JORDAN POLLACK directs a research laboratory in dynamical and evolutionary machine organization at Brandeis University.
We scientists like to think that our way of knowing is special. Instead of holding beliefs based on faith in invisible omniscient deities or parchments transcribed from oral cultures, we use the scientific method to discover and know. Truth may be eternal, but human knowledge of that truth evolves over time, as new questions are asked, data are recorded, hypotheses are tested, and replication and refutation mechanisms correct the record.
So it is a very dangerous idea to consider science as just another religion. It’s not my idea but one I noticed growing in a set of Lakovian frames within the memesphere.
One of the frames is that scientists are doom-and-gloom prophets. At a recent popular technology conference, a parade of speakers emphasized the threats of global warming, sea level rising by eighteen feet and destroying cities, more category 5 hurricanes, and so on. It was quite a reversal from the positivistic techno-utopian promises of miraculous advances in medicine, computers, and weaponry that allowed science to bloom in the late twentieth century. A friend pointed out that in the days before PowerPoint these scientists might have been wearing sandwich-board signs proclaiming, “The End Is Near!”
Another element in the framing of science as a religion is the response to evidence-based policy. Scientists who do take political stands on “moral” issues such as stem-cell research, capital punishment, nuclear weapons, global warming, and the like can be sidelined as atheists, humanists, or agnostics who have no moral or ethical standing outside their narrow specialty—as compared with, say, televangelists.
A third, and the most nefarious, frame casts theory as one opinion among others that should also be represented out of fairness or tolerance. This is the subterfuge used by the intelligent-design creationists.
We may believe in the separation of church and state, but that firewall has fallen. Science and reason are losing political battles to superstition and ignorance. Politics works by rewarding friends and punishing enemies, and while our individual votes may be private, exit polls have proved that science didn’t vote for the incumbent.
There seem to be three choices put forward: reject, accommodate, or embrace.
One path is to go on an attack on religion in the public sphere. In his book The End of Faith, Sam Harris points out that humoring people who believe in God is like humoring people who believe that “a diamond the size of a refrigerator” is buried in their backyard. There is a fine line between pushing God out of our public institutions and repeating the religious intolerance of regimes past.
A second is to embrace faith-based science. Since, from the perspective of government, research is just another special interest feeding at the public trough, we should change our model to be more accommodating to political reality. Research is already sold like highway construction projects, with a linear accelerator for your state and a supercomputer center for mine, all done through direct appropriations. All that needs to change is the justification for such spending.
How would faith-based science work? Well, physics could sing the psalm that perpetual motion would solve the energy crisis, thereby triggering a $500 billion program in free energy machines. (Of course, God is on our side to repeal the second law of thermodynamics!) Astronomy could embrace astrology and do grassroots PR with daily horoscopes to gain mass support for a new space program. In fact, an antigravity initiative could pass today if it was spun as a repeal of the “heaviness tax.” Using the renaming principle, the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) program can be brought back to life as the “Search for God” project.
Finally, the third idea is actually to embrace this dangerous idea and organize a new open-source spiritual and moral movement. I think a new, greener religion, based on faith in the Gaia hypothesis and an eleventh commandment to “Protect the earth” could catch on, especially if welcoming to existing communities of faith. Such a movement could be a new pulpit from which the evidence-based silent majority can speak with both moral force and evangelical fervor about issues critical to the future of our planet.