Evidence versus Faith
A lot of people assume I’m an Atheist, but I’m not, because that would just be too easy. I’m a Pagan. Most of my ancestors were Celts—the indigenous people of the British Isles—so I practice their religion to give myself a sense of history and cultural identity. That, and week-long outdoor Pagan festivals are really cool, and I’ve never heard of week-long outdoor Atheist festivals. Sure, you could listen to biologists give lectures on plants and the environment for a week, but where do you get the all-night drum circles and the bonfires and the people howling at the moon?
People believing they have supernatural powers on their side helps to keep them optimistic. This is a big paradox, and a huge problem for the future of the world. Back in the days when we were still living below the physical limitations of the Earth, we could afford to believe in things that didn’t exist, use imaginary forces in our decision making, and make inaccurate predictions about the effects of our actions, because the environment could still take up the slack.
Hence the other big reason I’m a Pagan: To prove it’s possible to practice religion Atheistically. Religion was a way people found to try to figure out how the world worked, and it was a way they used to record important things they’d discovered and pass them along to their descendants. It was a crude ancestor of science, which mixed facts and opinions together without distinguishing between the two. It was an attempt at science, with emotional defense mechanisms built in to make people feel like it worked. It was the best anyone could think of at the time, but it worked pretty well—which is why people all over the world figured out the same trick. But now humanity’s belief in the supernatural has turned into one of the biggest threats facing the world.
There is a lot of debate within the Pagan community about what is Paganism? What did our ancestors discover about the world, and what were they trying to teach their descendants—meaning us?
The version of Paganism I and some other Pagans practice says that the tradition of Paganism isn’t specific beliefs, but the approach to studying the world that led our ancestors to arrive at their beliefs. The first principles of that traditional approach consist of:
Figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible;
The Earth is very big, very powerful, and very complicated;
We depend on the Earth for our lives;
So you better figure out how to cooperate with the Earth.
So simply put, the version of Paganism I practice is ancient tradition of planetary biology. My ancestors were trying to figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible. The only difference between their version of planetary biology and mine is that they hadn’t figured out the trick of science yet. Science is the most efficient way to figure out how the world works.
My ancestors did what most every parent does, and taught their children about all the things they had figured out about life that worked pretty well for them. But that doesn’t prove that they must’ve been right about everything. Once you adopt the tradition of figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible, because the world is very big, very powerful, and very complicated, and because you and everyone else depends on the Earth for your lives, so you better figure out how to cooperate with the Earth, you accept that the tradition you follow requires you to fix all the ideological mistakes your ancestors made. It is still the Earth we depend on for our lives, not the approval of our ancestors at whether or not we carry on the outward aesthetics of their traditions. I believe that my ancestors would want me to fix their mistakes and adapt their traditions as necessary to continue cooperating with the Earth so it would continue supporting me and everyone else. I would certainly want my own descendants to do that.
A lot of people are talking right now about a convergence between science and religion. But a lot of people are jumping the gun and equating science with religion, saying they’re both good ideas so they must be equally true, or some more complicated version of that belief.
The problem with that is that religion isn’t self-consistent. There are a lot of religions in the world that disagree with each other. You don’t need to be a scientific genius to see that that alone proves it isn’t possible for religion and science to be equally true, because if two religions aren’t even compatible with each other, they can’t both be compatible with science.
However, since all religions are the products of evolutionarily equal humans asking and finding answers to the same questions about life, and I’ve found a way to make the convergence between my own religion and science, that proves it is possible for every religion to make the convergence with science. Since ever religion is different beyond their identical origins, it’s inevitable that some religions—like mine—are more compatible with science than others. Some can converge easily with science, and some will be much more difficult. Inevitably, some will have to be adapted a lot before they can converge with science.
A lot of people have been trying to adapt their religions to science, and a lot of other people have been trying to adapt science to their religions. So I just want to make this clear: Science is not negotiable. It’s the objective study of how the universe works, and the universe works in one way and one way only. For you to believe otherwise would be humanocentricism once again, because for you to believe that the laws of physics must make exceptions to accommodate your religion is for you, mortal human, to believe that the universe must work in whatever way is most convenient for you.
Two of the four universal questions of religion make it obvious that every religion began the same way my version of Paganism works. What makes the universe work and how people can make themselves happy, spell out almost directly the attempt to figure out how the world works, as efficiently as possible, and how to cooperate with it.
The biggest discrepancy between science and religion was that science couldn’t answer every question anyone had ever asked, but religion could. Until science caught up to religion in that regard, people would still have to use pre-scientific beliefs to try to understand how the universe worked, and that isn’t a convergence of science and religion.
The biggest obstacle to people trying to make a convergence between science and religion has been such a lack of public understanding of science. A lot of people who know a little bit about science have been trying to negotiate on science without realizing it, because they were trying to compromise on scientific laws that they didn’t know about.
I realized both of those problems, which is why I’ve been working on planetary biology from both the ancient and modern directions at once, and now I’ve written this and my other books. Planetary biology is possible now because various scientists have found patterns of cause and effect that encompass the entire realm of objective human knowledge, so science finally has caught up with religion. Now all there was left to do was to compile all that science in one place in an easy-to-learn format, so that everyone could learn how science works and how much has been discovered about the universe, so everyone can finish the projects they’ve started, and converge their religions with science.