Religion and Science - a debate

(Update - Smitha replied)
Background
I recently wrote a blog on Science Education in India. In that blog I mentioned that rationalist movements are not effective and that their mission is a failure.
In comments, one of my frequent commenters, Smitha, challenged this statement. He also pointed out (read his comments here) that rationalist movements have precedent and that faith needs to be challenged as an obstacle to progress.
I have no big problems with faith, although I do not believe in God. I am an atheist, but I do not consider religion a threat. Since I wanted to explain my point of view to Smitha and vice versa, this blog post is being written. The idea is that Smitha's comments to this blog will be promoted to the main post as an update so that we can carry a civil debate. Let us see how far it goes. We are both busy people and may not update frequently. But please check back this post from time to time if you are interested.

The Case against Religion
Let me start with this first - I do understand that a set of humans at this juncture have a healthy hatred of religion. Starting with practices such as Sati, child marriage, female circumcision, racism, casteism, the horrors of religious wars such as the crusades, burning witches at stakes, stoning for adultery and so on; to the current global tinderbox of non-state-terrorism to state-terrorism there are many evils of society that have been instigated, sustained and sanctioned by religion.
Even at this present time we have seen the horrors of 500 year old grudges held by Hindu fundamentalists; the End Times driven evangelical fervor of Christian fundamentalists that drives American violence against West Asia; the ethnic hatred perpetuated by the Buddhists of Sri Lanka; the Caliphate dreaming Al-Qaeda and Taliban's reign of Terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan and several other conflicts around the world based on religion. New cults spring up all the time - such as the LRA in Uganda; Wahaabism in Arabia or the several Kalki avatar based cults of South India.
It is tempting to see these obvious effects of religion and then come to a conclusion that the concept of religion (broadly defined as a belief in a Supreme God) needs to be eliminated from Human society. That, in the future, we will LEARN about religion at schools, just as we will learn about untouchability or casteism - as a thing of past.
The proponents of this non-religious future point to increasing trends of population in developed countries to be non-religious. This future, they insist, is attainable using the following methods:
1. Education that emphasizes rationalism
2. An effort to eliminate religion from the public sphere
3. A constant effort to scrutinise human actions through rationalism

So where do I stand on these?
(Throughout this essay I will use the male term God to denote a supreme being, purely for convenience. I understand it may as well be a Goddess, if she exists)

My Views of Religion
Before I begin, I want to point out three broad trends in my arguments:
1. I have a belief in the universal declaration of human rights, which guarantees practise of religion.
2. I do not like judging the actions of humans who cause no harm to others through their private lives.
3. When I talk about science and scientists I include the soft (inexact, humanity-based) sciences such as psychology and sociology. In fact, I think they have more bearing on this debate than the exact sciences.

Thus, even though I have a pretty good knowledge of and fascination for science, I do NOT think that science and religion are two opposing poles from which one needs to choose for living a happy life.

The Judgements of Rationalists
The biggest mistake that religious people make, when judging atheists is this: they think establishing a moral compass (to know right from wrong) is impossible for people who do not believe in a God.
It is absolutely possible to know right from wrong just by being self-aware. You do not have to believe in God to know right from wrong.

By the same token, rationalists believe that it is not possible to be interested in Science or be a professional without a disbelief in God. That is, you have to reject religion in your PRIVATE life to be a doctor in your public life.
I think this is a completely false item of faith among rationalists. They are making the same mistake that religious people do - of judging people's private lives to be a guide to their public efficiency.
Let me explain why this is false:
a. There have been innumerable scientists who have been religious in their private lives. That does not prove anything deductively, but it does call into question the rationalist basis.
b. The truth is, the human conscious mind can perfectly live with contradicting beliefs. We do it all the time in relationships. It is possible for a person who reads the Bible or Quran or Gita daily to ignore their literal meanings and treat it merely as a vehicle for some peace of mind. That same person can step into their office and be a doctor who knows the germ theory of disease. It happens all the time in daily lives - in India most people pray at roadside temples and then go to work and fulfill their social and professional roles quite successfully.
Now, I am NOT saying that religion is essential for society. But at the stage in which we are, people can manage the dissonance effectively.

It is only when religion gets oppressive and authoritarian and provokes a LITERAL interpretation of scriptures that you have a problem. That is best managed by compromises - by a good education and self-awareness, I believe, it is possible to minimise such effects.
So, I believe, frankly, that rationalists have NO right to judge other human beings who cause no harm to society.

A Life of Illusion
One debater quoted Carl Sagan to me on this. Sagan said a life of reason should be preferred over one of illusion (I don't remember the exact quote).
Now, I think Sagan was wrong. He was obviously speaking from a exact scientific perspective. Psychologically speaking all of us have basic illusions through which we observe the external world. One simple illusion is, of course, the illusion of immortality.

The Yaksha asks Yudhishtira what is the greatest wonder in this world. Yudhishtira replied, "The greatest wonder is that every human sees others dying before him, all around him. And yet carries on living as if he is immortal".

We all have it. Going by the exact sciences, our very purpose is only to pass on our DNA. Yet humans strive to reach immortality by works of imagination and creativity. Everyone tries to find meaning in their lives. That is the whole role of philosophy.
Thus, an illusion-filled private life is fine - as long as you don't act like Chandramukhi.

The Rationalist Ideal
This is why I believe superstition and myths and rituals have their place in human life. The rationalist ideal is that of a life in which every action is examined for rationality. I am an atheist but I don't carry around this belief in rationality in all actions. There are many, many sources of irrationality other than religious belief.
For example, take a marriage ritual. Remember the premier rationalist movement of DK in Tamil Nadu pushed for a non-ritualistic marriage. In the end such marriages became rituals themselves, with some even tying the Thali. The point is, many of these rituals are engaged in as a duty or as fun. They are a communal activity and have deep psychological implications for a social member. American presidential inaugurations have rituals, for God's sake.
I am not arguing (as religious people do) that rituals need a rational meaning - such as a meaning for the tying of Thali. If there is a conscious meaning it is not a ritual. Human beings seem to form conventions and some kind of social acts in sequence as rituals from time immemorial. A goal to eliminate these (which cause no harm to anyone) is a goal born out of passing judgement on other people's lives.
This is why I have no problem participating in a ritual. In fact, even religious people do not participate in rituals out of a deep conviction for "meaning" or blessings or whatever. They do it automatically.
Let me put it this way - irrational rituals have as much meaning as life itself has meaning.

Religion and State
The word secularism in India has been corrupted thanks to the BJP's pushing of their brand word "pseudo-secularism". I believe religion has no role in public policy. But it gets more subtle than that.
France recently banned headscarves in schools. They also banned crucifixes and any religious symbol, but it immediately caused a problem. It is obvious to me, as an Indian, where the problem would be. For example, for a foreigner, the Sikh turban is a religious symbol. To me it seems a matter of cultural identity. This is more so in a foreign country, a colonial country like France, with deep-seated racism. It is no wonder to me that people see the ban as an assault on their identity.
The issues of identity goes very deep into our psyche. In movies we see characters spouting lines such as "I am Indian first, then a Tamil, then a Hindu" and so on. It is not as simple as that. The world has not gone through an ideal development phase that enables seeing ourselves just as humans. In fact, I suspect it is impossible for us to NOT recognize racial, regional, linguistic, religious and cultural identities - such is the diversity in this planet. Instead of attempting to fight identity, it would help if we managed such issues by recognizing the rights of minorities separately.
This is why I pointed out that sociology is at odds with the rational movements. While the rational movements attack frontally any role of what THEY SEE as religion, religion itself is not, simply, religion. The practice of untouchability, for example, has "religious" sanction. But it is likely that the sanction was AFTER the practice was widespread - I doubt if Manu Smriti INVENTED caste. Similarly what we call Islamic terrorism, is seen as a knee-jerk response to the forces of globalization, by sociologists.
I am NOT saying that religion is all good - mind you. I think it enables authoritarianism - deference to a master authority no matter what. It enables a literal interpretation of its scriptures.
But there are several aspects of religion and it is possible to regulate some while understanding and appreciating others.

Spiritualism
One such aspect is the ability of religion to trigger an exaltation in the human spirit. I am not saying that only religion can do it. But there are a lot of creative people who are also religious - particularly in Indian music and art. This trend is also there in Arabic, Persian, and almost every regional art. How can we pass judgement on religious people, while at the same time wondering at the poetry of Andaal or the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan? The mystical and spiritual strands of religion have enriched many lives and helped them find their own meaning.

In conclusion, I think rationalists have swung to the opposite pendulum from religion. Their faults of judgement are similar to those of religious people. Both of them seek an utopia instead of trying to make sense of where we are at this stage. Both of them are extremist in their views and selectively apply knowledge.

Smitha, your turn.

Update: Smitha's reply
Smitha says in comments:

I tried to post the rebuttal here. But it wont allow more than 4096 chars at a time. So I'm posting it in my blog instead.
pichuva.blogspot.com

P.S: I've a tendency to digress. You also have to excuse the general structure of the argument, I was pressed for time. Also, the text contains many unacknowledged quotes and verbatim arguments from many of my daily reading materials.

Indian attitudes to Science Education

My early exposure to science was not very good. We had a bad science teacher from 6th std to 8th std. No practicals, but lots of chanting in the class room. He taught Newton's third law by singing. "Action and Reaction are Equal and Opposite", he sang and asked all of us to join in. We had no idea what action or reaction was. But we joined in the chant because he beat you if you did not shout loud enough. Now, that has left me with a lifelong scar - I still hear the singsong in my mind when I read about Newton or watch rockets taking off - "Action and Reaction are Equal and Opposite".
Later in my life I took Physics at college and attended an interview in IIT Madras for Master's in Physics. They asked me how a bottle rested on a table. And I answered that the force of gravity on the bottle was balanced by the opposite reaction on the table. It was a wrong answer, because although action and reaction are equal and opposite they act on different bodies. They made fun of me for some time for that. It was sad that the teacher who taught me Newton's laws was more interested in singing than on the actual meaning of the laws.
The way science was taught was the way Thirukkural (Tamil poem) was taught. We all dreaded Thirukkural at school, particularly in the 10th std because they had fifty of them as "manappaada paattu" meaning we had to know them by heart for the examinations. In the examination, we were asked inane questions like this - "Write the Kural that ends with 'Arivu'". And we would all be looking at each other and mouthing the kurals at the examination.
This, of course, ruined all interest in Thirukkural for all of us - it was seen as one of the peculiar torture mechanisms preferred by adults.
Newton's laws were taught almost in the same fashion. If there were lots of laws by Newton, they would have asked us "Reproduce the Newton's law that ends in 'Opposite'" and we would all be staring at each other. As it is, in exams they asked us to write the laws verbatim.
What saved me, from a lifelong hatred of the exact sciences, was the books at my home that my father bought. One of these books was called "In the Name of Science". I don't remember the author.
That book talked about a peculiar problem that farmers faced in the 17th century. They could pump water using suction pumps but each pump could only push water to a height of 34 feet. So for a deep well, they needed multiple stages. This was a problem posed to Torricelli (I don't remember all the details). At that time there was this saying "Nature abhors a vacuum". If nature abhors a vacuum then a suction pump should be able to pump water to whatever height. Torricelli thought about this issue and had a key insight. What if air had weight? If air had weight and we are living under a ocean of air, then, Torricelli reasoned, probably the weight of 34 feet of water was all the entire atmospheric weight could sustain. (This is called now as atmospheric pressure). To prove that this is true, Torricelli chose a test tube full of mercury. Mercury was 13.6 times denser than water. So, in a meter long test tube, atmospheric pressure can only sustain around 2.5 feet of mercury. Torricelli tried to see if this was true and well, he found it was true and thereby created the first artificial vacuum. In the process he also invented the barometer.
This story was narrated in the book with beautiful illustrations. The book continued on into other experiments such as the one where 8 horses could not pull apart a vacuum sealed sphere.
This book caused my first interest in science and I looked for more such. My father bought a few Russian books; even a Tamil translated book on the Special theory of Relativity. I had no idea what they were talking about but read them anyway.
One of the Russian books talked about a experiment by Galileo. If you had a heavy object tied with a long string suspended from an axis, you have a pendulum. A pendulum swings back and forth and it has a time period and an amplitude. It is natural to suspect that if you pull a pendulum far enough and let it go, it will swing faster. Well, Galileo found that this assumption was wrong. The time period of a pendulum's swing ONLY depends on the length of the rope.

This was an experiment I could do - I got a rope, a iron ball and then tied to a nail and tried swinging at different points. I did not have a stop watch so I counted manually. It sure seemed Galileo was right, and I did not make any dramatic discovery that overruled Galileo.
Now, you would think that I went on to become a scientific whiz kid. Unfortunately, that is not what happened. This post is about why I did NOT become such a whiz kid.

The Examination System
While I kept trying to read about Astronomy, and tried to build my own telescope by stealing lenses from the school science lab, I still had no clue why I was doing all this. I wanted to observe the moon up close (I still have not done that). I took some chemicals from the school lab and tried to burn the house down. But I did all of these without knowledge of the scientific method and what it means. School should have taught me that, but instead they were giving lots of details about the chemical equation of Hydrogen Sulphide.

In 9th std, we got an excellent science teacher, finally. His first class (I still remember it) was a lecture on Pavlov and his dog. For those of you interested in this experiment, here is the wikipedia link.

In that lecture he explained the reflex actions that guided most animals and humans and the principle of classical conditioning. He quote from the dreaded Thirukkural - the poet says that men should share their food as even crows call each other when they see food. The teacher said that crows called out on seeing food out of reflex and not out of nobility. Otherwise they would not be fighting with each other when a couple of more crows reach the scene. This was the first time we actually had a science teacher lecturing anything. He just talked for 45 minutes, without referring to a book or dictating notes.
He taught us for 9th and 10th, and my liking of science grew a lot in those years. Yet, we were faced with a dilemma - his lectures were essentially useless to us, when you went to the examination and the questions went like "Define reflex action". You lose marks if you even swap words in the definition.
This is why, in spite of good teachers (and they are few) our examination system is royally messing with our heads.
Slowly, the examination system squeezes out any interest in the actual subject you may have. People blame religion for a lack of interest in science, but it is our own examinations that makes us lose interest.
When we got into high school and then later college, there were practical classes, in which you go into the lab and perform experiments. These sessions were made as dry and devoid of fun as possible. You needed to have an observation notebook. Then you had a practical notebook. The practical notebook was awarded points for neatness - it needed a brown paper cover and a label on top. Then each experiment had an objective and other sections. We all copied from each other and from seniors making the whole system worthless.
Again and again and again, we measure the refractive index of glass - we knew it was 1.5 by 9th std, but we had to perform experiments whose sole objective was to find out the refractive index of glass. We did not know why so many experiments were devised for finding something that everyone knew. This resulted in some "backhand work". In Physics lab there was an experiment called the Newton's Rings. It was complicated and hurt the eye and its purpose was - you got it - to find the refractive index of stupid glass. In my class, we devised a method by which we would sit at home and work out the 32 readings using a calculator which would result in the answer, 1.5. Someone took it too far and showed the answer to the professor without coming to class. Unfortunately, there was no electricity on that day and it is not possible to perform Newton's Rings without a powerful mercury lamp. He got caught.
We had a micro processor lab in engineering college. I always got into trouble with the professors because my "observation notebook" was not neat. It was a programming lab and I actually wrote the programs in the notebook. Why would my notebook be neat if I am trying out different assembly programs? Incredibly, in one of the electronic labs, the professor wanted to "discipline" us. The labs were more about discipline than having fun with electronics.

I blame the system utterly for making science education so meaningless. Even after three years of Physics I had no idea what the scientific method was. If someone had asked me the difference between the Renaissance or the Age of Reason, and the period preceding that I would have been unable to answer, even though I had a science education all my life. In fact, I bet most people reading this blog would have the same problem.

Indian Society and Science
Our society treats science the same way we treat all knowledge - it should be "received" and accepted without questioning. In the case of science, many educated Indians reject that it is a fundamental shift in looking at the world.
I had an argument about astrology with a couple of colleagues. One of them said that a long time back Indians had identified the planets as nine (nava graha) and that this was getting confirmed by modern science. I pointed out that the nava graha of Indian astrology included the Sun, the Moon, Raghu and Kedhu (eclipses). These are not planets. Raghu and Kedhu don't even exist. Thus Indians knew only the five visible planets that most of the ancient world knew.
I am not going to rant about astrology more here, but the key problem in Indian understanding of modern science is two-fold:
1. A belief that modern science is no different than ancient knowledge - that the means of acquiring it and the means of making new findings are similar to, say, alchemy.
2. A belief that modern science is somehow "western" and thus a patriotic rejection of its ideas.
This is why you see people insisting that the ancients knew about everything or an attempt to explain "scientifically" homams, yagams and so on.
There are also two other reasons for our rejection of scientific values:
1. An inferiority complex about being colonised causes us to be suspicious of giving "credit" to white people.
2. Our own "rational" movements have not helped the cause. They have called for a wholesale rejection of religion and examining every action through a rational prism. I think this is not practical - it is possible to acquire scientific knowledge and also accept religion. Our rational movements have started out on a crusade against any aspects of religion (meanwhile inventing their own religions, holy people and rituals). Most sociologists and psychologists accept a role of rituals, myths and legends in human life - rationalists are thus going against the spirit of science itself, in some ways.
My point is not in finding a middle ground between science and religion. I don't accept portraying them as opposing poles. They are in different dimensions and cater to different roles in human life.

The Scientific Method

Modern scientific method originated in Europe, with the works of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. It is a specific event in human history. Even though we link it with the exact, "natural" sciences such as Physics or Biology, science includes all quest for knowledge, its synthesis and analysis. This quest, after the 16th century followed specific methods of hypothesis, empirical observations, theory formation, predictions, repeatable tests, and most importantly, peer review. This method is the defining change that has brought us all the progress of the past 4 centuries. Just as economic historians identify the explosion of capitalism as an event that started 3 centuries back, the advent of modern science is traced to the beginning of the 17th century.
This event happened in Western and Southern Europe. Historians trace the Renaissance to specific social conditions around the city of Florence, Italy. It spread to regions closest and then most of Europe, soon after. Simlarly the advent of the Age of Reason was caused by social conditions.
One key thing to note is that the scientists engaged in advancing the method were self-aware that they were part of a new age of human history.
We have to realize that the scientific method represents a clean break from the previous periods of human history and is a unique idea.
We ought to be proud of this "human" legacy - it is not a western legacy (in spite of all efforts by the West itself to take ownership).
One of the best ways to understand what science is, is to learn what science is not. There is a classic book by the mathematician, Martin Gardner called "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science". This book defines pseudo science and covers several examples of it in a very interesting fashion. If our current Chief Minister or the media had read this book, they would not have run around with Ramar Pillai and his "Mooligai Petrol" 10 years back. Anandha Vikatan published an editorial calling "anti-Tamil" and "elitist" the professors in Delhi and Madras who rejected Ramar Pillai's work.
If, our education emphasized the role and the history of scientific method even a little bit, we can place ourselves in some context within scientific knowledge. We can distinguish it from alchemy and pseudo-science. Instead we have people hiding in homes with all curtains closed during a solar eclipse.