“People need certitude.”
Certitude is a mirage. Maybe it
started with Descartes. He thought the only thing he could be certain about was
that he was able to think. “I think, therefore I am.” But ever since, some
people have gone off on the crusade to acquire certitude. Some of those people call
themselves “scientists.” But there are other kinds too, who call themselves
“religious people.”
Science is based on observation. We
use one of our five senses to observe something closely. What we look for are
correlations.
A correlation is a situation where
when one thing happens, another thing tends to happen. We would like to say
that when one thing happens, another thing always
happens. When one thing happens and another thing always happens, we say that
the first thing causes the second thing.
But we can never say “always.” We
can observe something 10,000 times, but the 10,001st time the
correlation can fail. Because we can never say “always,” every scientific
statement is a fiction, a story that we make up. The story is probably true but
could be false. To claim that one thing causes another is creative writing.
We keep on observing. We keep
trying to find causes, even though we know we can never be sure our stories are
true. We string together statements about causes and make the string into a
theory, which is just a higher level fiction. We have to do this because
otherwise all we have is a basket of correlations, and correlations without a
theory are useless.
Science is story-telling qualified
by observation. Careful observation, like what we can do with a microscope,
leads us to modify older stories we have told. They used to say that cholera
was caused by bad air. When they could observe water with a microscope, the
story changed: cholera is caused by microscopic bugs in the water. The effect
of the changed story was miraculous—cholera disappeared. The miracle led people
to look for certitude through science.
Religious people look for certitude
too. Some religious people look for certitude in a text, like the Bible or the
Q’uran. Catholics look for it in Scripture and Tradition. Tradition is when the
community always says something.
How do we know that the community always
says something? We don’t. The community may have said something 10,000 times,
but the 10,001st time it may say something different. The history of
Catholic doctrine is a history of the story changing as people observe things
more closely.
I was taught in my courses in
theology that when an ecumenical council says something, we can be certain the
saying is true. The First Vatican Council in 1870 said that when the Pope says
something about “faith or morals,” we can know the statement is true.
When the First Vatican Council made
its declaration, there were people who thought the saying was a mistake, that the
Council Fathers were trying to please an aging Pope Pius IX. Since Vatican I,
popes have been locked into the statements of their predecessors. The locks
have become increasingly strained. Pope Paul VI said in 1968 that the use of
“artificial” means of birth control is immoral. He had appointed a group of
people—all presumably faithful Catholics—to look into the question. The
majority of the group did not think contraception is always immoral. But Paul
VI apparently thought he did not dare go against what Pope Pius XI had said
back in 1931, so he decreed that contraception is always immoral. Every pope
since then has declined to say anything different, but the birth rate among
Catholics in the United States has dropped dramatically since the 1950s.
Conservative U.S. Catholics point
to a correlation: when Catholics considered contraception immoral, the churches
were full. Since they quit seeing it as immoral, the churches have emptied. The
conservatives say that the cause of the decline in religious observance is the
abandonment of the doctrine on contraception. The word “cause” is just as much
a fiction here as it is in science. The conservatives are using a scientific
argument to defend a religious statement.
Catholics also look to “natural
law” as a source of certitude. Scientists regard statements about “nature” as suspect.
How do we know something is “natural”? Because people have always said it is? Because
it seems self-evident? The authorities in Saudi Arabia apparently thought it
was self-evident that women should not drive cars.
Both science and religion operate
on “faith,” which is to know things without being certain about them. That
seems impossible—how can I know something without being certain about it? But
we do it all the time.
I know someone loves me. But I
cannot be certain that the person really does love me. Yet without the
“knowledge” that someone loves me, love is impossible. Love is based on faith.
Science is based on faith.
Scientists know that organisms have evolved from non-organic structures. But
their knowledge could be wrong, because no scientific statement is
invulnerable. The observation that falsifies the entire theory of evolution
could be out there, waiting for someone to find it. What is more likely is that
someone will frame the story in a new way, the way Einstein re-framed Newton’s
story of how matter and energy operate.
Both science and religion have
people who know that we cannot have certitude. Such people acknowledge that
even if they cannot have certitude, they believe that what they are doing can
be good for people. They both operate with the assumption that faith can live
side by side with questioning.
For the last couple of hundred
years, ever since people began applying scientific observation to the Bible, it
has seemed that science corrodes faith. Seminaries turned out sceptics, who went
about destroying religious faith and emptying the churches. The skeptical clergy
made two mistakes: they thought that science can give us certitude, and they thought that religion should give us certitude. By making
certitude a pre-requisite for the good life, they distorted science and destroyed
religion.
We are all human beings who live by
the worlds that the people around us create. We live by the stories that our
tribes believe. Scientists cannot work without a community of fellow
scientists—we call them “peer reviewers,” and their very existence tells us
that the truth of what we publish has to be verified by the community.
Religious people cannot operate without a community of fellow religionists.
Religion without community is magic.
The fragility of knowledge does not
lead to chaos. There is no way for coaches to develop foolproof ways to win
games, yet we continue to play games. Games are rewarding. When they cease to
be rewarding for players or fans, we modify the rules.
The experience of “reward” in games
is a good analogy for what Jesus called “life” when he said “I came that they
might have life.” Games are rewarding when the players treat each other with
respect—disrespect can get you thrown out of the game. They are rewarding when the
players can lose—the players are vulnerable. When one side always wins, we
change the rules. Games are rewarding when people continue to play even after
they lose—they are faithful to the game and its players. Respect, vulnerability
and faithfulness are the components of love.
Games do not offer certitude.
Science does not offer certitude. Religion does not offer certitude. Yet all
three are worth doing. All three can help us love.
