Something I’ve thought about for a while: rationalism, science, and religion, and how uneasily they seem to sit together in some people.
I’ve got nothing against religion itself, but I do wonder about scientists who are deeply religious. Being a scientist is supposed to mean being rational, questioning everything, looking for evidence rather than accepting baseless claims. I notice this more in India, where I’ve seen scientists who are openly, proudly religious. It makes me wonder, are these people scientists by passion, by something they genuinely feel in their heart, or are they scientists simply as a job, a profession they do without that underlying temperament actually being there.
Because here’s my honest question. If you’ve spent your life questioning everything as a scientist, why does that questioning stop the moment it touches religion or God? Someone who is truly a scientist at heart shouldn’t be able to compartmentalise like that. I think a genuinely rational, deeply scientific mind and a religious one are, at some level, two different things.
If you look back at history, Einstein is often brought up here. He wasn’t quite an atheist, more agnostic I believe. And I think that fits, agnosticism suits a scientist well, because science is fundamentally about admitting we don’t know everything yet and staying in search of the truth. That, I understand and respect. But being firmly religious while also being a scientist sits at the other end of that spectrum for me, and I don’t think that’s quite right.
Something that really stuck with me, I heard it from Ricky Gervais, who’s openly a proud atheist, and he made a point about this that I think explains it better than I ever could. He said if you took every scientific book that exists, physics, biology, chemistry, all of it, and burned every copy, destroyed the lot completely, then waited even a hundred thousand years, those same discoveries would eventually be made again. People would independently arrive at the same laws, the same facts, and the books that came back would say essentially the same thing, because the underlying truth doesn’t change regardless of who finds it. But if you did the exact same thing with every religious text on Earth, burned them all, wiped them out entirely, they would not come back the same way. They’d come back in completely different forms, different names, different stories altogether. That difference alone tells you almost everything you need to know about which one is actually tracking something real.
I think this is part of what holds India back scientifically. There’s a real lack of what people call scientific temperament here, and I believe the country’s deep religiosity is a big reason for that. Religion is everywhere in India, mixed into politics, into daily life, impossible to ignore. Even tourism gets wrapped up in it. People travel to see new places, to get away from the everyday monotony, and somehow it still has to be dressed up as a pilgrimage, Vaishno Devi, Rameshwaram, wherever. Maybe a thousand years ago that was genuinely the only reason people travelled, but that’s changed now. I wish we could just be honest that we’re going to see somewhere new, rather than needing a religious label attached to it.
I don’t want this to come across as ranting against religion for its own sake. I was never particularly religious myself, and if anything my own thinking has drifted further towards atheism over time, mostly because religion never personally gave me anything I found valuable. I know people say it brings inner peace, and I don’t doubt that’s true for many, but it’s worth remembering religion has brought plenty of bad along with that too. Look at how much of the world’s conflict, historically and today, comes down to one group believing their God or their religion is better than someone else’s. Less religion, in my view, means more room for science, and more room for people to actually prosper.
It makes me wonder how religion even started in the first place. My own theory is that it filled some gap, some loophole in society, some need people had for answers that didn’t exist yet. If you look at the European Renaissance, from the sixteenth century onward, religion held enormous sway before that, present everywhere, but slowly it ceded ground, and science was given more space to grow. In India, that shift hasn’t really happened, religion hasn’t given up that ground to science in the same way.
I suppose nobody willingly gives up authority. If religion won’t step back on its own, I think it needs to be pushed back, so science can be given more room to move forward, because ultimately it’s science that brings real prosperity to people. Science asks uncomfortable questions, including ones as basic as whether God actually exists, and I think that discomfort is important. This kind of irrationality is something we need to be willing to let go of.
More to come on this, I’ll keep updating it.
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