Religion intoxicates with irrationality

“If religion isn’t the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is?” asks Daniel Dennett in a recent article in The Guardian.

 

Again, the irrational behaviour of 60 000 men, calling themselves mighty but being closer to stupid and naïve, to believe all the nonsense the potato farmer Angus Buchan tells them, shows how great this threat is.

 

Recently I heard that the Stellenbosch scientist and lecturer Dave Pepler, also well-known as the presenter of the excellent nature program Groen, left a class where he had just completed a lecture on the importance of evolutionary science, when he was accosted by a group of students from the Shofar sect. They spat at him and hurled abuse at him.

 

This is the influence pastor Fred May of Shofar has on people one would expect to be intelligent. This is the type of threat religion has in store every day against rational thinking and scientific discoveries and findings.

 

Dennett, director for the Centre of Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Massachusetts, emphasises that perhaps television or addictive video games are more dangerous to science than religion. “But although each of these scourges – mixed blessings, in fact – has the power to overwhelm our best judgement and cloud our critical faculties, religion doesn’t just disable, it honours the disability.

 

“People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and to make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them,” writes Dennett.

 

Religion is nothing less than intoxication with irrationality. As Dennett points out, “You don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don’t have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense to do massively crazy things. And – this is the worst of it – religious faith can give people a sort of hyperbolic confidence (spat at a scientist who does not believe in your holy book), an utter unconcern about whether they might be making a mistake, that enables acts of inhumanity that would otherwise be unthinkable.”

 

Dennett writes that although other institutions or traditions (sports or art) may encourage a certain amount of irrationality, “only religion demands its as a sacred duty.”

 

Imagine those 60 000 men blindly following the chips farmer “transferring all that respect, loyalty and intense devotion from an imaginary being – God – to something real: the wonderful world of goodness we and our ancestors have made and of which we are now the stewards.”

 

Pepler recently referred me to that wonderful chapter/episode in Jacob Bronowski’s book and television series The Ascent of Man. In the chapter “Knowledge or Certainty” Bronowski writes about the greatest strength of science, that it never believes in certainty. At Auschwitz, he steps into a pond of water where the Nazis, so certain of their truths, scattered the ashes of Jews they killed in the concentration camp. He writes:

 

“This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave (my emphasis). This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

 

“Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken’ “.

 

Unfortunately, the Shofar students who spat at Pepler and threw abuse at him, did that because of religious arrogance. Because of religious dogma. But the most frightening, because of ignorance enhanced and strengthened by religion and its leaders.