Why I am a Secularist

Perhaps it would be rude to suggest that religion has no place left on this planet. After all, the act of outlawing religion seems to betray the belief that men have freedom and free will, and the inalienable human right to exercise freedom and free will. 

By E-Nuf

However, because of this freedom and this belief that man is born inherently free, we have to accept that there will be beliefs that contradict our own, leading to many debates (hopefully of the intellectual sort) and letters like The Arrogance of Secularists by batsman that perhaps seek not to sway either side, but rather to persuade the undecided.  

I find it rather bizarre that such a letter would be published on Malaysia-Today. For one, it doesn’t quite define the term “secularist” well, instead of launching into a diatribe on the evils of non-belief in god and denouncing science as the “absolute truth”. Perhaps it’s because of my physics background that is tickled by the tossing out of terms like Theory of Relativity, dark matter and string theory, essentially setting up a straw-man argument to denounce the inconsistencies of science and its failure as a god.  

With all due respect, let’s overlook what batsman has said about all these specific examples of the fallacies of science and backpeddling on scientific theories and I just want to make the broad argument that science is very different from religion.

Unlike religion, science is not as batsman claims, an absolute truth, but rather an empirical truth. This means that it comes from observations and testing, the usual steps in scientific rigor. The basic scientific method is to observe, hypothesize, predict, test and finally analyze. It goes back to what everyone was taught in Form 1 science. It’s decades ago for me too, but I remember. 

Because of this method, science is fallible. It really is; like how scientists were puzzling how electromagnetic waves could travel through a vacuum, and they conjectured a mysterious substance called ether to explain it. But science’s redeeming feature is that it always best attempts to describe a given phenomenon with the best available information at that particular moment. Should someone discover some new information that renders a particular theory defunct, then by all means, we accept it and move on to a better explanation.  

So all these scientific backpedalling is merely an admission of error, and that scientists are only human. I could hardly say the same for people who call themselves “men of God” or people who preach God’s words. Oh yes, and let’s not forget politicians too.  

I sense a growing outrage among the religious that science has encroached on God’s territory. After all, science has attempted to explain how human beings came about without divine intervention, perhaps the greatest crime against religion, because we are, after all, supposedly created in God’s image. And yes, I do sympathise that because the scientific explanation is based on statistics and random chance alone, that we just got lucky, and it denigrates our self-belief that we are the all-important beings and masters of this planet; and maybe given another couple centuries, the galaxy and universe.  

And perhaps this is why the whole creationism movement and intelligent design debate, to me, is the most insidious and diabolical plot launched by Christians. Yes, Christians; to subvert the whole scientific process and pass religion off as a scientific theory. Happily, I would say that the debate is over, with the creationists mourning their dead hypothesis that is neither observable nor provable, and hence, unscientific. 

But my problem with religion, (which is why I’m a secular atheist) is that people of religion always compels me to join the faith, while people of science don’t really care whether I believe in this Theory of Evolution or a Revised Theory of Evolution. Heck, even the scientists who discovered dark matter (yes, discovered; dark matter can actually be detected by its gravitational effect on other masses and it does actually exist despite batsman’s claims) could care less if laymen such as you and I buy into their explanations unlike the zealots who preach fire and hell and brimstone unless I convert. 

And this leads to my second growing discomfort with religion, and that is when the religious attempt to impose their own personal religious beliefs upon me through the state laws in the society I live in. And I mean sensitive topics like abortion and homosexuality, which are typically seen as crimes against God.  

I’m actually all for the aforementioned, because I believe that ultimately, a person should be able to live as he chooses (just like Perakians should have the government they choose) and let his own personal beliefs, his religion, his morals, his principals guide his own life choices instead of imposing a blanket decision for himself, his neighbours and his neighbours’ neighbours. 

And so until I am proven wrong, that is pretty much why I’m a secularist.