THE DAWKINS DELUSION

By Sankara Saranam

An oft-quoted idea of Albert Einstein's is that while religion without

science is blind, science without religion is lame. These days he might
say that while there are quite a few blind religionists, we are not
without our lame scientists either.

The "religion" that is blind without science is of course religious

institutions. Since organized religions are not dedicated to the
scientific method to arrive at material knowledge, religious leaders and
believers must depend on science to understand the workings of the
cosmos. That includes comprehending its age and the origins of life.

To Einstein, religion at its best was synonymous with teaching ethical

living while eschewing scientific statements. That is religion's true
mission as it is a singular purpose science cannot fulfill. Religious
writings repeatedly fail the test of science, but it was no matter to
Einstein since ethical principles could still be extracted from myths. We
are no less the keepers of our brother and sister human beings
because the sons of Adam are as mythological as their father.

As such, the Mormon religion has no place in claiming an ancient

language existed that never did, anymore than does creationism have
a place in cosmology courses, because no ethical principle is at stake if
"reformed Egyptian" was never uttered or if the world is five billion
years old. Another way of putting it is that science is obliged to show
that Jesus is a character of fiction and religion is obliged to spread the
inclusive teachings of Jesus, and neither should be bothered by the
work of the other since Jesus's teachings are not at all invalidated by
Jesus's lack of historicity, and vice versa.

Because of scientific blindness emerging from organized religion,

wherein the history and divinity of the messenger becomes more
important than the message, Einstein was painfully aware of how far
short religions fell from their calling. He noted that unless religious
leaders dispensed with the neither scientific nor ethical notions such as
of a monotheistic personal God or "Chosen People" status, they would
not only fail their mission but do harm to the public.

So Einstein stressed that ethics, not precisely organized religion, was

the real "religion" that gave legs to lame science. He acknowledged
that while ethics might be taught by a centralized religion, it exists
independent of all religions and no religion has a monopoly on it.
Ethics free of scientific statements (as opposed to organized religions
that might be tempted to confuse their myths for scientific statements)
without science is never blind. One need not know the age of the
universe or the origins of life to be ethical; but scientific advancement
without a guiding ethical principle is humanity's worst nightmare. We
must avoid what Martin Luther King referred to as the "guided missiles
and misguided men" syndrome.

Humanity thus needed a system of thought outside of science but also

in keeping with reason (thus disqualifying authoritarian revelation) to
understand ethics because science alone would always draw an ethical
blank. The scientific method could say nothing regarding ethics or
arrive at a standard of good because all ethical standards – including
the one that says science itself is an ethical imperative -- are at
bottom arbitrary. Right and wrong are simply not within the purview of
science.

There's something other than ethics – or the same thing we routinely

call a different name – that science also can't detect or measure: the
self. The one mystery of this cosmos that science can never know is
self-awareness. There is no material explanation for, or even a
scientific measurement of, the self. Science can never directly measure
a sense of self, which is prior to sensory stimulation, thought, feelings,
and volition – namely, all the basic tools of material science. Science
can only measure the secondary footprints of the self, which yet
remains eternally invisible and unknowable.

We all know a sense of self – no one denies that -- but that knowledge
is not material science. It is intuitively based on our capacity to look
within, which is as much to say it is mystical knowledge since it is
utterly independent of empirical data. While religions are full of
unscientific miracle stories that predominately inculcate a superiority
complex instead of inclusive ethics, nothing is a miracle to the material
scientist; but because there is awareness in the cosmos, the cosmos is
a miraculous wonder to all of us when we take a moment to consider
it. A cosmos without self-awareness makes more sense to science -- in
fact, it's the only cosmos of which science is aware! A cosmos with
self-knowledge changes everything.

It is no coincidence then that science is lame precisely when it comes

to knowing the self and knowing right from wrong. Ethical knowledge
and self-knowledge are two ways of talking about the same thing. The
sense of self and the sense of right and wrong reflect each other. The
narrower the self, the more distorted the standards of right and wrong
will be. The more expansive the self, the more right and wrong will
reflect universals and not be laden with conditioning arising from
geography, epoch, culture, religion, etc. Just the belief in divisive
eternal apotheoses is enough to warp every ethical sensibility in this
temporal world.

This is also why our sense of time and sense of self/ethics are
connected. Narrow self breeds narrow time frames, like beginning and
end times, but more than that the narrow self will interpret memories
with an extreme defensiveness, always inclining to bolster its little
world view and myopic view of selfhood. The future memories of such
a narrow self will similarly fail to deviate from the comfortable confines
of the self's parameters.

With past and future so entirely constrained, it is no wonder that the

sense of right and wrong will be severely warped. The narrow self is
unable to entertain an unfamiliar yardstick for right and wrong when
these determinations are rigidly predefined to yield a good that is
equivalent with whatever supports its belief system and world view
and bad as whatever challenges them. Thus is born all degrees of
crusaders, racists, misogynists, gay-haters, end-time believers, and
suicide bombers – i.e. divisive selves.

Scientifically exposing religion's dark underbelly and the mythic status

of Yahweh, Jesus, and other cultic god delusions is vital if the human
race is ever going to outgrow the infantile stage of divisive
monotheism. But even infants have a self that requires nurturance
that science will never satisfy. Of itself, science can never provide the
satisfaction to be had by even the primitive worship of a mythic image
of God. The scientists that would protest to this statement have simply
failed to ask themselves if it was the scientific method and the
resulting material knowledge, or their own sense of self projected onto
the vocation of science, which brought them personal reward.

Worshipers project their selves onto their professed gods and find
solace, and scientists do them same with their profession. At bottom, a
similar process is underway: a focal point of concentration is
established, allowing the self a space to revel in itself. The danger of
divisive mythic images of god is clear: the sense of self affirms its own
narrow divisive parameters in the process of attentive worship in order
to bolster itself. The danger of science without expansive ethics is also
clear: scientific minds unethically hire out their attentions to the
highest bidder in order to materially bolster themselves, fighting like
mercenaries in technological wars on battlefields of pharmaceutical
sales and arms races.

Scientists can rightly protest that advancing technology is not true

science, just as sincere seekers of a larger self will protest that
organized religions have distorted the timeless teachings of the
intuitive mystics of all cultures that investigated the realm of cosmic
self-knowledge (much as modern scientists investigate the cosmic
realm of material knowledge). But when the atom bomb or suicide
bomb drops, who has time for excuses?

So any scientist's reference to a god or selfish gene is thus belittling

and intellectually dishonest, not to mention hypocritical. The sense of
self is not limited to religionists, or humans for that matter, and the
worship of a personal god is simply a primitive and easily accessible
expression of a developing self. The reference carries with it the
generally accepted monotheistic definition of god, meaning it criticizes
what certainly demands critical analysis -- the worship of an exclusive
idea of god that merely bolsters the narrow self – but it does not
appreciate the positive use in historic mythic symbols of expansive
principles (of which scientific investigation is also one) as focal points
of concentration, so long as the respective mythic images do not
devolve into exclusive cults (of which there certainly have been a few
in the history of science).

Of course, no scientist will ever find a selfish or god gene. Self-

awareness is not simply a process that is far greater than the sum of
its parts. It is a substance far prior to all parts that can never be
localized in a test tube. The self finds itself in everything because, at
bottom, the cosmos is made of the substance of awareness. This is
neither a scientific statement nor a statement of faith, but rather an
intuited position taken by the rare modern and ancient mystic, after
long decades of inward exploration using ascetic and mystical methods
– methods that require far more discipline than is required by the
scientific method. In any case, we can more easily believe in the
fabled Yahweh than that scientists, by virtue of the tools of material
science, are free of a sense of self, narrow or otherwise. If there is
dogma in religion, there is as much in the field of science because the
self will be inclined to defend its belief systems and theories
everywhere.

Carl Sagan once unscientifically suggested that instead of worshipping

a nonexistent god, we can look upon ourselves as the cosmos's
experiment at understanding itself. This was his attempt at expansive
ethics, but science training does not imply intuitive training. Though he
properly posited awareness on the part of the cosmos (we're living
proof of it!), he presumed the cosmos is aware enough to conduct
experiments in monkey minds to know itself, but not aware enough to
know itself directly. True to the form of the cosmically central
omnipresent self, the statement places the self of its speaker – the
scientist -- at the center of purpose in the cosmos and material science
as the highest cosmic expression, just as religionists place themselves
at the center of existence and their rituals as the highest expression of
holiness. Can't we see a pattern here? Don't we all appear to belong to
the same religion of selfhood?

And if Sagan is right, someone ought to tell the cosmos, which can and
will eventually ruin its experiment with a mindless meteor. And where
does the cosmos eternally store the data of this mundane experiment?
What great victory is it to the cosmos that a complex organism
residing on one world discovers a minor atmospheric detail of another?
And how does discovering every little fact of the cosmos, as if that
were even possible, add a whit to an ethical understanding of a larger
self when the two are not mutually contradictory? Indeed, how does
finite material knowledge even translate into direct knowledge of the
cosmos, and why would the cosmos only be interested in indirect
dualistic material knowledge and not direct nondual self-knowledge?

Francois Voltaire didn't believe that undermining an unethical religion

required replacing it with anything else, but the history of religion
proves otherwise. Sagan was wise in trying, but the idea is to replace
it with the real "religion" to which we are all ideally bound: expansive
ethical principles. Einstein intuitively voiced those principles succinctly
and perfectly: "The true value of a human being is determined by the
measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the
self." The degree to which we are free from conditioned ideas of self,
not how much material knowledge our species accumulates, is the sole
measure of our ethical and cosmic success as human beings. This
means that we are all, not merely the scientists among us, at the
center of place and purpose in the cosmos, that purpose being self-
expansion. This ultimately requires liberation from a narrow Christian,
Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, American, male or female, black or white,
gay or macho, dog lover, parent, or rich and famous self that
conditions our hearts and minds with divisive and exclusive ethical
perspectives. Even a human self, as divided from an animal or alien
self, must be overcome. This is the process that deserves the name
"spirituality."
Science is itself not, nor can it deliver, the religion of expansive ethics
or provide the intuitive methods of self-knowledge anymore than can
organized religion deliver scientific theories. To find that expansive
identity, no scientific degree is needed. No religion is necessary either,
and most are better avoided these days. All we need do is tend to the
seed of self-expansion by looking within ("intuit") to the soil in which it
grows: our hearts. Surely, no god – monotheistic or pantheistic –
would make it any more complicated than that.

Posted with permission From http://www.godwithoutreligion.com