MODERN SCIENCE HAS BEEN ‘ENCHANTED’ BY RELIGION, AND IS USING ITS TOOLS OF AWE AND ETERNAL MYSTERIES TO PITCH TO A YOUNGER GENERATION THAT HAS LARGELY ABANDONED RELIGION, BUT STILL YEARNS FOR MEANING.
POPULARIZERS ARE SUCCESSFULLY BORROWING FROM RELIGION’S PLAYBOOK
When the famous American cosmologist and science popularizer Carl Sagan made his 1980 documentary Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, his script struck what his wife and co-writer Ann Druyan described as a deliberately “biblical cadence.”
“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be,” Sagan said. “Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”
It was no accident that his opening lines evoked the same sense of primitive wonder as the opening lines of Genesis, according to a new research paper. Presenting science in the rhetorical garb of religion is an effective trick that has been recently repeated in the documentary’s remake Cosmos: a Spacetime Odyssey, hosted by the American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Both programs illustrate just how deeply modern science has been “enchanted” by religion, according to research presented at the recent Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Regina. Popularizers of science borrow religion’s ancient tools of awe, reverence and wonder to pitch to a younger generation that has largely abandoned organized religion, but still yearns for deeper meaning.
As a result, a documentary series that offers the most popular modern introduction to the science of cosmology is at once “prophecy,” “revelation” and a “world view,“just like classical religion, according to Anthony Nairn, a University of Toronto graduate student in the history and philosophy of science.
“Cosmos created a narrative of science, not about facts and figures, but something that placed the human story as a deep component of the cosmos,” Nairn said.
“By implementing a religious-like story, Cosmos is enchanting science. This reflects a larger movement taking shape across Western North America to enchant science and its education, which, in young social circles, dismisses religion, yet hungers for meaning and purpose,” he writes.
There is a long history of intellectual lines being blurred when religion and science meet, from scientists who have been in thrall to the ethereal beauty of their subjects, to believers who struggle to reconcile evidence with faith.
“The mythologizing of the history of science and religion has led to contests between the two,” Nairn writes. He gives diverse examples, from the persecution of Galileo to a 2014 debate between Ken Ham, a Young Earth Creationist and Christian fundamentalist, and Bill Nye the Science Guy, a television personality.
That debate illustrated the silliness that results when religion is regarded as primarily a collection of factual claims about the cosmos, rather than a practice of worship. When religion and science are set up as competing theories of cosmology, in a fight that follows the rules of science, there is little doubt that religion will lose.
But this outcome is somehow unsatisfying. It is a pantomime battle. It overstates the achievements and explanatory power of science, which remains ignorant about the deepest questions of, for example, cosmic origins, how life began and how consciousness arises from matter.
It also fails to take into account the reasons people are drawn to and stay with religion and instead assumes it is simply to hear a robed man tell them pseudo-facts about the origin of the world. But the Bible, the Qu’ran and the Torah are not textbooks and treating them as such leads to two distinct kinds of nonsense: the pseudo-scientific claims of biblical literalists and the “well, actually” responses of science popularizers, which are typically presented as the overconfident last word.
There is a flip side to discussing religion on scientific grounds and that is discussing science on religious grounds. This is what Nairn has identified as a modern intellectual trend, in which Cosmos and its remake are the shining examples.
“Cosmos is more than a science education show, it is more than a historical artifact, it is more than a legacy of a man: it is prophecy, it is revelation, it is a world view. A perspective on science, the human story, and life,” Nairn writes. “It blurs the seemingly hard line that exists between what science is and what religion does.”