Is science better than religion for finding God?

August 11, 2011 6:30 AM

Does religion prevent humanity from knowing God?

Has anyone written anything from the philosophical viewpoint that historical religions interfere with humanity's understanding of God? Has anyone said science is a better way of understanding the Universe, and therefore a better way of understanding God, than today's organized religions?

posted by atchafalaya to religion & philosophy (23 answers total)

To the extent that this isn't just chatfilter, what you're looking for is called "natural theology". The high water mark of the concept was in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Most natural theologians are less concerned with saying that organized religion is bad, and more concerned about saying that it's unnecessary.

Remember, it was only really possible to suggest that organized religion is actively bad for about the last hundred years,* and by that point, the people who were criticizing it weren't all that interested in finding God via alternate means.

*I mean, sure Hume said some things to that effect, but he was kind of an outlier. Directly criticizing religion as such was a great way of getting yourself in trouble for most of human history.
posted by valkyryn at 6:38 AM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

This is 100% unanswerable, considering there is no proof for god and no way to test this.

> Has anyone said science is a better way of understanding the Universe, and therefore a better way of understanding God

This statement makes zero sense. Science studies nature, not god. God is a projection of your psychology. Yes, as far as we can tell scientific methodology is the best way to understand nature.
posted by damn dirty ape at 6:48 AM on August 11, 2011 [6 favorites]

This is a fascinating question, and I hope it receives an authoritative answer from someone who knows the history of science. I suspect that this was a big part of how science was framed during the Enlightenment in 18th century Europe — praising god by developing an understanding of the perfection of the universe.
posted by Nomyte at 7:00 AM on August 11, 2011

what you're looking for is called "natural theology".

Also called Deism. But Deism is more of the idea that God is knowable without religion than that religion stands in the way of knowing God.
posted by three blind mice at 7:00 AM on August 11, 2011

Science studies nature, not god.

The Natural Philosophers of the Enlightenment would disagree. They believed in God, but also believed in their work was a way of wiping away the mysticism and occultism that currently tried to explain the workings of the universe and reveal the finely-tuned complexity of the universe as a machine-like creation of God. Isaac Newton, and others, held sincere religious beliefs that while fully acknowledging a Creator, seriously conflicted with the establish church.
posted by griphus at 7:07 AM on August 11, 2011

The Gospels are very firm on the matter of religion interfering with human understanding of God. They don't, however, say anything about science being a better approach. Rather the opposite, they say that understanding of God is not best attempted through the intellect.
posted by tel3path at 7:08 AM on August 11, 2011

This is 100% unanswerable, considering there is no proof for god and no way to test this.

Bullshit. The OP asked if anything had been written on this topic. I'm a pretty hardcore atheist and I'm still quite capable of saying things like "some religions believe that clergy are necessary to communicate with God, while others disagree," even though I personally believe the entire concept is bunk. The question is quite answerable: Is this something that people have talked about, and if so, where can I read about it?

And that answer is, in fact, to look into natural theology and Deism. As three blind mice notes, Deism as we view it today isn't usually explicitly about religion being bad so much as unnecessary, but a lot of Deists did hold that belief - if you start digging into a lot of Enlightenment religion, you'll find a lot of disdain for churches, which in this context can be read as "organized religion," while retaining some level of God-belief. You might find something useful in, say, Jefferson's writing on religion.
posted by Tomorrowful at 7:10 AM on August 11, 2011 [5 favorites]

In line with what griphus is saying - Neal Stephenson brings this up in various permutations throughout the Baroque Cycle, particularly in the interactions between Daniel Waterhouse and John Hooke in Quicksilver.
posted by EvaDestruction at 7:30 AM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Yes. Examples. More examples.
posted by likeso at 7:46 AM on August 11, 2011

[Folks, key words here are "Has anyone written anything...", not "what are your personal thoughts on...". As a question about existing literature this is answerable, but this is not the place for a freeform discussion about religious or philosophical beliefs.]
posted by cortex at 7:46 AM on August 11, 2011

Does religion prevent humanity from knowing God?

Much may depend on how you define 'religion' and 'knowing God'. This is explored at the beginning of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, to wit:

31 Created in God's image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of "converging and convincing arguments", which allow us to attain certainty about the truth. These "ways" of approaching God from creation have a twofold point of departure: the physical world, and the human person.

32 The world: starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world's order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe.

[...]

33 The human person: with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God's existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the "seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material", can have its origin only in God.

34 The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality "that everyone calls God".

35 Man's faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith. The proofs of God's existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason.

Not much in there w/r/t religion per se, though obviously the role of the Church is explored in detail throughout the remainder of the text.
posted by jquinby at 7:53 AM on August 11, 2011

To be more explicit: Falsafa and my examples are in fact faylasufs. More background.
posted by likeso at 7:56 AM on August 11, 2011

Has anyone written anything from the philosophical viewpoint that historical religions interfere with humanity's understanding of God?

The records of Christ's interactions with the Pharisees in the New Testament lend credence to this view. I particularly like this passage in Matthew 23 (if you'll permit me an extended quotation):

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The teachers of religious law and the Pharisees are the official interpreters of the law of Moses. So practice and obey whatever they tell you, but don’t follow their example. For they don’t practice what they teach. They crush people with unbearable religious demands and never lift a finger to ease the burden.

“Everything they do is for show. On their arms they wear extra wide prayer boxes with Scripture verses inside, and they wear robes with extra long tassels. And they love to sit at the head table at banquets and in the seats of honor in the synagogues. They love to receive respectful greetings as they walk in the marketplaces, and to be called ‘Rabbi.’

“Don’t let anyone call you ‘Rabbi,’ for you have only one teacher, and all of you are equal as brothers and sisters. And don’t address anyone here on earth as ‘Father,’ for only God in heaven is your spiritual Father. And don’t let anyone call you ‘Teacher,’ for you have only one teacher, the Messiah. The greatest among you must be a servant. But those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces. You won’t go in yourselves, and you don’t let others enter either.

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you cross land and sea to make one convert, and then you turn that person into twice the child of hell you yourselves are!"

posted by BurntHombre at 7:57 AM on August 11, 2011 [4 favorites]

Kierkegaard made a point of how Christianity was often a hindrance to actually being a Christian.
posted by Obscure Reference at 7:58 AM on August 11, 2011

The late Dr. Ron Nash wrote an excellent book called Faith and Reason which puts forth the proposition that God is quite knowable through the mechanisms that He has provided to us.
posted by DWRoelands at 8:13 AM on August 11, 2011

Spinoza kind of wrote along these lines.
posted by empath at 8:23 AM on August 11, 2011

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan The title alone sounds like it might be along the lines you're looking for. It's actually a series of lectures Sagan gave back in 1985.

I actually haven't read this book myself yet but I keep meaning too. So thanks for the reminder!
posted by Mister_Sleight_of_Hand at 10:07 AM on August 11, 2011

Thanks so far for some very interesting responses. Let me add a couple of things: I'm not religious or a believer myself. I'm just interested in whether or not someone has said, the more we know of the universe from a purely scientific perspective, the closer we are to finding out what God really is.

You know what comes to mind? In Contact, when I believe we find a message embedded in pi, out to some as-yet-unseen number of places.

Has any philosopher or theologian said scientific investigation of our Universe is the path to enlightenment?
posted by atchafalaya at 10:39 AM on August 11, 2011

This in no way answers your question, but may be an interesting tangent to follow. The book Finding Darwin's God discusses several issues such as evolution, big bang theory and quantum physics and tries to find a compromise or reconciliation between science and faith. The author is a molecular biologist and a Christian. Not really evangelical, but more of an effort to understand things from two approaches.
posted by Doohickie at 10:47 AM on August 11, 2011

There is a long tradition of 'negative theology' which is profoundly sceptical of the claims of religion to tell us anything meaningful about God. The sixth-century writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius suggests that it's dangerous to use traditional religious language, such as 'God is good', because it can easily mislead us into believing that we actually know something about God. If we want to talk about God at all, we should use radically non-religious language ('God is drunk') rather than standard religious language ('God is good'), because it's less likely to fool us into thinking we know something we don't.

Of course, this position is just as hostile to scientific positivism as it is to religious positivism. As far as Pseudo-Dionysius is concerned, a scientist like Stephen Hawking who believes that by unlocking the secrets of the universe we can 'know the mind of God' is making exactly the same mistake as the naive religious believer who thinks that God is a big bearded man up in the sky. Who are we to think we know anything about God? As Meister Eckhart puts it: 'God is nameless, because no one can say anything or understand anything about him. If I say 'God is good', that is not true. I am good, but God is not good.'
posted by verstegan at 10:53 AM on August 11, 2011

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was developing a theory of "religionless Christianity" whilst in prison from 1943 to 1945. I recommend his Letters and Papers from Prison; I found it very insightful.
posted by orrnyereg at 12:28 PM on August 11, 2011

Has any philosopher or theologian said scientific investigation of our Universe is the path to enlightenment?

I can think of a few traditions in which the path to enlightenment involves running some sort of psychology experiment on yourself, with the goal of disproving a firmly-held "hypothesis" about yourself or the world. For instance:

1) A lot of Gnostic traditions start from something like "The material world isn't real. Enlightenment is convincing yourself of this."

2) The core of Buddhism is something like "Your thoughts and perceptions are fleeting, unsatisfactory, and don't constitute a permanent 'self.' Enlightenment is convincing yourself of this."

3) Some modern occult traditions are sort of the opposite of Buddhism here: something like "Your true will is all-powerful, and you can use it to create whatever reality you want. Enlightenment is convincing yourself of this."

In a way, these are more like high school lab activities than they are like real scientific investigation. That is, you're re-running an experiment that thousands of other people have already done, just to make sure that the correctness of their conclusion really sinks in. Still, they've all got a "Hey, don't take my word for it, try it and see for yourself" element that you might be interested in.
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:46 PM on August 11, 2011

Plenty of Christians, myself included, are excited about science in all its forms as ways to learn about the reality that the Lord has created. I do not understand Christians who think scientific pursuit could harm God. (In the same vein as the phrase from the Bible "the love of money is the root of all evil" - yes, if people make science their god it will blind them to the real creator...but genuine scientific pursuit in no way nullifies the reality of God)
posted by carlh at 5:20 PM on August 12, 2011