I’m trying to summarize this, wrap it up in a neat bow. I’ve tried a couple times and when I look back, it’s more like I’m being repetitive. The AI summarize assistant at the top post can do that for you. The recent Dawkins interview contains a succinct, “yes the meaningless of life can be terrifying, but grow up”. The “something else” that all of the above authors talk about is just a salve for that. We want something else; it might even be a survival mechanism to want it, but that doesn’t make it real.
In the discussion below, the Bishop’s weak argument is exposed. He makes the claim that a personal sacrifice is proof of a higher purpose and therefore a higher something must be the source of it. Alex responds with a suggestion that it is evolutionary. The Bishop can only say, “I don’t think you believe that”, and “that’s too big of a leap of logic. You’re stretching the point.”
The interview is conversational. The Bishop references some theologians and they both talk about Plato and Aristotle, but it’s not academic and it’s not a debate where they put each other down. I think Alex is aware that the Bishop is failing miserably and doesn’t feel the need to point it out other than providing the counter narrative.
Another of the failures is when the Bishop repeats that science begins with a premise of materialism, which can’t be proven. That’s not what happened. Science began as a method to settle disputes over why material things, things people experienced and reported, happened the way they did. The Catholic answer was to ask God, and the more powerful the person was in the Church, the more “right” they could claim to be. Science asked for demonstrable evidence and listened to everyone with respect. They sorted out the different claims from different perspectives and arrived at the conclusion that the source of whatever they were looking at was material. After centuries of that, we don’t bother with first proving the material starting point. We’re 99.999% sure it’s correct.
So, in conclusion,
Science can examine the faith experience, gather evidence about it, validate that someone had an experience, theorize about it and similar experiences, and create experiments to understand it. The data includes social as well as chemical. Faith makes the claim about something more, it forces a perspective, it starts with a premise that has no proof and says proof doesn’t matter. It draws a line between itself and science. Science reaches conclusions. If the probability of the conclusion is high it builds on it. It is always open to new data.
Faith holds us back. It takes the human experience, our sense of something we call “self” that can also have an experience of oneness and connection with anything and everything and tries to explain that. Science is open to examining everything, including those senses that everyone reports. It doesn’t begin with a question like “what is the soul?”, it begins with, “what is it that we experience and sometimes call the soul?”
Every faith tradition includes something about our limitations. From saying we are lowly sinners who will never understand the mind of God, to saying some people can reach nirvana or ultimate knowledge and some can’t. Science is only limited by what we know. There may be a limit to how much we can know, but I don’t know how we’ll know when we get to that point.
