Making Room for Each Other: My Position on the "Science vs. Religion" debate

The Short

The New Atheist movement criticizes religion based on the worst actions of its so-called adherents. My largest problem with the New Atheism is that of scientifically trained people going out of their way to insult religion. Being a Catholic school refugee, a friend of anti-Islamophobic activists, as well as a biology major, I have some experience with both scientific and religious cultures, and find value in both. I also claim to be an anthropologist, or someone who tries to understand how sets of ideas influence the thoughts and actions of people that are exposed to them. In addition to being a statement of my personal position between these two approaches to making sense of the world, I like to think this is also my humble ethnologic critique of what is popularly known as a “culture clash.”

This treatise on my current beliefs is based on a refutation of scientific determinism endorsed by the New Atheists, whose poster-boys such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens insist that the world would be much better off without religion. I am a scientist, but I believe that science has limits as to how much it can inform the individual search for truth, and the pursuit of social well-being. I feel similarly about the dogmas of religion, who for the everyday individual are just as believable as those of science. I am also a spiritualist, or a non-materialist, or an extra-materialist, or maybe just a hopeless romantic when it comes to literary interpretations of the world, in that I believe that reality is ultimately subjective for the individual, and that every person will inevitably fill in the gaps between their experiences of the physical world and the “objective” reality of science with constructed narratives, and that these narratives are necessary for all individuals to function in the world.

I should also mention that I have not done much reading on the science-religion debate (though I intend to), and that many of my philosophies arise from reflections throughout my general educational, personal, and cultural experiences. Over periods of time and series of relevant events and occasional readings, I have been constructing a view of reality that is nervous-breakdown-resistant, which I imagine to be the goal of everyone’s personal epistemology. I intentionally did not refer to other sources for this writing as a meager act of rebellion against flanking my own thoughts with those of others’ as though they belonged to someone else first (that's what's awesome about blogging).

Making Room (The Longer of It)

Why I am not “religious”

Many people will die a lonely death. No religion, science, or spirituality can alleviate the pain of this truth. People who profess to the major “Western” religions tend to trust in a heaven, an afterlife, or a judgment day that will redeem or make up for the void created by such miserable events. I do not believe these things, so in turn I believe there is very little possible redemption for the actions and circumstances of the individual beyond his / her time on this earth. I believe the only after-life is the story that living humans preserve for the deceased and the legacy of one’s living choices, and their impact on the living’s actions. There is only one stage (in the Shakespearean sense) of life as humans can ever understand it. For a “non-believer” like myself, this realization is hard to grapple with, so that every other belief about finding and creating redemption in any stage is banked on hope.

I also do not believe in an interventionist God who makes optimal decisions about how to run the universe based on some plan he’s created for himself, or at least not one that I could ever count on knowing. This (for the most part) saves me from being angry at a God who lets people die miserable or alone. Thus you could say that I believe that humans are alone in their decisions, and, barring natural and cosmic events, the sole determiners of their own fate as a species. I think most atheists agree with me on that point, but there are also many things that I am specifically not saying. For example, it is not to say that all self-identifying religious people believe in that particular idea of God. Nor that I don’t believe in other metaphorical understandings of God. Nor that humans do not inherit a certain legacy of fate that is defined by our nature, and has been described in so-called religious texts such as Genesis. Nor is it to say that I don’t ask for things anyway.

The limitations and responsibilities of science

I am a scientist. That means, in addition to having a degree in biology, that I understand and believe in the [need for an] idea of an objective reality, and in the ability of science to provide us with knowledge about that objective reality. Science, to me, is a method of understanding the world by induction through repeated observation and falsifiable experimentation. Problems begin when science presents itself, like many religions, as a system of belief.

Most people, including scientists, do not typically acquire their understanding of the world scientifically. Just as most of us will not scientifically investigate whether or not our parents are our parents, nor will we have the interest, time, or resources to investigate whether the sun is a star, or whether basketballs and golfballs fall at the same rate, but we will continue to believe what our families and scientists tell us because we have been raised to trust them. To the extent that the individual does not participate in the scientific process of acquiring knowledge that does not directly impact his everyday life, the universe as told by science is a narrative that functions similarly as religion.

Even if we were all able to learn about the world scientifically, it would still not produce a knowledge that humans can fully comprehend. For example, materialists contend that there is no reality outside of the physical reality, and that thoughts, feelings, emotions are simply the products of neurons firing in the brain, but this, while intellectually comprehensible, like many scientific facts, is not within the grasp of human physical experience. I know that my body is made of cells, because I have seen them under microscopes (and didn’t rack up a $30,000 debt for nothing), but “I” don’t consciously participate in their processes. Ultimately, the physical world to me is the one that I can physically manipulate, which, compared to the one they say is out there (or in there), is not very much. This is not to say that I believe that there is an “extra-physical” reality that is simply undetectable by any group of the human species (though I could argue the existence of an “extra-physical” reality for myself in the case of the planet Neptune, underwater volcanoes, and China, because I have never directly experienced any of them except in pictures). This leaves a huge, intangible space to be filled in with ideas that are as consequential as our physical interactions with the world. Material / shared objective reality exists, but it is not the only realm of human experience.

Science and religion are both motivated by the instinctual human need to understand the universe outside one’s very superficial physical experience of it. Humans, including scientists, have an instinctual, unavoidable tendency to fill in the void beyond their sensual experience with their own narratives. We interpret the world through fluidic, illogical abstractions that are clumsily expressed in words. I believe that these narratives are powerful, necessary, consequential to the actions of humans in the physical world, and therefore, real. Science has contributed significantly to these narratives, but they are not limited to what science has to say about them. However, science, as a culture, must recognize itself as a piece of that narrative whose contributions are limited to what can be measured, falsified, detected directly or indirectly by human senses, and translated into numbers, and that there are many things very relevant to the human experience that science may never explain due to these limitations. Furthermore, scientists, as humans, should not imagine themselves immune from this constantly negotiated story, and should assume some moral responsibility in the impact of advances of scientific knowledge on their social and physical environments.

Science need impose itself on religious doctrine only insofar as it claims to be scientifically founded (and wrong). I support every effort to make sure that “intelligent design” and 10,000 year-old Earths never get taught in a science classroom. However, it is wrong of any member of the scientific community to make sweeping judgments about everyone who professes a non-materialist creed based on these strict (and rather unfaithfully materialistic) interpretations of religious texts. The scientific community could do better to 1) present science as a method of acquiring knowledge rather than an alternative system of belief, 2) be a little more sensitive to the cultural backgrounds of its students, since some of its greatest achievers come from many cultural and devoutly religious histories, and 2) fill in the void of social responsibility left by Tuskegee experiments and atomic bombs, i.e. make science look a little more human, even if it many don’t like to believe it is. In turn, religious institutions have no place in trying to push unscientifically founded claims as science, because 1) its epistemology is not rooted in the material world, 2) what can be proven physically is no longer a matter of faith, and most importantly, 3) choking the dissemination of scientific knowledge will allow scientists the exclusive ability to manipulate the world and society without the scientifically-informed will of the public. Instead of hurling insults at one another, both “sides” could do much, perhaps better on the community level, to create a middle ground of open inquiry about how to understand the world and the group and individual’s places in it, which is, when it’s not about selling books or keeping paying congregants, is what concerns most people.

[In]Conclusion

What I have written here will likely become much more refined as I read more, but I wanted to write myself an introduction to these cross-cultural epistemological and social problems. I meant mostly to talk about epistemological limitations of science, and why I am not a scientific fundamentalist-zealot. There is much more I hope to cover in terms of its not-so-scientific relationship with society. Why do I pick on science? Most simply, because I have been more indoctrinated by scientific culture in recent years than religious, and because I believe that the sophomoric, proselytizing style of the New Atheists pose a new threat to the responsible integration of scientific knowledge into society.

As for me, I am absolutely fascinated by the universe as it exists around me, and I am grateful for the methods and tools that the scientific tradition has given us to understand it more than superficially. At the same time, I think it was a trick of God (or evolution) to give us the mental and physical tools to access and perceive of worlds beyond our own that we can never directly experience, so that we are destined to forever question, live in doubt, and in turn, faith. My understanding of this world is constantly modified, through interactions between my internal-emotional, superficial-physical, and extra-physical worlds, and I try to keep myself open to this negotiation. The more I insist on things being a certain way, chances are better that contradictory experiences will produce destruction or delusion, and progress will fail. Similarly, when science and religion abandon doubt, they both fail.

putting myself in their shoes

There's nothing like getting into my literacy students' heads and experiences by way of trying it myself - learning a new writing system in a second (or third) language. Learning Arabic definitely puts me in their shoes. After trying to make my way through a short article in Arabic, I notice that the words I read in Arabic break into three categories of non/comprehension:

1) the 98% I sound out and don't understand
2) the 1% I sound out and do understand
3) the other 1% that I can recognize without sounding out, like السلام عليكم (salam alekum) and such

For some time I have stressed phonics on my ESL students, I now believe, at the expense of word-recognition strategies. That is until I realized how much we really read by recognition of words.

Do we really have a library of thousands of words in our heads so that we don't really read letters so much as word shapes? According to the National Institute for Literacy website:

Rapid and effortless Word Recognition is the main component of fluent reading. Words that beginning readers initially sound out through Word Analysis or phonics come to be recognized as whole units after readers encounter them repeatedly in connected text.

At least I can say that I figured it out on my own before checking with other sources (like I probably ought to have done...). In any case, I think regardless of how much formal training teachers go through, that is, more than any other way, how we learn to teach.

Everybody has a car...

... but my grandpa has a donkey...
- Children's Arabic song (supposedly)

Unemployment reading project #2 (after Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol. 1) is finish my Teach Yourself Arabic book. Even though I teach ESL, I underestimate how mind numbing trying to learn a new language can be. (Sorry, students! May I have more mercy on your lesson plans!)

In the interest of trying to mitigate the pain of rote learning, I tried out this Arabic song lyrics blog. While it can be very helpful, I found it is only really good if you a) already know the sound of the song's lyrics or b) are willing to learn them. Let's say I am not huge Arabic-pop music fan, and appreciating the better music is more likely to come with learning more Arabic...

Let's not hurt ourselves, I say. I found this humble gem of a Lebanese children's tune. Indirect objects, old words, new verbs, all in less than 6 lines, and put into a sing-along-able mp3.

kelloun andoun siyyarat wou jeddi 3andou hmar
bi rakkebna khalfou wou byakhedna mechwar
woul bolice bi safferlou
bi idou bi acherlou
siyyarat bit zammerlou: pap pap pap!

Translation:

Everybody has a car but my grandpa has a donkey
He lets us ride behind him and takes us for a walk
And the policeman blows his whistle at him
With his hand he makes signs to him
All the cars honk at him : Pap Pap Pap.

new great way to waste time online

If you're a girl, maybe you've Googled things like "how to look good,""how to meet nice guys," and "am I pregnant?" Or you've checked out Cosmo's articles on what men REALLY want, etc. But have you ever considered looking from the inside out? Say, by way of Googling, "how to meet women." It's a great way to get some insight into (or a great laugh out of) how men are told to think of women, not to mention themselves. This is how I spent the last hour or so of my day.

The first results page presents:

Meet new women - Askmen.com
whose probably best-intentioned advice is "plan how you're going to physically and emotionally respond to a woman who ISN'T interested in talking to you" (Tip #8), but later offers more guidance on this point in Tip #2: If she says "No, I don’t have e-mail," you say, "Well, do you have ELECTRICITY? OK, you can give me your number then, but it's so hard to reach people these days." And if she objects to giving you her number, no worries… just tease her with "You're going to be OK, just write it down. It's only an e-mail address (or phone number), silly."

The best part about this one, and any other similarly done, is that it's written by a man, although you could argue that shallower articles written by women on the same topic can be just as interesting....

WikiHow after giving steps on how to plan and execute "the hunt," recommends getting a dog or borrowing a cute younger family member to provoke conversations.

Honestly and interestingly, Yahoo Personals has an article that offered the best advice I came across. The goal is still narrow in relation to the broad-minded strategy they recommend, but the advice is commendable compared to the one-dimensional, single-encounter tips given on other sites.

Also, check out the Friendly Atheist on meeting atheist women, and The Park Bench on nerdy women. I leave it to you to get creative on Googling how men are told to think about other subcultures.

So I can't make this as interesting as your own reading would be, but if you have an afternoon to burn on a Cosmo article on how men really think, you might consider this as an alternative.

So what is anthropology?

- chemist I met at the bar last night. Followed up by "So.. what's the application of that?"

At the Society for Applied Anthropology Conference last March, I was happy to meet a few grad and senior undergrads like myself questioning the entire idea of anthropology. One girl had done an undergrad project in West Africa, had the time of her life, but began wondering about the cultural distances that will always separate her from the people she studied, and that if this alienation would be mutual between the "anthropologist" and the "subject," then what gives us the right to be the ones to speak for them? Another girl was researching tattooing trends in her hometown, for what seemed to be quite that reason. Why go talk about someone else's culture when there is so much to learn about your own? And finally, the most memorable, the guy who, for his conference talk, read aloud a semi-fictional story he wrote which condemned anthropologists as a class of people who profit from the stories of the less fortunate.

When I asked him what he wanted to do for his graduate work, he said probably auto-ethnography, which made perfect sense when he said that he was half (or fully? I can't remember) Latino, like myself. Anthropology has historically demanded that you isolate yourself from your subjects in order to get the most "objective" observations. This illusion might have been easier to maintain when practices and expressions of every day life were radically different between the observer's personal history and the observed's, but it's almost impossible when these alternative practices and expressions are already familiar to the anthropologist through heritage or other personal history.* Now that anthropology has become accessible to that historical "other," and global exchanges and modern communications have led more people to think more reflexively about "cultures," the historical "self/other" dynamic consciously dissolves. It is almost impossible to ignore the fact that the context of the observer is just as complex, fluid and transient as the observed, and auto-ethnography is one way for the anthropologist to reconcile with this realization.

For a while anthropologists could get away with just talking to other anthropologists, consumers of "exotic" cultures, some lofty grant societies and government officials. They could get away with only being one-way translators, but that is sure to change with new media and more "halfies" joining the study. The discipline itself has resisted bursting wide open, I think partly for fears of complete obliteration at worst and the identity crisis that would ensue at best, but more perhaps because the anthro's livelihood typically depends on writing to other anthros more than service, communication, and activism in the communities in which they live and/or study. To me, the only thing that will save it from the circus it would (or has) become is to do just so. Burst wide open.

It's time to start sharing. It's time to stop claiming "multilingual" and "progressive" and "culturally literate" if we can't bring it outside the intellectual class, who tend to be privileged if we have the kind of time to write and publish about the problems of the economically peripheral (though demographically dominant) world. Isn't it ironic that we claim to be so good, we can get in with some other exotic culture on the other side of the world, but we don't know how engage with those in our hometown communities? Back to Anthro 101, everyone. Get on the radio, on the TV, in the magazines, in the libraries and high schools. Talk about the villainization of the Arabs and Muslims in the media, talk about the medicalization of illness, talk about what it takes for someone to leave their home country for any reason. Treat patients, teach literacy, and get on environmental justice projects. We're not talking rocket science, or physics or cosmology, even though Einstein, Sagan, and Hawking all did it.

Although SfAA members are a biased sample, it was encouraging to find people sharing these sentiments at the Conference, who I believe are part of a growing trend. Aside from talk of auto-ethnography, studying up or studying home, doing something different altogether, and most appealing to me, collaborative research, we need to turn ethnography inward, I mean, really inward, not to our own society, but our own culture of anthropology. Is there a way to resist the publish or perish standard? Can we switch out doing a paper or two on, say, a review of Amazonian hunting practices for presenting a lecture at a town library? Can we find stipends for work at immigrant service centers, or teaching cultural literacy at a local high school? Can we propose a collaborative master's, or even doctoral, project?

Will we ever stop finding ourselves in family gatherings, parties, and bars trying to explain what it is that we do?

* Lila Abu-Lughod, an Egyptian anthropologist who studied Bedouin tribes in her native country, termed such people "halfies."

Back home, you cannot even walk on the same side of the street as your teacher...

... if he is coming in your direction. You have to cross the street to go around him. You must have the highest respect for the one who is giving you an education.
-B, in response to my contemplations of teaching high school

Tomorrow will be Class #5, of Week 3 in our Literacy class. I'll be finishing up with long vowel sounds and basic phonics. I could spend longer on phonics, as they spent several months or years on it when I was a kid. My students may feel like I have breezed over things, nerve-racked by all the words I give them as examples of say, long "a" or "ou," thinking that they have to memorize them. But the run-through was intentional, because we don't have all the time that kids have to learn. Henceforth I will be putting a lot of faith in word recognition through reading, and practice through writing.

Provided that their faith in me is still strong, the majority of students are ready to go forward. Only two of them are behind enough to warrant a more drawn out review of phonics. And even then I am tempted to rush them, because we only have 8 weeks of class left, and I feel like I have to get them at least somewhat functionally literate. I could try word recognition alone, like I did with Gui, which works for a little while with more impatient students, but not for very long without having to go back to phonics. This is why I got it out of the way to start, so that now the only way to go now is "Read." Read every day. Consume words like a fish drinks water. It's how I did it, which is pretty much the only thing I go by. Our training was as good as it could be for teachers that are not getting paid to do it, which is to say, many things are pretty open-ended, but I am all right with that because it gives me freer rein of my class.

I may be getting ahead of myself, but I am pretty convinced that teaching someone to read has more to do with patience, creativity, and some reflexive intelligence than with being trained in certain methods. I don't think it gets much more complicated than phonics and word-recognition approaches, and having the tact to know how and when to use them. What I'm getting at is that I want a TESOL job without sinking another $10,000 for an MA.

Or maybe I will just move to West Africa....

Everything you talk about, you say, "we will do this later."

-B, student from my Literacy class.

In the first week of the ESL*/ EFL/ TESOL Literacy class I am teaching for the summer I realize I enjoy a luxury that many educators can't say they have - that is, my students actually want to learn. Such is the beauty of adult education, which must not delude one into thinking that a career in secondary education is similarly ideal, of which I was reminded by one of my co-workers who is also a public school special-ed teacher.

For 2 and a half hours, twice a week, I sit in a room with 7 sets of eyes on me. Five West Africans, one Mexican, and most curiously, an American student who recently graduated high school. Three women and four men among them. All of them speak English, some with stronger accents than others. The first feelings of actually teaching, nevermind your anticipations before you walk into a classroom, are those produced by those eyes on you. It's not like any conversation that you can excuse yourself from if you get tired or come to a loss of material. They expect me to produce for them some knowledge, to transfer some understanding of the mangled forest of the written English language, just as much the task of a 4th or 5th grade teacher. For a couple, it's kindergarten and 1st grade material. If your audience is unreceptive, the feeling is daunting. If they are receptive, it's empowering. (By comparison, if your audience is one of professors and grad students, as say, at a conference, it's downright nerve-racking) Across the board, whatever kind of day you're having, it's objectifying, because what you are expected to do is perform, and the meaning and meaningfulness of you to your students is endowed by your performance.

Other than having tutored and teach-assisted literacy students for 5 months now, and a knack for grammar and language dating back to my Catholic school English lessons, my documentable credentials for such a task are minimal. They may or may not know that I lack the official qualifications to teach reading and writing in a publicly-funded institution. I don't even have an established syllabus or curriculum (which makes it really more fun for me, having time for such things). In other words, for all they know, I could be as good as any other shlep off the street. But they look at me no less expectantly, as best I could tell in the two classes thusfar.

The perceptions of what I am capable of, between myself and my students, is most interesting for me when it comes to I., my American student. The only difference between us (in these regards) is four years and a bachelor's degree, but for now someone has convinced him that I can do a better job than Philadelphia's public school system. To work up to this challenge, that is, to be such an enabler, in his life as well as my other students would be, well... an honor. This is the word that comes to my mind, and repeatedly. At first I think of it as a little clumsy, but if asked, what do you call it when people entrust you with something invaluable? It's current inappropriateness has mostly to do with the fact that I can't yet say that I have fully earned it. In the meantime, we can settle for warm and fuzzy.

As of now, I have no tools to measure success, except perhaps my class attendance, because to me not showing up would be the ambiguous protest. Plus, it seems they have already cultivated something of a coherently positive class atmosphere, which is a good sign. At least they're comfortable. Now that I am on the other side of the classroom, I realize how little teachers can know about what is really going on in the minds of their students. You're so busy presenting, trying to make sure that you're being clear, that you can't see yourself or the reactions of your students, so you can only hope that you're not leaving anyone behind. As much as my students' investments in my class are acts of faith, so it is for me. Fortunately, unlike many classrooms, the goal of students and teacher are more genuinely the same, a fact which is the source of my motivation.


* "ESL" is, as has been noted before, an inaccurate, not to mention presumptuous, title as many so-called "English as a Second Language" students, including some of mine, speak more than 2 languages.