What's wrong with science as religion

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, concludes "The First Three Minutes" with these cheery words: "The more the universe is comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." The universe that we optimistically call our "cosmic home" is nothing of the sort, says Weinberg. Our existence is a "more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents." The human story is a tale told by idiots suffering from delusions of both purpose and grandeur, and we are all actors in this grand farce.

Yet even as gravity pulls Weinberg into the black hole of bleakness, he suggests that there is, perhaps, a ray of hope -- a sliver of salvation -- in science, which "lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." Weinberg, like poor Job in the Old Testament, finds the world troubling. But his response, like Job's, suggests that the dreariness of the world has not completely extinguished his mythopoeic impulse.

Science, it would appear, has the raw material for a new religion. Trust traditionally placed in God can be relocated to science, which is reliable and faithful, as well as ennobling. Life can be oriented in a reverential way around the celebration and protection of the great diversity wrought by the evolutionary epic, a diversity that has produced creatures capable of reflecting on this grand mystery.

The grand creation story at the heart of this new religion of science inspires reverence among those invested in its exploration. The world disclosed in this story rests on a foundation of reliable and remarkable natural laws. These laws -- gravity tethering our planet to the sun, fusion reactions producing sunlight, chemistry enabling our metabolism -- possess the capacity to bring forth matter, galaxies, stars, planets and even life, all within a framework of natural processes that we can understand. And as we decipher these processes, their marvelous character only enlarges. No matter how well we understand them, they still evoke awe and surprise. The modern scientific creation story is so much more than a mere alternative to the traditional biblical myth of Adam and Eve; it is a genuinely religious myth with an astonishing depth and a proffered competence to meet the needs of the religious seeker -- the needs that draw millions of Americans to their houses of worship every Sunday morning.

The other pieces of the new religion also fall naturally into place. Our existence is a gigantic miracle, billions of years in the making, and way more interesting than any magical conversion of water into wine. The atoms in our bodies were forged in the furnaces of ancient stars that exploded, seeding our galaxy with rich chemistry. Our planet and its life-sustaining sun formed from this recycled stellar debris. "We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon."

The scientific creation story, unlike the parochial accounts in our religious texts, belongs to all of humanity; it is the story of the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Jews, the Christians, the Confucians, the readers of PZ Myers' blog. We share this story with otters, giraffes, hummingbirds and the stars overhead. Atheist theologian Loyal Rue sees in the universality of the scientific story hope that a fragmented and suspicious humanity might find common ground on which to build a global village of trust and cooperation. "We are, at the moment, in many different places, with many histories and hopes," he writes in "Everybody's Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution." "But we are now called together to one place, to a shared history and to a common vision of enduring promise. If there are saints enough among us, we shall survive."

So there it is -- a brand-new religion, courtesy of modern science. We have a creation myth, ethical directives and a meaningful place for humankind within the grand scheme of things. These are the ingredients that "constructive theologians" like Gordon Kaufman of Harvard Divinity School tell us are common to all religions. As a bonus, we have science to guide us into truth and assure us that we can find solutions to our problems. And we have inquisitors like Myers to ferret out heretics and martyr them on his Web site when they appear.

But is this going to work? Can a religion be built on nature and science, rather than God and sacred texts? And, if it could, would it be better than the old-fashioned religions it is replacing? If our present religions, like milk in our refrigerators, have all expired, we need a replacement to meet our mythopoeic needs. Can science do this for everyone, and not just the residents of ivory towers?

For starters, getting people to worship the new scientific creation story will be no easy task. A few dynamic speakers, like Brian Greene and, until recently, Stephen Hawking, can fill auditoriums with gee-whiz scientific stories of hidden dimensions and many universes. But most people prefer to watch sports and, perhaps not surprisingly, even more attend conventional religious services. Darwinism and big-bang cosmology have never been near and dear to human hearts, especially those filled with old-time religion. Sure, there are true believers who find these scientific ideas awesome in the most literal sense of that word. I am happy to place myself in this group. I can be moved to tears by the transcendent beauty of a math equation.

For science to become a true object of worship, it must elbow aside the reassuring and seductively simple belief that "God loves you." This deeply personal faith statement would have to be replaced with one that says something like: "The cosmos worked really long and hard to create you and you should be really appreciative."

But let's assume for the moment that this is possible -- that science can be canonized, moralized, transcendentalized and politicized into a replacement religion, with followers, codes of conduct, celebrated texts and sacred blogs, houses of worship, "saints" of some sort and inquisitors of another sort. And let's suppose that it's possible for this new religion to move out of the ivory towers of academia, where it lives now, to take its place alongside the other "world" religions, attracting hundreds of millions of adherents drawn from the main streets of the world and all walks of life. What would this new religion be like once it became institutionalized? After all, if religion fills a genuine human need, something has to fill the hole created by its passing -- something that appeals to billions of people.

Could we be sure, for example, that this new scientific religion would not give rise to the extremism and aberrant behavior that plague conventional religions? Would concern for the diversity of life, for example, inspire vegetarians to blow up slaughterhouses, and run the local butcher through his or her own meat grinder? Would reverence for the cosmos reinvigorate astrology? Would appreciation for natural selection bring eugenics back out of the closet? In other words, if science dismantles the traditional religious content that people use to satisfy their impulses -- many of which are quite passionate -- will we really be better off?

There is also no compelling way to get ethical directives from science. To be sure, religion has a version of the same problem, but that simply points up the challenges they both face, not the superiority of science over religion. Even Stephen Jay Gould, the peacemaking agnostic, suggested that religion should make the ethical calls.

On a practical level -- and I write as someone who works in the trenches at an evangelical college -- I am worried that attempts to treat science as if it is a religion will only drive the big, abrasive wedge currently between science and religion even further into the chasm of misunderstanding. What we should hope, instead, is that science can become a more congenial guest in the house -- church, temple, mosque -- of religion and not be so determined to proselytize or even evict all of the current occupants. There is much in religion that need not trouble the scientist and much that the scientist can value. Scientists must learn to live with that.

In order for many of us to truly feel at home in the universe so grandly described by science, that science needs to coexist as peacefully as possible with the creation stories of our religious traditions. I share with Myers, Dawkins and Weinberg the conviction that we are the product of cosmic and biological evolution, that Einstein and Darwin got it right. But I want to believe that, through the eyes of my faith, this is how God created the world and that God cares about that world. Does this belief, shared by so many of our species, make me dangerous?

I am incredibly impressed with the achievements of science. But I don't think science is omniscient and I am not convinced that science will ever know everything. I am not convinced that science is even capable of knowing everything. That we can know as much as we do seems rather miraculous, in fact. Is it so dangerous to believe that there is a bit more to the world than meets the scientific eye, that behind the blackboard filled with equations there is a rational, creative and even caring mind breathing fire into those equations?