Beyond Science and Faith

This semester I am taking a class called Problem Solving: How Science Works in order to fulfill my quantitative reasoning credit (I am majoring in creative writing and religious studies), so it was with some interest that I stumbled upon this silly diatribe on the separation of science and faith. I admit that I have occasionally used the argument described in this article to explain why I think a religious or spiritual perspective is still important in modern life. Certainly the scientific method is not based on the same kind of faith with which people claim belief in deities, but I think there still is some point at which we have to trust our senses. As the article states, science makes the one assumption that the Universe has rules (that we can know), and I suspect the assumption made by science rests on the faith that our senses can tell us something accurate or objective about reality. As quantum theory has pointed out, the observer is still a part of the equation, and the language we use to talk about scientific discoveries is intimately shaped by our perspectives as humans. While there still is a broad range of difference between this and dogmatic belief, I personally think that science and religion have a lot in common: they are narratives written by humans in order to understand, explain, and often justify our place in and use of reality.

Certainly there are many problems with having a dogmatic faith in some belief despite evidence to the contrary. Creationism makes for bad science, but on the other hand, big-bangism makes for bad religion, because it refuses to address the question of the relationship humans can or should have to the world we live in. Certainly countless numbers of people have been killed in the name of Jesus, but there have been equally countless living beings killed in the name of science. From animal testing in laboratories to the very real crises of global warming, it often seems that science's only aim is to make more science. Curiosity did indeed kill the cat (and any number of species around the world), but it was not the cat's curiosity. One of the biggest challenges is the amount that scientific study has been progressively tied up in corporate agendas, which care little how their products ultimately affect the world around us. What is missing from science is often an ethical raison de'etre, what has often, for all its evils, been an essential part of religious teachings. What mythology, and faith in these stories, have the possibility of imparting is a moral reason to behave in a certain way in the world, and just as scientific laws and reasoning have made such widespread technology possible today, the philosophical underpinnings of religion have made society possible today.

What I am perhaps most interested in asking is what aspects of the spirit are overlooked by science that are necessary to the human condition? A search for meaning behind the objective numbers, a striving for connection, emotion, expression of something much deeper in reality. How do we fit into all of this? What stories can we tell ourselves now to make sense of quantum mechanics, the death of god, global communication?