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Faith and Science: Taking Sides During the Virus

4/25/2020

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The tug of war between Faith and Science has risen to new levels during our worldwide siege with the Corona Virus. We had gotten used to a certain level of “Science Denial” with regards to Global Warming - a problem whose most devastating effects are ahead of us, so there’s still some room for deniability. The pandemic has upped the game considerably. In America especially, the levels of denial while people are dying all around us is first glance nothing short of astonishing. People engaging in a mass protest against “Government Restrictions” meant to save their lives, pastors holding services that endanger the faithful, leaders calling for a restart of the economy even if some “heroes” and “expendable elders” need to die for it, young people ignoring the danger because the “stats” are on their side – what’s going on here? 
 
          If you look very carefully at the underlying foundations of human faith, the reasons begin to show themselves.
 
          Human faith, or “belief”, the notion that some higher power is behind things, has been part of the human psyche since we developed a psyche. What we resist above all else is the idea that we are an accident of mindless nature. At the moment, the human race is under attack from an accident of mindless nature, stirring up core anxieties that have haunted us since the Stone Age.
 
          In this scenario, our medical response (science) is not enough. In addition to the fact that the sheer numbers affected are straining our medical resources, and there is no vaccine anywhere in site, the epidemic has also shut down the economic and social structures that were the framework and support for what we considered our “normal” lives. All of a sudden, we’re back where we started, huddling in a cave with a raging storm outside and no way to keep warm or forage for food. At least that’s the way it feels.
 
          In any threat situation, our inner defenses are as important as our external ones. Biologically speaking, any medical professional objectively weighing his/her physical risks against whatever they’re getting paid would run for their lives. Any other species would leave the fallen behind and run for their lives. Our saving grace as a species is that we’re about more than mere survival. But it cuts both ways.
 
          The ICU nurse fights the mindless virus by actively assisting its victims. The man without a face mask standing on top of a car in a packed crowd outside the Governor’s office is doing a variation on the same thing – finding a way to fight back against an invisible adversary. Since the virus isn’t listening, we need to argue with somebody.  The statistics and projections the news keeps bombarding us with serve very much the same purpose. These numbers have no effect on a constantly mutating microscopic threat - but using them to make projections helps us feel more in control. The problem, of course, is that “Only 5% of deaths from the virus are in my age group” doesn’t count if it makes you careless. When it kills you, you’re 100% dead. But, once again, the numbers give us the illusion of control, much in the same way that thinking God will spare us if we all stop sinning does.
 
          A few years back, I did a piece called “God is an Allegory, but so is the Number Six”. In short, some people say there’s no such thing as God, but it’s easy to forget that there’s really no such thing as "six" and God’s been around a lot longer. Some clever Arabs made 6 up - and not all that long ago in the scheme of things. The universe doesn’t care about six and neither does the virus. (Anyone interested in pursuing this idea further can scroll down my blog list to January 2014.)
 
          The raw fact is that control, even in the best of times, is an illusion. Anything can happen at any time. No one is guaranteed their next breath. The human psyche developed faith as away to cope with knowing that. It is as essential to us as breathing. It got us out of the caves and it is the only thing that will get us through this. A certain amount of trial and error is part of the game - in mathematics, in medicine and in faith.
 
          The trick is in not letting the faith that keeps you alive get you killed, a balancing act the human race has been doing with mixed success and failure for some time.
 
          Hopefully, this will be one of our successes.

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The Churches and the Virus

4/7/2020

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      Plague has always been a problem for organized religion. From its earliest origins in the human story, belief in the gods has been a response to things happening that humans can’t control – things like floods, drought and illness. We can’t control these things – but as long as we thought the gods did, we didn’t feel so helpless, especially if we belonged to an organization that claimed to be able to influence them/Him/Her on our behalf.
 
    Until relatively recently in human history, it was       believed that illness was a punishment for sin and could be cured by appeasing the gods. Prayer, especially when offered by a priest, was thought to appease them.  And on a one by one basis, many people who were prayed for actually did get better, so the idea stuck.
 
          But in an epidemic, where thousands keep getting sick and dying, prayer just doesn’t work. It didn’t then and it doesn’t now.
 
          In the 14th century, the Bubonic Plague caused a major credibility problem for the Catholic Church in Europe. The fact that the plague raged for years and that the clerics were killed off just as fast as the common people undermined the notion that the Church had a monopoly on God’s influence. The result was not a loss of belief in God’s power over disease, but rather a loss of confidence in the authority of Catholic Church. In many ways, this set the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. The people of Europe started looking for someone with a better connection to God’s ear. The idea that the Plague was a bacteriological disease transmitted by fleas carried by rats would simply not have occurred to anyone, and wouldn’t for another couple of hundred years.
 
          Organized religion is in a similar situation now. The idea that disease is caused by natural phenomenon (bacteria, viruses) and can be treated by natural means (medicine) has been around for the past few hundred years and has been largely successful. But people still go to church and still pray for the sick. The deep needs that religion has addressed for all of human history can’t be addressed by Tylenol.
 
          High on the list of those very real needs is the notion that human life makes sense and that our lives mean more than a bunch of biological processes we share with monkeys. The pandemic is an attack not only on the idea of the “bargaining” function of the Organized Religions, but on the very sense of human meaning they are there to support. If we can be killed off in the hundreds of thousands by mindless, lifeless, microscopic specs that by blind chance are multiplying in our all too human bodies, then how special are we really?
 
          Fortunately, that deeper concern is being answered in great part by the countless acts of service and generosity humans are showing other humans in this crisis. If we’re the kind of species that’s willing to put our own lives on the line to save total strangers, then there must be more to us simple flesh and blood. There is. And that will survive, this virus, the next and more.
 
        What may not survive is the religious bargaining chip. The more established Faiths (Catholicism, Mainline Protestantism, Islam) have responsibly accepted the reality that gathering the Faithful puts the Faithful’s lives at risk, and have shut down (or gone on line) for practically all of their public rituals. The few fundamentalist pastors who promised their followers that God would protect them, and would heed their prayers when they prayed together, have paid a heavy toll, as have their followers. The few in reach of a microphone who have spoken out to claim that the Coronavirus is some kind of Divine punishment have largely been dismissed as ridiculous.
 
           When the dust settles, organized religion as an institution may find itself in the same position the Catholic Church did when Martin Luther nailed his famous theses to the church door. What is different from the fifteen hundreds is that the failure of prayer globally has been witnessed globally, brought into every home on screens provided by human technology. The virus attacks believers and unbelievers alike and everybody knows it. The Churches couldn’t stop it. None of them.
 
          Whether the  idea of an “Organized Faith” can survive without its lobbying function is yet to be seen.
 
          Faith will survive. The churches may not.
 
          Consider this a work in progress.

 
 
 
         
 


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    Charles Nolan regularly blogs about the ideas expressed in "The Holy Bluff".

    New blogs are added about every few weeks, and previous ones are archived for the interested reader.

    Charles Nolan welcomes comments and questions from readers and can be reached through the Contact page of this website.

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