Should a scientific temper imply an automatic rejection of religion? Dr. V. Ramaswami
This epoch in history we are fortunate to live in is one where almost every aspect of our lives is touched by science. Science has given us many new gadgets, made day-to-day living much easier and pleasurable, and has, to a large extent, helped to prevent and alleviate many bodily and mental ailments. It has helped us understand nature a lot more, and even given a feeling that we can conquer it through science. The validity of anything from a scientific point of view supposedly rests entirely on observations, testability, and repeatability. Its theories are confirmed by the correctness of its predictions. People all over the world are extremely influenced by science, and most, including the non-college-educated, do hold a scientific optic. Yet, science is not entirely faultless or only beneficial. Science has created weapons capable of incredible destruction leading to innumerable deaths and horrendous hurt to many peoples of the world. Science has also erred badly, however unintentionally, causing much harm such as the thalidomide disaster and the bad effects of many farm products like pesticides and hormone- based interventions on nature. Once outside the laboratory, science is not all that perfectly predictable either, medical science being a standing example.
Unlike most other species inhabiting the earth, man has been blessed with a keen intellect and a high level of curiosity. From early on, men (and women certainly) have tried to understand not only their environment and nature, but also what their own lives are all about and how those could be improved. From these pursuits arose religion and science, religion preceding science, at least as we understand it today, by many centuries. At their core level, religions deal with the same deep questions that science has attempted to answer – questions such as whence we came, whither we go, what makes up the world around us, and how to make life better. At a practical level, religion has given an anchor for many to maintain their peace and stability in a world fast changing and throwing many challenges and unanticipated misfortune. It has helped many contain their innate animal instincts and live what one may call a reasonably righteous life of coexistence respecting others. Unfortunately, religions at the level of practice have burdened themselves with many superstitions, faith based (as opposed to analysis based) beliefs, and rituals that pose some formidable challenges to a scientific mind. It is also true that much harm has been inflicted on large sections of humanity in the name of religion. These have made many exposed to science, particularly the young, tend to reject religion altogether.
Are science and religion, in spirit and from a purely epistemological point of view, antithetical to each other? Here, by religion, I mean core religious thought (like vedantic advaita), based not on any dogma or blind faith, but on concepts built using careful analysis and maintaining a high degree of logical consistency with and conformability to empirical observations. Thus, I exclude faith based religions, ritualistic practices, superstitions, etc., and am focused entirely, in this discussion, on the core metaphysics of religion. Can we really reject that religion based on science? Can science be the final arbiter, and are its foundations and logic really all that complete or infallible as many may think? These questions come up repeatedly in one guise or the other in many forums – from dinner tables to law-making bodies and courts.
Examining the questions in the above paragraph is a daunting task that requires many more pages than a short article, and indeed I am in the process of writing a book thereon. I encourage readers to give me the various premises on which they cast doubt on religion in the core sense in which I am considering here. In case, that sounds somewhat escapist, ask any scientist and they will tell you how science like religion is equally burdened, at the people and practical level, by bias, dogmas, fights, and rituals just as religion is The book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ by Thomas Kuhn documents many such from history. It is best to up front ignore these aberrations and to concentrate only on the core. Below, I will give some thoughts in the light of some familiar example oppositions based on a so-called scientific optic.
First, consider arguments based on the inability to observe some religious conceptions like ‘God’, ‘atma’, ‘brahmin,’ etc. A careful examination will reveal that our objection should equally hold for almost all sciences, since each of them is built on certain primitives or terms that are not defined and are taken for granted a priori to exist and to possess certain properties. After all, what is a definition except that it is the explanation of some entity in words that describe it in terms of some other entities or concepts? Given the finiteness of the dictionary in any language, or even all of them combined, a repeated attempt defining every term used can only end up in a circular definition and not an absolute definition of any of these primitives. Thus, any branch of human knowledge has to depend on some primitives that defy a complete definition. Also, such primitives are often not even observable.
Let me illustrate the above points with the example of Euclidean geometry, a branch of mathematics considered the purest of sciences. Among the many primitives in this area are points and lines. Are they observable? How could they be if they are each to occupy a zero area or zero volume? Under a microscope, the point you make with your pencil will indeed look like a circle filled in, and a line you draw would be wiggled crazily. How would you define a point or a line? I challenge you. Yes, you could think of a sequence of points made by ever sharper pencils and something that they will converge to. What does ‘converge to’ mean? How do you know there exists something they will even converge to and that they don’t ‘converge’ to a nothing? Do we reject all of geometry immediately? No, we work with these ‘abstract, idealized’ objects of which the points we place and the lines we draw on a graph paper are imperfect facsimiles thereof, and build a large edifice of useful theories and subject areas like engineering, architecture, etc., don’t we? In any branch of science, there are indeed many very fundamental quantities that compare with the point and the line of mathematics. It is unfortunate that even many college-educated ‘scientists’ are not exposed to the fundamentals of science at this level.
Things do not stop here. A proper scientific theory starts with postulating some primitives, their properties, and their inter-relationships. In an area like mathematics, these are called ‘axioms’ – i.e., statements taken for granted and believed in, based on their reasonableness based on our own experience and observations of the real world. Thus, two simple axioms of Euclidean geometry are: (a) Through any two points, there exists a unique line; (b) Given a line, there exists a point not on that line. This entire geometry is built on a finite number of such axioms from which ‘theorems’ or other ‘facts’ called theorems are derived using deductive logic. Almost, all science is this way only, although a formal axiomatic presentation is seldom made in other sciences accounting for hiding the shocking fact that every branch of science is built on many unknowns and unverifiable or unverified postulates. To add to this, science is not entirely dependent on logic but is based also on notions of observations and tests, something we will address a little later.
How comprehensive are our axioms or comprehensive could they ever be? This is something that mathematicians have examined at great length. Among the axioms of Euclid was a rather complex and unintuitive one that led people question if it could be dropped? This led to the notion of independence of axioms, an axiom considered independent of the others if its removal still results in a system satisfying all other axioms just as its inclusion does. I will not state this axiom in its original form but an equivalent form that asserts that the sum of the angles inscribed in a triangle is 180 degrees. (Figure on the left). A mathematician by name Riemann demonstrated geometries that obey all axioms of Euclid except this one. An example of this can be instantiated on a sphere. Assume that by a line through any two points on a sphere, we mean the largest circle drawn on the sphere containing the two points. This geometry of points and lines do obey all the axioms of Euclid except the one about the angles concerning triangles. In this geometry, you can see that due to the curvature of the sides of triangles, the sum of the angles is greater than 180 degrees! (see Figure on the right). Some constructions on a saddle instead of on a sphere led to geometries with triangles sum of whose angles is less than 180 degrees. Thus, it is very possible that replacing an axiom by its negation may still provide valid systems. How well have you checked what the axiomatic framework of your branch of science is and how this works with it? In fact, in other branches of science too, advances have occurred due to such fundamental considerations; the evolution from Newtonian mechanics to Einstein’s Relativity Theory is a well-known example.
Talking of the axiomatic method, one should certainly talk about the work of a famous logician called Goedel. He proved that in any system with a finite number of axioms, there will always exist statements that are not decidable; not decidable in the sense that whether you include the statement or its negation, you may still be able to have consistent systems of axioms – i.e., axioms that do not contradict each other. At a philosophical level, what this means, is that with the finiteness of ourselves (our alphabets, words, vocabulary, …), there is no way we can answer any and all questions decisively. Thus, the infinite cannot be discerned with our finite faculties is not just a religious thought, but very much a scientific one as well. Indeed, these findings have made some purists reject the ‘reductio ad absurdum’ as a valid method to disprove a statement. Ask yourself, is this ‘reductio ad absurdum’ not a staple of science based on testing and observations? These considerations should bring a sizable amount of humility to the scientist in us when we try to scoff at religion based on some fragile arguments.
I will conclude this article with just one more example. Take the karma theory of Hinduism. According to this, a lot of what we have and experience in this life are influenced as consequences of ‘karma’ inherited in previous births through our actions. A scientist may well ask if it is so, what karma was inherited by my first birth and from where? Up front, this is a legitimate question, but only until we give it some serious thought. Let us again turn to mathematics, the purest of sciences and this time to something more familiar to us than even Euclidean geometry. Consider the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, … with which we count. These are formalized by a set of axioms in Number Theory called Peano’s Axioms of which one asserts that there exists a number called 1, and another that every number has a successor. Thus, 2 is the successor of 1, 3 is the successor 2, and so on. Now, if you ask me, what is the successor of the last number, what would be my answer? The ‘last number’ is a non-existent entity since you are dealing with an infinite sequence here! Imagine Peano defining not the numbers 1, 2, …., but -1, -2 , -3, … with an axiom that every number has a predecessor. Is there a first number? The question is meaningless. Thus, in a system conceived of as births forming an infinite cycle of being manifest and not manifest, how can one even talk of my first life or let alone where its karma came from?
There are many other dubious arguments against religion based on science that sound hollow once we examine them at depth. The criterion of observability as a test of veracity is equally one of them. For example, many statements made on objects light years away based on observations that originated light years earlier may in fact be vacuous, since for all that we know these objects may have ceased to even exist. Measurement of Time is yet another imponderable of science. Just see how the definition of a second has evolved as we have moved from the interval between events to mechanical devices to crystals and atomic clocks. The inherent discreteness and imperfections of our observations and the notorious Heisenberg Principle governing observations are enough to caution any scientist if not a careful study of a scriptural text like ‘Drk Drshya Viveka’ that much before modern science has delved into the limitations of human observations and human means of knowledge.
I am a scientist at heart and indeed so in every waking moment of mine. I am also a mathematician. I have been lucky to have been exposed to some of the foundations of mathematics, mathematical logic, and science. Before that I used to view much of religion with the same suspicion and disdain that many of the young do today. But as my own knowledge and ability to grasp it have increased over the years, I am astounded by the depth of seriousness with which some religious thinkers (to me, it is mainly the proponents of advaita) have examined fundamental questions that matter not only to religion but to all sciences. The greatest lesson I have learned is not to write off anything until I have gained a good understanding of it as well as of the very basis on which I may make a judgment. To me, religious thought at such foundational level is certainly no less important than any science particularly when that thought allows for challenges and meets them with cogent and logically consistent answers or is willing to change itself and evolve. A scientist with a mind open to examine the wealth of such thought with due respect is more equipped to inquire objectively than one who bases most of one’s judgment and conclusions only on a superficial knowledge of either science or religion.
The author Dr. V. Ramaswami is a mathematician by training and an engineering researcher by profession with many scientific publications and patents. The views expressed here are strictly personal. Comments or questions may be sent to him at vramaswami@gmail.com and are welcomed by him as part of his efforts towards writing as comprehensive a book as possible on this important topic.
