So, here’s an attempt to order some vague thoughts into a profound observation. (You’re probably used to that kind of approach from me by now.)
Mystery and the unknown are important in science. They’re what drive the whole thing. It’s all about asking “Why?” to stuff. “Why does the Sun move across the sky like that?” “Why does that apple – or anything else – fall down at the rate it does?” “Why did that happen when I prodded this?” Like a two-year-old, but with a budget and a lot of spare time.
It’s based on observation. We observe something, and say: “This is the data we have. Why do we seem to see what we seem to see?” The quest of science is to come up with an answer to that question, to imagine a model of reality which explains why we make the particular observations we do.
(There’s also the angle of “What if?” – as in, “What if I smashed these beyond-microscopically tiny particles together at almost the speed of light?” – but that’s just a way of finding something new to ask “Why?” about.)
The observation I wanted to make, though, is about the rather different approach to the question of “Why?” that’s often taken by religion.
Religious people often make a big thing of the importance of “mystery” as well, when it comes to God’s way of doing things. There’s so much that’s beyond our understanding, that’s deeply ineffable, that’s on some higher level of logic than mere mortals cannot hope to comprehend.
But it seems to be a different kind of mystery, with a different sort of “Why?” question that follows from it. A lot of them have a similar form to “Why do bad things happen to good people?”, but that’s not a question looking for a straight-forward causal answer, in the same way that a question about gravity is. There’s an implied clause in the question, which gets to what it’s really asking.
If God exists, then why do bad things happen to good people?
Science’s questions look to explore an unknown facet of the world we’re living in. Religion’s questions are a tacit admission of incompatibility with the facts. The fact that you need to ask why, given God’s existence, things are the way they are, tells you that the assumption of God’s existence is not easily squared up with what we observe. There’s an intrinsic challenge that the premise will have to find a way to stand up to.
Some of the “Why?” questions of science contain implicit challenges to their premises, too, such as: “If they’re all releasing phlogiston, why do some things gain weight and some things lose weight during combustion?” But this wasn’t treated as some ethereal wonder, or some intractable problem of philosophy beyond our ken. It was a statement that things shouldn’t act this way, if we have the right idea about phlogiston – and, eventually, the idea had to be abandoned.
When people talk about the problem of evil, the implication is that things shouldn’t be this way if God exists in the way he’s commonly understood. An all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent entity can’t be reconciled with the cruel randomness of the suffering inflicted by nature. Why is this seen simply as an unapproachable curiosity and mystery of the way God is, rather than a challenge that needs to be resolved if our worldview is to make any sense – even if resolving it means giving up on the God idea, like we did with phlogiston, when it becomes incompatible with the data?
It occurs to me that I may be mostly just re-hashing Greta Christina’s problem of unfishiness here. But it’s come up recently from a few religious sources I’ve read, and I wanted to try thinking it through.
Part of the problem, at least in Christianity, is that Faith is a fundamental part of the ‘test’ of one’s commitment. There are countless stories in the Bible to reinforce this idea. I spoke about one in my post The Problem of Faith.
The idea is that you accept that God’s will is mysterious on the understanding that your Faith will be rewarded by His love. It’s a kind of a self-reinforcing (but completely illogical) feedback system.
I believe it works because this very system is reinforced early in everybody’s lives. Your father or your mother tells you that something is so, even though, to your unformed mind, it seems hard to fathom:
“Don’t touch that heating element! It’s hot!” (…but it looks so pretty… I might… OWWWWWW). “I told you!”
Eventually you stop testing for yourself and trust that your parents will actually know things you don’t (until you become a teenager, when, by Universal Imprimatur, you know everything. But I digress). This is why you find the ‘family’ analogy all through religion. God is our ‘Father’, Mother Mary looks after you, ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ administer the word of the Lord. The implication is that you should trust your family without questioning them because, after all, they have your best interests at heart.
This idea that you ‘can’t know everything’ is the only one that has ever been advanced to me that has a plausible logical platform as an argument for religion. It was put to me by a dear personal friend who once studied to be a Catholic priest (and who is still quite devout, despite being a gay man and therefore an abomination in the church in which he worships – I still can’t quite get my head around that). I’ll paraphrase his argument from another of my posts:
He went on to say that we do the same thing with science – most of us don’t, for instance, actually know that the Large Hadron Collider makes teensy particles smash into each other at lightspeeds. We just trust a whole lotta people who seem to know what they’re doing, who say this is what is happening.
So essentially, he argues, putting your trust in God’s representatives on their say-so is the same as putting your trust in science’s representatives on their say-so.
This is a compelling argument, but it has a deep flaw, which I won’t go into here, but you can probably see (it’s explained more in that previous link, anyway).
The water is muddied further by the probability (well, it’s my opinion that it’s probable, anyway) that our minds might just not be capable of understanding everything, even with science. This is NOT to say that there aren’t proper scientific explanations – just that we may not be able to comprehend them. When you start to talk about the fringes of science – quantum behaviour, neurology and consciousness, complex math, astrophysics encompassing multidimensional universes and so forth, you get glimpses of the conundrum. There are things which our minds don’t glom onto very successfully and even though you may argue that you can approach them scientifically there is the possibility that they will remain forever mysterious.
The real difference between a scientific view of the world and a religious one, then, is that religious people accept that some things are beyond our understanding and don’t care if they are explained or not, and scientifically inclined people yearn for (indeed, are compelled to seek) a deeper understanding, even if the explanation looks more confusing than the mystery itself.
And, of course, there are the kinds of questions that science just can’t answer: Why do bad things happen to good people? What is the purpose of anything? What happens when we die?
For most people, just saying that things happen because they do is not very satisfying, and it’s much cheerier to think that Our Dad actually has a plan and it will all work out OK in the end.