Apparently, Bill O'Reilly, one of these TV pundits who gets paid lots of money to show off his stupidity, tried to engage in a religious debate with an atheist. In doing so, he put his own ignorance about both the physical world and his own religion on display for all to see. In short, he argued that belief in religion is "real" because of the mysteries of the tide. As we all learned in elementary school, tides are not all that mysterious and haven't been for centuries.
To me, the foolishness is in the assumption that somehow science and religion are competing ways of knowing. I do not agree with that perspective. Each has their own domain in which they provide meaning to separate questions. Science tells us what happens to our bodies when we die. Religion tells us what happens to our essence (aka soul) when we die. To me, science and religion answer different questions and support different social functions.
This sparked a vigorous debate on a blog that I participate in about the validity of religion as a way of knowing or as a basis for behavior. Some point to the what they view as senseless rules (prohibitions on eating pork) that have outlived their purpose. I see this has simply not understanding how things like rules (or rituals) have meaning beyond the rule. There are others who truly believe that religion is "the opiate" of the willfully ignorant. I personally see this view as offensive.
To me, casual rejection of others' truths shows that you do not live in the world where those truths have meaning. And, what is important here is the meaning that people bring to their truths. The basis of O’Reilly’s comment wasn’t really about what causes tides but that there are mysteries that seem to have no explanation, and God provides that explanation and therefore gives meaning to the mystery. The fact that tides can in fact be explained doesn’t actually remove God from the equation, it just shows how simple, or at least inarticulate, O’Reilly is.
A key concept in the kind of research I do is the idea that reality is socially constructed. And that includes scientifically based facts. I happen to have a lot of faith in most empirically determined facts, but I also know that African Americans were scientifically shown to be intellectually inferior. Men had been told for years that the reliability of the PSA test in detecting prostate cancer was scientifically validated when in turned out that it was not as reliable as people were led to believe. Consequently, many men suffered needless interventions, and some still suffering the effects of those interventions, as a result of what amounts to unexamined faith in science.
The truth behind how science works is that sometimes quite a bit of what we do is based on assumptions that are supported by little more than faith. That isn’t to say that there are no scientifically validated facts. The relationship between the moon and tides, or the process of gradual genetic change in phenotypes (aka evolution) has been repeatedly shown to be the best answer to very specific scientific questions. And there are empirically shaky conclusions to scientific questions that were put out as “truth”, like the relationship between vaccines and autism. This "truth" was acted upon with disastrous consequences for children around the world.
What’s important about social constructions is that, regardless of their “truth”, they are real to people who believe them. The Thomas Theorem states that if you define something as real, it is real in its consequences. So, if you define pigs as unclean, the real consequence is that you do not eat them. This may have been the result of seeing the relationship between eating pork and dying from trichinosis and deciding that a rule was needed to ensure health of your people (an explanation for the Jewish pork prohibition that is not entirely supported by evidence, by the way). It does not change the fact that the rule had meaning and that people acted on the basis of that rule. What is important here is not the rule, but the meaning behind the rule.
The other thing about social constructions is that the justification for rules (and rituals) can evolve over time to serve different purposes. So the prohibition against eating pork no longer serves a potential health purpose but serves to define a community. Having a sense of identity is just as important as understanding what it takes to cook food safely. And given that human beings are scientifically proven social animals, it may even be more important in the perpetuation of the species.
O’Reilly is a Roman Catholic. If you do not live in that world and don’t share its assumptions, it is easy to dismiss his social construction of the world. However, a stronger argument against his stupid remarks can be made if you understand that his references about what is mysterious have not been considered mysteries by his own Church for centuries. (And you can go on all you want about how the Church went bat-poop crazy with Galileo and Copernicus, but the scientifically trained urologists also were pissed when the scientific evidence against the PSA test came out last year.)
Calling any belief in religion stupid is not an effective method of undermining what may be undeniably real to others. Since science has no special claim to truth either, such arguments are only patronizing. Indeed, the one thing that religion and science share is the certainty that its assumptions have meaning and therefore are real to its believers.
**Full disclosure: I am not adherent to any religious belief system. I was baptized and confirmed a Catholic but stopped practicing almost two decades ago. With that said, I have been called a secular humanist, which is a label that I will recognize, if you need me to be labeled.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
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