Rehabilitating Faith

Atheists love to meme. I’m seeing a lot of single-image, single-phrase take downs of the many-thousand years history of faith. Underlying all of it seems to be (because this isn’t always explicit) the common complaint that religion is, as Hitchens and others have claimed, “a menace to civilization.” The contrary they offer is always science. Apparently the Enlightenment arrived just in time to save us from ravages of superstition.

It’s true that people have perpetrated unspeakable horrors in the name of religion. The Crusades and the Inquisition and the Religious wars that burned through Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the genocidal expansion of Europeans into the Americas, these are familiar to all educated western people. And as for the rest of the world, we could easily go through Islam and Hinduism and create an equally astonishing catalog.

It’s also true that science has given us extraordinary wonders: space exploration, MRI machines, Newton’s laws and Einstein’s theories and electric can openers. Science has improved agriculture, lengthened and, in may ways, eased our daily lives. I don’t know if on the whole it has reduced our anxiety about life, but it has eased the daily struggle of many of our lives, with the hope for the ones not yet well touched by its wonders.

But Science has also given us nuclear weapons and chemical and biological weapons, and climate change, and mining work and factory work and the assembly line. Peasant labor at its worst was never more dehumanizing than an assembly line. Moreover, without science, the logistics of the assembly line could never have been converted into the  logistics of the gas chambers. If faith is an impediment to human progress, science is an impediment to human survival.

But I don’t blame science. And I don’t blame faith either.

People can and have always will abuse faith to create religion, and will always use religion to advance the darker side of humanity. They will do the same with science. We can debate whether nuclear weapons are an abuse of science or just the logical extension of an intellectual discourse that exempts itself from all considerations of moral value or human consequences in its theoretical and practical and disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

We should be able to agree that a theology that supports the practice of genocide is an abuse of faith. Can we agree that the horrors of a science that admits no morality can only be mitigated (if they can be mitigated at all) by an appeal to values such as are asserted via an appeal to and belief in a just and loving God? Take that away and all you have is this always contestable pragmatic appeal to doing the right thing, an appeal that is always defenseless in the shadow of greed and the will to power.

Have I said it clearly yet? It is not religion but science that poses an imminent threat to the world. And though we still want to believe that a better application of science with save us, it will not.

You can’t help but love all the great things science has wrought and all the ways it has revealed how extraordinary we could be. As Hamlet said, and no one ever said it better:

What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason,
how infinite in faculties, in form and moving,
how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension,
how like a god!

You can’t help but get angry at the way that the power-centered appeals to God have held humanity back from the life-saving, life-easing, curiosity-fueling advances that have emerged from the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.

But the struggle equally in science and in religion has shown us nothing clearer than this: how our better angels are no match for our fundamental demons. One demon can kill any number of angels.

The problem is not science, which is wonderful. But it isn’t religion either. We don’t just need to believe in a higher vision. We need also to acknowledge that faith has done as many or more extraordinary things as has science: consoling, enlightening, enriching, humbling, exalting, giving meaning to lives in the way that the cold Enlightenment cannot. Faith as done more good in the lives of actual people than has any other way of being in the world that has ever taught: more than science, more than any philosophy, more than the exaltation of the uber mensch. The work of faith in the souls of people goes almost entirely unrecorded. I believe that faith has produced more unrecorded good than all the recorded evil it has been accused of.

Faith is nothing more than the call to love. Any gesture in that direction is a practice of faith. And it doesn’t matter who did it. Any deviation is an abuse. The call for the destruction of faith in the name of science is fuel to the lurking demons in all of us. If is an offer of succor to the destructive forces of economic imperialism, climate change, untethered A.I.  It is a call to the destruction of earth’s faltering experiment with higher intelligence. We cannot afford it.