From RALPH ESTLING
Sue Birchmore tries personfully to reconcile science with religion (Forum,
3 March), but what she is really doing is using the word ‘religion’ as if
it were a synonym for ‘ethics’. Many have made this same epic confusion.
Religions certainly do contain within themselves ethical systems but
religion isn’t ethics, any more than I am my gall bladder. Atheists and
nonreligious systems possess codes of behaviour; science certainly does,
though that is not to say that all or even most scientists regularly obey
them with any greater fidelity than most Christians obey the dictates of
Christ or Moslems those of Mohammed.
What distinguishes religion from ethics is supernaturalism, the (as
yet uproven) belief that there exists in or ‘beyond’ the Universe a spiritual
essence capable of being personified, as God or Nature or Life Force or
Teleology or Entelechy or the Anthropic Principle – I once made a list of
them and gave up at number 23 – which (or Who) possesses a keen, if inexplicable,
interest in the welfare of human beings, so much so that it (or He) created
and maintains the physical Universe with that one thought in mind: how will
it affect human contentment? Defined in this way, a religious – as distinct
from an ethical – outlook, takes on a somewhat different aura, and a real
scientist, as distinct from an unreal one, cannot embrace its basic tenet,
no, not even on Sundays, without also embracing the spiritually and intellectually
invidious qualities of double-think that George Orwell warned us of, where
we are deeply committed to believing two diametrically opposed and mutually
contradicting systems of thought.
I have no doubt that Birchmore can point to numerous scientists who
do exactly that, and if she cannot, or is too polite, I certainly can. But
this does not alter the fact that an honest scientist, which is to say,
one more interested in pursuing aspects of reality than in pleasing or consoling
himself or herself, would engage in such frivolous insincerity, to use Russell’s
phrase, and still call himself or herself a scientist.
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‘Is it possible,’ Birchmore asks, ‘to be simultaneously a good scientist
and a religious believer?’ No, if by ‘good’ she means honest, and if by
‘religious believer’ she means supernaturalist. Is it possible to be simultaneously
a good scientist and a holder of a personal moral code, a system of ethical
beliefs? I do not see how it can be otherwise.
Ralph Estling
Ilminster, Somerset
