First, I would like to dedicate this post to Jordan Peterson. He is an important writer, thinker and intellect of our time who can cover everything from physics, evolution, psychology, morality to religion in a single narrative. He seems to have a wide and deep understanding of all the subjects he takes covers.
I had this notion that I don’t need any belief system in order to act morally and my moral values are rooted in rationality and scientific thinking. It turns out that my moral values aren't rooted in rationality. I could provide rational arguments to some of my moral principles but even they fail after some level of questioning.
In this post I have tried to capture some of my views on science and religion after this transformation. I have not provided detailed explanation for each of the points I have put forth. I encourage the readers to ponder over the points before dismissing it as meaningless or confusing.
Religion served two purposes to human: one is to explain the world around him and another is to provide the moral values he should be holding in order to survive better. Science only replaced the former but not the later. In the religious structure, these two aspects, the worldview and morality are intermingled and inseparable. If we remove one the other will collapse. When human reached the scientific thinking and took the path to empirical wisdom, he saw religion as an inconsistent and inadequate explanation of the world around him. To him the religion appeared like a primitive form of science that has to be abandoned immediately in order to make progress. What he missed out is the other aspect of the religion that he has not found a replacement for. To understand this better we have to look back into our evolutionary past and the purpose the region served.
Modern man often thinks that the rational thinking is his only tool for survival. What he failed to recognize is that his species and its predecessors not only have survived for a very long time without the help of rational thinking but they also laid the biological and behavioral foundation for the modern society.
Animals survive using the knowledge and wisdom they carry in their biology that is inherited through genetics. Nest building, migrating, forming social structure are some of the prominent examples of this knowledge. If we decode this stored knowledge in animals, it will not be in the form of rational thinking. It is fair to assume that the knowledge is stored in some kind of structural form that the animals acts out through their behavioral pattern.
On the other hand, human can carry and transmit the knowledge not just through biology but also through his individual and collective memory and external symbols. This is the reason why human make tremendous progress across each generation compared to other animals. For a new knowledge to emerge in an animal, it takes thousands of generations of mutation and natural selection. In human, a new knowledge encountered by one individual is transmitted to the millions around him within his generation and carried over to the generations to come. This is the fundamental difference that sets our species apart from all other animals. Human have found a very powerful tool to carry out this process, namely the science. What science focuses on is the objective realities of the world. It is not that the objective reality is the only way to interpret the world but it is the way to collaborate with millions of people and make systematic progress.
Human also carry another important type of knowledge which helps his survival in a social setup. This knowledge is based not on the objective facts but on the subjective values and meanings of the world around him. These are the moral values that defines his behaviors towards his fellow human beings. Like his scientific knowledge, these moral knowledge is also the result of long and hard process of trial and natural selection.
Though many moral values of our species are stored in our biology, we also had to carry them in culture. As explained earlier, the culturally stored knowledge progresses at a much faster rate than the their biological counterpart. The culturally carried knowledge enhances and compliments our the genetically carried knowledge. To give an analogy, the wernick’s area is the part of our brain that is specialised in languages processing. This capacity of our brain is almost useless if we did not get exposed to a worldly language. Even a primitive or incomplete language is useful in exercising and enhancing our language processing ability.
When human invented language, he started formulating his long carried abstract knowledge into descriptive form. These descriptions became the doctrines of the earliest religions. When multiple human groups came together, their religious doctrines collided and transformed to form modern religions. These modern religions helped in uniting large groups of his species to form bigger and better social structures. This large scale collaboration along with the scientific methods enabled him to make exponential progress that led him to the eventual conquest of the material world.
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