There is no god and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.
— Penn Jillette, in God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales
This is a very interesting thought, not least because, in my view, it is essentially true. If all present religions were wiped out, they really would never be duplicated in their present form. But the fact that the laws of physical science would be able to be exactly recreated says less about its essential truth than about the simple fact that science is not a product of complex interpersonal relationships, while religion is.
I can show what I mean by applying Jillette’s statement to American Culture, for example. If every single trace of American Culture died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. This is because American culture, like religion, is not a product of physical laws, but of a complex history of the interaction of millions of limited human perspectives and relationships. This says nothing about the value of American culture, or of the value of any particular culture. It also does not make sense to say that because of this, American Culture is somehow “false.”
What Jillette is really upset about, I suspect, is the religion that claims to be more than what it is, a set of immutable laws, rather than the collective response of humans to a perceived divine influence whose revelation towards the whole human race is (unlike natural revelation) effectively limited at best. Such a religion is American Evangelicalism, for example, whose shrunken catechism will allow of no mystery in the universe, and for whom exploration is therefore tantamount to heresy. So also was Medieval Catholicism by the side of the Medieval Islam that explored and pioneered advances in math and medicine.
The propensity to inflate the authority of one’s own approach to the universe is endemic, not to religion, but to human nature.
(Source: kottke.org)
