Are You Religious? Or Are You Just Superstitious?

Are You Religious? Or Are You Just Superstitious?

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People have often made remarks about religious decline. I don’t think religion is on the decline. I think religion is improving, actually. What I think is really happening is people are dropping one superstition for another, in a lot of cases–or leaving behind superstition altogether–and that those who considered themselves religious at one point, but no longer affiliate with any particular denomination or creed, were never really religious to start. They were superstitious.

The thing about scientific advancement is it removes from us the tendency to believe in stupid things. Now, I contend with full force that science is in no way incompatible with religion (in the proper sense, which I’ll soon define) or God. (That is, in principle, impossible.) But science does great ruin to any unwarranted belief in hobgoblins or any lucky rabbit’s foot.

Superstition is the result of bad philosophy, of not being able to think things through. People who rub a healing stone are superstitious, so are those who attend Burning Man, or offers prayers to “the universe.” It’s all very much the result of gullibility. And to the extent people maintain such peculiar beliefs, science will continue to destroy them. “Religion” in that sense will continue to decline. My argument, however, is that is not religion at all.

Now, I am a Christian–a Catholic, specifically. And certainly there are no shortage of superstitious Catholics out there (Catholics often get a rap of being the most superstitious…), and these are just the sorts of people who are driven out of the church when their superstitions are challenged (superstitions the church ought never have allowed to develop), or there is some sort of scandal going on. They don’t really understand the faith. If they did, they’d see there is no conflict between the gifts which they receive supernaturally from God, and the truths unearthed by philosophy and science. It is only to the extent that they believe in things by their own faulty reasoning (or another person’s faulty reasoning, perhaps) and not in that which God has specifically revealed to them, that they are people of weak, or even superstitious, belief.

If you think, for example, that the universe is god (in other words, if you’re a pantheist) and then science says the universe is just fermions and bosons and detects nothing divine about it, then you’re going to be in a pretty tight spot. But if you believe (properly) that the universe is a creation of God, and not God Himself–as God has specifically stated–then the difficulty is no longer there. The universe is a creature, just as we are.

It should be said that many philosophers and scientists are superstitious, as well. Some of them are the most superstitious of all. That is the problem with not seeking religion proper: You won’t believe in nothing; you’ll believe in almost anything. Stephen Hawking–brilliant as a physicist he may have been–was a powerfully superstitious person. He thought, for example, that quantum gravity could have sprung the universe into being out of nothing. Quite frankly, you might as well believe in fairies, if you’re willing to believe in that. Please understand: a set of equations cannot confer reality to anything, they can only describe a reality that’s already there. (To be precise, he’s confusing etiology, or how one physical state can explain the emergence with another physical state, with ontology, or why any physical state exists at all. The laws of nature, the quantum vacuum, all of these are most assuredly “something” or “some things” rather than “nothing.”) The question is who ordained these equations to begin with, and put into being the stuff they’re describing? Lest anyone be fooled, what Hawking says in this respect is not the result of science, but of bad philosophy, which has resulted in a sort of superstitious belief. Oddly enough–or perhaps to be expected–Hawking didn’t stop at the mere superstitious. He later went on to make attempts at prophesy, regarding extraterrestrial life and machines taking over the world. All of which is the result–not from the absence of religion–but the adoption of bad religion.

Science helps us discern against unwarranted beliefs, like Zeus. Since, if Zeus existed, we should expect to find him, or something that points to him, atop Mt. Olympus. But we don’t find Zeus atop Mt. Olympus, nor anything that suggests he was there. So, in the case of Zeus, absence of evidence counts as evidence of absence. But take the God of Christianity. Sometimes a scientist (acting as a philosopher) will say there is no evidence for that God, either. But this is a confusion. Since, in this instance, that person is making a simple category mistake. Here, absence of evidence of the supernatural within the investigation of the natural, does not count as evidence of absence, since we should not expect to find such evidence to begin with. Just as we shouldn’t expect to find plastic tabs with a metal detector, we should not expect to find God through the methodology of science.

But if God transcends the universe, and sustains it, as Christians claim, then God should offer much in terms of explanatory power and scope (along with simplicity), from that which we do know through science and philosophy, which God does. For example: Why any contingent thing exists instead of nothing (including the universe), why the universe began to exist, why the universe is fine-tuned for the emergence of intelligent life, why the universe itself is intelligible, why we perceive the existence of objective moral values and duties, and, of course, why something like the Christian religion would have historically emerged (especially in light of the probability of that happening if God did not exist–an argument I make here.).

Science and philosophy should help us to refine our religion; it should help us to get religion right. If we ever find that either is causing us to reject our religion, or coming into conflict with it, we need to re-evaluate either one or the other or both. Am I believing in something I shouldn’t? Something like Young Earth Creationism (which, I’ll re-iterate for the umpteenth time, was never the traditional interpretation of Genesis; fundamentalism is the way most of us know it didn’t emerge until the late 19th century)? Am I using bad philosophy? Or, is the science just not in yet?

Good philosophy will get us to a general (and moral) monotheism. But we need religion–that is God’s specific revelation, or statements about Himself and man; God’s gifts, in other words–to really know the greatest truths of the world. Science and philosophy can get us to a point. Religion fills in the rest.