Part I: The Problem of Faith in the Modern World (cont.)

The Role of Science in Western Culture (cont.)

Science and God’s Place in the Universe

We have reached the point where the material world is more real to us than any spiritual dimension, and the scientific worldview has come to dominate how we approach the world. In modern societies, even among those who are most religious, our assumption is that any new insights into the way the world works will come through the scientific process, not through supernatural revelation. We explain things that happen around us by using scientific, not religious, concepts. The sun doesn’t rise because some divine power is moving it, but because the sun comes into view as the earth spins on its axis. Whether or not God created the earth and the sun and sent one spinning in an orbit around the other isn’t very relevant to a perspective that describes the sunrise in terms that come from scientific observation instead of divine revelation. We know that the sun rises because of events that occurred billions of years ago, not because of anything that God is doing today.

Because of this, even religious people find it hard not be drawn into what’s called a deistic view of the universe, the belief that the universe was created by God at the dawn of time, wound up like a clock, and then left to run on its own with little or no further involvement by God. We don’t see God as an active force intimately involved in the second-by-second operation of the universe, necessary to its very functioning. Instead, we have demoted God to the role of creator emeritus. As much as we want to believe that our prayers can somehow change the course of events, we reluctantly accept that any divine intervention would be so extraordinary that it would be very much unexpected. And so we usually find ourselves reduced to using the term miraculous for events that are everyday occurrences, like the birth of a child or the flight of a bumblebee.

The crisis of faith that is shaking the modern world is not so much a failure of spirituality than it is a growing awareness that the picture of God that we were raised with no longer makes sense in a world that we see through filters colored by science. These filters keep us from seeing anything that we might have otherwise thought to be supernatural or even the ordinary result of God’s action. Instead, they let us see only the explanations that fit the scientific worldview, and so we no longer really expect God to disturb our everyday lives.

Even if we don’t reach the point where we deny or even just doubt the existence of God, we at least end up leading our lives pretty much the same way that agnostics do. Our faith in God has become both shallow and hollow, so that our belief in God no longer shapes our attitudes or actions except in special circumstances. When we pray, we don’t really expect our prayers to make any real difference, or maybe even worse, we learn to water down our prayers to make sure that we won’t be disappointed when God seems to ignore our expressed desires. Instead of praying for a change in our circumstances, we pray for the ability to accept them. We move through life thinking that nothing we do makes any difference to God, that nothing we do might affect how God deals with us or the world around us. Our belief in God has become not much more than a matter of intellectual assent instead of something that actually shapes how we behave or what we expect.

This declining power of religion has been noticed by certain elements that have a vested interest in how we may or may not be controlled by religion. The result is a rising tide of religious fundamentalism that tries to reverse this trend by attacking its root, the scientific worldview itself. Believers who are swept up by this fundamentalist tide are required to accept revelation from narrowly authorized sources as the only source of truth. Ultimately, fundamentalism’s limitations restrict its ability to spread its influence throughout the general population. More importantly, fundamentalism is regressive by its very nature, and the powerfully progressive forces at work in the scientific worldview remain overwhelmingly persuasive as science continues to improve its ability to make our lives longer and more comfortable, and to explain the universe around us.

Mainstream religion, then, finds itself caught between two irreconcilable forces: religious fundamentalism and scientific fundamentalism. It must find some way to integrate the spiritual zeal of religious fundamentalism with the progressive influence of science. As a crucial part of this process, mainstream religion must avoid the trap of allowing either set of fundamentalists to control the religious agenda. The recent fixation on Darwinian evolution and, by extension, the paleontology and geology that contradict the so-called young earth theories of creationism doesn’t confront the more basic challenge that physics poses to religious belief. Evolution is really just a side show, a mere byproduct of the way that physics has pushed God’s role in the universe to the margins of our lives and of our minds. It’s not biology or geology, but physics that has forced God off of the stage. As a result, we must be able to reconcile our belief in God with physics more than with any other area of science.

Part I: The Problem of Faith in the Modern World (cont.)

The Role of Science in Western Culture (cont.)

Material Realism

So science has taken over Western culture by infiltrating itself through the technology that saturates our experience. But how, exactly, has science shaped our belief systems in a way that undermines our belief in God?

At the heart of the scientific view of the world is a philosophy known as material realism. I call it a philosophy because even though its ideas are the basis of science, material realism is basically a religious claim that cannot be proven by any method, scientific or otherwise. Instead, the scientific method starts with material realism and creates its rules assuming that material realism is true. More to the point, as we shall see later, when scientists happen to stumble upon results that challenge material realism, those results (and often the scientists who discover them) are almost automatically dismissed as being unscientific.

Material realism is the belief that reality is just the physical (material) world and that all you need to know to understand everything is the physical laws that govern the material world. According to material realism, talk about a “higher” reality is not only unnecessary, it’s a useless distraction that gets in the way of scientific progress.

As Amit Goswami explains in his book, The Self-Aware Universe, there are five dominant principles that form the basis of the philosophy of material realism, principles that just about everyone with any sort of modern education accepts to some degree or other. These five principles are strong objectivity, causal determinism, locality, physical (or material) monism, and epiphenomenalism. I’ll try to translate.

Strong objectivity is the belief that reality is, well, real. That is, it’s the belief that reality does not need someone to observe events for them to happen. It is a belief system that answers the question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” with an emphatic Yes! Strong objectivity says that the structures and processes of reality don’t have to be observed to exist and affect each other. They are not subjective (dependent on the viewpoint of an observer), but rather objective (independent of any observer). When you get down to it, this is the whole reason scientists follow the scientific method in the first place, to find out what is really real, not just what they expect to see. Scientists believe that, to quote The X Files, “the truth is out there,” waiting to be uncovered. According to strong objectivity, that’s all that science does: uncover the truth that is there but hidden. This belief has been such a basic part of the worldview of scientists that most have not even considered the possibility that it might be wrong, even when—as we will see in Part II—some of the discoveries of quantum physicists have challenged it. In a way, it’s easy to understand why that might be the case. Strong objectivity is such a basic part of the way scientists look at the world that to question it is to challenge their entire worldview. Pretty scary stuff.

Causal determinism is another basic belief that is essential to the scientific worldview. At heart, it is the assumption that things don’t just happen spontaneously, that every event has a finite set of causes that would produce the same result every time so long as you could exactly reproduce those causes. Of course, every event in the real world is the result of a very complex combination of preconditions that is practically impossible to recreate, but this fact is thought to be just due to our human limitations, not a flaw in the belief itself. A logical consequence of this view, of course, is that there’s no such thing as true randomness, so that even events that look random—like a coin toss or a throw of the dice—can be explained by the conditions and forces that produce what seems to be a random event. In other words, it’s not really a matter of chance that a coin lands heads up, for example. Instead, in theory you could explain it by the amount and direction of the force you used to flip the coin, any imbalances in the weight of the coin, the influence of air currents, and the surface that the coin lands on. According to causal determinism, then, if you could exactly reproduce those conditions, the coin would land heads up every time. Of course, this is how the scientific method is supposed to work: The scientist controls all of the conditions of an experiment except one. By changing that one condition (called thevariable) and seeing the differences in outcome that result, the scientist can figure out how changes in the variable produce different outcomes. This makes sense only if the scientist believes that each outcome is exclusively the result of the events and conditions that lead up to that outcome, that the result is no more and no less than the sum of the parts that produced it. Again, however, the discoveries of quantum physics challenge the idea that this principle applies at all levels of reality.

Locality means that everything is, well, where it is. While that might seem ridiculously obvious, it really isn’t. Not only does this mean that things are bound to their particular location, more importantly, it means that the influence that one thing—be it a material object or an energy field—has over another thing is limited to its place and time.

In some ways, this might actually be harder for us to believe than it would have been a hundred years ago. In this age of telecommunications, we constantly encounter experiences that make it seem that events can affect other events far away. For example, we watch TV, seeing things that are happening hundreds of miles away. What isn’t apparent, though, is that even though a television set can display an image captured far away from us, this happens because that image is turned into radio waves that travel between the TV station and the TV set. The distance in space (and time) is spanned by events that are set in motion at the TV station and, in effect, spread as a series of events (radio waves) that eventually reach the TV set and cause the picture to be displayed there. So the appearance that an event causes a result at a distance is really an illusion, the product of a chain of events extending unbroken from the original cause to the eventual result.

The principle of locality is essential to the scientific worldview because we need it to understand the chain of cause and effect of causal determinism. If an event at location A causes something to happen at location B, the principle of causal determinism means that you have to be able to explain the chain of events that take place between A and B. The principle of locality is so essential to the scientific method, in fact, that when theories of quantum mechanics showed that—at the subatomic level, at least—events in one location can affect events at a distance without things happening in between, Albert Einstein spent much of his later years trying unsuccessfully to prove that those theories were wrong.

Physical monism is the idea that the physical (material) world is all that there is, that there’s no reality apart from the physical processes that we are a part of. By definition, this rules out anything metaphysical, from the human soul to God himself, at least to the extent that either the soul or God can affect or even be seen from the physical world. Everything that does happen can (and must) be explained by the laws of physics. Anything that doesn’t play by those rules is, well, unthinkable. If we admit that the metaphysical might be possible, we also must admit that science cannot give us a satisfactory explanation for everything. Most of us can live with this incongruity, but the scientific fundamentalist is horrified by this possibility. And yet, on this point, we might be able to find a way of affirming physical monism in a way that embraces (and explains) notions of reality that would usually be described in metaphysical terms. In fact, this is what this book is all about.

Epiphenomenalism tries to apply the other scientific principles to the fact that we human beings are conscious, a fact that is extremely hard to explain using those scientific principles. Even though we experience our own consciousness as the essence of who we are, scientists usually conclude that consciousness is only a byproduct (epiphenomenon) of the biological processes of our nervous systems. To a certain extent, we accept this conclusion. We see that when someone’s brain is injured, that person’s consciousness can be reduced or even wiped out. We count on having our consciousness suppressed when we are given anesthesia for surgery, and we are glad when we awake afterwards with no memory of what happened. And yet we have the unshakable feeling that there is something more primary, more durable at the center of our consciousness than anything that can be explained by anatomy and physiology. This actually may provide the best explanation for our persistent belief in a supernatural level of reality that can’t be explained away by science. Even scientists who insist that there’s no other explanation can’t help but act as though they are motivated by something beyond the principles of material realism, as though they have freedom of choice and that their choices are meaningful, that Why? really is as important as How?.

Despite this very personal experience of a metaphysical reality that goes against the principles of material realism and the rest, we in Western cultures have become so completely programmed with the ideas and values of science that they have come to control how we think, even if we’re not scientists ourselves. Indeed, to a certain extent, material realism has become one of the fundamentals of Western religion because Western religion describes God first and foremost as the one who created the material world. Of course, Western religious traditions insist that a metaphysical dimension does exist, but they also consider the physical realm to be highly significant, very much real. This is in contrast to Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism that insist that the material world is just an illusion. In the West, though, we believe that the material world that God created is, to a certain extent, self-sufficient. And so we live out our lives firmly convinced that the physical world is what is truly real.

Of course, most of us still believe in miracles, but even there, our belief in miracles is based on the idea that the material world is pretty much self-contained and governed by laws that make it predictable. Miracles occur when the unpredictable happens, when God intervenes from outside to suspend the laws of nature that make the world stable, that make it an acceptable reality. It’s exactly because God so rarely interferes with the material world that we can count on it to be trustworthy and constant.

Part I: The Problem of Faith in the Modern World (cont.)

The Role of Science in Western Culture (cont.)

Technology as the Fruits of Science

Up to this point, I’ve talked about the impact of science on our lives in terms that are pretty abstract and obscure. Even though we may vaguely grasp the way science shows us how the atom works or how the universe began, that understanding has little to do with how we go about our daily routine. In fact, though, science plays a key role in almost every moment of each day because of the critical role that science has played in the creation of the technology that defines how we live in the modern world. Because we recognize this relationship, our dependence on technology gives greater strength to the authority of science in our minds.

A revolution began at the end of the nineteenth century when science was applied more and more to the creation of new technology. Before that time, advances in technology were mostly evolutionary, the result of practical experimentation: New things were tried and, if they turned out to improve how something worked, they continued to be used. If they didn’t, then they were discarded. Although this sounds a lot like the scientific method, it is different because it was purely a trial-and-error process. The goal was to make the thing itself better, not to learn about the basic principles of nature that allowed the new thing to work. For this reason, invention was more craft than science, that is, the pursuit of knowledge for its usefulness, not for its own sake. Even the best-known inventor, Thomas Edison, developed most of his products through trial and error instead of applying scientific theory. His famous saying that invention is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration shows this: There’s no mention of any use of scientific theory, just new ideas and effort.

In a way, Edison was among the last of the “old-school” inventors. As advanced scientific knowledge began to flower in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Einstein published his first paper in 1905), the discoveries that resulted began to be used to improve old technologies and to create new ones. This trend was not entirely new, of course. After all, Benjamin Franklin studied the nature of lightening and showed that it is a flow of electricity, so he was able to invent the lightning rod as a way to safely channel the electricity from the air to the ground through a wire instead of through the building itself. But this way of applying scientific discovery to the art of invention continued to be more the exception than the rule until the twentieth century.

Physical theories of electricity and magnetism inspired the greatest results among inventors at the beginning of the twentieth century. Early nineteenth-century scientists like Michael Faraday, Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta, André-Marie Ampère, and Georg Simon Ohm developed the scientific knowledge of electromagnetism that was the foundation for technologies created by later nineteenth-century engineers such as Nikola Tesla (electric motors), George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison (electrical generation and transmission), Samuel Morse (the telegraph), and Alexander Graham Bell (the telephone), and in the following century, such inventions as radio, the vacuum tube, and the cathode ray tube used in the first TVs and computer monitors.

Electronic gizmos are the most obvious product of science, but just about every invention of the twentieth century was at least helped along by science. For example, the Wright Brothers’ knowledge of the Bernoulli Principle (the unequal pressure that gives wings their lift and propellers their thrust) made it possible for them to invent the airplane. The theories of James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann led to the invention of refrigeration. And on and on.

Most of us are at least vaguely aware of how the scientific method has sped up the development of the technology that we use every day, and this helps give the scientific process a greater credibility than can be found in any other area of human activity. Religion, on the other hand, appears regressive by comparison because it is mostly based on the authority of writings and traditions from the ancient past. It’s no surprise, then, that as technology becomes more and more central to the way we live, religion is losing its influence, receding to the background and fading in importance.

Part I: The Problem of Faith in the Modern World (cont.)

The Role of Science in Western Culture (cont.)

The Scientific Method and Truth

One really important reason that the scientific worldview has taken over Western culture, despite feeble resistance by believers, is because the method it uses is so successful at figuring out what is true and what is false. And it is successful because, unlike other ways to seek truth and describe reality, it is truly progressive. Before the scientific method took charge, Truth was handed down by people with authority. And because we didn’t have bumper stickers back then to tell us to, we didn’t question authority. So, if you believed that everything that Aristotle wrote was true, you wouldn’t look for evidence that his worldview was flawed precisely because it was your worldview as well. No wonder people thought that reality couldn’t change.

On the other hand, the scientific view of the world is based on the idea that whatever we think is true is only partial and ever-changing. Every discovery, no matter how firmly supported and widely accepted, is assumed to be just one step on a journey, one piece of an always-growing puzzle. So even when a theory is “proved” (a term scientists don’t like to use, except maybe when talking down to us laypeople), it simply becomes the basis for new hypotheses. On the other hand, hypotheses that aren’t confirmed by experiments are thrown out, and scientists who continue to cling to them are pushed to the margins of the scientific community and lose its respect.

Because of this forward-moving quality, the scientific method gets better and better at predicting the future, that is, what develops from current conditions and events. This is most often seen in the laboratory, of course, but it also applies to everyday happenings as well. The weather report is the most obvious example of this, but such areas as medicine and engineering are also based largely on the ability of the scientific method to predict an outcome even when the exact conditions and events leading to that outcome have never been seen before.

Even beyond these everyday examples, science was able to predict such (literally) earth-shaking developments as the splitting of the atom long before they were accomplished. Newton, much less prophets and philosophers, couldn’t have foreseen such a discovery, but the scientific method that Newton pioneered created the conditions that eventually led to the theories that resulted in nuclear fission. In other words, scientists didn’t just stumble upon nuclear fission. Instead, the ideas of such visionaries as Albert Einstein led scientists to perform experiments that, through the process of constant fine-tuning, enabled them to create the first controlled nuclear reaction and then, sadly, the uncontrolled nuclear reaction of the atomic bomb.

Such developments as these have led us to give the scientific method a level of authority far greater than any other. Maybe with the exception of the most willfully closed-minded religious believers, we have come to view science as the most reliable way of finding the truth, the most consistent and powerful way to learn how the world really works. While we may embrace scraps of our ancestors’ faith, the reality is that we place far more trust in scientists than we do in prophets and priests, at least on a day-to-day basis.

Meanwhile, back at the book...

Part I: The Problem of Faith in the Modern World (cont.)

The Role of Science in Western Culture

The ultimate irony of the debate between science and faith is that the argument is already over, and science has won. The scientific worldview has conquered all others, at least in America and the more modern parts of the world. It’s everywhere, influencing practically everything we do. Seriously. Planning a party? Do you ask your pastor to say a prayer to beg God not to rain on your event? Or instead do you check your favorite weather report to find out what the odds of fair weather are for your special day? The fact that the second approach is the only one just about any of us would seriously consider shows how much of what we believe is based on science, not on religion. We no longer believe that weather is caused by the whim of a fickle God who can be coaxed to do what we want, but rather that it is the result of natural forces that scientists can measure and predict the effects of. Even the most religious among us watch the weather report to plan our day, not to laugh at how impertinent it is.

Or think of what we do when someone we love is critically injured. If we’re not Christian Scientists, we call 911 or rush them to the hospital, then we might pray for God to get involved, often asking him to help the doctors and nurses practice their science well. In a way, we’ve managed to demote God to the role of physician’s assistant.

 Every day, we do things that people a few generations ago would have thought impossible, mainly because science has shown that it can be done. We climb aboard an airplane and, despite its great weight, we trust that it will lift off and fly us to where we’re going. We watch events happening on the other side of the planet, probably unaware that the picture is being carried by satellites and lasers over glass “wires.” We point our phones at an interesting scene, record a video, and then send it to five friends around the country. Each of these activities began with scientific theory that was confirmed by experiments and then applied to technology. The only way this technology is possible is because of how well the scientific process has been able to give us a deeper understanding of how our world works.

Although we are not aware of it—and in fact, we probably would deny it—we in the Western world have come to believe more firmly in Isaac Newton than in God. We go about our days assuming that the physical rules that Newton discovered control how the world around us will behave, in part because those rules have been declared to be laws that seem to be more reliable than any of God’s moral laws. We understand that things fall when we let go of them, not just out of habit or because of supernatural forces pulling them down, but because they are obeying a law of gravitation that Newton said controls the whole universe. When we feel how hard it is to move something heavy, we know that Newton’s law of momentum explains why it’s so difficult, not that the darn thing is just being stubborn. Even though we may be only vaguely aware of how Newton’s ideas came to be accepted as laws (by first being worked out as mathematical formulas that were then verified by countless experiments), we have come to accept their authority without quibble. On the other hand, when someone is caught doing something bad, even something truly evil, the best we can do is pray that justice will be done, and usually we assume that it is up to us as a society to make sure that it is.

The place that Newton holds in our culture is mainly because he stood at the beginning of the scientific revolution that came to define how we look at the world. Newton’s theories were among the first to be systematically tested, both by analyzing the math behind them and through scientific experimentation. This turned into a virtuous cycle of sorts, where the truth of Newton’s groundbreaking insights was ever more firmly supported and the process of scientific experimentation itself came to be increasingly accepted as the most reliable way of revealing the truth. What happened as a result was the birth of the Enlightenment, when Western society turned away forever from blind obedience to authority and turned instead to the scientific method as the most trusted path to knowledge. In the Christian world, even the Bible became the subject of scientific study by scholars, scholars who often reached conclusions that disturbed the faithful and sparked a backlash against using science to study things that should be kept securely within church walls.

In spite of this limited backlash, though, even the most religious people in America accept the basic validity of the methods and assumptions of scientists. Yes, some people are offended by certain scientific theories because those theories seem to deny something that they believe God revealed through the Bible—in effect, calling God a liar—and yet those same people will often try to use other scientific theories to disprove the ones they disagree with. For example, fundamentalist Christians who think that Darwin’s theory of evolution contradicts the story of the creation of life in the book of Genesis will often claim that Newton’s laws of entropy prove that evolution is impossible. After all, they say, Newton’s laws say that everything is moving from order to disorder, so evolution must be impossible because the new life forms that supposedly result from evolution are usually more complex than the ones that came before. These “proofs” rarely stand up to close examination, though, because they almost always twist these laws or just flat out apply them wrongly. Even so, the fact that fundamentalists attempt to use science to discredit science shows how much the scientific point of view is actually accepted by people who, if asked, would heatedly deny that their worldview depends more on science than on revelation.

We interrupt this book for a thought about dying

Tonight on NPR's Fresh Air, I heard an interview with Dr. Sam Parnia, a critical care doctor who is the director of resuscitation research at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine. He has written a book, Erasing Death, that talks about his research into optimal cardiac arrest care and the experiences that a small number of people experience after undergoing full cardiac arrest, experiences that Dr. Parnia prefers to call after death experiences, not near death experiences because, as he points out, the people who have those experiences are clinically dead. (Which implies that he doesn't view resuscitation as snatching the patient from the jaws of death so much as an actual resurrection.)

One of the things that struck me was the following statement:

And so what our discoveries have started to do is to question the way we consider the relationship between the human mind, what is classically been called the psyche or the soul, and the brain itself. And it may be that the human mind, consciousness or soul may be able to function when there is no brain function at all.

Classical science has clung fiercely to the Aristotelian view that consciousness is a byproduct of biological functioning. One way of interpreting much of the weirdness of quantum mechanics, however, suggests that there is something about consciousness that is not confined to the material realm. It's interesting to see that  mainstream medical scientists, following completely different paths, are reaching the same conclusion.

If you're interested in hearing more from Dr. Parnia, you can find the interview and information about his book at the NPR web site.

Part I: The Problem of Faith in the Modern World

Culture Wars: Faith vs. Reason

About 45 years ago, a Time magazine cover asked, “Is God Dead?” More recently, a report delivered to a meeting of the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, no less, declared that an analysis of census information in nine countries indicated that religion would soon be “extinct” in those locations.

Faith in God is at an all-time low, especially in places that are actually part of the modern world, like Western Europe. Polls show that only a small fraction of people in Western Europe believe in God, and the same is true in places like Japan, where the religious traditions never were very strong on belief in a Supreme Being in the first place.

Wherever you look, the people who have the highest education are the least likely to believe in God, and those who have little or no formal education have the greatest faith in God. It would appear that the more you know, the harder it is for you to see how God can exist. Or to put it another way, it seems that faith and ignorance go together like a horse and carriage and are just as unfashionable.

Americans don’t fit this trend, however. Although the average American has a higher level of education than in most countries, more of us believe in God than people living in places just about anywhere except predominantly Muslim countries. But in America, even though just about everyone says that they believe in God, our faith is pretty shallow. Overall, the number of Americans who attend church regularly is lower now than just about any time in the last century, and when they are asked by pollsters, twice as many people claim to attend church regularly than actually do. Even before the twentieth century, church attendance was really quite low, even though most Americans think that our forefathers and foremothers were an especially pious bunch.

Today, our personal piety is also pretty thin. Despite all the arguments about prayer in schools and other civic places, few Americans actually pray every day, at least not very earnestly. (Sorry, but I don’t think “God is great, God is good…” or “Now I lay me down to sleep…” represents heartfelt piety.) A lot of Americans say that they think the Ten Commandments should be posted on courthouse lawns and in public schoolrooms, but if asked, disturbingly few of those same Americans would be able to name more than four or five easy ones, such as thou shalt not kill, steal, or commit adultery. Most of those same Americans would be upset to see the return of the so-called blue laws that kept stores closed on Sundays a few decades ago and would think them a violation of their God-given right to sell and shop whenever they want. Anymore, even the most hard-nosed fundamentalists don’t think twice about stopping at the Piggly Wiggly on their way home from church.

Even in one of the most supposedly religious countries in the world, religious faith doesn’t seem to penetrate very deep into people’s public lives. Think about it: When was the last time you saw someone pausing to say grace over a Big Mac? Most of us think that such public displays of devotion are odd, maybe even downright peculiar, and so even the most devout people adjust their public behavior to conform to the prevailing secular standard.

For a country that thinks itself very religious, we’re surprisingly narrow-minded about other people’s religiousness. The vast majority of times when religious people appear in a TV show or movie, they’re shown as buffoons, hypocrites, or dangerous fanatics. Some people might say that this is just because Hollywood is run by a cynical, profane elite, but this argument is pretty weak. After all, when other kinds of bigotry have appeared on the screen, protests have swiftly persuaded media executives to tone it down or get rid of it altogether. Racial and ethical stereotypes are not allowed unless they are being lampooned. And yet two types of people who can still be ridiculed are the religious and the overweight. (As a member of both groups, I feel especially picked on.) If even a small minority of the American audience was serious enough about religion to be offended by such portrayals, they would be off our screens faster than you can say the N word.

Even in private, few people spend much of their time being religious. Maybe most families have a Bible (hopefully not one with the word Gideons embossed on the front), but not many Americans actually read it regularly. Few families make it a point to pray together, except maybe at mealtime, and fewer still try to give their children even a basic religious education.

If anything, the state of religion in our common political life is even worse. Our leaders feel like they have to claim to be pious Christians (or in a handful of cases, pious Jews), but our government hardly shows the influence of real Judeo/Christian values. Oh, there’s a lot of trumpeting about a “culture of life,” but the same leaders who make the most noise about it have pushed us into wars that have caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians. Why is it that “What Would Jesus Do?” seems limited to matters of personal morality but somehow never affects our foreign and social policy? Or does anyone think that Jesus would start a war against anyone, much less a preemptive war against a far-off nation that posed no imminent threat to us? Or does anyone think that Jesus would push cuts in programs that care for the poor and disabled to pay for tax cuts for the rich? When did Jesus ever say anything nice about the rich or tell the poor that they deserved scorn for their condition? (Sorry. I couldn’t help letting the pissed-off preacher in me come out.)

I think it’s clear that our country really doesn’t care about how sincere our leaders are in their religious beliefs, just as long as they seem to agree with our own narrow and self-centered worldview. Otherwise, how can we explain how evangelicals lined up against arguably the first born-again President (Jimmy Carter) to help elect a candidate who was the first divorced President (Ronald Reagan), all in the name of “family values”? The truth is that the majority of Americans don’t really care that much about our leaders’ real beliefs, just so long as what the candidate claims to believe is able to gain the support of a small-but-powerful religious minority with enough money and influence to tilt an election their way.

And so we find ourselves in a nation that is pretty much superficially religious, a nation whose citizens rarely let what little faith they have affect their actions and who make fun of those who do.

As we become more separated from our religious roots, we find ourselves cut off from the values that gave us a strong foundation for our lives. Our lives become more and more empty and meaningless and we end up trying to fill that emptiness with things that we think will make us happy. Instead of honoring people whose lives reflect virtue and integrity, we most admire people who are rich and famous, without really caring how they got that way. The quickest path to celebrity is being notorious, and while we might give the Paris Hiltons of the world a cursory “tsk tsk,” we still give them more attention and admiration then we do to people who actually achieve something important. The people we think are successful are those who look good, who get (or are born) rich, and who are able to keep their faces on the cover of People magazine.

To make things even worse, though, we export this cultural toxic waste around the world through our media and consumer-obsessed corporations. Try to imagine how our movies and TV shows, filled with partial nudity, extramarital sex, and openly gay people is received among people who think that a woman is indecent when she shows her face in public. It’s easy to see why there’s a fundamentalist backlash in the Muslim world against us. I hate to admit it, but there’s a good reason why they call us the Great Satan: In the Bible, Satan is the tempter, and we are certainly tempting much of the rest of the world to abandon their traditional values so they can imitate our casual self-indulgence and profanity.

Naturally, the Muslim world isn’t the only place where a fundamentalist backlash is taking place. America has a sizable fundamentalist movement, too. Even though Christian fundamentalism represents a small minority of Americans, it’s a very vocal movement that is able to shape people’s opinions even if it’s not able to convert them to its core beliefs. As a result, a sizable chunk of Americans think that evolution and global warming are still controversial among scientists and that the Bible can be used like a textbook to answer questions about biology, geology, and history. Without a doubt, this is because Americans feel that society is changing just too damn fast, and so they nostalgically cling to a Golden Age when everybody’s faith had a firm foundation in God’s excellent Word. Not that people really want to go back to the way things were a hundred years ago, but they do miss what they like to imagine were the solid virtues of the past.

But religious people aren’t the only fundamentalists, of course. There’s also a scientific fundamentalism that is at least as influential as religious fundamentalism because of the way it controls how scientists go about their business and because of how it shapes what educators do, especially at the college level. Believe it or not, scientific fundamentalism is even less tolerant than religious fundamentalism because, while religious fundamentalists have to accept at least a part of the scientific worldview (mainly because it works so well), scientific fundamentalists think that they have to reject the entire religious worldview. For the most part, religious fundamentalists are at least willing to admit the truth of the ideas of Galileo, Newton, Mendel, and Einstein—in fact, practically all scientific pioneers except for Darwin and his heirs—but scientific fundamentalists crusade against all religious faith, even to the point of rejecting belief in a generic, impersonal, uninvolved God. The scientific community usually treats with contempt those few scientists who have the courage to even suggest that there might be any reality beyond what can be proven by experiments. These scientists find it hard to get their works published and to get funding or associates for their research, even when that research has nothing to do with religion. It’s no surprise, then, that most scientists who do manage to keep some sort of religious faith hide it from their colleagues rather than risk crippling their careers.

The problem for the rest of us is that all kinds of fundamentalism are totalitarian. That is, they delude themselves into thinking that they provide the only correct answers to all questions and so they insist that everyone must adopt their particular beliefs and none other. For most of us, scientism (the religion of science) is especially attractive because its practitioners are so useful to us. After all, science is the source of all of the medical wonders and technological gizmos that make our way of life possible. And it’s hard to argue with the claims of scientism when science has shown itself to be so successful at figuring out how the world really works. The problem is that while science is really good at answering the question How?, it’s completely unable to answer the deeper question Why?, a question it doesn’t even think is important.

So most of us find ourselves stuck between these two militant factions. For the most part, we agree with the scientific worldview because it’s so reliable. Science tells us that natural laws, not God, control the universe, and since we hardly ever see true miracles that defy those laws, it’s hard to argue with science on that point. On the other hand, we can’t completely surrender to scientism because it can’t give our lives meaning and direction. Even though our everyday experience doesn’t really jibe with religion’s emphasis on the supernatural, at least religion is better at helping us find the meaning and direction that scientism just plain ignores.

As we’ll see next, the scientific worldview is the one that we live by day to day. We almost always trust reason, not revelation, as the way to understand how the world works, even when reason seems to push our spiritual needs to the fringe of our lives.