On Belief – The Response: The Realities of Religiosity

Before I start, the usual disclaimer: what I postulate in this post is strictly based on my observations and readings about the nature of religion, and in no way aims to discredit any religion. I simply want to highlight the realities of belief in our society today, the purpose of which is to highlight the problems to the public.

This post of mine is a response to Ed Chng’s On Belief, which discusses the relationship between science and religion, and what it means for the nature of belief. While I am going to question the nature of belief and religiosity, I’ll be focusing more on the realities of belief in the world today.

I identified three main issues from Ed’s post:

First, the premise of the scientific discipline,
Second, the complexity of the universe,
Third, the reality of religion as a social institution.


First, on the premise of the scientific discipline.

It is true that the scientific discipline only recognises what can be proven. This is the core principle of the scientific method. Knowledge is based on experimentation that can be repeated, with observable and measureable results.

But this reveals two questions:

First, does it become “epistemological axioms”?
Second, in “reducing” phenomena to numbers, equations and models, does it not limit or eliminate the possibility of entities not measureable by such empirical methods, an entity like... like God?

My responses to the following questions are as follows:

First, science recognises the temporal nature of knowledge, and accepts change. By contrast, religion is bound by doctrine, and assumes knowledge to be absolute and eternal.

Of course, religious doctrines have themselves undergone change and evolution, but in today’s context, they have fossilised into “unquestionable truths” about what theologians think about the world.

In addition, the axiomatic nature of scientific knowledge doesn’t mean it cannot be proven wrong. There are places in the universe where the laws of physics break down (black holes, at the quantum level), and these phenomena are discovered with scientific methods. Theories are constantly subject to change and challenge, but rather than resist change, theories undergo improvement through these processes.

What atheist scientists (like biologist Richard Dawkins) and philosophers are against is when religiosity closes the minds of people. For these people, God is simply another word for “I don’t know.”

When this happens, knowledge will completely lose its meaning.


Second, on the complexity of the universe.

Ed argues that science does not recognise the complexity of the universe. The reverse is true. Science recognises the complexity of the universe, because it can comprehend the universe in scales beyond the human imagination.

Look at the values. What is a light-year? The distance travelled by light in a year: 9,460,730,472,580.8 km. And the distances between stellar objects are measured in the millions of light years.

What about time? There’s the cosmological decade, which is logarithmic in nature, which means a cosmological decade is ten times its preceding decade. So by the time you reach the estimated end of the universe you’ll need several pieces of paper just to draw zeros.

On the other extreme, there’s the Planck time: 1 attosecond, one billion billionths of a second. Can you imagine what can be done in that time?

Religion, on the other hand, is handicapped by the weaknesses of human language.

Let’s take for example Genesis. If God created the universe in six days, what is a day? Earth was created in Day 2, so it might be fair to assume Days 3, 4, 5, and 6 is one Earth day (not specifying the number of hours, because there is no consensus across civilisations), but what about Day 1? Still one Earth day?

Not to mention the idea that God's concept of time is different from ours in other parts of scripture.

So it begs the question: is science reducing the universe, or is it religion?

Of course, here I’m criticising the literalist approach taken by the born-again evangelicals , but the point is, who now has a true sense of scale?


Third, the realities of religion as a social institution.

Since religion is a social institution, it does fulfill certain social functions. I agree with that. For many, it has provided security, or a moral compass. I do not question the ethical ideals of religion. But seeing the realities of religiosity created many doubts in me about the nature of belief in this world.

According to the Thomas Theorem, from a sociologist of that name, situations that are defined as real are real in their consequences. So putting aside the question whether God does exist or not, the fact that people believe in God creates social structures and behaviour that are very real in their consequences.

Like for example the Crusades, and international terrorism today.
And since religion is a social institution, power relations apply in any social institution.

The institutionalisation of Christianity in post-Roman times generated wealth and influence, which in turn created interests and power structures that remain in place today. And it is these that had been the cause of human suffering throughout our history, because churchmen gave up the spiritual for the mundane.

As the saying goes: “Power corrupts.”

When clergymen launch wars in the name of God, they are in actuality fighting for worldly interests. When theologians launch inquisitions, they are trying to maintain their monopoly of knowledge and control of thought.

So when ministers preach the love of God yet at the same time warn of eternal damnation in hell, it makes you wonder whether that love is truly unconditional.