Mind's Eye Science and religion in modernity

One thing I found impossible to escape as an academic is that a small
amount of initial research always turns up a vast literature that can
only really be used to define a problematic rather than direct
rational action. As a young man I imagined science could answer a lot
of the issues that prevent us forming a modern culture. My ideas were
crude and more reading and better teaching would have shown me most
attempts at this had already failed. The story, as I see it, starts
in ancient Greek philosophy and its disdain for public opinion or
doxa. The Greek had also realised contradictory argument can be made
on more or less anything and produced much piss-witter on the virtuous
individual produced though education in virtue ethics. This 'virtue'
was produced within a slave economy they did not seek to change. Even
Locke managed to justify slavery if the people were taken in the
course of a just war.
Francis Bacon produced a list of Idols that a scientific world-view
needed to avoid. I say 'list', but in fact eleven of them are dotted
about his work, written in suck-up prose to the authorities of the
day. Leibniz wanted to produce a language (of Reason) in which social
problems could be worked out as we might do sums. Various
sociological positivisms attempted to define scientific method and
apply that to social problems.

These days I think the turn we need is against control-freakery and
ecocide dressed-up as entertainment and economics. Perhaps unusually
for a scientist I would like to see religion play a wider role in
social change, but the start here would involve admissions of the
appalling history of organised religion as a control fraud of empire.
The Xtianity of Rome and crusades is no more acceptable than the weird
tale of the Koran in which the religion is in strange relation with
history, geography and time. Our arguments for 'god' or a way of
living do not have to be based on myths of people meeting the deity or
communing with him/her/it through talking salamanders or on the path
second left after the burning bush. We need something more modern and
informed, without sexism, 'chosen people' and ludicrous myths about
prophets.

We have no idea why we cling to this cosmic rock. The science that
may allow us to leave and live among the stars and prepare for
weather catastrophe (man-made or otherwise) is the same that has given
us weapons of mass destruction. We need universal values against
totalitarianism to allow us to focus our lives in more sensible
spiritualism than we have managed so far. Thinking of Bill's UFO
experience I watched Promethius (the Alien prequel). A disappointing
film even in HD, it does put forward the notion we may have been made
by other beings and concludes (after we routinely kill them by ramming
their spaceship) with the odd actress playing the main role and the
head of an android setting off to find who made the aliens. This is
only slightly more sensible than a world of talking snakes and I read
better stuff in comics as a kid.

Slave ants pursue rebellion against their masters with no hope of
saving their own lives. There is even an 'arms race' in the co-
determination of evolution. Religion is as much an evolutionary
product as science. I can point to crude versions of religion amongst
chimps and such matters as insect consensus and science. Memory is
explainable in evolutionary economics in terms of it role in future
prediction. With caution on the matter of 'on mice and men', I would
suggest what usefully separates science and pseudo-science are rules
and values that make it difficult to lie. There is no method. And
down the line we don't want a world in which only scientists know
enough to tell other people what to do. Or a set of priests of
mullahs.

Anyone any thoughts?

--