The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [136]
By making pronouncements that are, even if only in principle, testable, religions, however unwillingly, enter the arena of science. Religions can no longer make unchallenged assertions about reality so long as they do not seize secular power, provided they cannot coerce belief.
This, in turn, has infuriated some followers of some religions. Occasionally they threaten sceptics with the direst imaginable penalties. Consider the following high stakes alternative by William Blake in his innocuously titled Auguries of Innocence:
He who shall teach the Child to Doubt
The rotting Grave shall ne’er get out.
He who respects the Infant’s Faith
Triumphs over Hell Death
Of course many religions, devoted to reverence, awe, ethics, ritual, community, family, charity, and political and economic justice, are in no way challenged, but rather uplifted, by the findings of science. There is no necessary conflict between science and religion. On one level, they share similar and consonant roles, and each needs the other. Open and vigorous debate, even the consecration of doubt, is a Christian tradition going back to John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644). Some of mainstream Christianity and Judaism embraces and even anticipated at least a portion of the humility, self-criticism, reasoned debate, and questioning of received wisdom that the best of science offers. But other sects, sometimes called conservative or fundamentalist - and today they seem to be in the ascendant, with the mainstream religions almost inaudible and invisible - have chosen to make a stand on matters subject to disproof, and thus have something to fear from science. The religious traditions are often so rich and multivariate that they offer ample opportunity for renewal and revision, again especially when their sacred books can be interpreted metaphorically and allegorically. There is thus a middle ground of confessing past errors, as the Roman Catholic Church did in its 1992 acknowledgement that Galileo was right after all, that the Earth does revolve around the Sun: three centuries late, but courageous and most welcome none the less. Modern Roman Catholicism has no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a Universe 15 billion or so years old, with the first living things arising from prebiological molecules, or with humans evolving from ape-like ancestors -although it has special opinions on ‘ensoulment’. Most mainstream Protestant and Jewish faiths take the same sturdy position.
In theological discussion with religious leaders, I often ask what their response would be if a central tenet of their faith were disproved by science. When I put this question to the current, Fourteenth, Dalai Lama, he unhesitatingly replied as no conservative or fundamentalist religious leaders do: in such a case, he said, Tibetan Buddhism would have to change.
Even, I asked, if it’s a really central tenet, like (I searched for an example) reincarnation?
Even then, he answered.
However, he added with a twinkle, it’s going to be hard to disprove reincarnation.
Plainly, the Dalai Lama is right. Religious doctrine that is insulated from disproof has little reason to worry about the advance of science. The grand idea, common to many faiths, of a Creator of the Universe is one such doctrine - difficult alike to demonstrate or to dismiss.
Moses Maimonides, in his Guide for the Perplexed, held that God could be truly known only if there were