Science Trumps Religion

A local radio channel here in Daytona Beach always presents some Protestant minister who offers a brief message to the flock early in the morning.  I’m not sure who’s paying attention around 6 a.m., but I’m usually driving to my office then and catch it.  I could be the fellow’s only listener.

This particular day, he was fulminating about science.  The problem as he sees it is that when scientists play God, they create evil.  He cited the atomic bomb and the gruesome German medical experiments on hapless prisoners during World War II.

 

He could have mentioned many other example of science going awry, such as the invention of nerve gas, development of weapons of mass destruction that so enraptured the Bush Administration and the like.

Of course, in chastising science, he somehow forgot to mention what happens when religion tries to play God: little things like the Spanish Inquisition, the Spanish decimation of native Americans, the Crusades, the multiple religious wars fought between Protestants and Catholics, the battle between the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic, the Israeli-Arab conflicts etc. 

Instead, the voice on the radio created a strawman named science and battered it with gentle-sounding words.  Unfortunately, there is no entity called science.  Instead, there are men and women working earnestly toward an elusive target called knowledge.  Some of that knowledge belies religious teachings, but that is understandable: one field deals only with facts, the other only with belief.

However, religion and science are not natural enemies.  Initially, science had the support of religion. For centuries, Islamic and Roman Catholic leaders encouraged scientific research in the hopes of understanding God.  As a result, first in Baghdad and then in Cairo more than a millennium ago, Islamic sultans created a House of Wisdom.  They brought together great scientists of their day to work with other renowned scholars in an effort to unravel the mysteries of the world.

In the process, they created the first universities and the first systematic sites for scanning the stars while amassing new information in such diverse fields as medicine, mathematics, chemistry and biology.  When Islam grew insular, the scientists took that knowledge to Europe and helped spark the Renaissance.

Early in the second millennium, Christians were led by Roger Bacon, a Catholic monk who helped developed scientific principles.  Many more would follow in his footsteps. Astronomical observatories were often included in churches, the tallest structures in cities.  The Church would only begin to oppose science when the findings by such individuals as Copernicus and Galileo contradicted biblical teachings.

Nevertheless, religious teachings typically traveled hand in hand with science, lead by such giants as Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler from the mid-17^th century to the early 18^th century.  One of the fathers of modern astronomy, Kepler did not hesitate to credit God:

The more rightly we understand the nature and scope of what our God has founded, the more devoted the spirit in which that is done. (The Secret of the Universe)

Newton echoed him: His most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being...This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as the Lord over all.(Principia)

Indeed, many of the top scientists were (and are) fervently religious, hoping to find within their work more evidence of God’s effort.

The problem then isn’t with some nebulous creature called science.  The fault, as the comic strip possum Pogo once famously noted, is that “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Religion has helped people endure difficult times, provided succor to the poor and hungry, offered hope and inspiration. On the other hand, throughout history, religious leaders who belong to a faith that dominates do not hesitate to attack, burn, mutilate and murder nonbelievers.

At the same time, scientists are responsible for curing diseases, extending life, sending men to the Moon and beyond, deciphering the past and raising living standards for many humans to levels unimagined 100 years ago.  Yet, scientists have also unleashed deadly weapons and raised the specter of a human-caused Armageddon.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, realized the danger after watching a test of his creation in New Mexico.  Years later, ironically on a radio show, he recalled: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

The truth is, as John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton, wrote in an 1887 letter:"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

That’s true for science and for religion.  They are both blessed and cursed by human nature and therefore have the same failing, no matter how much a radio preacher wants to separate them.

Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.

Pro-Lifers Miss the Point

When I was living in Cleveland many years ago, I was modestly active in the women’s rights movement.  I joined the National Association for Women because I have never understood why some people believe women should not be treated on par with men.  There’s little difference between genders, especially in areas that count, such as the ability to think, take responsibility, work and make decisions.  Besides, disenfranchising half of all humans is downright idiotic, depriving the world of 50 percent of human brainpower and intelligence.

My efforts in Ohio, which included being the token male on a radio show about women’s rights, naturally, got me into the abortion issue, which may be even more controversial than religion, my usual bailiwick. I was introduced to the acrimonious discussion when a friend in college had to be smuggled to New York for an illegal abortion and was physically harmed by the procedure.

That was before the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that struck down state laws prohibiting abortions.  Now, 38 years later, the arguments continue.

Most recently, former Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain issued inconsistent comments on abortion: he’s seemingly pro-life and pro-choice at the same time.  In addition, he thinks abortion should be illegal, but if a woman and her family think an abortion is necessary, then nothing should stop them.  Moreover, only a few women are affected annually, so what’s the big deal?

Naturally, his opponents have fired back with lots of charges.  Former example, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, who also opposes contraceptives, immediately attacked Cain’s uneasy stance: “Herman Cain’s pro-choice position is similar to those held by John Kerry, Barack Obama and many others on the liberal left. You cannot be both personally against abortion while condoning it – you can’t have it both ways. We must defend the defenseless, period.”

His comments were muted by two factors: they were included in a fundraising letter, and he trails badly in the Republican preference polls against former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

The effort to hoist abortion as an issue in the presidential campaign is doomed to failure.  Although it remains part of the litmus test of a “true” conservative, candidates who have run solely on an anti-abortion stance have consistently lost elections around the country.

More importantly, it ignores the basic issue, one that I realized back in Cleveland. 

This is not a religious issue.  After all, according to published figures, “13 percent of abortion patients describe themselves as born-again or Evangelical Christians while 22 percent of U.S. women are Catholic.” This is not a religious issue.  That’s an awful lot of people from usually pro-life groups that Santorum and his ilk are trying get votes from with an anti-abortion stance.

It’s not a class or racial issue.  Women who get abortions come from all social levels and ethnic backgrounds.  About 57 percent have college degrees.

No, this issue is not even about babies; it’s about women.

They do not choose to have an abortion casually.  It is a difficult decision to undergo any kind of medical procedure, however safe the operation has become.  Studies of abortion patients show that the decision to have an abortion is based on various significant reasons.  Many lack the money or the ability to start a family or increase the size of an existing family.  About 66 percent actually plan “to have children when they are older, financially able to provide necessities for them, and/or in a supportive relationship with a partner so their children will have two parents.”

Another large group has decided to end their pregnancies because they face severe health issues if they continue or their fetus has severe abnormalities. 

In addition, “about 13,000 women each year have abortions because they have become pregnant as a result of rape or incest.”

Over all, about 1.3 million women a year make this difficult decision.  That’s almost identical the number of abortion performed annually before 1973.  The reality is that about 1.3 million women in this country a year will get abortions legally or illegally.  Should they undergo the procedure in the best possible conditions rather than be forced, like my friend, to trust her health to an unlicensed doctor whose interest was focused on income and avoiding legal problems and not on his patient?

Those opposing abortions focus on the babies.  They ignore the women.  That’s what was done before the women’s rights movement, too.  It’s not a good idea.  Women are intelligent enough, capable enough and responsible enough to make medical decisions affecting their own lives and bodies.

If that was not clear decades ago, it certainly should be by now.

Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.  Many of his essays are posted at www.williamplazarus.blogspot.com.

Conspiracies Are Mostly Nonsense

One of my university students is the contrary type and an easy target for conspiracy theories.   His latest involves the Moon and claims that no one actually landed there.  According to him, this country spent billions of dollars to fake the various trips there and the initial 1969 landing.

He points to the fact no stars appear in the lunar images taken from the Moon.  After all, we can see there are billions of stars.  Guess what?  As any photographer knows, when something is really bright, like a spacesuit, dimmer objects – like distant stars – faded into obscurity.  We just don’t have film that can simultaneously handle something very bright and something else very dim.

How about the ripples seen in the flag when there are no breezes on the Moon?  That one’s easy, too.  The astronauts had to rotate the flagpole to insert into the soil, creating ripples from the stored angular momentum.

On top of that, thousands of people were involved in the flights.  Moon rocks were brought back and studied extensively by scientists worldwide.  Astronauts who went there are still available.  No one has claimed the trips were faked.  That’s impossible if they weren’t real.  Conspiracies with more than two people invariably fail because someone reveals what has really happened.  That’s human nature.

Even the plane-hijacking scheme that ended in 9/11 -- planned by a small band of closely knit conspirators in far away Pakistan or Afghanistan -- was known by the FBI before the terrorists struck.  The warning just got overlooked in the steady stream of anti-American threats that continue to flow.

There are plenty of other conspiracies anyway.  Who shot President John Kennedy?  What about a second shooter hiding behind the grassy knoll?  Conspiracy buffs have been chewing over this idea since 1963, a process enhanced by disagreement with the government’s official Warren Report on the shooting that placed sole blame for the assassination on Lee Harvey Oswald.

I just read a book that claimed a Secret Service agent seated behind the First Family actually killed Kennedy when responding to Oswald’s shot and that his own gun went off accidentally.  That’s just one of many conspiracy theories.  In a widely studied book, prominent criminal attorney Frank Ragano claimed that a former Mafia leader on his deathbed confessed to arranging for the assassination.

Was James Earl Ray a lone assassin who shot Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 or was he only a link in a yet-unidentified network of sinister schemers?  Were American troops sent to Afghanistan in part to revive the poppy crop suppressed by Taliban leaders?  I saw an extensive program claiming the CIA is funding its operations by selling heroin derived from those flowers.  No, it’s not.

Why stop there?  What’s in Area 51, the secretive portion of Edwards Air Force Base in Nevada?  Aliens?  What crashed in Roswell, New Mexico back in the 1940s?  Is the U.S. covering up alien landings?  No, there have been no alien landings.  Misguided military experiments are far more likely given the vast distances in space.

Conspiracies have no time limits either.  There are still scholarly debates about who really was behind the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.  Lincoln’s son, Robert, burned records, supposedly muttering that there were things in them people shouldn’t know.  His efforts launched a thousand tales about then-Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and others who may have conspired to kill the president. Actually, based on the records of what was burned, the younger Lincoln destroyed only his own personal files – old checks and the like.

What remained of his father’s papers was actually incinerated during the 1871 Chicago Fire.

Squashing conspiracy theories raises a question:  Why do people continue to believe such nonsense?

The answer is simple:  The facts are not convincing, alternative facts seem plausible and/or some people deliberately distort the facts.  That’s the entire recipe for the idea of a conspiracy to flourish.

For example, in the distorted facts category, Arabs, not wanting to be saddled with 9/11, blamed Jews, insisting Jewish employees in the World Trade Center had been warned about the bombing and gotten out.  Not true.  The percentage of Jewish deaths in that tragedy matched the percentage of the population.  Holocaust deniers, too, invariably are pushing their own contrary theories – a great way to get a lot of money at the expense of ethics -- or simply dislike Jewish people.

Facts are skimpy on early cultures.  Time and environment have seen to that.  So, some people are convinced that ETs created the pyramids, even started life on this planet.  They need proof, of course, and will go to any means to “prove” their point. Erich von Däniken’s 1968 book, The Chariot of the Gods, which made up information to support an argument for alien visits, gave a boost to such claims and has helped sustain the belief in a conspiracy to erase the “truth.”  

Actually, there’s plenty of evidence of how the Egyptian culture developed to the point of being able to erect a pyramid without other-worldly influences.   

The same is true with conspiracies related to the origins of Christianity.  There are multiple conflicting facts, so The DaVinci Code, with its secret organization, somehow seems possible.  Could Jesus have survived, married Mary Magdelene and fathered a line that had to be protected, thereby engendering much of European history?  No, not a chance, except in a novel.  The Priory of Sion – the centerpiece of author Dan Brown’s conspiracy -- never existed; it was invented in a separate 1960s book.  Besides, if Jesus had children, then he could no longer be God, making his protection unnecessary.

However, the failure of historical research to collaborate Christian historic claims has created an opening for conspiracy theorists.  That’s equally true for the deaths of Lincoln and Kennedy. Since it’s impossible to answer all concerns, there’s always space for an alternative explanation that is surely being “covered up” to prevent the “truth” from emerging.

Nor does logic and supported evidence make any difference.  My student is not convinced anyone landed on the moon no matter that his concerns have been factually and fully answered.  He has lots of company in the shadowy world of conspiracies. Some of our political candidates are convinced that gays can be changed – but prevented by a scientific conspiracy to hide the truth; that socialists are trying to take over government – based on disagreements over policy decisions not on any factual evidence that either people are actually trying or that socialism, in moderation, is a bad idea; and many more. 

They shout their claims, and, voila, a conspiracy is born that ensnares people like my student.

Are there conspiracies?  Sure.  Do they succeed?  Maybe once in a Blue Moon.

Bill Lazarus regularly writes about religion and religious history.  He also speaks at various religious organizations throughout Florida.  You can reach him at www.williamplazarus.com.  His books are available on Amazon.com, Kindle, bookstores and via various publishers.  Many of his essays are posted at www.williamplazarus@blogspot.com