Science, religion and morality
Recently, an article written by Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal on the moral behaviors of animals got me thinking about the relationships among science, religion, and morality. He raised some very good points based on the experiments of the animal kingdom (mainly primates, our ancestors) and indeed cleared my all-time confusion - whether the humanistic view and scientific view are compatible.
In the past few years, countless atheists argued that God is a delusion and urged trust in science and the rooting of ethics in a naturalist perspective. It seems quite normal to criticize or challenge anything in modern society, but would there be any good out of insulting people who find value in religion? And more relevantly, what alternative does science have to offer?
According to Frans, science is not in the business of deciphering the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. Scientists are good at finding why things are the way they are / how things work.
It is undeniable that even the most committed atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic principles of Christian morality. Over the centuries, everything we have accomplished, even science, was either developed in hand with or opposition to religion. As Frans said, it is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion.
In Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, he depicted a panorama of paradise lost with great humor. One of the symbolic systems of the painting is alchemical. Alchemy became science when it freed itself from immoral influences and developed self-correcting procedures to handle flawed data. But science’s contribution to a moral society remains unknown.
At the end of the day, we couldn’t excise religion from society, because science and the naturalist perspective couldn’t fill the gap and become an inspiration for the good. Any framework we develop to promote a certain moral outlook is bound to produce its own list of principles, prophets, and attract its own faithful followers, so that it will soon look like any old religion.
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