I’ve had decades to stew in my education, which was in physics and biology. And in those decades, the religion of my youth, Catholicism, in which I had some interest as a young person, has become increasingly incomprehensible to me. Lately, I have been enjoying an interest in the history of religion (Religion for Breakfast, Lets Talk Religion), but it amuses me that while I find the history of religion fascinating, the more I learn about it the more loathsome it all seems to me. This is despite the fact that atheism, as a cultural force, seems on the decline, and, in my sociocultural milieu, out of fashion. But despite the fact that I find atheism slightly embarrassing, my conviction that not only are religions wrong in a variety of senses, but perhaps even actively bad for human beings, seems to grow all the time.
How can I feel so certain about this? Well, there are a lot of ways I think about this, but I’d like to focus on one of them in this post: I believe in the microscopic world and its causal relationship with the macroscopic. It surprises me that its taken me so long to put into words the relationship between these two seemingly unrelated things, but in retrospect their relationship could not be clearer to me. One can get a sense of the issue by thinking about the earliest forms of religious practice that we know about: burial, ancestor worship, and the association between natural forces and gods.
Consider a person and their transition to being a corpse. One day they are active, walking around, talking, eating, breathing. The next they are an inanimate object. Critically, at the moment of transition and immediately after, the body appears, macroscopically, to be identical to the body before hand, at least in many sorts of deaths. This difference begs for an explanation and most human populations seem to have hit upon the idea that the person is animated by some force which has departed from the body. This is an adequate if difficult to demonstrate guess if you have no idea about the microscopic machinery which makes a human body go. If, on the other hand, you can appreciate all that intricate machinery and chemistry, the self reproducing and reinforcing patterns of interactions that keep a body going and, also, the fact that they can go wrong without much of a macroscopic catastrophe, then you might never imagine a spirit in the first place.
So too for natural phenomena. Knowledge of electromagnetism hardly makes lightning less powerful, but it does explain how it happens in mechanistic, even predictable, terms. Since we understand disease as a microscopic phenomena we do not need to imagine the local witch has cursed our child. So many Ur-religous ideas become supereragotory when a knowledge of the small world and dumb causality furnishes an adequate explanation.
Neuroscience makes credible the claim that the brain is not merely an antenna into which the soul broadcasts the instructions of being, but a sort of biological soup of computation in which we can plausibly say every conscious state has a corresponding neural correlate, even if that correlate isn’t localizable in any specific part of the brain. The structure and behavior of neurons makes their role in underlying the conscious experience sufficiently plausible as to render non-physical explanations almost if not entirely superfluous.
This occurs in other areas as well. We look out at the world and see kinds of things (dogs, cats, horses, humans, men and women, pine trees, and so on). We see that cats in Catmandu resemble in nearly every respect cats in Catalan. Without a knowledge of the microscopic constituents of these phenomena an explanation seems required, but now that we know that a bundle of genes (and perhaps the cellular context and other factors) determines the shape of the resulting organism, we need no longer imagine that the constancy is enforced by a supernatural agent. A microscopic, local, causal, explanation is plausible.
It is not so much that science disproves religion. It has, in fact, very little to say on the subject outside of the historical and psychological elements of it. It is that the ontology furnished by the modern way of thinking about the world renders most of the explanatory feats of religion pointless. We do not need it to explain anything we see in the world.
Readers of a certain persuasion might argue that the ultimate cause of the universe still requires explanation. That might be, but our understanding of the comportment of the world makes even fulfilling that need with religious ideas seem untenable, at least so far as the idea of a human-like god is concerned, since we can no longer pretend that a human is not adequately characterized as a specific kind of amalgam of microscopic causal elements. Such a specific thing supervenes upon the universe and its quite hard to imagine, for me, the universe in turn supervening upon something with those properties in turn.
I want to make clear that I do not think of this as “science knows everything.” This is manifestly untrue, as all the ontological structures alluded to in this post are hardly easy to precisely describe or justify, as anyone with an interest in and knowledge about Quantum Field Theory could tell you. In a fundamental sense, being is mysterious, both as we are fundamentally separated from the world by the meanness and unreliability of our senses and because grounding our knowledge even in experiment or theory appears impossible. It is only that, to the extent that science gives us knowledge of a provisional kind, it nullifies the need for explanations furnished by most religious traditions.
One might argue that in the absence of scientific certainty, an absence I acknowledge above, that we should just allow religious thought anyway. To that I say, sure. I’m happy to allow it. In fact, I disclaim any ability to disallow it. But I will say that it seems a rather gaudy decoration upon the fundamental, immanent, mystery of being alive. Each moment of being is intensely profound and there is no boundary between the profound and the profane and using religion to chop up the world that way seems very sad to me, to say nothing of all the social and personal harm it seems to do.