In a hypothetical world ruled by science, religion would be a relic of the past, banished from everyday life and relegated to the dusty archives of history.
Such was the scenario envisioned by a handful of the participants gathered together for a conversation on science and religion hosted at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California in November 2006. The conference, Beyond Belief-Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival, featured 34 scientists and philosophers drawn mainly from US, UK, and Australian universities to discuss a pressing set of questions:
Is this the beginning of a new age of unreason? Will faith and dogma trump rational inquiry? Is it possible to reconcile religious and scientific world views? Can we be good without God? And, if not God, then what?What prompted these questions and served as the genesis for the conference was the 9/11 tragedy and increasingly dangerous trends that have since developed.
Cited as the most serious of those trends were the alarming rise in religious fundamentalism, some brands violent in the extreme-to wit, suicide bombing; the continuing conflicts between science and religion in the classroom and in the courtroom; and the strident calls for a return to religious values as an antidote to a decline in public morality.
Mentioned only in passing, but perhaps the one event that offended scientists most deeply, was the political decision banning stem cell research in the US, which was perceived as a clear instance of faith and dogma trumping rational inquiry.
For the science and academic communities, 9/11 was a wake-up call, as it was for many others. Subsequent events only deepened the conviction that the survival of civilization as we know it is now at stake. “We could lose it all.” one participant warned.
Thus, over a three-day period, academia’s Big Guns presented their views. They discussed how best to answer these questions and develop an approach for reversing current trends and avoiding the ultimate crisis.
Billed as a bit of a rumble between rival gangs, the conference promised the good fight and did not disappoint. Throughout, the proceedings were impassioned, informative, rarely boring, and with just enough humor to keep everyone’s head above water. With charts, graphs, pictures of the cosmos, etc., the presentations and panel discussions went on for 25 hours over those three days. It was a lively show.
But, contrary to reasonable expectation, the fight was not carried out by representatives from the other rival gang: religion. No representatives from the religions that came under attack were present at the conference: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Although a few participants affirmed they were persons of faith, the conference was from a demographic perspective wholly secular. (Demographically, 10 participants were hard scientists (physics, biology, neuroscience, etc.); 5 were soft scientists (anthropology, sociology, etc.); 6 were philosophers of various persuasions; 11 were cross-disciplinarians; and 2 were science publishers-and every one an author; a few, best-selling authors.)
Despite the religious non-representation, however, many of the non-religious challenged the attacks made upon religion, charging the antagonists with, essentially, having exceeded their competence. Such challenges were issued by hard scientist against hard scientist, by philosopher against hard scientist, by soft scientist against hard scientist, by hard scientist against philosopher, and so on. In fact, so heterogeneous were the views, so diverse the opinions presented at this conference as to defy any attempt to readily summarize them.
The New York Times science reporter, George Johnson, did, however, make a good stab at it. His article, A Free-for-All on Science and Religion, makes for an informative, entertaining read. But, like most news reporting, his article focused mainly on the conflicts and personalities. To convey the drama of the proceedings, Johnson tried to identify the pivotal moments, but ended up missing the important news.
One pivotal moment (ignored by Johnson) came on the second day when Scott Atran challenged much that had been presented. Atran is a hostage negotiator and an organizer for a NATO working group on suicide terrorism, quite in addition to his role as scientist, all of which lent some weight to his remarks.
The first day had been devoted primarily to the popular sport of religion-bashing. In their mock court of law, the bashers charged religion with the major crime of purveying dogmatic principles and teachings unhealthy for mankind. Dogmatism, they alleged, induced, even fostered, a wide range of irrational behavior, including intolerance, hate, violence and war.
The first crack to appear in these plausible (if less than compelling) arguments came when Susan Neiman, Princeton philosopher, pointed out that the real question to be addressed is: “How can we make people better when we cannot persuade them with scientific facts?” With this reminder of what the conference was ultimately about, Scott Atran expanded that crack into a gaping hole.
Atran claimed his fellow scientists were suffering from a serious case of unreality: “No facts have been produced (at the conference), no cases presented, no evidence that actual science is being used to convince others to join you… If you want to engage the public and make it a more peaceful, more compassionate world, you’ve got to get real; get some data; get some knowledge,” he exclaimed. “Who are the Jihadis? Who is a suicide bomber?” he asked of his largely clueless audience.
“Who is the other fellow?” is, indeed, the central question and one that neither science, nor philosophy, nor mainstream religion has ever satisfactorily answered. But, as it is the crux of the matter, profitable inquiry lies in finding out.
In October 1956, L. Ron Hubbard made “the other fellow” the theme of Man’s Relentless Search, the first lecture of the London Congress on Human Problems. Hubbard pointed out that it is our ideas about the other fellow and the other fellow’s ideas about us that, to a large degree, monitor one’s behavior toward the other.
He explained the dynamics that lead to a progressive deterioration of communication when wrong ideas about the other fellow are spread far and wide. The broad lies spread by Third Reich propaganda were cited as an historical case in point (all Germans are supermen; the French, the Russians, the British, and everyone else, inferior). Ultimately, he indicated, such lies can lead to a deteriorated mode of communication that consists of bullets and bombs.
Today, on the brink of yet another spiral of deterioration, we are faced with perhaps the most subtle and basic of misapprehensions about the other fellow, or, more generally, about Man: Is Man really an emergent property of brain cells and structure? Or: Is Man a made thing, possessing a soul and owing allegiance to a Supreme Being? Or: Is Man in essence a spiritual entity, possessing a mind and a body?
Of these three paradigms, the first violates the principle of parsimony (i.e., Occam’s razor); the second appears to be in sunset mode; but the third, a result of robust rational inquiry, holds the most promise. In the decades since the1956 Hubbard lecture, the spiritual technology that Scientology comprises has succeeded in improving the other fellow’s behavior, ethics, morality, and general outlook on life.
At the conclusion of the three-day rumble in La Jolla, participants may have felt the conference only a moderate success. Many views were aired and roundly discussed, and, from that perspective, it was a resounding success. But little consensus was achieved on the issue that mattered most: defining a viable approach to the other fellow so as to reverse current trends and avoid the impending crises.
On the other hand, the participants can be given high marks for taking some responsibility for the world situation. The conference may not have achieved much, but it was a start, and a second conference, Beyond Belief II, scheduled for October-November 2007, may achieve more. The entire proceedings of Beyond Belief 2006 have been preserved on media, and are available for viewing online at The Science Network website.