How science is nested in religion
(An answer by a canadian orthodox iconographer and carver Jonathan Pageau to a comment of an atheist).
On the video, that I did recently on the symbolic versus literal interpretation of the Bible, I got a very good and concise comment about atheism and why many people have abandoned religion. I have some sympathy for atheism in many ways, mostly because many religious people have done a dreadful job at explaining things and have alienated generations of smart people and also because atheists often become that way through curiosity and a desire to have an integrated world view. I mean, when you face literalist religious types, there's a kind of blind unconsciousness, that is truly nauseating. I once confronted a literalist type and when I asked him: when it says in the Bible that Christ was taken up into Heaven where exactly did He go into? - The atmosphere? To the Moon? And that person had actually never thought about that, had never asked himself that question. So, yeah, sympathy for atheists.
I'm going to read the comment which is by a user named Ambertrance and I'm going to try to answer as best as I can.
Quote: "I am an atheist, because my pure and honest desire to understand the universe led me to answers from biology, physics and other scientific fields. These answers are more sublime and precious than anything I know. I believe religions and symbolism can confirm meaning in one's personal subjective life, because I've been on that path before. You could say, that is enough, because all we have in our existence is our subjective point of view, but I believe it's a noble act to care less about that and to desire to know what happens in the universe outside your own personal life. Then how could anyone judge you for being an atheist when science, as imperfect as it is, brought you knowledge about distant stars and galaxies, the small world of atoms and much more. Mysticism and religion did not enlighten us about matters above subjective and social aspects. Many other things can replace religion, mysticism and symbolism in creating a stable and moral society. The value that science brought to humanity, on the other side, is irreplaceable. I will cease being an atheist and become spiritual or whatever when all these pretty connections and symbols will make a difference in allowing me to understand the nature of the universe outside my insignificant tiny life".
(End of quote).
I hope I chose a comment that most atheists would find represents a typical journey which would lead one to atheism and, to be fair, that's a pretty generous statement. Many atheists might be far more acid in their vision of the symbolic language.
There are a lot of things to untangle, but here we go.
Symbolism and religious language is not just about the subjective and social, and symbolism is indeed a language describing what happens in the universe. Then why, might you ask, is it so different from modern science? Well, the answer often given by atheists is that it's just a less advanced system of what science is trying to deal with. We know more today and so we can correct the mistake our ancestors made. So if we take for granted that religious language were there to describe the world in a technical sense, the same way modern science is attempting to do, then "yes", modern science has a more, let's say, accurate and exact description of natural laws and events. But I think to assume that is ill-informed and maybe even a bit ill-intentioned for if one compares apples to oranges and insists that they are the same, while constantly mocking the orange for being a queer regressive and inadequate apple... well, there's something that's wrong.
Then how do we account for the difference between the two? Well, maybe something like this: symbolism and religious language in general are an attempt to understand the universe, yes, but also while simultaneously understanding the process by which we understand the universe. Let me repeat that in another way. It's both a description of the world and a description of how I can describe the world. In relation to modern science religious language would be something like a meta-process or a meta-language because it tries to express the thing it is focusing on, - let's say, a mountain, - while also expressing the process by which that focus is even possible. If modern science can describe a mountain height, width, terrain, its foliage, its mineral constitution, religious language is expressing why I have a category like mountain in the first place, why that category is relevant to humans, basically what does a mountain mean.
The scientist will retort something like this: a mountain doesn't mean anything. But to say so is to ignore the human variable, ignore that we are the ones looking at the mountain. Even if I believe, that mountain is outside of my tiny existence, it ignores consciousness, ignores why I would bother to have a category like Mountain, it ignores that I have to climb a mountain or go around a mountain, when it's in my way, it ignores the effect going up a mountain has on human consciousness. All those things are real!
Symbolism tries to take all of that into account, that is - discuss a mountain without pretending that we are not human beings living in a world of mountains. So it does have a personal and social aspect to it because it takes into account consciousness, but it isn't just personal and social. Taking consciousness into account doesn't mean that it's a relative thing and subjective in the way that we see that word today in the sense of idiosyncratic arbitrary to my own particularities and proclivities. There's a universal aspect to the experience of a mountain.
So the religious language is above the scientific language and contains the scientific process within it. I know that Jordan Peterson has mentioned this a few times but he hasn't had the opportunity yet to elaborate completely, how that works, in his talks and I know it's hard to understand and it will seem aggravating beyond belief to many atheists at the outset, but I'm going to try to give an example that will unpack this as much as possible. I think we can keep going with the mountain. I've talked about mountains before in other talks but it's such a basic image that it can help us understand many things.
There are reasons why mountains are often sacred. The experience of a mountain is that as you ascend the mountain the width of the base is refined, it necessarily gets narrower, narrower and narrower as you go higher and higher. The experience of particularity is contained more and more because as you go up the mountain you can see more and more, you can see further, so when you're at the bottom of the mountain you can only see the very particular - the rocks in front of you, the trees around you, - but as you ascend your gaze widens and you get more and more of an encompassing experience. This refinement of experience happens as the mountain itself becomes narrower and narrower, moves from the particular and the many to the one and the universal. So reaching the summit your view opens up completely in a kind of a jump, because suddenly as you reach the summit - in that very moment - the entire world seems to appear beneath you and you can see the mountain itself on all its sides and the horizon all around you.
That experience of the mountain - the one I've just described - is the same as any hierarchy. Let's take the Army for example. The men are at the bottom and get specific orders, specific tasks, but as you go up the military hierarchy - the coprals, the generals are less and less in terms of quantity. There are more men and less leaders and then they also have a more global vision of strategy and each level contains the explicit actions of the lower levels within them. Let's say the men have to dig this trench, transport things to this Outpost. The higher levels contain that within the more implicit strategies, - let's say, reinforcing that front, defending these assets. When one ascends one reaches, let's say, the top General where the patterns of the battle are set up with the final goal in mind - outflank the opponent, take this City, win the war. Similarly the same hierarchy will have a conceptual equivalent: for example, specific species of something, let's say, a Dalmatian, a Greyhound or a Terrier despite their wide differences can be contained in a higher concept, which is dog, which can be then contained and regulated by higher and higher concepts - canine, mammal animal and then being.
What the language of symbolism does is suggests that there is a structural relationship between all these different versions of the hierarchy, that they exhibit the same truth and so are connected in a manner which has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of quantitative analysis of science and everything to do with language and consciousness. Christ is the Head of the church just like our physical head is the symbolic head of our body, that is certainly not a scientifically valid statement.
Now we're going to take it one step further. What happens is this: symbolism (religious symbolism) is exactly that ladder, it's exactly that mountain, it offers images at the base of the mountain - the most particular images possible, - these act as a kind of support for the higher levels of meaning. Symbolism is always very concrete, very immediate - a tree, a rock, the earth, the heavens, - but the structural patterns then move you up towards more Universal and encompassing realities. Now most of all we need to understand, that this mountain, this ascent is also an ascent of consciousness, because we - human beings - are organized in the same way, we have these desires and multiplicities on our edges, these competing personalities, which pull us here and there, tend to pull us apart, pull us into multiplicity, but as we ascend our own consciousness we find a center - the head or the mind (the church fathers speak of the Nous [νοῦς - mind or intellect in Greek]) and that center of consciousness is capable of transcending and unifying the multiplicity into oneness.
Now the symbolism of hierarchy. I've just described the mountain. The ladder is also the root of why we identify the highest things with spirit, air, wind or with intelligence, why we identify the highest of high with Heaven, which is so high above us that it is unreachable. It's not that God is physically in heaven, no reasonable Christian believes that, but rather the analogy of our experience of heaven, of ascension is the root, the support, so to speak, for that which is beyond and cannot be described directly.
Hopefully that's clear enough, but I still haven't shown you how that works. I want to go back and read the comment, that I was sent, and hopefully I can show you. Our commentator says:
"I am an atheist, because my pure and honest desire to understand the universe led me to answers from biology, physics and other scientific fields. These answers are more sublime and precious than anything I know".
Notice: she says, these answers are more sublime and precious. Now, what is that word "sublime"? It's an interesting word because something sublime is something which is elevated. The source of the notion of sublimation was the change of a solid into a vapor. So is that, which she means, that the scientific answers are literally like changing a solid into a vapor? Of course not! What she means is that scientific answers are more precious. She said, it is rarer - something like the move from the large quantity at the base of the mountain to the rarer and rarer and more sought-after summit. What "sublime" means is that scientific answers are more like heaven (vapor) and less like earth (solid).
Quote: "I believe religions and symbolism can confirm meaning in one's personal subjective life, because I've been on that path before. You could say that is enough, because all we have in our existence is our subjective point of view, but I believe it's a noble act to care less about that and to desire to know what happens with the universe outside your own personal life. Then how could anyone judge you for being an atheist when science, as imperfect as it is, brought you knowledge about distant stars and galaxies, the small world of atoms and much more..."
Now, this is where we need to pay attention:
"The mysticism and religion did not enlighten us about matters above subjective and social aspects..." - Now, notice again, that she uses the word "above". Does she mean that, for example, if I had a stack of scientific data like a pile of paper, let's say, that I would place it on top of a stack of subjective and social matters? No, obviously not! What she's saying is that there is a hierarchy of value, a mountain of meaning and scientific knowledge is in her opinion closer to heaven, closer to the oneness of the summit. And that's really interesting, because the science, scientific method is, by its own admission, by its own process, a removal of all hierarchies of value. It is the leveling of the world into measurable phenomena, the removal of all meaning. Yet, in order to express the superiority of science our commentator must resort to the same language, the same structure we use to say that God - the Absolute, the One, the Origin of all multiplicity - is in Heaven. So, what is fascinating is that she can use that structure of heaven and hierarchy unconsciously exactly because the scientific method does not include it in its worldview, - does not take it into consideration how we exist and how we encounter the world. She said it herself:
"It is a noble act to care less about our subjective point of view and to desire to know what happens in the universe outside your own personal life".
She is criticizing symbolic language while using the symbolic language to elevate, to magnify and subtly commit herself to science and its precious sublime answers.
But the language of elevation of hierarchy (being indeed the manner in which we describe, we ascribe value to things) is the religious hierarchy that we find in Dante or in Jacob's Ladder, or in Moses, - is the ascent of the mountain, the great chain of being, as it has been called, - it goes unnoticed even as it is being used, creating a form of cognitive dissonance, an unconsciousness of language and of one's own embodied human existence.
You know, I used to think that when atheists proclaim their allegiance to "the flying spaghetti monster", they were just joking, but now I'm starting to think, that because they elevate the scientific process, because they elevate something, which is in itself a denial of any elevation, that maybe they do worship something at least akin to "the spaghetti monster". - Because they don't understand, that analogies of hierarchy are coherent, that we move from the specific and quantifiable, which is what science attempts to describe (dig that trench, carry those guns), to the origin of existence, the purpose (win that battle, win the war), which is also the capacity to even see, to even consider specific and quantifiable things: you move from the feet to the head, from the earth to the spirit, from the children to the father, from the darkness to the light. All religious images are completely coherent as they place themselves on the hierarchy of being, but if one thinks, that earth is more sublime, that quantity is more precious, that descriptions of facts are above their meanings and the purpose of why we're describing those facts and not others, well, someone who is able to inhabit unconsciously such an upside down inverted world can put anything at the top of that hierarchy and, I guess, the flying spaghetti monster will do.
So, when our commentator says: "I will cease being an atheist and become spiritual or whatever, when all these pretty connections and symbols will make a difference in allowing me to understand the nature of the universe outside my insignificant tiny life". - All I can say is this: you are already spiritual, you've told me yourself; it's only that you're trying to throw mud up in the air, throw mud up into the Heavens in the hope, that you can then worship it...