A Primer

An opinion I've always held is that as long as you're trying, you're okay. It's the educator in me. Some people might look like they understand the entire world effortlessly, but I know that the people who wrestle with new information, who struggle with new ideas and new ways of understanding, those people are the ones who own the information they take in. We grow via struggle.

I wanted to come here with a guide to dealing with one specific struggle: reconciling religious beliefs with a scientific worldview. But the only word in that clause that doesn't need a thoughtful, nuanced definition is with, and I'm not even sold on that. What is a belief? What do you call a religion? For all that we use the word, does anyone have a hold on what a worldview really is? Above that, what's a "scientific worldview" and does anyone really, in their heart of hearts, hold to that? And even if you have a handle on religious beliefs and scientific worldviews, what do you mean by reconciling?

I can't, with any level of integrity, give you any answers to those questions in the space of your average blog post. I could write a book on reconciling religious beliefs with a scientific worldview and still fail to fairly and completely represent the discussion. But what I can do is outline some viewpoints that might help a person of faith exist in our postmodern society with a little less cognitive dissonance. Or, at least, give you some ways to think about the discussion to help you on your way to your own conclusions. After that, all I can do is send you a booklist.

-A great starting point in any discussion is to hear what other people have to say and my favorite short read representation of the issue at hand is Tim Urban's "How Religion Got in the Way" post on Wait But Why. It's got some NSFW language, but I think it lays out your basic contemporary beef with religion with humor and charity. His "Religion for the Nonreligious" post also provides plenty of truth and food for thought.

-Think about what space your faith takes up in your life. Is it a link to a community? A source of comfort? A way of looking at the world that challenges you to be a better person? Why do you show up? Is it essential? The role your faith plays in your life will frame the discussion for you in ways you didn't even realize, so it's helpful to do some soul-searching up front. What attributes of God do you hold to be true? Are you okay if there isn't a God? or a heaven? or a hell? How malleable are you to new information?

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-To me, there are aggressive versions of two diametrically opposed viewpoints that are both unhelpful. The first is religious believer who has a literalist reading of their sacred texts. Young Earth Creationists are good examples of that. Religious texts have deep meaning for the people who read them and we shouldn't discredit that, but you miss a whole world of color and meaning when you come to a religious text intending to read it flat, with only the thoughts and ideas that you bring to the text. You're more likely to pay attention to the words that confirm your point of view and to ignore those that don't. It's one of our innate biases. The only religious text that I have any experience with is the Bible and for me, some of the most profound insights I've gotten out of that book have come because I listened to the conversations that were being had between the different authors of the books across centuries without coming to the text with an idea of what I believed to be true.

The opposing viewpoint that I find to be unhelpful is the one that says that science is the only way of knowing what's true. The umbrella term science covers as many viewpoints as the umbrella term Christian does, but I'd say that if you're looking at the world from a scientific point of view, the only truths in the world are those that have empirical evidence behind them and the only thing that exists is the material world. I think that's a great starting point, but I also find it to be limiting. Now, I know that I'm on the verge of sounding like the Cowardly Lion here:

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but to say that the material world is the only thing that exists limits the amount of things we can know about. I (personally) wouldn't be satisfied with our knowledge of the universe even if we could explain everything about the human experience in terms of physical processes. In the most naive way of stating this possible, study of the material world can never prove or disprove the existence of the immaterial world, so I think it's best to keep an open mind about things.

-Finally, I've found thinking about modernism and postmodernism helpful when you start to dig into what you believe. (I'd heard the word postmodernism bandied around but never defined, so if you're like me and looking for a primer, I liked this article for that purpose.) Attempting to reconcile the idea that science can explain everything in the universe, leaving no room for a god of any kind, with your belief in the existence of a god and the specific creeds that go along with your faith will make you dig into what you believe and what you think about truth and what makes something true.

For myself, I believe in God the way I believe in miracles- I've had experiences that confirm my beliefs but they're so personal, they can hardly be used as convincing empirical evidence. I also know that I'm predisposed to believe in something bigger than myself and that I need to be considering new points of view to counter that bias, to see if that's something I can honestly explain away. And even if it turns out that I'm wrong and the looming potential of a lack of purpose in the universe, I don't know that the human experiment is insignificant. As Night Vale says, "Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is small and yet it is."

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