Displaced Deities

The evolution from religion to science is illuminated throughout the article “Displaced Deities, a reply.” The author, Barbara Ehrenreich, establishes a connection between religion and science as ways of explaining the natural processes of the world. It accomplishes this by providing a historical timeline of the ways in which humans had previously explained various concepts. In addition, Ehrenreich also explains the evolutionary aspects of religion that have taken place, whilst comparing and explaining the distinguishing characteristics of each one.

The natural progression of religion is not portrayed in a manner where religions were aiming to overpower and vanquish others. On the contrary, those less capable of sufficiently answering the questions nature raises began evolving and taking on different forms. Eventually, the use of inductive reasoning to derive theories contributed to the creation of science and the scientific method.

One of the ideas expressed in this article is that Science was not created as a means to tackle religion. Ehrenreich states, “science did not set out to destroy the monotheistic deity, but it did push him into a corner and ultimately rendered him irrelevant” (2). This point stood out to me because of the controversial characteristics of it. The impact of using “irrelevant” to describe the monotheistic deity is a bold, yet agreeable choice. However, there are still a significant number of people who still identify with an organized religion, worshiping a monotheistic deity in this day and age, so long after the idea of science has been invented.

This produces the question of why? Why is it that so many people continue worshiping deities after they have been rendered unable to answer our questions?

Religion has been a significant part of world history: being the cause of many wars, witch trials, and holocausts. Although religion has done it’s share of harm, it has also provided many people with a community. The idea of community in religion is also peculiar because of the lack of such an extent of this feeling in any scientific field of study.

Unquestionably, religion has in it established expectations of community and trust. Ideas of love and care and family. In fact, according to the Christian religion, everyone on Earth are brothers and sisters of their God. Conversely, religion also has intrinsic fear, specifically that of dissent. The balance of these two makes the process of religion disappearing that of a prolonged one.

The notion of abandoning one’s religion is often a long and scary process because of what they’re taught while they were in it. For instance, most religions contain a ‘place’ souls go to when they die where they reach paradise. For example, Nirvana in the Hindu religion. This is the end goal of people worshiping the religions. This conception was created as the explanation for where humans go when they die, arguably contributed to by the natural fear of death. When humans learn that there is a potential ‘paradise’ awaiting them after death, this encourages them to do what is necessary to reach it. On the other hand, when science tells them this isn’t the case and Nirvana, in terms of science, doesn’t exist, the necessity to overcome the fear of death as well as the potential of going to Naraka makes it an extraordinarily difficult topic.

Because of the fact that science does not permit these personal connections, it rarely takes on the loitering form that religion does. For example, when the heliocentric theory was proven wrong, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion took over with little to no backlash or hesitation. Although both religion and science come from the desire to understand the Earth, religion relies on spirituality, while science relies on observable truth of the natural world. Therefore, these aspects of religion are the reasons for which it seems to so persistently linger, despite the emergence of science as a replacement.