Chapter 5: Science and Religion

In the time of the Greeks and Romans, little was truly understood about the world. To explain natural phenomena, society developed mythologies about how reality operated. Most of us are familiar with the Greek gods. The rising and setting of the sun was Apollo riding his chariot. Lightning was Zeus casting bolts down from Mount Olympus. Death was passing the River Styx and being welcomed by Hades. Want to have a baby? Pray to the goddess Aphrodite, who was responsible for love and fertility.

As human knowledge increased, so did the sophistication of the explanations. Humans moved from anthropomorphizing the natural world to a more philosophical and sophisticated way of thinking about existence. Monotheistic religions arose which didn’t seek to explain every sunrise or sunset as the act of a god, but instead attributed human purpose to a deity who provided rules for living a fulfilling life and making the world a better place. 

The next jump happened in the Enlightenment when humanity reordered the solar system, putting the sun in the middle and relegating the earth to just one planet in an increasingly crowded planetary system. But the key breakthrough of the Enlightenment was the creation of a system to uncover truths about the world around us. Today, we call this the scientific method. 

At its most basic, the scientific method consists of several different components. They are:

1. Observation of the world.

2. The creation of theories about this world in the form of a hypothesis.

3. The testing of this hypothesis to see if it is correct or not.

4. The addition of this hypothesis to our body of knowledge, if correct, or the discarding of the hypothesis, if not.

5. The continued testing and revision of a hypothesis based on additional knowledge and information.

6. The storage, sharing, and propagation of this information to other experts and the wider community.

The process is like a flywheel that is always spinning, always churning through hypotheses to see which make the cut and which do not, accelerating with each rotation to generate more and more knowledge.

Why is this so important? Because what we see in the world around us is often not easily explainable and truth and insight derived from the scientific method can have profound impacts on how we behave and our future. 

Take the case of washing hands. For most of human history, humans did not understand how germs spread. So, after medical procedures, doctors would visit other patients without washing their hands. Infections were rampant; death from infections a common occurrence. It was in a Hungarian hospital that progress began. A Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmeleis noticed that infant deaths in the doctors’ ward were higher than in the nurses’ ward. Priests visited patients in the doctors’ ward, so an initial hypothesis was that these religious men were somehow spreading disease and the staff prevented the priests from entering. It made no difference. Dr. Simmelweis continued to study the problem and realized that the doctors often visited their maternity patients after performing autopsies. Dr. Simmelweis developed a second hypothesis that cadaveric matter might account for the difference (at this time, science hadn’t yet uncovered the role of germs). He then tested this theory by having the doctors wash their hands with chlorinated lime after autopsies. This small change led to a huge decline in the mortality rate in the doctors’ ward, dropping it to the same level as the nurses’.

It took another hundreds years for scientists using the scientific method to fully understand how germs work and come up with a true scientific rationale for hand washing. Today, doctors not only wash their hands, but also sterilize their instruments between procedures. Imagine, it has been less than two hundred years since humanity has gained the knowledge that washing hands prevents the spread of disease! 

Without the scientific method this information would have never been developed, or if it had, it would have remained isolated to one individual or country. In the meantime, hundreds of millions of people would have died from infections in childbirth and from both simple and complex medical procedures. 

There are many ways to explain a phenomenon. But unless that explanation, that hypothesis, stands up to rigorous testing, it doesn’t have practical value that can improve the physical world around us. Ascendants acknowledge the importance of science, testing, and repeatable results as the path to knowledge creation and a better world.

Science and Religion

Critics would say this is a techno-scientific way of looking at the world that completely discounts religion. Ascension believes there is an important place in this world for religion. While the scientific method helps us fortify the world around us and build a better future, religion can help fortify the soul. 

A good friend of mine, Hans Chen, once provided the best explanation to me of the power of religion. He hypothesized that the Western world would not have become the pre-eminent power in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries without religion. Only religion gave sailors who feared they would fall off a flat earth the faith and courage to sail on. Priests, sometimes on zealous religious quests, traveled far into unexplored territory to spread the word of God. In doing so, they helped to spread knowledge. 

Religion played other roles. The Jewish Torah and Talmud codified systems of  behavior and methods of adjudication which eventually evolved into our judicial system. And it was the monks, priests, and imams of the middle ages who preserved knowledge that would eventually flower again in the Enlightenment.

Many people of faith also believe in science. The two are not incompatible. The list of individuals of faith who have made significant contributions to knowledge creation is long. Albert Einstein was unsure of the existence of God but would not rule it out, calling himself agnostic, and often seeing the thumbprint of “God” in the beauty of the world. Perhaps a higher power bequeathed to humans the ability to create knowledge, or perhaps we stole that gift as Prometheus did with fire. 

Faith is an integral part of Ascension but it is not required. Faith, like many things in life, is a choice that each person can and should make for themselves. Ascension is open to you regardless of the path you choose. 

The Founding Fathers realized that religion should always be a choice and enshrined in the very First Amendment of the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

This choice in personal belief, combined with the rights enshrined in the Constitution, was a fundamental building block in the growth of knowledge in the 19th and 20th centuries.