Les naivités dangereuses
by Rean Rhyne

Language itself, as Orwell long ago pointed out, is an inevitable victim in times of war and political stress and upheaval. Often the changes in language are not obvious, originating in new labels or terms, with the best of intentions. Time passes and it becomes clear that the language is poorer, shallower for the change.

One of the items on the domestic agenda of the second Bush administration is a program call "faith-based initiatives." (It, like most other domestic undertakings, has vanished because of the terrorist attacks, but it will in good time return.) The concept is this: Church-related charities do so much good work that, the Bush people propose, there is no reason not to funnel federal monies to them. The churches have an organizational structure already in place and by supporting them we avoid further expansion of the federal bureaucracy.

Before domestic debate stopped on September 11, civil libertarians were already mounting arguments against the proposal because of its obvious attempt to breach the wall between church and state.

Note the linguistic sleight of hand: "faith-based." Not "church-based," not "religion-based," but "faith-based." Clearly the formulators were aware of the tricky territory they were entering and hoped, by using a non-loaded term like "faith", to avoid a battle on the constitutional issue of church-state separation.

Judging by the early responses to the program, their hope was in vain. Nobody was fooled by the carefully chosen terminology. People on the left saw the federal government getting into the church business. People on the right were willing to go along with the proposal as long as "faith-based" meant "Christian." They were disturbed by the thought of tax dollars flowing into the hands of, say, Buddhists, Sikhs, Muslims, and (God forbid) the Hare Krishnas. Whenever Congress again returns to domestic problems, the debate will no doubt resume and intensify.

More intriguing, and perhaps also more dangerous, is an unnoticed, profound naivity implied by the choice of the term "faith-based."

Those who are for and those who are against the proposal immediately agreed that "faith" refers only to religions and the systems of belief on which religions are based.

What no one noticed is the reflexive omission of the one true global "faith-based" system, that being of course the system of belief which we call "science."

Only a primitive, simplistic, myopic view of present-day culture can fail to see that science is the true religion of the world today. At some gut level traditional religionists know this and in various clumsy, sometimes dangerous ways fight it.

In America you have fundamentalist Christians crawling out of the TV woodwork night and day cawing about "creationism," their lame, childish attempt to use the methods of science to "prove" that the world was, contrary to all scientific evidence, created at four o’clock in the afternoon on April 5, 4004 BCE or whenever

In the Muslim world you have fundamentalist Muslims trying their violent best to impose and re-create an oppressive, feudal society on the masses of believers.

What all these noisy strivers fail to realize is what most scientists themselves fail to realize: that science itself is a faith-based system of belief.

It just happens that science as we know and practice it is, in many large areas of culture, pragmatic, accurate, and demonstrably helpful for finding a way through the painful problems of life in this world.

At its original core, dealing with human, macro-scale reality, science has proved to be remarkably efficacious, easing sickness, lessening pain, expanding the tools of education, creating meaningful work for millions of people. There, at its core, science is unbeatable: it does what it claims it can do far better than any religion. It offers meaning, hope, and help.

Which is all to the good.

The generally overlooked problem comes at the outer edges of science, when it either goes far within, deep down into the microscopic world, or far without, into the vast distances of stellar space.

In those two areas, the very tiny and the very large, science stumbles, and it is in the stumbling that we can see mostly clearly that it too, finally, is "faith-based."

How does science stumble?

Consider: In its core issues, science truly is marvelous, solving problems, creating wondrous devices to entertain, to educate, to heal, to reduce human suffering. But in those much larger and small arenas, everything begins to become much less clear, much less straightforward. And science stumbles badly as it reaches for all manner of clever, abstruse theories to "explain" the behavior of matter on the largest scale (the macro-universe) and matter on the smallest scale (the micro-universe).

Over recent decades, struggling with various intractable observations of the large and small worlds, science presents us (and itself) with ever-more paradoxical theorems: atoms which interact instantly over long distances, a universe which seems to be expanding and contracting at the same time, and so on.

What has happened here of course is that science at these limits has come up against the problem with which religions, for better or worse, have from the beginning tried to grapple.

The problem is Mystery. Existence as mystery, not only inexplicable but unstateable in any human language.

Religions too, when confined to narrow human space, generally do well in offering theories of behavior. The Golden Rule in one form or another pops up everywhere, simply because it works. A society in which people follow such an admonition functions more smoothly than a society in which people don’t. But, like science, when religions venture into vastness, dealing with the really big questions of life and death, they stumble. One religion says things are like this, another says they are like that. And each, on the flimsiest of evidence, claims that it alone is right.

A "faith-based" initiative as government policy? Why not, if—and of course this is a very big "if"—we respect the true meaning of the word "faith" rather than consigning it to the historical trash-heap of other words that have been distorted and destroyed for short-sighted political ends.