A Caricature of Science

The alleged war between science and religion prevents us from understanding either

“Belief is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science.”
- Bruno Latour

The late Bruno Latour told a tale about Portuguese explorers landing on the west coast of Africa and encountering strange people who worshipped fetishes. They patiently explained to these ‘ignorant savages’ that these objects could not be their gods because their own hands had made them. When the black-skinned folk failed to understand, the white-skinned visitors smashed their idols and went about setting up gold-trimmed statues of the Virgin Mary, amulets of the saints, and sacred sculptures representing God. The Africans blinked in amazement, for these invaders seemed incapable of applying their own odd logic to themselves.

This parable captures the lunacy entailed in accusing others of holding naïve beliefs, while elevating your own beliefs to the lofty heights of ‘objective knowledge’. Minds conditioned by contemporary universities are trapped within this hopelessly inadequate way of understanding both the sciences and religion. Graduates in the sciences possess a naïve reverence for the ‘objective’ (facts they have been taught to worship even though they have have been shown in painstaking detail how they were constructed). Yet graduates in the humanities emerge with an equally naïve contempt of the sciences! Latour warned that we face yet another century of swinging hopelessly between an overly simplistic ‘realism’ and an equally stupid view that reality is entirely constructed. He saw this differently, suggesting that construction and reality are synonyms. Through complex interactions within networks of innumerable things, we assemble our collective ways of understanding what is real.

Our stubborn insistence upon a war between science and religion is a clear sign that our perspectives on reality have become stunted. This is perhaps the only remaining mythology uniting the sundered halves of the fallen university curriculum. As Latour’s quote above captures perfectly, we imagine an epic cultural clash between what amounts to a caricature of knowledge given the name ‘science’ (and practiced like a bad religion), and a caricature of religion given the name ‘belief’ (which either receives our arrogant contempt or is dismissively ‘tolerated’). At the heart of all this silliness are people who - just like the Portuguese explorers - naively believe in naïve beliefs. All that changed is that the sacred idols occupying our blind spot are no longer the symbols of the Catholic faith.

‘Belief’ is less a cognitive state than it is the name for a cultural bugbear created as the shadow for an idolatrous ‘knowledge’. As Latour warned: “Belief and knowledge sailed, and sank, in the same boat.” Admitting this needn’t involve falling into so-called ‘cultural relativism’, where nothing is true. Latour dismissed relativism as just piling another delirium onto the heap of confusions that came before. Rather, he offered a path out of this trap by recognising that both the sciences and the religious traditions are flowing. Any attempt to treat these practices as static merely forces them into fetishes to be worshipped as idols. The flows of the sciences can be found in the careful attempts to assemble the truth through the interpretation of evidence. But where are the flows of religion...?

As a practicing Catholic (who admitted to being unable to speak about what he is doing at church on Sunday), Latour held a subtle view of his religious life. He suggested that religion had been misunderstood as an attempt to assert authority and power - confusing the abuse of religious institutions with their deeper purposes. Rather, authentic religious practice for Latour was about “exploration, hesitation, and weakness.” When lovers say ‘I love you’, the sentence itself is trite and boring. It’s certainly not original! But the transformation in the listener and speaker is the purpose of this phrase - and this is anything but trivial. Religious speech, likewise, exists not to merely transport information, but to transform people and lives.

Our enforced opposition between science and religion reveals itself in the stilted contrast between mighty knowledge (the ‘objective’, seized by the dogmatists of the sciences) and mere belief (the ‘subjective’, ghettoed with all things religious). This deranged scheme requires that we abandon any hope of understanding the flowing nature of authentic scientific practice even while we must steadfastly deny that there can be any such thing as authentic religious practice. Thus, as Latour accused, belief has become a caricature or religion precisely as knowledge has become a caricature of the sciences. This comedy of errors is a blight on thinking that infects us all.