Religion is a topic that’s near and dear to me. I think the conversations about the reasons we exist are some of the most important that we’ll ever have. But so often, it’s these conversations that people shy away from in life. Religion is a hot-button issue and with how widely opinions on the topic can vary, it’s no wonder that the subject has been a home to controversy.
Religion has a lot to offer. It can provide people with everything from a belief system and a sense of security to a feeling of community and a reason to be kind to others. It offers us purpose. And humans have been searching for purpose as long as we’ve walked on two feet. There are just so many features to this planet of ours that demand explanation.
But what’s truly remarkable is that, since the birth of science, we’ve actually arrived at answers to so many of our deepest questions: What causes the push and pull of our tides? Why does the sun disappear each night? How did we come to be the way we are? How large is the world and what happens when you reach the end of it? Where are we in the universe? Is planet Earth all that is?
But even as we’ve found answers to these timeless enigmas, so many of the deepest questions still remain unanswered. But in the face of those grand questions, religion is unyielding. It offers definitive explanations to unanswerable questions. What happens exactly when we die isn’t something that can be guaranteed. Personally, I doubt that it’s nothing at all.
But the notion that visionary desert wanderers of the bronze age had any deeper insight into the universe’s most elusive mysteries than today’s scientists is a cause for concern. The idea that prophets in one of the world’s least literate regions had a more solid grasp on our cosmic value than today’s physicists is nothing short of dangerous in its implications.
We’ve calculated everything from the size of our planet, to the velocity of its rotation, to its place in the solar system. We’ve calculated the speed at which our solar system travels through the galaxy, and the galaxy through the universe. We’ve ascertained the speed of light and that has informed some of our understanding of black holes.
Whatever questions these are answers to are so unfathomably beyond the scope of anything we could ever have possibly expected. They’re extraordinary in their scale. To simplify it all down to a universe that was “created in six days and six nights” is to cheat ourselves out of centuries worth of painstaking innovation.
It isn’t the entire religious community that’s cynical of science. While each religion has their fundamentalists, American Christianity is particularly well-documented. According to a 2022 Gallup poll, 20% of Americans still believe that the bible is literally true. According to a random sample of 1,007 adults, Gallup found that 40% of evangelicals believe that the bible is factual.
To build the telescopes that brought us to such awe-inspiring realizations about our universe is an achievement that nearly defies comprehension. The latest one we launched, the James Webb telescope, has begun to give us glimpses into the very first stars and the very first galaxies.
Without science, we would have never figured out automobiles. Instead, we’ve built the cars and trains that became planes and rockets. We’ve built telescopes that travel inconceivable distances through the inhospitable vacuums of space at unthinkable speeds. They fold and unfold themselves like origami swans in machinist feats of precision.
To cheat ourselves out of all of it in favor of a universe that was created in under a week is to forfeit far more dazzling truths. To turn our backs on these cosmic cliffs of ineffable scale in favor of Adam, Eve and the talking snake is to accept lives in a much smaller world.
But to discount religion’s approach to these grander questions certainly isn’t to deny that the universe is a mysterious place. For the sake of the God of all Gods, please refer back to the photo above if you doubt we’re immersed in something beautiful. It would take light 93 billion years to travel from one end of our universe to the other. We have supernovas that collapse in on themselves and turn into holes that suck up matter itself. The universe is comprised of 27% dark matter that, even though we can’t see it, we know must exist because it outweighs the rest of the universe by a ratio of 6:1 and we can observe its effects.
The more deeply you look at any subject, the more it opens up. And what we’ve found in our exploration of astronomy thoroughly discredits the origin stories that have been presented by most major religions. But because science has pervaded nearly every facet of our lives, religions can’t easily skate by claiming to be anti-science as they were in the bronze-age and through much of history.
Instead what religion too often offers today is a selective refusal to acknowledge the scientific truths that are the least convenient to the belief system. It’s why creationism has remained such a persevering belief in spite of the fact that 97% of scientists accept that humans have evolved. The implications of those James Webb telescope photos are so staggering that they simply can’t be reconciled with the world views of scripture literalists.
It’s religion’s bullheaded refusal to accept new information as it arises that makes it so very dangerous. Its’ denials today are no different than the ones that arose when we discovered that planet earth wasn’t the center of the universe; we just haven’t yet been granted the benefit of hindsight. Where faith-based thinking is involved, anything is possible. When we allow rational thinking to fall by the wayside, we’re vulnerable to tyrants, demagogues and the worst impulses of the largest masses.
It’s true that good can come from religion. I’ve known many kind Christians. But religion is no prerequisite to kindness. And so often, religion is the tool that’s required if ever there’s a mass that needs to be manipulated. It’s a story as old as time and it’s one that even the most outrageous charlatans continue to tell. If it weren’t for blind faith, a deeply unreligious man like Trump could never have ridden that wave of sham Christianity all the way to the White House.
It’s an uncomfortable truth that some of life’s greatest questions still remain unanswered. It’s only natural that we should want to get to the bottom of these mysteries. But to pretend we have those answers now is the great fallacy of religion. When the answers to such colossal questions are accepted without pause, it leaves the world in a dangerous place.