Coming from a primarily catholic society, 89.3% of the Mexicans who practice a religion being catholic (INEGI, 2010), I’ve always found myself in the position looking for the rationale behind many traditions and habits. The initial questions started to evolve until I came to an existential crisis, I had to determine for myself whether I believed or not in God (at least to the extent of the Mexican portrayal of such an entity).
All of my inner questionings about Mexican religious institutions were embedded within a certain social context. As Bauchspies et al discuss on the second chapter (Bauchspies et al, 2007), religion and science are human institutions that can be used to trace a society. Religion, as an institution for moral order, is seen as the feedback of our own creation. Such an institution was constructed to represent values and morality, which were then anthropomorphized into Gods. Yet nowadays we fail to acknowledge that Gods are human’s own creation and thus, they only exist insofar that humans need to institutionalize their moral codes:
“We are now in the realm of a good sociology of knowledge problem. The “we can never know” claim is at worst an effort to prevent this discovery from reaching “innocent” and “vulnerable” minds. It is also based on ignorance of the scientific grounds of social theory, or an unwillingness to acknowledge even the possibility of such grounds” P.61
The debates between creationism and evolutionism (Nye et Ham, 2014) served as a repertoire of arguments for my own view, learning many facts about our universe that clearly contradicted the idea of western creationism. Surprisingly, through that period I had the paradoxical notion that science was about the search for the absolute truth, completely missing its postpositivist philosophy.
By using the framework proposed by Bauchspies in terms that religion and science are similar in their constitution and that both institutions look to answer the same question, I placed a focus on the answer they try both were claiming as the right one. Technoscience offers the “singularity” as the catalyst for the Big Bang, catholic religion offers “miracles” through an intelligent designer.
This in turn makes more interesting questions arise: to what extent was the singularity a miracle and vice versa? To what extent is God an infinitely small probability, or more precisely: What is the probability for a miracle?
Yet if we part from the point that we are to dismiss the “we can never know” argument regarding God, then the only remaining option is to determine whether there is one. The focus shifts to finding the answer, an impossible task. Especially since it’s impossible to disprove something that doesn’t exist and science’s postpositivism approach isn’t meant to finding the ultimate truth. This leaves us without the answer to the existence question, but at the same times closes the window for relativism, since “we can never know” is out of the question. It appears as if God neither exists nor it doesn’t, but mostly the opposite of that.
References:
Bauchspies, W. K., Croissant, J., & Revisto, S. (2007). Science, technology, and society: a sociological approach. Malden: Blackwell.
Nye, B., Ham, K. (2014, February 04). Retrieved February 13, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3AkI
INEGI. (2010). Religión. Retrieved February 13, 2018, from http://www.beta.inegi.org.mx/temas/religion/
*Bloopers: Try looking at the image until the word “existence” loses all its meaning 😀
Add yours Comments – 1
This chapter was generally confusing for me. Honestly, I think this chapter is out of the scope of the book. I was expecting a more scientific perspective of the notion of truth. I think interpreting religion and dealing with it in a 20 page chapter is not the role of scientists or science historians. It would be better left to philosophers.
About the interesting question you brought up (is singularity a miracle or not?), let me just bring a quote about miracles from “Michel de Montaigne”, a sixteenth century French philosopher:
“I have my ears battered with a thousand such flim-flams as these: ‘Three persons saw him such a day in the east; three, the next day in the west; at such an hour, in such a place, in such habit’. In sooth I should not believe myself in such a matter. How much more natural and likely do I find it that two men should lie, than that one man in twelve hours’ time should fly with the wind from the east to the west? How much more natural that our understanding should be carried from its place by the volubility of our disordered minds, than that one of us should be carried by a strange spirit upon a broomstaff, flesh and bones as we are, up the shaft of a chimney? Let us not look for external unknown illusions, we who are perpetually agitated with illusions within ourselves. I think we are justified in disbelieving a miracle so long as, by non-miraculous means, one may elude its verification as such. I am of St. Augustine’s opinion, that in things hard to prove and dangerous to believe it is better to lean towards doubt than towards assurance … “
I admit it’s not a very “philosophical” quote to clarify the subject, but he has a point. There is always a more believable possibility to a miracle. To what extend was the singularity a miracle? I believe singularity is a relatively believable possibility brought into the light by science instead of an unbelievable fact called God (if you consider the very existence of God as a miracle in its nature). Then you might ask the question “how would you measure the degree of ‘believability’ of a phenomenon?” I don’t know. Honestly this is a mess.