freeinfidel

Scientific materialism is often condemned by religious believers as being reductionist, as though perceiving the essential truth of something were a bad thing. But does it justify this pejorative abuse of the term?

What do people of a scientific inclination see when they look at the world? They see the complex bonding of elements. They see the intricate play of physical forces. They see the comprehensible strangeness of the quantum realm, the staggering immensity of the universe, the eternal truth of natural laws, the sublime irrationality of pi.

Our accumulated scientific wisdom is vast - so huge, in fact, that no-one today can simply be a ’scientist’, not even just a physicist, chemist, biologist. To have any chance of fully comprehending and utilising any branch of science means specialising.

But this enormous treasury of knowledge is not enough for scientists. They want more. Every true scientist is driven by what he or she does not know. The existence of science as a discipline is an acknowledgment of our ignorance, but also our desire to leave that condition. It is an assertion that ignorance is undesirable, a form of failure, a primitive state that we, as evolved life forms, should leave behind. All true knowledge is valuable, even if we can’t put it to use immediately. Talking about the curiosity that motivates mathematicians, E C Titchmarsh said:

It can be of no practical use to know that pi is irrational, but if we can know, it surely would be intolerable not to know.

Scientists are explorers, constantly expanding our horizons. So how can a discipline that is almost incomprehensibly vast and complex, and to which we are adding every day, be reductionist? Such an accusation is oxymoronic at best. In fact, you can probably drop the ‘oxy’.

What does the believer comprehend while gazing on the magnificence of nature, with all its complexity?

God did it.

This, surely, is the ultimate in reductionist thinking. As an explanation for the world and all it contains, it is disappointingly banal, feeble, simple-minded, crude, unimaginative. Frankly, it’s a bit silly.

The faithful complain when rationalists ‘explain away’ the mysteries of the spiritual realm - when they provide logical, supportable, real-world mechanisms by which apparent visions or miracles come about. But these explanations are made possible by that accumulated wisdom, acquired painstakingly by innumerable explorers after truth, collected and refined over centuries. Even the simplest assertion in science is built on a sophisticated foundation of knowledge that was hard won and required vast effort.

In this sense, no rational explanation of a supernatural phenomenon is ever ’simple’, however easy our fund of knowledge has made it. Flying from Paris to New York is simple. All you do is sit on a plane for several hours. What could be easier? But start thinking about the effort and knowledge required to build a flying machine, jet engines, the seat-back video, and you will understand that there is nothing simple about it.

On the other hand, the believer would ‘explain away’ the miraculous (and even those things that scientists already understand) with nothing more than “it’s god’s will” or worse, “we can never understand this. It’s not for us to know”.

The so-called ‘mystery’ of religion is nothing more than glorified ignorance. Can anyone explain the benefit of not knowing something?

If you enjoy the experience of standing in awe and wonder at the magnificence of the universe, try learning some science. There is nothing so splendid as the complex truth of nature.