Jeune Street

Centre for the Study of the Texts, Baha'i World Centre

In Oxford (and elsewhere in the UK) busses now carry a hilarious advertisement from the British Humanist Association that says: “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” The advertising campaign  speaks to the compative nature of the science versus religion debate -- it was driven forward by Prof Richard Dawkins, who recently resigned his post at Oxford to write a children's book to warn them away from 'anti-scientific' fairytales.

The scientists leading the anti-religion charge seem, however, to be out of touch with developments in the philosophy of science over the second half of the 20th century. How we think about science has long since evolved from Newtonian thinking about a mechanical world with a static underlying order to the (now widely-accepted) position that scientific knowledge is intersubjective -- it is known to be true when the scientific community accepts it as true. Science operates with a faith that the material world has an underlying order that is intelligible. This approach to science does not challenge most religious positions that the universe has a spiritual order, as well as a physical one.

Frederick Grinnell, previewing his new book Everyday Practice of Science: Where Intuition and Passion Meet Objectivity and Logic (OUP, 2009), outlines the complementarity of science and religion as ways of knowing. This insight -- that science and religion are not opposing bodies of knowledge, but methods of inquiry -- is crucial to appreciating their mutual interdependence. Grinnell puts it this way:

One can imagine the religious and scientific attitudes as filters that reveal distinct domains of knowledge — domains that cannot be observed or inferred or negated from the other perspective.

'Abdu'l-Baha approached the question of the relationship between science and religion in much the same way, about 100 years ago:

Religion must stand the analysis of reason. It must agree with scientific fact and proof so that science will sanction religion and religion fortify science. Both are indissolubly welded and joined in reality. If statements and teachings of religion are found to be unreasonable and contrary to science, they are outcomes of superstition and imagination. That which is found to be real and conformable to reason must be accepted, and whatever science and reason cannot support must be rejected as imitation and not reality. [italics mine]

Our knowledge of the world is fundamentally provisional. I think this is better recognized in the social sciences -- which deal with (unseen) social reality -- than the natural sciences -- which investigate material reality. Think about such abstract concepts in economics as 'the market,' 'labour,' or 'equilibrium.' These all describe social conditions, and yet they never describe them perfectly (markets never operate efficiently). Religion operates in a similar way by using concepts and language to describe spiritual reality ('God,' 'prayer,' 'revelation') in such a way that we can talk about them, even if the discourse fails to fully apprehend its object.

I guess all I'm trying to say is: let's adopt a little humility, folks.