Science or Dogma?

We all know that Marx said about religion: “It is the opium of the people.”¹ But this shall not be the main topic here. Instead the topic here shall be about cases where religion actively interferes negatively in the spread of scientific knowledge and cognition of the objective reality, the materialist world.

There are some ignorant Christians that like to quote this verse by Paul against scientific cognition: “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”² They quote it as if this verse would prove anything. Do empty words prove anything? I don’t want to engage here in a debate about if Paul was a legitimate “apostle” or not. Instead I will remark here that the Bible also contradicts Paul. The most clear example is probably this Proverb:

“A fool has no delight in understanding,

But in expressing his own heart.”³

Why is it so fitting? Because Paul called those seeking for understanding and collecting knowledge “fools” while in another Bible verse it is the exact opposite around. And this is not the end. Another Proverb says:

“How much better to get wisdom than gold!

And to get understanding is to be chosen rather than silver.”⁴

Seems the Book of Proverbs was written by “fools in the eyes of God”, at least when we follow Paul. Who should Christians listen to? That is up to them to decide, if they can even make sense of their own holy scripture.

Islam is even worse. When criticized and pushed to the wall, Muslims say “Allah knows best!”⁵ and end the debate from their side with that. The Quran does not even explain what the soul is though it is an essential topic for any religion to clarify this matter. It only states that only “Allah himself” would know and that humans would not have much knowledge anyways⁶. This is ridiculously thin. This is blind faith in case of doubt. This is contrary to cognition of the objective reality, the recognition of the material world. This is also a reason for the backwardness of Muslims and especially Muslim countries when it comes to scientific knowledge among the people and as a result also their socio-economic development.

It also does not help to bring up some Hadith against this blind faith, as if Islam would actually seek knowledge. There is this Hadith: “Seek knowledge even if you have to go as far as China, for seeking knowledge is a duty on every Muslim.” The thing is, that the classification of it is “mawdu” (fabricated). And even the version “Seeking knowledge is a duty upon every Muslim.”, so without the mentioning of China, is characterized as “daif” (weak). Also the Hadith “Thinking for an hour is better than worshiping for sixty years.” is regarded as “mawdu” (fabricated)⁷. Besides that, the meant “knowledge” is not scientific knowledge but the knowledge about the Islamic scriptures and faith. So in any case Islam does not support seeking for actual knowledge. It is a speed bump for the development and spread of advanced technology and reactionary in social questions.

Shall we be completely against religion therefore? No, definitely not. We should see it as part of the ideological and cultural sphere. Charles Darwin saw religions as something that universally exists among mankind, though not necessarily as monotheism with its faith in an “Omnipotent God”, but instead as “belief in unseen or spiritual agencies”⁸. For us religion is mainly a private matter as long as it does not harm the public affairs, like interfering with scientific knowledge. When we want to combat poverty, ignorance and disease we must spread scientific knowledge among the people. So this field is mainly a fight against ignorance, in this case ignorance caused by religious fanaticism.

How do we combat the blind faith in verses from “holy scriptures”? By spreading a scientific outlook on the world: Dialectical materialism. For that we must grasp one essential sentence of Marx: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”⁹ By “grasping” I do not mean to learn it by heart and recite it like a Bible verse, but to process it in context. When existence determines consciousness, then we are influenced by our material surroundings, then we just know what we have learned due to outer conditions.

Mao said: “Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment. It is man’s social being that determines his thinking.”¹⁰ Can we rely on people claiming to have “revelations” that they speak the truth? Surely not!

When we want to seek knowledge, we have to experiment. Mao said: “If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the structure and properties of the atom, you must make physical and chemical experiments to change the state of the atom. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.”¹¹ Does anyone know how a mango tastes before ever trying it? No. Did we know that the world is made of atoms before there were scientific experiments about that? No, though there were some theories already in ancient Greece about what the matter is made of. They were called atomists. But they came to the question from a philosophical perspective, they had no evidence for their theses. The Bible is in this regard right: “For there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, nor hidden that will not be known.”¹² There is nothing that science will not reveal and uncover one day.

Mao also speaks about the matter of “indirect experience”. That what scientists found out cannot be reproduced by us at home obviously. But that doesn’t invalidate their research. “Moreover, what is indirect experience for me is direct experience for other people.”¹³, as Mao said. In a society that is based on division of labor not everyone can make direct experiences with everything, but we can share our discoveries. Of course there can be fabrications, like the Elizer Masliah faking studies regarding dementia over the past decade and therefore making the conclusions from his forged studies for the treatment of patients invalid¹⁴. So we shall not blindly follow any scientist like worshipers follow their priests, that would turn science into a pseudo-religion, but we shall have the claim to follow scientific knowledge and concluding from it.

This is surely more practical than following millennia old religious scriptures as if they contain the “eternal truth”. Even the “holy scriptures” show, when being analyzed, that they are a product of the time in which they were written in.