A Negation of the Primary Merit of Science and a Case for Religion and Philosophy

This is a paper I wrote for school recently. I don't stand by every idea I explore, but there is a notion in it I think has merit.

A Negation of the Primary Merit of Science and a Case for Religion and Philosophy 

Samuel Bird

Introduction 

You wake up to a jarring alarm that gets up much later or much earlier than the sun. You think about the night before and how late you stayed up watching the news or playing a video game and your eyes are still strained. Your mind that is not designed to take in a never-ending barrage of information and so begins to process. Like a drinker to their bottle, you pull out your phone to see what is new in the world. Some horrendous terrorist attack happened this morning, someone from high school found love before you did, and a notification that your credit card payment is due. Now, in a lower mood state, you turn to the same thing that caused the problem as you scroll aimlessly, hoping to find something to make you feel connected in a sterile world, but your thumb gets tired as the algorithm gives you nothing. Getting out of bed, you pour a bowl of synthesized flavors, highly processed grains, and diabetes-inducing-sweeteners into a bowl layered with carcinogens before pouring in some genetically engineered milk.  

You look at the time and a dread hits your stomach as you realize you must go to work and be around people: that thing which you are, but scares you most. Straining to go from brutal isolation to being expected to be cheering and convincing, you reach for this pill-of-the-month suggestion from your doctor as you pop it in your mouth. Maybe this one will really help your depression unlike all the others. You tried not to think of the side effects as you took the ominous cylinder but the doctor’s words come back to you: “One of the side effects is suicidal ideation.” You get in your car to start it up. Immediately some news you saw last night about the effects of pollution and climate change comes to mind as you are reminded the world around you is contaminated. You pause for a moment and think about that world. That is just how you feel about it all, this world, everyone, yourself is contaminated.  

The thought crosses your mind of many well-adapted species to wonder if you are making the gene pool worse, should you remove yourself from it? You push the thought out of your mind thinking it is just the meds. You turn on a programming and turn the volume up to hear an anthropologist talk about the “amazing advancements of the modern age.” He talks about how much money we all have, how much healthcare, and how much information. He goes on and on about how enlightened our age is and how miserable the past was. A thought comes to mind from school of a philosopher saying it was “nasty, short and brutish” (Hobbes). You feel trapped between a horrendously isolated, sterile, and life-dismissing now, while feeling no hope from a past that you think didn’t even have all these wonderful commodities.  

2. The dialectic 

This leads us to the next question: Is our progression and the zeitgeist of our age a fatalistic fact or a contingent happenstance? By this I mean, is this world we have created for ourselves necessary, or is another option available? I posit that despite all we hear about inevitable advancements, we do not have to choose this. For all of humanity's time as a species, only one percent was after the agricultural revolution (Bowles). What were people doing that whole time before? Why were they okay with such a miserable life? The answer is that they didn’t have to be. They used strong social bonds, a close relationship with the organism they evolved to be and the environment they evolved to be in, and of course, larger divine mythos and narratives (Pontzer). While the other two are worth exploration and we may touch on them, I wish to look into the latter. From our first science class, we go over the history of science and look at how it came about. We hear about how foolish Aristotle's biology was, how much the Catholic church tried to slow Galileo's efforts, and how a belief in a divine quelled people’s curiosity. Religion was perhaps okay for what you did with your grandparents on a Sunday morning, but it had no place in thought as we have now become objective, wiser, and more enlightened. All the while we hear these things, we are faced with the examples illustrated earlier. So, this is the conclusion up until now. It is either the case that science has epistemological merit alone or that perhaps other efforts to make meaning and bring about goals such as a relationship with the divine and philosophy have merit. 

This thinking does not come in a vacuum and represents an old subject that has been beaten near to death. This is where the concern could very easily arise that if we give up on the question, it just becomes a given to us. We then assume we can’t ask it or think about it. So, let us go back, a long way back. From Hobbes and Descartes in early modern time, there was a dialogue of whether truth was found starting from the world and being synthesized into our minds or coming from the mind and being impressed on the world. Brilliant minds like Berkeley and Leibniz varied in their take. Hume then took the razor-sharp blade of skepticism to the concept to find all that was left was matters of fact and relation of ideas (Hume). This removed causation from the knowable. Kant awoke to this conversation and sought to add to it. In the critique of pure reason, he says that in addition to the other tines in Hume’s fork, we have the synthetic a priori (Kant). He finds that the relationship between self and world didn’t make for absolution of truth from either the self or the world, but like a shoreline, there is a thin border between what we are and are not that we know.  

From this we get constructivism which states that the human mind molds and morphs raw data from the world into knowledge. The knower’s belief was more than just the justified knowledge. In making a case for causality, Kant had to let go of metaphysics. This left the world with a powerful new tool and a great stride in thought, but while there were many great minds that thought around Kant, no one succeeded in taking the conversation to the next level. Philosophy lost a forward-thinking role in society as it began to dawn on the world what this lack of metaphysics meant. From the empirical philosophers came more and more that found the world as a mechanistic entity and even humanity as a mechanistic beast.  

Empiricism was now unbridled by having to principally keep itself unique from rationalism and began to amalgamize both the analyzed and the synthesized. With no question for the assumptions used, science ran with a calling made by no one toward a goal unknown. As an epistemic system, it was value free, and such, without careful values input, one could be sure good values would not come be an output. The value then in need of filling was human pleasure and avoiding pain. The basis of it all was a desire to build resources and tools to make a better world. What is this better world then? The ethics of science are complex and multifaceted, but it seems to have lined up well with one particular theory that had a mutually reinforcing relationship.  

All the ancient and divine narratives fell by the wayside as a medium for finding tools for goals took over the minds and large-scale conversations. More than religiosity, it removed many of the ideas that made a human life worth living: meaning, goodness, and love. Each now had become a phenomenon of the evolved social animal as we became nothing more than “A hairless ape in a cold-death universe” (Bird). This may seem one way or another, but if science is the case predominantly then it would be hard to critique, but its own inconsistencies began to become more apparent. Hegelian thought reintroduced metaphysics without sufficiently justifying a reason for doing so. It began to be clear that whatever humanity was, we were moving toward something and there was progress to something greater. Now that society was our new God, we need our devil. In Marx we find a way to make humans again fit that role in the form of conflict theory (Engels). Now humanity was both what we worshipped in its progress and what we cursed in what it stopped. As Nietzsche saw it, heaven came crashing down to earth (Fox). You may ask, well no matter if there is a case against it, isn’t science true? Hasn’t it done so much to make life better? Can there really be any other claims a sense of world and knowledge for life? 

3. Critique of Science 

When we say science, what do we mean? We can vary greatly in what this large methodology can entail. At its core, science is an empirical pursuit of knowledge based on a rational framework and a priori assumptions. Simply put, we make guesses as narratives that have merit, then check them against the world. This of course then makes us ask if our guesses can skew the question. Science is in this way a medium that combines both the synthesized and the analytical with some degree of arbitration. Being a medium for knowledge, it has the intent of bringing information from the outside world to the inside world as belief via justification. This was not as truth, but as raw data.  

Furthermore, when it comes to belief in things, we not only believe in things purely on the merit of dry fact hood, but as value-centric beings, we need to ask what motivates a belief in something. For this reason, it follows to address the merit of opting into a belief system based on the principle of its truth value, and the pragmatic value it adds to our needs and objectives. This is where science shines as it looks into fact hood to give us what we desire. We will of course need to ask what our desires should be, but that is for later. A critique of science would then be done best by critiquing its truth value as well as utility. For the sake of brevity, there will be a movement from science as what it ought to be as a discipline into what it is. This will both cover the outcome and the intention. The principled critique of science will address science as a study while the pragmatic critique will focus on science as it has been applied, often poorly in what is called “Scientism.” 

3.1 Principled critique of Science 

Epistemological merit and subsequent truth value or otherwise of science and its outcomes is going to come from three different things: Its assumptions and how properly basic they are, its necessary and sufficient conditions, and its clarification of negating what it is not. In terms of the assumptions, NASA says that “scientists assume that there is a real, structured world in which events are capable of being explained by natural cause and effect principles” (NASA) Here we can find the implicit and explicit assumptions of uniformity of nature, causality, and a monastic and material world. To the first point, a phenomenologist would say that there are rather unique instances that comprise the world rather than series of things that fall into concepts. With enough steps of this type of induction, one could easily find that the model had become more pronounced than the world it was describing.  

Causality certainly has cases against it as Hume pointed out the variance between our perception of moments that comprise causality and its actual effect. (Lorkowski) Finally, if science were to assume a solely material world, then of course it could conclude what the premise already granted. All these assumptions would be fine if they were consistent, which they certainly are not in application. Following the current models will find one assuming different rules for reality based on the micro or macro focus. This is illustrated in the disparity between relativity and quantum theory (Macias). One could simply say there being disparities is fine as the zeitgeist of progression will sort this out. This Hegelian assumption is a contingent one and not a necessary one and as such, there is not significant reason to conclude that science has application to truth outside of needed applications. The assumptions are the groundings of a methodology and start as its foundation, but even if the foundation is shaky, what is science such that we should believe in it? The next step in definition is the necessary and sufficient conditions which are as follows: Observation based, reproducible, Predictive power, an improvement on current knowledge, naturalism, uniformitarianism, describes mathematically, simplicity, harmony, and falsifiability. To negate just one of these does not negate science as a whole, but if each are put under suspicion, it adds that element to science at large.  

Science has a unique relationship between rationalism and empiricism and as such, concepts are then checked against the world to see if they align with the initial concept. If seeing is believing, then this holds up, however, one would not have to look too far to find some healthy skepticism in terms of observations. This pull of data between the outer and inner worlds is mediated by sense organs that have evolved to find berries and predators and as such have an inherent weakness in observing data from stars. For example, we can't sense dark matter or even light on the ultraviolet side of the spectrum. If we then find an instrument to sense what our organs cannot, this then adds one more layer of mediums for data to be off. As such, observation has clear concerns in terms of justification of truth value between inner and outer world.  

Reproducibility has all the same issues as observation while also limiting what science has access to. Problem of induction aside, we can make a test to find out the chemical reaction of a compound from two initial liquids, but larger scale theories could not have the same treatment. We would not be able to make another universe via a big bang to then see its expansion, though the test itself can be done again. We could not start the first single-celled organism and then get it to evolve over time. We can see aspects of these in motion as small slices of time and assume that they fit into these models, but it is at least logically possible that the models do not explain that system. Perhaps the universe expands and contracts from some unknown force and the assumption of current expansion does not suggest an initial singularity. Once this hypothesis has been formed, a surprising amount of time can be spent on verifying it before it is rejected.  

Predictive power is as much of a merit as it is a condition for science. The idea is that the model at hand has grasped the past such that the future will follow closely behind. Based on the dynamic nature of reality, despite its consistencies, one could see how the past could not resemble the future. Additionally, this condition also assumes that the model has the information that the past and the future hope to have in uniformity. This of course then has the issue of whether or not the model at hand grasps that relationship that may not exist. If we can’t even control that we know the past, even if we assume the future would be the same, we can’t know the initial conditions and any possible emergent properties.  

Science's strong relationship with the zeitgeist of progression is more than a contingent factor as an improvement to the existing body of knowledge is the next condition. This concept of better across time implies lesser earlier. This would then cast doubt upon the idea that there is absolute knowledge or even unquestionable at any point in time. This criteria also then leads to the question, what is an improvement? Is it more knowledge or more useful knowledge toward a goal? If it is just additional information, this could potentially lead to a contradiction to the assumption of simplicity and Ockham’s razor. This also ads to the issue of information overload the world finds itself in now. If we make the model complex enough to capture reality, it would be so complex we might as well look at the world rather than the model. If we define improvement as success toward a goal, then we struggle with arbitrariness in objectives. If we were to use the utilitarianism aim of maximizing pleasure and mitigating pain, we would then ask if this aim is consistent. For example, we may try to make our lives more comfortable and then from the resource we use create an ecological disaster. The effects of science as a contingent state will be discussed in the pragmatic portion.  

Naturalism and uniformitarianism overlap in their assumptions of reality and its relationship to concepts. There are some metaphysical claims here that could be otherwise, but again, the claim of consistency and models that capture reality is where the questioning arises. If we were to say there were laws that held the world together, we would then need to ask why are they so as they are not a necessary fact. If we grounded those rules, it would be from a source that no longer allows for the metaphysical claim of monism or pure naturalism.  

Mathematics is a quantitative rational method that has some of the most properly basic assumptions of any study. It is repeatable, a priori, and has the most defensible assumptions. Its bastardized amalgamation with empiricism has an arbitrary nature to it that outside of convenience has little motivating factors. This is where the discrepancy between the quantitative and the qualitative halves of science comes in. For example, if I were to take three whole units and then combine them, I would have three. If I were to then divide them in thirds, then I would have a split that would end in each going on to thirty-three point three-three percent repeating with no end. Separately, they have the attribute of wholeness, but separately, they have this property of being unable to be divided into equal parts. To even put a unit of reality into a quantitative form to make formulas around has issues. For example, if we were to do a count of people, would we count the cells they leave behind, their clothing, or their hair? These demarcations that make something fit into a quantitative set then have an arbitrary nature.  

Ockham’s razor is a sort of law of conservation for concepts and as such the simpler the model, the more likely it is to be a case. From the above mentioned conditions combined with this, it is clear a system needs to be as complex as it needs to be to grasp reality while then being simple. However, if we have more complex models, it then needs to be asked if the models are just being made more specific to grasp onto reality while only seeming to be so. In contemporary physics, continental physics has the behavior of electrons behaving in a way that is neither simple nor intuitive. Other models have such a significant complexity that even a shallow breadth of knowledge is not graspable to the average person. Quantum entanglement alone is a strong case for a science as a model being complex enough trying to grasp the world, such that it isn’t not cognitively accessible (Garisto). 

3.2 Pragmatic critique of Science 

Up to this point, science was in reference to science as a necessary fact from definition. As we look at the effects of science, this would more appropriately be focusing on science as it happens to have been. The rest of this critique will focus on the contingent fact of “scientism” (Okasha), however, it will still be referred to science to keep the continuity. An awareness of this necessary and contingent science will demarcate what is being said.  

To gauge the utility of something, there needs to be an objective or goal in mind that science, in this case, would act in fulfilling. This may seem like a obvious given, the goal is to make human life better. We then need to ask what better looks like and what values matter most when at odds with others. We then may find that the consequence of this human centrist thought would end up in causing damage to the things that give human life. This is all a contingent critique of science not from how it is said to be in theory, but in practice. Political ideologies battle this same variance as they find that a good idea might not line up with good application and from that find the system at hand is non-desirable. When looking at lists of the consequences of scientific application, one could always say this contingent fact is of poor merit by chance and there is nothing in the system that would lead to it being necessarily so. With enough data points, it can become clear that this is not the case.  

The idea of science as a tool combined with the runaway progressive zeitgeist to end in tragedy will be a necessary fact. This is a vital distinction as it will help with the potential failing of reasoning that is “science may have caused this mess, but it can also fix it.” If there is a failing, then there is a preferable. If it is bad to destroy our planet, there must be some opposing goodness such as allowing it to perpetuate. Where then do we gauge the ethics of science? Around the same time as much of the scientific revolution, there was an advancement of utilitarian thought as it had a physical grounding fit for a mechanistic world view. There of course are many different ethical theories used by science as a movement, but in terms of what was generally used to gauge its ends, it held a predominant role. As they have a relationship, a critique of one is a critique of the other.  

In the book “A click, and then nothing forever” the protagonist is set with a dilemma of ending the universe or not. At first, it seems clear, and she chooses to not push it. The antagonist then asks her if she thinks life is about maximizing pleasure and mitigating pain. She concurs before he makes a case for how human experience has more misery in terms of extremity and time. This aligns with negativity bias which says we suffer more than not because of how our minds naturally construct our experience (Ito). With her initial assumption, she sees that existence causes all suffering that is and from that ending it would negate all suffering. This book serves in part as a critique of utilitarianism and makes room for other life objectives like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer's striving (Schopenhauer) or the Greek eudemonia (Martin). In an effort to give ourselves the most pleasure, we have found that this is an inconsistent goal and perhaps there is merit in the ancient adages about fulfillment only coming when you look away from it and focus on creating goodness. In short, what is “bad” or even non-preferable can be messy, but as illustrations are listed, one would be hard-pressed to not find one of these outcomes as unfortunate.  

In reaching this arbitrary objectives, fossil fuels were found to hold incredible amounts of potential energy that could be released as heat during burning. This allowed society to blossom and that energy to fuel many of the other advancements we will see soon. In the 1970’s the smog from the burning of these fuels in the form of cars became to be clear and pose health issues and as such, smog pumps were introduced. While the air was less visibly dirty, it still created carbon-dioxide. Carbon-dioxide is a green house gas. This means that it allows radiant heat in the form of light to pass through, while then insulating from the convecting heat it turns into once hitting the earths surface. All of this now happens in the atmosphere of the earth. There are plentiful resources to understand this more, but it leads to a heating of the earth. This heating, along with other pollutant factors, contributes to health issues, limiting biodiversity, and raising sea levels. (Gale) There are enough steps in this series of causes and effects to make a case for the skeptical, however it is the first unfortunate outcome of a runaway technologically progressive zeitgeist that will soon begin to stack. This isn’t definitional from science, but something about the value needing mind of humanity, which, combined with it makes it necessary from our application of science.  

From fossil fuels separation process, society was left with bi-products like tar which we used for roads, diesel fuel, and kerosene. Another product that was heralded in as the new material of our age was plastic. This polymer compound was inexpensive, easy, and impermanent. This led to a boom in human access to cheap goods. Their short usage and throw-away design left them at best to struggle to be recycled or go to landfills or at worst to be scattered all over the planet. From the top of the Himalayan mountains to the bottom of the Mariana’s trench, there has been discoveries of everything from microplastics to grocery bags. In her book “Plasticus Maritimus”, Ana Pego introduces these compounds as a sort of invasive species. (Pego) She illustrates her point by illustrating the expansion of super-islands made of plastic. In addition to tangling and unleashing toxins to animals, it presents a threat to the ecosystem at large. The chemists in their hubris to give the world the cheap goods it thought it needed, made the world we are designed to be in, trashed. 

The last two issues in part, as well as general deforestation, overharvesting, and shrinking ecosystems, have led to enough species going extinct so fast, that this phenomenon is one of the great mass extinctions. That means that less than one percent of our species' time and the inadvertent effects of our lifestyle choices have led to comparable loss of biodiversity to rival tectonic and volcanic shifts as well as the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs. The World Wildlife Organization calls it the sixth mass extinction before also saying “Unlike previous extinction events caused by natural phenomena, the sixth mass extinction is driven by human activity, primarily (though not limited to) the unsustainable use of land, water and energy use, and climate change.” (WWF) 

Humanity is known for being the only animal to adapt is environment rather than itself and this has been to the unfortunate effect of life on earth. There is one species that may have been affected the most deeply by this: humanity. The book “Civilized to Death” refers to evolutionary mismatch disease. (Ryan) This is the variance between an organism's adaptations and the environment that fostered those adaptations. It is not one singular disease but includes things that were once rare and now are common such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and pretty much every mental illness now diagnosable. Though human numbers are quite strong, humanity as an organism is rapidly going extinct.  

There is a specific reason why humanity may also go extinct in terms of numbers as well. Over the last 40 years, sperm count has dropped over 50%. It is not a tapering trajectory either, leading with a decline to zero estimated at being 2070. In her book, Shanna Swan researches the cause of this rapid shift and finds that the chemicals causing this come largely from plastics from a family of chemicals called phthalates  as well as an ingredient used in fertilizers called Atrazine (Swan). These chemicals act as a synthetic estrogen in receptors. This is causing younger and younger girls to start puberty and males to not be able to fully form in puberty. This lowering of testosterone is then in turn not allowing men to generate enough sperm. There are five criteria needed to define a species as endangered, and this crisis gives human multiple. It could be tempting to just say this is a perfect response to overpopulation, however on top of lowering the amount of people born, it is lowering the quality of those left alive. Sex-specific hormones play a vital role in everything from sexual function and general health, to emotional states and cognitive functions. As younger generations shrink, larger older generations will ballon the age demographics, creating economic issues. Finally, in the chemists attempts to give the world cheap and easy products, it has removed the biological imperative of reproduction, which is the closest thing to an empirical aim for life.  

This aimlessness is most pronounced in young people. Young men are being hit most as their role in education, the workplace, and family is crashing. Dr. Leonard Sax explains in his book “Boys Adrift,” what he thinks are the five causes for this: changes in education, video games, ADHD medication, environmental toxins, and the loss of positive role models (Sax). He references the horrifically common practice of having young people, often boys, move too much energy in sterile classrooms they were not designed to be in. Because institutional expectations are different, the children are given powerful drugs like Ritalin and Adderall. This is with the poor logic of, if it helps, then the child had ADHD. As it turns out, these academic steroids would improve any academic performance, but with some heartbreaking side-effects. These drugs would not allow the nucleus accumbens, the part of the brain designed for self-control and motivation, to properly develop. He equates this to being the cause of the many young men who are addicted to pornography and videogames and cannot get jobs or go to school. This is one example of runaway progress causing societal harm. Technological advancements, loss of intergenerational connection, and failed social engineering has come together in comorbidity to create what the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services calls an “Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” (HHS). This loneliness is bad for our health, being the health equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes per day (Seitz). In conjunction with these progressive social issues and chemical concerns, humanity is having less sex now, than ever before (IFS).  

These chemical and technological advancements are powerful, and they find their way into the hands of the powerful. They centralize energy and allow greater leveraging over the natural world, and as such, the few that control them most have a centralized power that has never been seen before. This power is centralized between monolithic super-corporations and governments. It is no coincidence that Marx only responded with his manifesto during the industrial revolution. Capitalism and a state were something that had a place and a merit, but when there was a new medium for creation that centralized the control of the means, it allowed fewer people to control more people. Now that there are cameras in every hand, microphones in every pocket, and open information about corporate and state powers combining to censor information, it is clear this industrial threat has become an existential one in the modern age. In Animal Farm (Orwell, 1946) and 1984 (Orwell, 1949) There was a centralization of power that came about by mediums that were introduced as something to herald in a better age. Think of the use of the windmill or the dogs in Animal Farm, and how this method for alleging bettering lives was used by the powerful to gain more power. China’s social credit score, in kind, needed a medium to bring about its control (Cho). Even in countries thought to be freer like the U.S., the state has cooperated with social media companies to control what is and isn’t said and their judgement is obviously primarily self-serving (Hamburger). A.I. empowers and compounds all these concerns (Lennox). This had lead many to wonder if we are much less free than surfs and slaves of ancient monarchs.  

 Books such as “Man’s Search for Meaning” (Frankl) and “The Happiest Man on Earth” (Jaku) make a case for the unstoppable force of the human spirit and human will. However, it is clear that scientism and runaway progressivism have this final frontier of freedom in their sights. Our mind and consciousness is simply not designed for the world we have built for ourselves. Natural processes like preparing for danger and lying low to save energy have been hijacked by a synthesized world and have become anxiety and depression (Rottenburg). This pronounced issue has led 39.1% of the population to suffer from these two illnesses alone (KFF). As mentioned prior, the remedies for these concerns are an epidemic themselves. The biochemical markers of the brain are not only affected, but the core of the conceptual world that comprises the human experience. Alleged objectivism in terms of physical properties has robbed people of their relationship to the divine and the meaningful. This has initiated a deep despair found in contemporary art. Even architecture has moved from an expression of the fruition of the human will, to just a drab building to house us. This painful and empty pain is best expressed by Camus, who said, “Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate” (Camus) As humanity built a world for themselves to belong, they found that no loving God built that world, and they were not welcome. Rachel Carson poses a question just as pertinent now as ever. “Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal” (Carson)? 

4. Case for Religion and Philosophy 

Logic uses the inclusive disjunct. This is to say that because it is not the case that science has primary epistemological value, it is sufficient to say that alternative avenues such as philosophy and religion have potential merit. There would be no need to affirm this half of the disjunct, however it will help us see what we have access to and what merit it would have in and of itself. There are many different avenues to knowledge and meaning making, but the two most time tested are religiosity and philosophy, the first being the understanding and obligation that comes from a maximally conscious being and the second being a rational approach to use of concepts relating self to world. This is not to say that all methods and instances of these have equal merit or even merit at all, but rather that the general concept and application could not only be true, but aid toward the fruition of a full human life.  

4.1 Principled case for Religion and Philosophy 

If one were to take a deep and thoughtful dig into philosophy of religion, they would find a case for and against God and divinity. The ontological and cosmological arguments would make cases for God from matters of fact and relations of ideas while the problem of evil would make a case for there not being a God or at least that God not being as godlike as we assume they are. To follow thought and reason to the limit where it fades into a metaphysical void would leave the thinker with no definitive answer of there being a God or not being a God. In a testament to Kant’s constructivism, God is rather what we use to make sense of the world. This world, however, can not make sense of this God. Belief in God is a subjectively contingent statement. This is not to say that God exists only in the subject, but the mind the alleged fact exists in, does. This allows the believer to maintain a belief in God and the atheist to always refute no matter the smaller evidences for information around God like the red sea or evolution. This is due to its intensely retreated depth of a metaphysical claim. This allows for the truth value to always be potential enough for one to justify belief.  

The question of whether or not God exists can always be asked, but it can also always be answered. There is contingency on whether God exists mind independent, but it is clear that at least for some, God does exist mind dependent. Does this alleged quality of existence attach the outer world to the inner as the ontological argument may suggest? This would be a separate claim. There could always be a converse claim of this phenomenon being the anthropomorphizing of reality to the conscious qualities we have, with none of what we biologically value as lesser. Perhaps this God plays a psychological role for a need for a consoling and parental figure. This brings up the question if in the vacuum of sure answers, if it is appropriate to respond to a truth claim based on our motivations. All else being equal, if there could be a case made for the utility of believing in God, and there is no reason to say one can’t that there could be merit to believing. If we can construct our experience, then we can construct our experience in a way we evaluate to be preferable.  

Philosophy’s truth value is the easiest to ground, but the most ineffable to locate. It is the medium for evaluating how properly basic a notion is as well as being the only study that you can only critique through itself. In fact, philosophy is used to build, maintain, and destroy other schools of thought. What philosophy is varies. The concept of “love of wisdom” denotes an engagement with ones being and epistemological state. The definition of “science of concepts”  illustrates the tools at hand at the material before us to be built. For simplicity, the definition used here is the deliberate engagement, relationship, and construction of self to universe.  

4.2 Pragmatic case for Religion and Philosophy 

Kierkergaard accurately found the merit in commitment outside of surety. This is where his idea of “Fideism” comes from (Kierkegaard). Even if one could not believe in God such as to remove any degree of skepticism, they could find it a powerful tool to make meaning. Consider a street pastor, you may have walked past and found their rhetoric annoying and you may find what he believes to be foolish. However, if you were to find that the divine stories, he tells himself include him seeing his dear mother who is passed again, you would likely have some mercy for him. He sees his life in terms of a religious narrative that outside of being true, is as useful as he uses it. His choices now have weight and aim, his future has a vision, and his relationships have a meaning. Religion always has been and always will be one of the most important and powerful meaning making machine for meaning making creatures (James). 

Religion makes meaning via a top-down method, while philosophy tends to make meaning via a bottom-up approach. Philosophy starts from the necessary facts of the world which is the solipsistic fact that we exist and the fact that there must be something other than us. This relationship between self and world is an ongoing process that we can take an active part in. As we choose how to structure our experience, we can do so toward good. All the seemingly random and meaningless experiences can now fit in a framework we choose (Bird 2). For example, rather than finding all the sad effects mentioned earlier as ones that induce fear into giving up, one could see them as a challenge to be face and a world to respond to. This could give a sense of power and control, which “the perception of control is not only desirable, but it is likely a psychological and biological necessity” (Leotti). 

5. Conclusion 

Science has merit, but it can not alone. It is a value-free system and as such can only give us what we want, but can’t decide what one ought to want. This medium of knowledge combined with a baseless metaphysical claim on human advancement has caused us to alienate ourselves from the we are designed to live in while destroying that same world. “Progression” is not a necessary fact of consciousness. Only the last one percent of our conscious species time has been post the agricultural revolution. It is easy to scoff their simplicity, but perhaps there was great wisdom in being what we are. What does this world we came from and perhaps will go back to look like? 

A cold breeze comes over your body through your hand-made dwelling as you are awoken and look around to see your family and tribe slowly get up from the same breeze as they begin to stir. A whisper of the bellowing smoke from the night before comes up from the fire used to cook dinner as you toke it and throw in more fuel while your siblings go out to find more wood. Once they come back, you pass around a strip of meat your body is evolved to digest. Realizing the shortness of food left and with a sense of the game in the hunt, you all decide to chase down a fresh kill. Your bare feet carry you in balance and silence toward a small gazelle as your mind goes still and silent as it locks in on the hunt. Your breathing becomes deliberately still as you pull back your arm before your powerful muscle launches a spear you made from hand into the side of the small gazelle. It writhes and lunges for a moment before your families spears lunge into the beast as your younger brother jumps of a small ledge and slits the animals throat. All the anxiety of losing the animal fade from their proper role as a sense of pride in you and your family as well as a sense of a direct relationship between your desire and motivation becomes clear.  

Carrying it back, you talk about the life that was given to you and any significance it had. You reason about your own selfhood and role in the world. Your family begins to share thoughts to make sense of their combined experience. Reason is used, and the sheer availability of people and their proximity gives a deep sense of security. Making it back to the camp, the elders begin to tease you on the size of the kill while regaling you with intergenerational stories of great heroes. The setting sun gives way to darkness as you find yourself back in those shelters eating your fill, hearing and telling stories, and being a part of something more. The idea of the world itself having a mind of its own comes into the stories as this entity is given a paternalistic role. A deep sense of security comes over you as you think the same parenthood that keeps you safe here, safe keeps the rest of the universe. The stories turn from tall tales of human doing, to tales of what this great being is up to and what it relates to. This being gave the gift of life, world, and all else you know, but in addition it gives you the gift of value: To know what matters most to aim for. You pull your children in close after a long day of the tribe watching them. You sit there in warmth and safety after a day of harsh environments and circumstances. This life you live, this earth you walk, this tribe you belong to, this God you believe, these thoughts you think, whether or not you know them perfectly as they are, you belong in them as exactly what you are.  

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