IMMOVABLE NATURAL FAILURE
MEETS IRRESISTIBLE UNNATURAL SUCCESSTo people in the West, the most familiar version of the question
"How can people believe?" is: "How can people believe in supernat-
ural agents, when there is science around?" After going through
lengthy descriptions of the mental processes involved in the acquisi-
tion and representation of religious concepts, we know that it is
rather misleading to talk about religion as a real object in the world.
It is not a very good starting point to oppose, say, religion to science,
[320] or indeed religion to anything else, because it is by no means clear
that there is such a thing as "religion" in the abstract. There are many
mental representations entertained by people, many acts of communi-
cation that make them more or less plausible, many inferences pro-
duced in many contexts.
For the same reason, it is very misleading to talk about science as if
that were a real object in the world. Science too is a cultural thing, that
is, a domain of mental representations that happen to be entertained
by a number of human minds. There is no science as such but rather a
large set of people with particular activities, a particular database that
is stored in a particular literature, and a particular way of adding to or
modifying that database. Which of these are we talking about when
we consider "science versus religion"?
Consider the database. The religion-versus-science debate took a
special turn in the West because of the existence not only of doctrinal
religion but of a monopolistic doctrinal religion that made the crucial
mistake of meddling in empirical statements of fact, providing us with
a long list of particularly precise, official and officially compelling
statements about the cosmos and biology, supposedly guaranteed by
Revelation, that we now know to be false. In every instance where the
Church has tried to offer its own description of what happens in the
worldandthere was some scientific alternative on the very same topic,
the latter has proved better. Every battle has been lost and conclu-
sively so. This is of course inconvenient. Obviously, a few people man-
age blithely to ignore what happened and to live in a fantasy world
where Biblical sources are a good instrument of geological knowledge
and paleobiology. But this requires a lot of effort. Most religious peo-
ple in the West prefer the escape clause—that religion is indeed a spe-
cial domain that addresses questions no science could ever answer.
This is often the foundation of some decidedly woolly pop theology to
RELIGION EXPLAINED