God is the Eggshell, God is the Sky

In the ancient Near East, religion was the standard by which pretty much everything was understood. It was the unquestioned, unquestionable root of reality, and however fantastic its suppositions may have been, they were not metaphorical.

The serpent spoke. Ladders descended from heaven. God walked in the garden. It's hard for us moderns to imagine what a worldview like that would be like. Easy to look down on, hard to imagine.

That's because, for us, science has taken religion's place as the lingua franca of reality.

As changes go, this is a revolutionary one. The Enlightenment didn't just encompass the Copernican revolution; it was a Copernican revolution itself, reorienting the conceptual galaxy of the Western world—including our relationship to religion, which has become, effectively, a hobby: something to humor as long as you have the luxury to pretend.

Of course, no believer would agree with that statement. Still, there's no doubt that in the modern West, at least, science has superseded faith as the measure of what's real. "If the Bible says it, I believe it," but if a study proves it, it is so.

For example, prayer is important in many traditions. People are taught it has the power to heal. But if a parent attempts to heal a child by prayer instead of medicine, and if that effort fails, they might reasonably be put in jail. If a medical provider fails to save a life, it's a tragedy, perhaps a malpractice lawsuit, but not a scandal on the level of a botched faith healing. This is because, as a society, we hold that prayer is nice but medicine is real, and when the shit hits the fan, you have a societal obligation to make a real effort to save your child.

Having hatched, we cannot return.

Thanks to modern scientific inquiry, we now know more of the empirical reasons behind things than we did before, and while this in no way diminishes the stirring of thunder or the force of love, it does compromise one's ability to believe in the literal reality of a River Styx.

We live in a world unlike that ancient egg. As good and powerful as the mythic paradigms may be in their way, we have exited and cannot rebuild the fragments.

I do not know where God exists in this new world.

I would like to think that God was the eggshell as well as the sky.

Two Languages

Science has revolutionized the way we interact with information, how we generate knowledge, the premises on which we make decisions about what to do. To be clear, in many ways, these are changes for the better. We can't ask science to stop asking questions. That's what it's here to do. We can't fail to take material action in the name of faith when the results of that failure would be detrimental. We can't ignore such a powerful toolset for solving urgent problems.

Yet as long as we enshrine science as the ultimate standard of true and false, real and not real, religion must be an ornament only—and with the denial of religion as a rational epistemology, things are lost.

It's worth remembering that no one language can express the whole of life. As languages, science and religion each address a need, express a faculty. We humans have many faculties, many ways of knowing. We interact with many kinds of reality. Some dimensions of our experience are easier to describe in the language of science; others, with religion. There are problems science can solve that cannot be addressed in religion's terms; and vice versa, there are things religion can do that science can't.

But here's the rub. If science is the measure of reality, the incompatible claims of religion cannot be trusted. And if its claims are not true, what is it really worth? Now that science has unmade religion, can it serve even its own purposes, still?

How will we meet our religious needs?

Maybe it seems self-evident, but in a societal climate of hard materialism, I feel it's important to make the point that science has not erased our religious needs and doesn't address them, at least not fully.

In some ways, it seems to. Like a religion, science offers a set of myths: fundamental stories that explain the nature and origins of the world, on which we rely to make sense of things. Like a religion, it's also a source of practical guidance: when in doubt, we can look to experts instead of priests to tell us what to eat, how to heal ourselves, how to change our fortunes or manage our feelings.

But as religions go, science is not a very good one. The whole scope of human inquiry cannot be contained in the questions to which science intentionally limits itself, to begin with. Empirical study can tell us much, but only so much.

Some would disagree; some would say that science covers all the bases, that it's a vessel for spiritual as well as empirical inquiry. I have a couple friends who call themselves practitioners of quantum mysticism. That's a category mistake. When you conflate science and spirituality, you're no longer practicing science.

Some would say that if science doesn't explain a thing, then that thing doesn't exist or isn't important. That's a mistake, too, throwing out whole dimensions of the human experience. I respect scientists, not scientismists.

To be clear, science is not a good religion because it's not a religion, period. And religion is bad science, because it's not science. It's not meant to be. It's built around fundamentally different priorities.

Both systems are, however, a description of reality. Both offer ways to engage with it.

I would hope there is a way to reconcile them.

I would hope we could stand science and religion side by side and allow each to speak its own language, without privileging either one the last word on what's real.

There must be importance to be found in the answers and images of religion yet, which can be translated into even our enlightened world ... not just for our amusement ("Oh yes, dear, unicorns exist—but only in stories") but in some larger way that holds water alongside the methods by which science works to reveal reality.

And not just in the Joseph Campbell sense, where one more empiricist seeks to frame our religious feelings in quasi-scientific terms, reducing mythology to the psychoanalytical. In that case, we haven't stepped outside of science-as-religion at all. I don't want to redefine religion. I want to rediscover it.

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The ancient cosmos was surrounded by water; so is the fetus in the womb. It appears the water has broken: the old rules make no more sense now. The wind is on our skin, and we can no longer get our oxygen from the umbilical cord. We've taken on a whole new means of interacting with air. Now that science has remade the questions, we must develop new relationships with the answers.