Characteristics of the Next Religion
3. The next religion will harmonize with science.
Science is not going to go away, and technology is not
going to become a less powerful influence on society. But this is no problem
for the next religion, because science has no interest in religious experience
or moral values. Science is simply a means of codifying our observations
and making predictions based on them. It is interested predominantly in
the physical world, and then only in events that are reproducible. Science
cannot even tell us that miracles do not occur, only that we are unable
to replicate them with any regularity. (Even this observation is circular--what
we can reproduce we don't regard as miraculous.) There is nothing in science
that need upset the practitioners of the next religion.
Religion trespasses into the domain of science when
it makes historical claims or claims to be able to change the physical
world in predictable ways through non-physical means. Science transgresses
on religion when it makes reductionistic claims, as for instance when the
results of brain research are used to claim that consciousness is nothing
but a chemical or electrical process. The next religion will grant
science dominion over the world of physical facts, and it will laugh at
reductionistic claims about the ultimate meaning of things.