Science is the Ultimate Religion

Religion is based upon faith in the consistency of God.

The Ultimate Religion is Science.

“The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist’ says God, ‘For proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing.’

‘BUT,’ says Man, ‘The Babel Fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It proves you exist, so therefore you don't. QED.’

‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn't thought of that.’ And promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

‘Ooh, that was easy’ says Man and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed at the next zebra crossing.”

– Douglas Adams “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”

The learning process and our efforts to understand patterns in the world around us is what helps us to survive. We use metaphors as images that reflect and interpret our understanding as we try to relate to and control our environment. The statement “I think, therefore I am” is actually “I perceive I think, therefore I think I perceive.” Our search for meaning (called “gestalt psychology” – pattern recognition), and our attempts to be rational, lets us use those patterns and connections to (hopefully) increase our chances of survival.

Science is the meticulous observation and measurement of reproducible physical properties as we perceive them. Religion is the conceptual body of cultural precepts that attempt to explain how and why the world exists and provides appropriate guidelines for group behavior based upon those precepts. Faith is the body of causal relationships based upon assumptions beyond known causal variables. Logic is the attempted observation and correlation of sequential events, forces, or concepts.

What the analysis of Science sometimes fails to understand is that faith is as essential to the human psyche as logic is essential to understanding in Science. What Religion usually fails to understand is that faith is only as valid as the premises upon which it is based. Irrational Faith, not grounded in logic or reality, becomes a Cult dependent for its survival upon authoritarian misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and/or misinterpretations, and destructive to both individual and group survival.

What Religion and Science usually both fail to realize is that Science itself is an “act of faith.” The Experimental Process of Science is based upon the assumption that when you do something “exactly the same” way a second time, you will get the exact same result. Science expands its “Understanding of Reality” by making slight changes to the Experimental Process and hopefully is able to correlate those changes to changes in the results. Without Faith in the consistency of the Experimental Process, or the consistency in the measurement of those changes, Science could not exist. (The metaphoric “Definition of Stupidity” as doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, is in actuality a humble description of the Experimental Process, because the real expectation and hope is that if “something different happens” you will be able to go back and figure out the causality of what was done differently.)

A discussion of God without explaining the mechanics of Faith and Logic ignores the fact that, despite the seeming contradiction, Logic and Faith are actually dependent upon each other. A discussion of one without the other is detrimental to the understanding of both.

This essay as metaphor is an attempt to resolve those conflicts.