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“Teaching Religion in an Age of Science”

Dr. Felicity McCutcheon

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”(Martin Luther King Jnr, “Strength to Love”, Fount, 1989)

This paper explores the way in which the prevailing ideology of scientific/technical knowledge is impacting on both the spiritual literacy and values development of our young people and the challenge this presents to Religious Educators. The paper will outline the development of the ideology of technical progress and critically examine the ways in which this ideology is changing the way human beings understand themselves and their place in the world. By providing an analysis of the difficulties Religious Educators face when introducing key spiritual concepts in the classroom, I hope to offer some suggestions as to how we might help our students remain open to the possibility of a meaningful, religious life.

“Teaching Religion in an Age of Science”

Dr Felicity McCutcheon

2nd National Religious and Values Educational Conference

Melbourne Grammar School

April 2003

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”(Martin Luther King Jnr, “Strength to Love”, Fount, 1989)

When I first began working on this paper, it was my intention to outline the challenges facing educators who have the task of making religious concepts meaningful to young people growing up in a culture dominated by scientific values and beliefs. I was motivated to do so after attending Peter’s seminar on Religion and Science last year, where I was struck by the ferocity of Dworkins’ attack on religion and the muddled (dare I say, embarrassed?) response to his attack by philosophers of religion and religious believers. It got me thinking about the way in which the relationship between religion and science is most commonly understood (or misunderstood) and how ill-equipped religious educators seem to be in helping their students understand and negotiate the debate. And it matters. It matters that students are helped to orientate themselves with understanding towards the issues because the legitimacy (and therefore the possibility) of religious meaning depends on it.

As I thought more about the issue and looked deeper into the constitution of the problem, I found myself being drawn into a much wider landscape. What exactly did I mean by the ‘age of science’? With what reason do I describe our current age thus? What particular difficulties do religious educators face today (as opposed to the difficulties common to all religious educators)?

I wonder what expectations you have of this paper. Are you hoping that I will provide the definitive answer to the question: can the modern believer accept Genesis 1 and evolution, or Genesis 1 and Big Bang theory? Perhaps you are hoping that I will tell you how to answer back to the scientist who demands that you provide evidence for your belief that there is a God. There may be other questions that you are hoping that I will answer. E.g. “Maybe she’ll tell us which parts of the science/religion debate should be included in a RE curriculum, and how might we teach them?”

It is only right that I confess right at the beginning that my paper is not about these things. I am not sure I even understand what people mean by ‘the science/religion debate’. I do know that there is a deep and real and important issue concerning the extent to which scientific knowledge has become the dominant source of authority; and in doing so, it has elbowed out all the others (spiritual truths included). I also know that such is the extent and dominance of scientific and technical knowledge, our students are in danger of never encountering, let alone grasping, the meaning of key religious concepts. So this paper is an attempt to reclaim some of the ground on which non-scientific forms of knowledge once proudly stood, with a view to legitimising spiritual knowledge in particular.[1]

My paper is entitled “Teaching religion in an age of science’ and by that, I don’t mean an age in which science is done, but an age where the prevailing ideology (or source of authority) is scientific. As the prevailing ideology, it is the one we are most blind to, because an ideology is rather like a pair of spectacles; it provides the conceptual lens through which we see, understand, come to know and therefore live in the world. I am going to begin by defining what I take to be the key characteristics of the scientific ideology and then move on to examine how it is reshaping the constituents of psycho-spiritual experience and the impact this is having on the teaching of religious or spiritual concepts. I am going to make frequent reference to the prevailing ideology and, for reasons that will become clearer as we proceed, I am going to refer to it as a Technopoly. This phrase comes from Neil Postman’s book of the same name; a book in which he defines and discusses our current cultural conditions in much greater detail than I can achieve today.[2]

Section: 1. What is the nature of scientific/technical knowledge and what does it mean to say that it is the dominant ideology?

Ideologies tend to be hidden from us through immediacy (just as a wearer of glasses doesn’t see the lens through which they look). One of the most effective ways of bringing the assumptions and key concepts of an ideology into focus is to imagine a world in which they have not taken hold. Plato’s dialogue, Protagoras, is useful for this purpose for in it, Plato retells the myth of Prometheus. Prometheus, you will remember, brought human beings the gift of fire and of technical knowledge but before he did so, humans lived short, brutish and miserable lives, at the mercy of the elements. The story goes roughly like this:

“Once, a long time ago, human beings wandered over the surface of the earth and had no way to make themselves safe. Everything that happened was a threat. Rain drenched their uncovered skin; snow stung; hail slashed. The sun’s dry heat brought searing thirst and fever to their unprotected heads. Helpless, they huddled in sunless caves beneath the ground. No hunting or farming skills gave them a stable source of food; no tame animals plowed or carried. No weather diviner’s art prepared them for the next day. No medical science healed their vulnerable bodies. Nor could they turn for help to their fellow human beings, undertaking cooperative projects, communicating in shared language. Speechlessness and wilderness kept them apart. Isolated, silent, naked, they could neither record the past nor plan for the future; they could not even comfort each other in their present misery.

These proto-type humans would soon have died off, victims of starvation, overexposure, the attacks of stronger beasts. Then the kindness of Prometheus granted to these creatures, so exposed to tuche [what just happens], the gift of the techne. House-building, farming, yoking and taming, metal-working, ship building, hunting; prophecy, weather prediction, counting and calculating; the practice of medicine; the art of building dwelling places – with all these arts they preserved and improved their lives. Human existence became safer, more predictable; there was a measure of control over contingency”. (Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p 90-1, brackets mine)

Without some kind of control and predictability, there was no opportunity to plan for the future, and without communication, these early humans lived in a silent, frightening world. When Prometheus granted the gift of knowledge, he gave us the ability to understand the physical universe and therefore gain some degree of control over both the natural world and our lives. The Greeks called it techne. We can recognise it as scientific and technical knowledge[3]. Techne enables humans to live lives that are safer and more predictable. It grants control over contingency (“tuche” = luck = what just happens).

Now it is obvious that some degree of control over contingency is essential for the living of a life of meaning and dignity. Indeed, as the Greeks well knew, it was essential to the possibility of an ethical life because ethics has to do with decisions and choices, and a certain degree of stability is required in order for a human being to be faced with the real possibility of choice and action. So the gifts of technical skill (how to build), scientific knowledge (how to explain and predict) and, crucially, the ability to communicate (in speech and writing) were essential for the development of human beings as ethical beings.

The extent to which we could ever gain control over the natural world and so make ourselves completely safe is an issue I will leave to one side (although I think that it is extremely important that we examine how realistic it is to think that such control can be achieved). The more important issue (and it was the one discussed most fully by the Greeks) is the extent to which a life should be made self-sufficient, immune to the incursions of what they called ‘luck’ (tuche: ‘what just happens’). If we could rid our lives of all danger, all pain, all defects, all uncertainty, should we? What kind of world would that be and what kind of creatures would we become, living in such a world?

The Greeks realised that the move to make ourselves safe would have an impact on our psycho-spiritual identity. In seeking to control the external world, the danger was that human beings would neglect their inner life, the proper functioning of which the Greeks held to be of crucial importance to the attainment of a happy and flourishing life. It was, the Greeks thought, a mistake to think that happiness could be achieved by controlling the external world. Such controls might help because they give us the chance to make choices and to take responsibility for our actions, but, on their own, the knowledge and technics of science could never provide a human being with happiness. Instrumental means could not achieve absolute ends. To make the point simply: a device that controls the temperature in which I live and work might provide physical comfort but it cannot provide spiritual contentedness. If I am overheated (so to speak) by unruly passions (anger, greed, lust and so on), a device for cooling the air temperature will not be of much use. By distinguishing the inner life from the outer (whilst acknowledging they are related to one another) the Greeks were maintaining the distinction Einstein was referring to when he wrote: “Scientific knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievement of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source”.

When a culture defines the ultimate goal of human life in the language, the values and concepts of Techne, then you have, what [following Postman] I am calling a Technopoly. In this sense, a Technopoly is not simply a culture in which scientific and technical knowledge are pursued, but a culture in which scientific and technical knowledge define and declare what the ultimate goal of human life is.

What does this mean? Well, most importantly, it means that the language of the inner life is relegated to a second-class status or – worse - declared illegitimate. Subjectivity and individuality are profoundly unacceptable in a culture dominated by techne. It means that the language of transcendence, of absolute value, of spiritual identity and meaning is reduced to the language of science and technology. It means that there is a conflation of the spiritual and the material (at the expense of the spiritual of course).

In a Technopoly the techniques of quantification are applied to questions where numbers have nothing to say and the material and the spiritual realms of human experience are confused with one another (the distinction between the ‘outer life’ and the ‘inner life’ is broken down).[4] The notion of ‘progress’ or ‘success’ is defined solely in scientific and technical terms. Moral authority (‘what should I do?’) is sought in standardised sets of procedures generating statistical outcomes, that are then heralded by ‘experts’ as authoritative guides to life.[5]

Postman brings out the way the spiritual realm has deferred to the technical when he writes: “In Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency and precision. And that is why concepts such as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. The priests of Technopoly call sin ‘social deviance’, which is a statistical concept; and they call evil ‘psychopathology’, which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts”. (Technopoly, p90, my emphases and brackets)

There is no question that our students are already feeling the impact of living in a Technopoly. We recently gave our year 8s an assignment on ‘the spirit’. One of the questions asked them to identify the areas in their own life where they thought they were spiritually immature. They were given the reference in 1 Corinthians 13 where Paul talks about the qualities of Love. The clue we gave them was that Love is a core spiritual quality and the extent to which we can truly love others is an indication of our spiritual maturity.

As I read through their work, my heart sank. What emerged with crystal clarity was that our students have successfully received all the messages that schools (and the wider community) have been sending them about the need to plan, to set goals, to concentrate, to be organised, to manage their time and so on and, in the absence of any other language about what is important, they have come to believe that their ‘salvation’ lies in learning the skills of organisation and management. And they, of course, are not alone. As adults, we are constantly being told that we need to manage our time, manage our health, manage our investments (houses used to be called homes), manage our relationships, manage our finances, manage our holidays, manage the environment; indeed, we surely are attempting to manage not merely our lives but the entire universe.

The level of anxiety in our year 8 students was high. Their condemnation of themselves (those who admitted that they weren’t very good at ‘management’) was also high, producing anxiety and worry and what I recognised to be a serious sense of moral or even spiritual failing. This makes sense of course. In Technopoly, you do indeed commit a sin if you fail to use your time ‘effectively’ or fail to manage your resources ‘efficiently’.[6]

A quick audit of the rhetoric of our culture (perhaps even our schools) will reveal that our young people are (implicitly or explicitly) being taught that being organised is more important than being just, being efficient is more important than being truthful, planning goals and working towards them carefully is more important than spontaneity and service and acquiring study skills is more important than being wise.

This is, of course, what one would expect in a Technopoly. To ‘manage’ something is to ‘have control over’ it or to ‘operate it effectively’. It is techne gone mad. And despite our almost hysterical insistence that we are happy, that life has never been better, that we enjoy comforts beyond the wildest dreams of their predecessors, the truth is that we are prone to despair, helplessness, anxiety, disconnection and violence[7]. And to cover up the truth of our predicament (because it is too hard to face) we begin telling ourselves a story that replaces Genesis 3. It is the story that we have all come to believe and which continues to justify our destructive domination of the planet.[8] It is the story of progress. We celebrate any scientific or technical discovery as an ‘advance’, whether or not the discovery is helpful or harmful. We have made it true by definition that new scientific knowledge and technical innovation is progress. And the accompanying moral of the story is the claim that anyone who tries to prevent ‘progress’ is evil or bad (or backward). According to the theology of Technopoly, failing to contribute to progress is sin. Idleness? Sin. To be inefficient? Sin. To be disorganised? Sin. To resist ‘consuming’ more than you need? Sin. Not to stockpile assets and seek to make money? Stupid. (I’m not sure we would call this sin because it means that someone else might take the opportunity you miss and that’s not bad; but it makes you stupid, doesn’t it?).

In answer to the questions: Why are we here and what is expected of us, Science rightly says, “that is not a scientific question”. Technopoly says, “What is expected of us is that we build ever bigger, ever faster, ever more powerful technologies of control and manipulation so that there is no nook or cranny in the universe that we haven’t come to dominate. Once we have total control, we will be safe and happy.”