Science and religion

27 6 2010

I've been revising poems out of their little skins, and have just written a nice knotty bit of theology about how much we can hate one another, as the people who executed Jesus or rather caused his execution hated him: he forgave them and died to take away their sin but what a terrible way to go! No wonder his sweat was like boiling drops of blood in Gethsemane, knowing what he had to look forwards to and praying to let this cup pass. Atheist or Christian, you have to be compelled by the human drama of the passion though it's an uncomfortable thing to contemplate, the Nazis crucified at least one priest and who knows what goes on in some dictatorships so the passion can't be dismissed as historical in some far off time when people hated and killed each other, look at Stalin's chilling comment, one murder is dreadful, 27 million murders are just a statistic. Pol Pot seemed to have the same ideas and recently the tidal wave that devastated Burma dropped out of the News when the regime in power sternly repelled offers of international aid, after that came a blank, a black out of information but people must have suffered and died. In this context the idea that surged beneath the surface in eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall came down is cheering: one joke is a tiny revolution. Long may people all over the world dare to crack jokes about their governing powers like the one about secret policemen, why do they go round in threes? One can read, one can write and the third keeps a sharp eye on the two intellectuals!

Madness is caused by evil, cruelty and hatred, oh I know there's genetic evidence linking psychosis to a certain genetic makeup but that's like saying it's human nature, genetic composition comes linked to a person in his or her own right with relationships, a history and set of personal circumstances. Madness isn't meaningless nor does it descend out of a clear blue sky quite randomly, something has to trigger the flux of dopamine and that is sharp distress of some sort, show me someone diagnosed with a psychotic illness and I'll bet money there's a deeply unhappy person there made so by cruelty and hatred from other people. Madness has a function, it shows it does matter if we're horrid to one another this is not an amoral world, our words and deeds are deeply significant and evil ones drive people mad. If you like it is a spiritual barometer registering the evil people do, as unhappiness is, we all have the capacity to be miserably unhappy given certain circumstances so that must be in our genetic makeup as well, see what I mean that catch all explanation is unhelpful and no explanation at all. It's like the bit in CS Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Eustace says in our world a star is a blazing cloud of gas. He is told no, that's what a star is made of not what it is.

Relying on a basic scientific "explanation" to the disregard of everything else would be like telling someone "Your genetic composition causes your person to trigger in me a mating instinct" instead of saying "I love you". I know which would be more likely to get me into bed, science is bloody good stuff for cause and effect and some intriguingly intricate explanations of the natural world, long live science but not to the exclusion of religion, literature and all our feelings. After all, having the explanation of the visible spectrum is fascinating but it doesn't describe the beauty of a rainbow, science enhances the beauty of the planet with understanding of the various lives and functions involved, science can't describe the effect of springtime, all that lovely greenness and buds opening from no human cause. And pretty silly we'd look if springtime failed, to understand it should be to cherish it with humility and gratitude, not to think we own it and it's come about exclusively for our benefit. Religion is blind without science, as Einstein remarked, adding that science would be lame without religion.

When I was mad the psychotherapists I saw told me I'd be cured if I admitted to hating my mother. Now that is bad science and one eyed science, for starters my Dad's behaviour to my dying mother had driven me mad and though my Mum was a tough character to be trusted with the tender care of three daughters she didn't want, I wanted to understand her better and find resolution, not chuck all the blame on her stupidly and misogynistically. I put up resistance to this idea and they started trying to trick me into slagging off my Mum, were they being bad mothers was that why I was angry? Etc etc. At that point I shut up, they weren't listening and were trying to twist my words, which chimed with rather a lot of childhood experience I wanted to understand better, not revert to like a cross two year old and scream and kick on the floor. Reading Charlotte Bronte's Shirley has helped me understand my Mum better, she was very like Mrs Yorke and like the character couldn't help her nature, there are some wonderful portraits from real life in the minor characters in Shirley, I'll leave you with a strong recommendation to get hold of a copy and read it!