The Big Picture

Of all the factions vying for ascendancy in the culture wars, the battle between science and traditional belief systems is probably the most crucial. This battle has been going on since Galileo and has been considerably escalated by, among other things, the advance of Darwinian Theory. The battle lines in this conflict have been purposefully blurred by some defenders of religious beliefs. In an attempt to enfeeble science, religious authorities have accused it of being “just another Faith”. That is, to say the least, a curious comment. It seems to belittle Faith in general, as if to say, science is just another fanciful belief system. On the other hand, religious authorities also claim that science can prove their beliefs to be a reality. This flip-flopping not only erodes the concept of Faith itself but also lessens our ability to form as truthful a picture of the world as we otherwise might through the development of a clear understanding between Faith and Reason. Trying to accommodate contradictory positions as mutually viable is a no win situation. But that is the insidious nowhere land our psyches have been inhabiting in recent times. As a result religious and scientific views are both rendered less than meaningful and neither can present a fully cogent vision. What we need to do is examine religion in an objective manner and identify its roots in the natural world. Placing religion squarely within the nature of things could serve, perhaps, to put humankind in its proper perspective.

That scientific findings run contrary to some of our traditional beliefs can, of course, be a cause for anxiety in people. Those beliefs form the very foundation for the structures of meaning that house our vulnerable psyches and they have passed as factual knowledge for millennia. Then science comes along and reduces their stature to that of myth and fantasy. A catastrophic conflict is created between what we want to believe and what science reveals as fact. Movements such as Creation Science are a desperate attempt to merge Faith and Reason in favor of religious beliefs. But such confusion of terms, like Creation Science, merely fills the gap between science and religion with nonsense. The gap between what science is telling us and what we want to believe can best be dealt with through a better understanding of what science is actually saying and realizing what it has to offer in the way of human values.

It is believed, however, that science can have nothing whatsoever to offer in terms of human value systems. Science can elucidate theories about the human need for value systems and for meaning in life over and above a merely natural existence but science cannot provide for that meaning. It is thought that science can only undermine what is meaningful. It is true that this has been an inadvertent aspect of science since its inception but it need not be a permanent condition. In extrapolating values from science some of our preferred scenarios, inspired by religious faiths, must, of course, fall by the wayside. The relationship of science and values will be fully elucidated here further on. For now it is important to keep in mind that altering our beliefs in accordance with knowledge does not mean the end of religious concepts altogether.

Our unwillingness to relinquish our preferred scenarios of the world runs deep and presents a formidable stumbling block to establishing values based on anything other than those scenarios. The human penchant for preferring fantasy over reality is well documented and can even be an occasion for enthusiastic applause.

The play, M. BUTTERFLY, produced on Broadway in 1988, is a case in point. It dramatizes the story of a married man, Rene Gallimard, who falls in love with someone he believes to be a woman but who is actually a man posing as a woman. Gallimard believes the object of his desire is a woman all through their initial platonic encounters and, quite remarkably goes on believing it throughout a long and intimate relationship.

The female impersonator is able to sustain the illusion of being a woman by, for one thing, claiming an extraordinary modesty and never disrobing in Gallimard’s presence. Even so, one may ask how could this be? How could a man not be capable of discerning the difference between having sex with a male as opposed to a female? This is not just an academic question about a playwright’s invention, for M. BUTTERFLY is based on a true story. One might suspect that the man in question was, at the very least, a semi consciously willing participant in the ongoing illusion and found the relationship with the person he was in love with as all to gratifying to be disturbed by any minor tactile differences he may have been tenuously aware of during their intimate encounters.

Be that as it may, the audiences of M. BUTTERFLY, during its Broadway incarnation, seemed to relate to the lead character’s peculiar situation with a strong sense of empathy. But why? It is, after all, not a typical experience for people to find themselves in love with someone pretending to be a member of the opposite sex. So, what was it about this play’s bizarre relationship that struck a chord in its audiences? It is certainly a more common experience to be attracted to and have a relationship with someone only to find out they were not the person you thought they were. And this may have been the connection with the play and its audience. But even after being presented with the naked truth about his lover’s gender Gallimard refused to acknowledge that “she” was in fact a “he” and created his own inverted version of the fantasy he had been inadvertently involved for so many years.

Interestingly enough, this stubborn refusal to accept reality did not dissuade the audience from its empathy for the play’s protagonist but rather seemed to intensify it. One would think, on the face of it, that such obstinate behavior would not serve to illicit anyone’s applause. Nevertheless, there it was.

So, what was it that caused the outpouring of empathy demonstrated in the audiences’ reaction? What was there to identify with so strongly?

Perhaps what audiences found to applaud in this provocative drama was the universal compulsion to believe what we want, or need to believe, even though such beliefs may fly in the face of reality. The audiences’ empathy might have consisted of a spontaneous recognition of the age old conflict between our precious illusions, the reality which continually encroaches upon them and our stubborn insistence on holding on to our illusions as long as we can by willfully denying whatever facts might threaten them.

Indeed, what we want to believe about our world and ourselves doesn’t always mesh with reality and when presented with evidence that our beliefs are contrary to the facts, either we accept the reality that our illusions have been shattered or we turn away from the facts and become fanatical about believing in our illusions. Threats to our illusions can, of course, cause grave conflicts within ourselves, as threats to belief systems in general can cause grave conflicts within and between institutions. Religion, for instance, has been wrangling with the disillusioning aspect of science for centuries.

When Galileo was able to demonstrate that the Earth was not at the center of all things, the Church, no longer able to disavow Copernicus’ heliocentric view of the solar system, branded Galileo a heretic and sentenced him to prison. The Church’s reaction was, of course, perfectly understandable. Such knowledge severely challenged the whole concept of God and Man. Human beings were, according to Church doctrine, the central purpose of God’s design. This doctrine also included the belief that mankind’s home, the Earth, occupied the very center of the universe. Displacing the Earth from that eminent position threatened the very foundation of the Church’s teachings and, thus, its complete authority over its subjects. So, like Gallimard in M. BUTTERFLY, the Church refused to accept the naked truth it was presented with and chose to continue to believe in its version of things even though that version had clearly been shown to be a fantasy.

Eventually, of course, the Church had to accept the heliocentric reality of our solar system. However, if it could have found a way to continue to live in ignorance of that reality it seems more than likely that it would have done so as evidenced by the Church’s long refusal to accept mankind’s place in the evolution of all living things.

Resistance and skepticism with respect to new perspectives that challenge the status quo do serve a purpose. They create a demanding screening process through which all claims to scientific discoveries must pass. But when new ideas are bolstered by an overwhelming body of evidence in their favor, such resistance becomes absurd.

For the traditional believer, however, such willful resistance to evidence is second nature since one has been well accustomed to accepting on faith certain things that are antithetical to reason. Evidence that contradicts religious beliefs can even serve as a spur to go on believing. As Tertulllian, an early Christian, said about believing in all the things in his particular faith that challenged one’s sense of reality, “I believe because it is absurd.” - a sentiment that can be useful for any number of strange beliefs that a man is actually a woman, for instance.