Some people like to be at the center of controversy. Posit one absurdity and someone will refute it with another absurdity. Take the extreme of an argument and the response against that argument will probably be extreme. Develop an extreme science that posits an extreme view of reality and others will posit alternative extremes.
Going to the Edge
It is a very human pattern of behaviour that we tend to want to see an ultimate manifestation of something or other. If there is a volcano, it is very human to want to see into the heart of the volcano. This is a very human activity and we call it exploration. Take a concept and one wants to go as far as that concept will lead even to the edge of reason.
What may happen is that the science or reality that creates an invitation for exploration may be a trap, a total waste of time, a place that has nothing of real interest. The journey to that place, nevertheless, takes its toll on those that would journey to it and those that observe the exploration taking place and make judgements.
What is the Direction of your Science or Technology
My experience is that few people understand the notion of direction when it comes to something as complex as the abstraction we call science. If science is a field, there are areas of that field that we can explore. What science is not connected to is technology.
Technology has fields like science has, but technology is not the same as science. We can have lots and lots of science, but very little technology, or vice verse. It is a mistake to confuse technology with science.
Creation of Science and Technology have Different Agendas
Some people, like Richard Hawkins may be exploring technologies and confusing such explorations with science. Rather than being judgemental, I would just throw that out as a proposition. Its a lovely abstraction that can distinguish between different stages of a cycle of activity.
For example, Darwin's discovery was new science, but Dawkins' discovery was new technology. The difference arises because of the motivation behind the exploration. Science that is technology invention has a direction which is orchestrated in ways that science as science is not. We think of science as being basic or developmental. Basic science is one thing. Fundamental science is another.
I realize that English limits my selection of words to describe the processes, but I think my message is clear. It is quite one thing to receive a prize for new science that is basic to promoting the interests of all mankind, but quite another to receive a prize to promoting a development or technology that biases the value towards a specific interest group promoting an agenda.
Exploration may, however, bring about a major explosion of activity and interest. Richard Dawkins may discover something that is valuable to those promoting religion, or he may stimulate a response from the religious community quite unlike anything he expects. What his explorations of dangerous ideas do, however, is produce a notion that such exploration is safe for society rather than destructive.
The North West Passage
Being in Canada, I am awed by the explorations that sought the North West passage, but I am also aware of the injunctions by the then managers of the Hudson Bay Company not to invite people to undertake the exploration into the North West. There are risks for society of exploration, especially in the world of competitive ideas. The North West of Canada and the United States, Denmark, France, Russia and the Netherlands, is now being opened up in ways that environmentalists really do find scary.
The rewards of exploring the North West passage today are so enormous that we could end up in a war situation. Man has had a history of secret competitive alliances and agreements that produce absolute destruction in their wake. Is this what we want from science or is it science at all?
Its not hard to see how the technological or informational results of science are potentially more socially divisive in many more ways than religion.
Activities of exploring, such as science and invention, that create new knowledge or technology may be socially destabilizing, and in science as in economics, as any central banker knows, one should maintain 'economic' stability above all else otherwise you are like to get instability, social upheaval, irrationality and war. Change and new science is wonderful stuff if the organism that seeks it and the society that must sustain it are sufficiently mature to cope with the results.
This is of course where uncertainty begins, but again to use the central banker analogy, it is not good economic or scientific management to create instability to quickly otherwise one just gets a big confrontation and destructive change, the Hegelian process of explosive change rather than the more gradual process of evolutionary change.
So, Richard Hawkins' exploration of the frontiers of dangerous ideas promotes rationalization, we must become aware that the results are not so predictable as to lead to gradual improvement in religion or science. They might just result in explosive confrontation and a badly managed exchange of respectable opinions and well worn positions.
At the Edge
One has to wonder what being at the frontier of religion or science actually means. To some there is the idea that creationism is an activity that seeks to provide a mythology for religion, a vehicle for completing with the strengths they see in science.
As an alternative to the notion of religion as being evolutionary, it might better be described that religion is at the edge of risk taking. That seems strange, but possibly religion is a group response to being burned by exploration in technology that goes bad and the change brought about by such exploration.
Hawkins dangerous ideas really do destroy valuable and important aspects of our beautiful world until the science and technology and religious fervour are redirected towards stabilizing solutions. It's as though, the first attempts at coping with new social problems are catastrophic and society as a whole has to learn from its really bad mistakes, its monstrous errors of judgment that destroy people and the beauty in the world.
Much, but not all religion, may arise as a result of the mass trauma produced by war and the individual trauma at the realization of death and destruction. The rational exploration for solutions arises as a method of coping with overwhelming change. What emerges as a social solution in the form often of religious fervour and commitment is not rational in the long term, even though at the time it seems rational.
Religion as a Means for Groups Coping with Massive Irrationality in the Living Environment
Seen in this way, religion is a method of groups coping with trauma and the inevitability of uncontrollable destructive change, such as the slaughter of innocents whether as a consequence of destructive forces of nature or the acts of competing warlike peoples. Judaism arose in a period of extreme trauma. Christianity arose in a period of extreme trauma.
For example, consider the rise of religious fervour during the New Deal period of the 1930's in which the socially destructive forces of bad economics and lack of stability resulted in a search for comfort and solutions in the immediate. For some groups, there was no time for considered solutions. In the USA, while Harvard academics went crazy for the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, they ignored the more relevant but long term science of their own local professor Joseph Schumpeter in favour of short term technology to find an immediate solution.
The Economics of Religion and Science Stimulated in Periods of Trauma
Both Keynes and Schumpeter realized that an ineffective banking system was at the heart of the economic dilemmas that faced all societies at the time. Peace required a new technology. The problem was that the new technology was not put in place soon enough and the world sank into war and the Jews were trapped within a monstrous period of irrational so called 'problem' solving.
In Canada, Major Douglas, a deeply religious engineer in Alberta, came up with a new religious economics and the idea of the A plus B theorem. Douglas's science was flawed but the direction of his technology was correct. Why should there be poverty in the midst of plenty. His society grappled with the destructive forces of starvation in a time when it was obviously unnecessary.
Keynes technology for the short term was better than that of Major Douglas, but both were going in the same direction, and if Alberta had been a country, Douglas's ideas might have worked better and longer. Schumpeter's science explained what the real underlying problem was while Keynes methods provided a means to grapple with the dynamics in a meaningful way.
In the end, Schumpeter provided the real long term science, but Keynes provided the immediate and necessary technology. Economists lost sight of the Schumpeterian vision of the creative destructive forces built into capitalism because of new technology and went for the religion of absolute truth as presented by John Maynard Keynes, the rationalist speculator.
Alternatively, consider the strength of the rise of Nazism after the great inflation in Germany. The religious fervour of Nazism is easily explained as a consequence of trauma as people sought irrational solutions to what seemed an irrational situation. Nazism as a religious response is not so easily digested unless one considers that religion is often a result of traumatic experience. It was not that Jewish people were the source of the trauma, but that people incorrectly thought that they were.
The real problem was the bad economics of the peace settlement of the first World War. Had France, at the end of World War one, not demanded that Germany pay for the war destruction and had the world reconstructed Germany and France into thriving economies, then the second war may not have happened nor would the Jewish people have suffered as much as they did. Isreal would probably never have been created and the mess in the middle east that we see now would probably not have been initiated. What is the Arab-Isreali war but a flawed solution to an old problem that was the result of a flawed solution to an earlier older problem? The science of peace has been terribly exploratory and the technology employed by France to create peace at the end of World War One was seriously flawed, so flawed that it destroyed much of the world as a result. Its both the science, the technology and the religion that are flawed. When and where will this madness end!
What Context for Religion and Science
Placing religion and science within a social context is not easy, but it is necessary for understanding. Religion is not so much an evolutionary process as a reasoned and rational response to trauma. Reason and religion have common social and natural roots and are not all that different in consequence.