Science as Religion

In college, I carefully crafted a thesis proposal questioning the scientific method. Its presentation was met with outrage, with students and teachers yelling over each other to tell me how this was a terrible idea, that I was fundamentally incorrect and I had no idea what I was doing. And maybe this was true, but I still wanted to talk about it. I stood in front of the crowded room silently, my stage freight being eclipsed by the panic I felt from causing such an emotional outburst from my peers. I waited for the noise to calm down before I opened my mouth to respond, only to be interrupted by my advisor telling me my time was up and I could take a seat. Later, she pulled me aside and told me I had to change my thesis if I wanted to graduate.

I never got the chance to have the conversations about science that I was craving as a 22 year old art student. I had a rich relationship with the natural world that conflicted with with what I was taught. I turned to the study of science to figure it out, only to keep coming up short and leaving me with more and more questions. I became concerned about the room for bias in the scientific method and how that impacted the way we were taught to view the world. It felt like we were only allowed to peek at nature through a window rather than actually understand how we were a part of it. I wanted to find others interested in learning about science without the human-created structures. I didn’t know where to find them.

At that point in my life I was fearfully compliant to authority, so I did pick another thesis topic. I scraped something together with a broken heart and graduated, only to be so harmed by the initial rejection that I didn’t make art or share my beliefs for over a decade afterwards. I took jobs that positioned me adjacent to the world I wanted to understand: first I was a naturalist, then I worked on exhibits at a natural history museum. I embraced the scientific lens because it was the only way I could be around other people who were unwaveringly passionate about the natural world, too. I would look for openings in every conversation to see if I could find someone else wondering about the very framework we were teaching to others, but the only feedback I received was to go back to school - the place that had silenced my questioning to begin with. But I did, I went back to search, and I took courses on biology and ecology. And they didn’t know what to do with me either, but they did really like my microscopic drawings and diagrams.

No matter where I looked, I came face-to-face with this fixed devotion to man-made laws that left me feeling like I was in a church more than anything else. I was taught that science was the opposite of religion, rooted in fact and encouraging constant expansive discovery of the observable world without emotional attachment. But people acted as upset as if I was questioning God during Sunday mass whenever I tried to bring up concerns with the foundation. It felt like I was experiencing science as a limiting antithesis of what I was originally taught. So eventually, I gave up. I gave up trying to fit myself into the rules, gave up trying to find others concerned about the indoctrination, gave up trying to make sense of it all in any capacity. I allowed myself to validate my own beliefs, finally, after decades of denying myself. I made an active choice to not participate in dogmatic science as religion.

I am still obsessed with the pursuit of understanding the natural world, but I do it on my own terms now and within my own community. In regards to the scientific method: I observe, I research, and occassionally, I hypothesize. But I recognize that any hypothesis or explanation I form is just something I am projecting. It’s a thought that separates me as an “other” from nature, that moves me away from my place among it. I use it to emphasize my humanness - a valuable skill, but not one I think lends itself to any discovery of universal truth in this world. I also test, I analyze, and I report my conclusions, sometimes sharing them publically like I am doing in this very moment. But in each instance I hold Bayo Akomolafe’s words as sacred: “truth is a strategy, not an arrival point.” These words are the difference between my version of science, the one laced with art, poetry, and love, versus the one performed with the actual scientific method.

It was when I stopped trying to fit in with the scientific world that I did find resonate branches. Areas like ethnobotany, mycology, and astrophysics seem to be content with letting abstraction and imagination weave into their findings. I find comfort in people who are able to hold the mystery of it all and accept things they cannot explain. Art and science were historically practiced side-by-side, with each informing the other. It is only in modern times that they have been separated - maybe this tone shift is to blame for the blind dogmatic acceptance that runs through my culture now, but I am not certain. Artists are thinkers first and foremost, observers who tie threads of thought together. In the very college that shamed my questioning, I was also taught that artists were essential for the progression of society because it is their job to point out things that others do not see.

I think a lot about what it would look like if we let art and science freely inform each other again. These roles are still similar, both practices of recording observations about the world within different sets of rules. While there is merit to having a culture full of specialists, this encourages people to go deep with their focus - not wide and encompassing, not web-weaving, not culture shaping. It is almost as if it makes both disciplines untouchable by keeping them in isolation, which is at odds with acknowledging our place within the vast interconnectedness of nature. If the boundaries were removed and we could collaboratively revel in the unknown again, maybe we could slowly make sense of it all - together.