Religion vs Science, the relevance to the gender politics confrontation

The main difference between religion and science is the nature of the response to our curiosity drive.

I have pointed out (Stokoe 2020) that the animal nature in us, called by Freud, the pleasure principle, is very powerful because it is primary (in evolutionary terms) and it always threatens to undermine the structure of thinking that derives from consciousness, because we experience it as a yearning for certainty (the expression of the pleasure principle).

This point, by the way, relates to the fact that our lived experience of brain activity is feelings.

Thus, the religious response is to go for certainty and the mechanism designed to undermine any attempt to resist that and maintain a capacity to face and explore reality, is to require an attitude of ‘faith’. In other words, I’m defining faith as a mechanism that closes down the reality principle and restores the pleasure principle.

Science, on the other hand, represents a mechanism designed to shore up the reality principle by defining a protocol that I have called, ‘what’s (really) going on here?’ This is the fundamental activity of the curiosity drive, and it is the process the first triggers the move from pleasure principle to reality principle in the developing baby.

So, the scientific method encourages us to doubt our first ‘explanations’ and, instead, to test them in the most objective (i.e. dispassionate) way we can. The religious method is to encourage us to ‘have faith in’ that first ‘explanation’.

There is no reason why religious beliefs cannot be subject to the ‘testing’, which is, after all, the method of the reality principle, except for the resistance of those who propagate and proselytise those beliefs, because they ‘re-frame’ the wish to test them as an assault of ‘faith’.  Of course, it is. The problem for ordinary people (by which I included all of us) is that the shadow side of the way our conscious mind has been developed – through the activity of the curiosity drive – is that we expect a meaning for everything and this reinforces a tendency towards expecting a teacher who can give us that meaning, so we are unconsciously ‘yearning’ (that word again, and for the same reason) for an ‘explainer’. Therefore, the injunction, ‘don’t question my explanation’ is accepted without question (i.e. without the stimulation of the curiosity to understand why someone would not want you to question*). The requirement by religions to ‘have faith’ is, therefore, always the indication that this system is opposed to the reality principle and all that follows from that. We can see it as an indication of an attack on thinking.

So, the main point of this blog is to reach the question as to how the ‘scientific’ approach should address the ‘religious’ one. I’m sorry if my answer comes as a disappointment. It is this: don’t bother. There is no point whatsoever in arguing with someone who has ‘faith’ because they experience argument simply as the devil/unbelievers/enemies testing their faith. Nothing so builds a commitment to faith than this sort of attack on it. Arguing with people of faith is pointless.

So, if we accept that those who are propagating such beliefs won’t change them (see Festinger’s studies of such phenomena, by the way), but that such arguments will only make them hold the more strongly to them, what do we do about the propagation of such beliefs?

The answer is, we talk to those who are being assaulted by the beliefs; our approach should be not to engage in debate with people who do not allow debate (because debate is identical with an assault on ‘faith’), instead, to address those who are being encouraged to accept these beliefs, particularly the version of ‘faith’ that is designed to deny debate. We talk to our fellow human beings about the dangers we perceive to be consequent upon the acceptance of these restrictions on our uniquely human capacity to think.

I have described this distinction so that we can turn our attention to the extremely unpleasant arena of gender identity politics. This is because I would say that it is strikingly clear that the test for whether those who are pushing the attitudes that lead to the accusations of ‘trans-phobia’ are manufacturing a religion. Trans-phobia is simply a modern version of the more familiar ‘blasphemer’, where the definition of a blasphemer is that he/she is daring to challenge the precepts of a specific faith.

I intend to write more blogs on this topic because I’m concerned to protect people who might be hurt by being drawn into what are essentially cults. My next blog is aimed at a specific audience, those bodies that register or employ psychotherapists, because a large number have walked, unquestioningly into a very serious error. By signing up to an expression of the gender-identity belief system, they have instantly undermined the basic approach of their own psychodynamic and psychoanalytic members by requiring them to endorse certain of their clients initial expressions about their identity, rather than seeking to enquire into the below the surface origins of these ideas.

* Not everything that is called a religion began as one. The Buddha was very clear in his instruction to his followers NOT simply to accept what he was saying but to find out for themselves.