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Many people these days are looking for a path of reconciliation between a scientific worldview and a religious worldview. Some say it can’t exist. I would like to propose a plausible method for finding this path.

If we really want to find that path, we must be willing to explore the ways that are open to travel, and accept that some ways are blocked.

Science is intended as a literal description of nature. If we assume Religion is also intended as a literal description of nature then we are blocked, because, in literal terms, the two sources are often contradictory.

If we assume Religion is intended as a figurative description, the path is now open for further exploration, so let’s explore.

The objection I hear most often, to a metaphorical interpretation of Religion, is that we can then make the words mean anything we want, and so, are unmoored from accountability.

While this is true as far as it goes, it doesn’t go so far as to completely block our path, but only to raise the question of whether it follows that since we could make it say anything, no correct interpretation could possibly exist. And I don’t see that it does. It only requires that we find a method better than guessing for determining which of the possible interpretations is most likely correct.

If we start with the symbolic and try to guess what it means, we could drift forever in a sea of random opinion and motivated bias.

If, on the other hand, we start with our confident mooring in science and look for what kinds of metaphors the facts might reasonably inspire, and then see if there are any matching patterns in the world of Religion… we might find some surprising correlations.

EXAMPLE: Garden of Eden

Start with symbol:
Two humans, made from scratch by an all-powerful creator God and placed in a perfect garden where their dietary needs were automatically met, though they were cautioned not to eat from a tree associated with knowledge, but which temptation they were unable to resist, resulting in their expulsion from the provisioned garden to a life where they had to work for their food, and seek redemption.

Your guess is as good as mine.

Start with science:
A large-brained Hominid whose heritable instincts were developed during millions of years of adaptation to its natural environment, uses its outsized cognitive capabilities to start experimenting with agriculture, which radically and more rapidly altered the environment to which it had been adapted than its biology could now timely adapt, leaving it dangerously conflicted and in need of modifying certain of its instinctual impulses that were now problematic in the new physical, social, and economic environment.

See any resemblance?

Thou shalt not transgress the newly revealed terms and conditions of orderly societal participation if thine intent be to avoid the eternal damnation of species extinction, as befell thine Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins. Thus sayeth the Unavoidable Reality.

Why would a pre-literate, pre-scientific, intelligent, symbol-making ape NOT have constructed easily remembered, orally transmittable, metaphorical narratives that told the story of this existential dilemma, and laid out the cultural rules for avoiding the hazards of evolutionary mismatch in this otherwise fitness-enhancing new environment? And with our currently escalating rate of advancement of environment-altering technology, why would we not be in greater, rather than lesser, need of a robust behavior modification program that a majority of us could remember, believe, and respect, regardless of whether it is expressed in literal or figurative language?

I have no way to prove that this interpretation is THE. ONLY. CORRECT. one. But can we acknowledge that this approach demonstrates at least a plausible allegorical telling of a TRUE story that leaves the path of reconciliation between science and religion unobstructed by reason?

I often hear it said that religion is about belief and science is about knowledge.

To my thinking, the reverse of that seems to be a more useful paradigm.

Scientists are the first to tell us not to get too attached to any scientific idea, because those ideas are always changing as new data come in. And that’s exactly as it should be.

How can we call something “knowledge” when it is forever subject to change? Is the “knowledge” that we “knew” fifty years ago which has now been superseded by new discoveries still “knowledge”? Was it ever? Is the new information now knowledge? Will it be fifty years from now?

Was the Recapitulation Theory – “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” – ever really knowledge when it was considered “science” in the 19th century? Did it just stop being knowledge when it was superseded by better evolutionary biology in the 20th century? Can we be certain the better knowledge won’t be superseded yet again in the 21st century?

How about Scientific Racism? Was it really ever “knowledge”?
It certainly was belief at one time.

In order to function in life we need to believe something. I can think of no better source for our beliefs than current, well-established science. And the minute the science changes, we would do well to let our beliefs follow – always keeping in mind that they are just the best beliefs we have.

So can we ever really “know” anything?

Certainly!

We know full well when we are suffering.

We know beyond doubt when we are filled with joy.

We know when we are fearful or angry.

We know when we are tired or hungry, and who is qualified to dispute it?

We can know love.

Knowledge of feelings, while susceptible, as anything, to misinterpretation, is capable of being apprehended with reliable certainty. When I have a kidney stone, I trust science to tell me what to believe about how it came to be or what I should do about it, but I am the world’s foremost authority on how it makes me feel.

The feeling of satisfaction from a job well done, or from a charitable act, is a truth that can never be replaced by any new theory.

And this realm of feelings falls squarely in the domain of religion. It was religion’s job, long before science was invented, to help us deal with our sufferings, and to reconnect us to our “spiritual” equilibrium, to our human social order, and to our changing world.

We may never “know” if the Big Bang is the final word on how the universe began, though it can serve, for now, as a useful belief. But human beings usually know whether they have found deep contentment in life.
And their quest for it is the stuff religions have always been made of.

Until you have seen clearly with your own eyes the principle that unites all of the world’s religions in perfect harmony, you have not seen the central principle of any one of them.

The science story is not a suitable religion story unto itself.

Science’s claim to usefulness is its capacity for relative accuracy; not completeness. But our need for narrative is one that prioritizes completeness over objective accuracy. Half a narrative is no narrative at all.

Yes, our narrative should accommodate science at every turn… as far as science goes. But a proper, functional, narrative can’t wait for details that may come next century. It has an obligation to project the most scientifically plausible placeholders until they can be dependably verified or improved upon.

This is the only legitimate difference I can see between an ideal science and an ideal religion. One provides accuracy; the other, completeness. It should go without saying that the religion story is not a suitable science story unto itself.

“Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.”
– Jordan B. Peterson, Twelve Rules For Life, p. 107

“We blew the metaphysical foundations out from underneath our culture, and we need to get them back.”
13:30

“There’s always a tension in religions between the dogmatic element and the spiritual element. And conservatives, technically speaking, tend to marshal themselves on the sides of the more rule-oriented and dogmatic elements of the religion, and liberals, roughly speaking, tend to marshal themselves more on the spiritual side. … The dogma is necessary because it conserves the structure, but the spiritual aspect is necessary because it updates the structure.”
19:45

Another thing I’ve noticed, which reinforces my suspicion that buoyancy is the spiritual currency, is a pattern in my dreams. They seem to be aimed at healing buoyancy leaks. An odd dream I had last night seemed at first to be difficult to decipher, and I was reading all the wrong “messages” into it, until I happened to notice that it was an exact retelling of an event that had happened earlier that day, when viewed from the perspective of emotional buoyancy injury. All the characters were played by different people, and the props were different items – such that I might never have consciously related the event with the dream – but the buoyancy injury was of the exact same type, delivered in the exact same way, with the exact same emotional issues at play. The internal playwright had taken the buoyancy threats and transposed them to another setting, with different players and props, all cleverly employed to examine the issues in a fresh light.

“It is important to know how old you are in spiritual development, where you are on this path. The function of initiations is to commit one’s whole psychological pitch to the requirements of a particular stage in life. The big initiation is when one has to leave the psychology of childhood behind: the death of the infantile ego, which is dependent and obedient, and the birth of the self-reliant adult participating in the society.”

– Joseph Campbell
A Joseph Campbell Companion, p. 84

Mythology was never intended to be taken literally.
Most common problems between human beings can be boiled down to semantics problems – a sickness of words. A poor conveyance of truth.
There’s a reason why we hold in such high esteem the reliability of a man to be “good as his word”. Our lives and safety can depend on it. So we symbolize our reverence for this character ideal by anthropomorphizing it – we turn the word into a person, so we can create memorable stories using his ideal, if fictitious, behavior as a role model.
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

Here’s the deal:

Humans need to acknowledge God.

The point is not whether you envision God as a literal, sentient, all-powerful, supreme being, or a metaphorical personification of our highest values, humans are designed with a god-space in our mental machinery.

But, the more literally you take the god-figure, the more literally you are obliged to live “by the book.” Genuine belief is not just a matter of self-proclamation, it is known by its demonstration. Belief claimed and not demonstrated is self-deception at best.

People whose God is metaphorical are free to live without guilt, shame, fear, and envy, if they’re willing to do the work, and aware enough to realize the Universe is much more powerful than they are. It created them. It will eventually take their life back from them. It is bigger and more complex than we can understand. It is eternal. It provides for our basic needs, but it requires that we live within the laws of what we have named physics. Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly where to draw the line between metaphor and literalism. Reality is reality, no matter how we envision it, measure it, or describe it.

My failure to recognize my relative smallness in the greater scheme of things is perhaps the greatest hazard I face in this life, for my own sake as well as that of those whose lives I affect. Something besides myself needs to be named as the greatest power. I can conceive of, and name that entity any way that suits my temperament. But I need a conceptual placeholder, at minimum, to represent the reality of that relationship, however described.

It’s not practical, or indeed even possible, for an individual to accurately declare “how things are”. The nature of Nature is just too immense. So if I am to attempt a disciplined life, I must arrive at some reasonable compromise between my best assessment of “how things are” in greater reality, and “what works” in the pursuit of my desired outcome.

So if, in the construction of a worldview, we think we have really captured “how things are”, we are flirting with self-deception. But if, in an effort to avoid that deception, we abandon the chore of refining our worldview altogether, we are flirting with irresponsibility. So we are left with the unenviable task of setting some artificial, if not perhaps totally arbitrary, constraints on our “practical reality”.

This is in no way any kind of license to overthrow or ignore aspects of “objective reality” that have proven to withstand the scrutiny of long-form science. To the contrary, these hard-won nuggets of gold should comprise the skeletal tissue of any reliable worldview. But realistically, these bones will always be a minority of the overall volume of “reality” in which our lives must play out. The unknowns will always outweigh the knowns, but we are called to live a full life, not merely a frame of a life, so a certain amount of judicious creativity may be unavoidable.

For purposes of filling in the gaps, the most useful operating system will not only resist the temptation to weave the soft tissue from comfort-oriented raw materials, but will also volunteer for the creative constraints which, under experimentation, prove to generate the desired result.

Rejection of irrational or destructive self-denial need not assume an all-or-nothing attitude toward self-regulation in general. If I assume that, in every location as yet uninhabited by science, I am God, then I am clearly setting myself up for some rude awakenings. But at least equally unfortunate would be to assume that, therefore, I am no part of God, and then not even try.

A healthy worldview construction plan needs the deepest practical familiarity with well-established scientific thinking (at least where it bears on the outcome of living one’s life) without fanciful embellishment, but not without science-informed conjectural projections into the unclaimed territory.

Realistic (likely to produce desired results) projection respects the laws of limitation, just as the known material world does. The job of guessing these limits accurately is more of an art than a science, but an indispensable art, and arguably, the greater part of assembling a useful map.