, the scientific process included, have to include some variation of faith is an ignorant and childish one. Deductive and inductive reasoning are not faith, nor is an unprovable statement made based on said reasoning.

My beloved Pluto, demoted to a footsoldier in a wide army of similar frozen gas and metal debris though it is, was not discovered through a direct observation. Instead, variations and disturbances in the observable orbit of Uranus led to the discovery of Neptune, and further calculations showed that another more distant body was also contributing to the detected variances. Men and women had to work for over thirty years to finally demonstrate the object photographically, and they did not do that work on faith any more than following freeway signs to reach a destination is such an act. In fact, any faith an individual might wish to have in the existence or non-existence of celestial bodies has no bearing on their actuality, any more than a fervent non-belief in the sun will cause it to fail to rise. Any argument saying faith plays any role in the scientific process is fatuous, and based on religion's historical repression of knowledge and discovery which threatened people's feelings of superiority it is obvious faith has only been and can only be a millstone around the neck of science.

The immediate argument against my proposition can be personified in Francis Collins, an openly and unapologetically religious Christian who headed the Human Genome Project, which should be reflected upon as one of the greatest achievements mankind is likely capable of. The monumental contributions to the sciences that have been achieved by those of a religious bent should not be minimalized or dismissed, but neither should they be elevated based on the beliefs of those involved or used as reinforcement for any kind of faith-based worldview. Collins' religious beliefs are, I argue, as incidental to his work as the color of his shirt or the number of letters composing his name. Furthermore, any attempt to unravel the information that we are composed of would have been viewed widely as heretical and blasphemous until very recently in the religious communities, and is still viewed as such by the more credulous and fundamentalist amongst them.

Another casuistic argument encountered is the equation of science with religion, as if a peer-reviewed and self-correcting reliable system of discovery could be reasonably compared to totalitarian pronouncements held over from flammable shrubbery. In this rebuttal, pro-religious beliefs are based in revealed truths (unfortunately referred to as facts in this argument) and scientific beliefs are based in a somehow separate-but-equal truth, and aside from the problems raised by keeping two sets of books, the conflicting truths have no problem co-existing. This is utter nonsense, and betrays on the part of the religious a rejection of how scientific method operates. The reason science is based in fact – the most important reason, in my opinion – is repeatable verifiability. Applying electrical current to water will separate it into hydrogen and oxygen in exactly the same way, no matter if the experiment is performed in America or Canada or Sweden. It is not accurate or honest or productive to say that religious revelations are equivalent, because individuals are affected differently by them and they are not reproducible in any sense of the word.

Not The News

And because of their ignorance and rejection of science, the states that are unfortunately saddled with backwards theocratic regimes pose the biggest current threat to our safety as a whole. The religious zealots who are doing their very best to erase all record of the fact that the cultures of Iran brought incredible insight on the sciences to the world cannot do the science required for modernity on their own. They have no capacity for it. Instead, they import their technology and learn what they can to work toward our collective nuclear demise, not our collective betterment. The attitudes of religion toward contraceptive technology and immunology has, at the very least in Africa, made the AIDS epidemic worse and allowed the maladies we thought gone forever to resurface, clawing up from the depths like Camus' Parisian sewer rats. How can anyone claim to be morally serious and support these backwards preachments?

Attn. plebe cannibals: This is not human flesh. This is a cracker.

Being a religious person would seem to be to be mutually exclusive with scientific inquiry, insofar as the most fundamental bits of religion are not compatible with what we know about energy and matter. Transubstantiation is nothing if not ridiculous, Abraham violates several laws of physics every time his Falcor-like flying friend is said to have ferried him between Syria and Mecca to aid him in the keeping of two families, and being a phenomenally poor judge of oil quantity is no basis for a holiday the post office won't even deign to recognize. Sadly, every significant improvement science has yielded has been, after the obligatory wailing and protestations of hurting their invisible friend's feelings, co-opted by fundamentalists and pronounced as proof of the majesty and intricacy of the celestial design. This indelicate bit of plagiarism, performed on the germ theory of disease, the theory of evolution, and the understanding of DNA to name but a few of the heavy-hitters, is the kind of whole-cloth intellectual robbery that religion is based on originally and reinforces its noxious self with currently.

I have some small familiarity with quietly forcing two conflicting ideas together, as I have smoked for more years than not, and by no means can I say that I didn't know full well what inhaling anything other than air would do to my lungs. With more education came more intricate detail of my sadomasochism, and vivid full-color images left nothing about it to the imagination. I possess all that knowledge, but still have no problem engaging in one of my most-beloved rituals many times in a day. It is a personal weakness, very similar to the weakness displayed in religious faith. I insist, however, that mine is different from theirs because I make no effort to legislate my habits to others, I pay tax on every pack, and stepping outside for a smoke will introduce you to far more interesting people than going to church on Sunday.
 

This is better for you and your fellow humans than any religion.

To return to my opening point, no thinking person can read the proposition of Gould's NOMA argument and see it as anything other than appeasement to the religious faction. There is not now and there never has been any intention from their side to peacefully coexist, and religion stands at every turn to obstruct and destroy scientific efforts to bring understanding of our existence. Begin with Copernican Heliocentrism and work your way through the whole sordid mess to stem cell research, genetics, and the twenty-first century oppression of women, and you will find vicious reprisal and ignorant arrogance is all any church has ever offered to scientific debate, inevitably followed by ferocious backpedaling and attribution to their prophet of choice when their juvenile protestations are proven false. It should be shameful for apologists to think of the centuries of progress lost in the name of childish superstition and fairy stories, and there are miles of essay written on that very subject, a kind of sad cry to lost opportunity that I commend anyone to read for themselves and consider. As written by Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: “How flattering to the pride of man to think that the stars on their course watch over him, and typify, by their movements and aspects, the joys or the sorrows that await him! He, in less proportion to the universe than the all-but invisible insects that feed in myriads on a summer's leaf are to this great globe itself, fondly imagines that eternal worlds were chiefly created to prognosticate his fate.”
 

No matter which of the “equivalent windows into the untruth” one chooses, no realm of illusion and baseless explanations will aid us in our collective condition. Irreparable damage has been done by religion to our advancements as a culture and as a species, and I therefore call for this kind of obstructive arrogance and dangerous ignorance to be extirpated wherever it may be found.