Religion! Science! Go to Your Rooms!

So, getting back to the whole "How can we integrate spiritual thinking into a culture whose worldview has become almost 100 percent empirical, and what exactly are those justifiably grouchy atheists missing when they want to chuck the whole enterprise of self-transcendence over the side?" question, about which I never really stop obsessing... I think I may have stumbled onto an important distinction between science, on the one hand, and less rigorously causal ways of looking at the world, like art and religion.

Here it is; see if you think it's workable: the nature of science is to narrow possibilities, so that we can more accurately predict what will happen next or determine why something happened in the past. Art and religion perform the opposite role from this — they're meant to expand the range of possibilities available to the heart and the imagination.

I don't know if someone else has pointed out this difference before, but it strikes me as a potentially very useful partial definition of each field. Because if we can keep this distinction in mind, we might be able to see when one way of thinking is straying too far into what should properly be the realm of another, and thereby prevent things from getting all messed up in terrible ways. For instance, religion notoriously makes claims about the origins of things, which claims end up disagreeing with science. It should stop doing that, because that's not its job. Or at least, it should admit that its origin stories are to be taken as fictional: there only to open our minds to possibilities that are not allowed by science.

Telling us what we should and shouldn't do, at least in concrete terms, is also something it should stop doing. Again, this is a way of narrowing possibility, rather than broadening it. Having us look inside ourselves at our motives, imagine what might be going on in other people's minds, or try to experience everything we perceive in some different way — those kinds of things are all fine and exactly what the point of religion (and partially of art) should be. But rules such as the ten commandments will have to go if we accept this distinction as prescriptively valid.

On the other hand, science can definitely overstep its bounds too. For instance, when people put their faith in the progress of technology as the way for the human species to realize its potential, that's probably not a very good idea. Technology does, granted, open up possibilities that were previously unseen, but it does so only in combination with imagination. If we start allowing technology's evolution to usurp the need for human imagination, as we seem to have been doing for a few decades now, we're in big trouble. Think The Matrix/Terminator scenarios, assuming we don't destroy our own habitat before creating artificial intelligence.

A broader mistake that science can make, and I would accuse Richard Dawkins and his disciples of this one, is to think that it has the answers to all the interesting questions humans can meaningfully ask. To put it negatively, the position is that if your question is not in principle answerable by verifiable, objective observation, then it turns out to be meaningless. It's the kind of smug, positivist attitude that convinces people who have no interest in science that the whole field is bad news. But luckily, it's just not valid.

Science is great at answering questions that demand a narrowing of options: What is the principle cause of global warming? (Twentieth century human culture.) What existed before the Big Bang? (Nothing.) Does God exist as some kind of being or measurable force? (No.)

But there are lots of other kinds of questions that science has nothing useful to say about: How can I better empathize with my neighbour? What is the nature of love? What does existence feel like if time is seen as an illusion? These kinds of questions require answers like, "Observe your own thought process without judgment," "Say this prayer with meaning," or "Listen to this piece of music." And it needs to be OK to only be able to give answers like that — otherwise, we miss out on too big and important an area of possible human experience.