Feb 8, 2010
Kim Stanley Robinson Equates Science and Religion
“It’s a religion in the sense of religio, it’s what binds us together. It is a form of devotion: the scientific study of the world is simply a kind of worship of it, a very detailed, painstaking, and often tedious daily worship, like Zen,” award-winning science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson said during a recent talk at Duke University.
“So you can think of science as a religion, and a devotion to something that you can easily regard as miraculous: the big bang, out of a single singularity, out of a geometrical point of infinite mass, that has an inflationary period where at 10-33 seconds after the beginning of everything suddenly there was an expansion of 1030 time. This is our current explanation of our universe. If that’s not sounding miraculous to you, I don’t know what would sound miraculous.”
In the never-ending battle between science and religion, there are two extremist positions: One views religion as total nonsense which has no place in a science-informed society, and the other engages in sophistry to show that science and religion are the same.
Some of this latter kind have argued that religion too is a science; others, as in this instance, like to say that science itself is another religion.
Calling religion a science may make some religious people happy, but I am not sure how many practicing scientists will be comfortable when their discipline is described as another religion.
They may take some consolation from the fact that this is done by one who is good at writing fiction.
V. V. Raman
February 8, 2010
Author of “Truth and Tension in Science and Religion”