Everyone Runs on Faith, Even Scientists

I model a lot of my writing on Bronze Age and Stone Age mythology. People living today may have changed considerably on a physical level, but I believe the biggest difference between us and our ancestors lies in our ability to store information outside of our own minds.

Writing. Records. Books. Decent filing systems. Databases.

Otherwise, we very much resemble the people who lived at the beginning of recorded history, although most of us want to believe that our intelligence, our humanity, our civilization outshines cultures that practiced human sacrifice or cannibalism. We're much better than that, right? Not biologically. No. We aren't superior; we just communicate better. We can share photos of our cats anywhere. Instantly. Ancient Egyptians would be SO jealous.

As a writer, I like to challenge myself to imagine how people without our access to information reasoned about the world around them. I have one main guideline: I assume that people living then were as intelligent as people living today. You can take that however you want.

No One Is Objective About the Origins of Civilization

While researching the second book in my Immortal Coffee series, a post-apocalyptic story, I was ravenously devouring documentaries about Mesopotamia, and I kept running into the same problem.

On one end of the spectrum, you find archeologists asserting that what cannot be proven didn't happen. On the other, you find laypeople, sometimes with degrees attached, trying to show that the evidence supports the events in their religious texts. Everyone has an agenda. Objectivity is rare when it comes to this region, because its early myths and cultures gave rise to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The academics interviewed in documentaries tend to maintain complete skepticism and avoid acknowledging any historical value in the writings later collected into religious texts. They're quick to cry "Confirmation bias!" at anyone who connects an event in the Bible or Quran to archeological evidence in the Middle East.

Both sides are guilty of treating these writings as something other than what they are: documents from an early era of human history. Ignoring those records is as bad as relying on them entirely. And the biases show up in odd places. Writing was invented in Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE, in China around 1200 BCE, and in Mesoamerica around 600 BCE. People readily accept that ancient Mexico invented writing independently, but just as quickly assume China must have been taught. It had two thousand years to filter over there, but the distance between Asia and Alaska? Impassable!

If You'd Never Seen a Volcano

I was watching the British series Secrets of the Bible, which, refreshingly, lacked the American passion for either fundamentalist interpretation or aggressive debunking. It focused less on conclusions and more on the journey each layperson and archeologist took. Most episodes proposed contradictory solutions. It seems everyone wants the story of Exodus to be true—unless you're an academic, in which case the Israelites borrowed it from another culture.

As a child, I remember being amazed by the poor special effects in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956), where a pillar of fire appears out of nowhere and somehow keeps Egyptian chariots from steering around it. A man with the staff and robe of a wizard performs some magic. I could hardly tell Moses from Merlin or Gandalf.

The actual text of Exodus describes a god leading the freed Hebrews with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. DeMille gave us fire in the daytime. No smoke. No leading. A better reading might be that the people in the story were following a massive volcanic eruption. Why not? If you'd never seen or heard of a volcano, wouldn't you take it for something incredibly awesome, possibly worth following?

Natural wonders are sublime because they force us into a higher awareness of our own insignificance. Even the destructive forces of floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes demand respect. They pull us out of our petty disputes and place our lives in a broader context. People without seismology or geology would have reasoned about that experience with the best tools they had. So do we.

The Problem of Induction

I believe we all rely on faith to interpret what we cannot explain.

Many people firmly believe that the scientific method can and will explain everything eventually. That sounds like good reasoning, but it's actually inductive reasoning: science has provided many explanations in the past, so we induce that it will keep doing so. Unfortunately, the only way to prove that induction is valid is with induction, which philosophers call the problem of induction. Some argue that science doesn't really rely on induction, but those arguments lean heavily on semantics.

And no matter—induction works. It just isn't perfect. Most people happily accept that current scientific theories don't represent perfect knowledge of the world. What's much harder to accept is that the belief that science will eventually answer everything is a strong conviction, derived from induction, and similar in almost every meaningful way to religious faith.

I'm not trying to undermine science in favor of religion. I'm trying to show that all belief systems depend on rational thinking, creative insight, and faith in uncertain theories, operating within the information available to them.

Science Is Our Medieval Christianity

Today, old religions are typically viewed as quaint traditions or irritatingly backward thinking. Faith in a god is up for debate. Questioning faith in the scientific method, or in the community of scientists who are venerated much like the saints of medieval Europe, is far more likely to cause a controversy. Science makes room for older religions under the umbrella of psychology, as something good for mental health, but there is an intense unwillingness to consider that science itself could someday be replaced as the most unquestioned philosophy. Replaced by something new. Not something old.

Let's face it. Science does make better technology, and it explains things better than religion. It's a bit weak on morality, but it beats monotheism for life-saving technology. Besides, if you really need some spirituality, most scientists don't feel threatened by archaic religions.

That is exactly what believing in Christianity must have felt like a thousand years ago. No cannibalism. No human sacrifice. The weak and the poor had an honored position. Christianity brought a code of laws and behavior that required a stable social order. And it wasn't typically threatened by pagan beliefs and practices; it absorbed them to make people comfortable.

So we shouldn't compare the faith of a medieval knight to the faith of a Christian today. We should compare it to our faith in science. When someone who believes in science runs into something that challenges it, they don't reject it; they try to make sense of it within science. A medieval Christian would have done the same. Christianity was progress. It was the framework of their civilization, and they would have assumed that anything and everything could be explained within it.

People have always been more flexible than they claim. Scientists pray when their car crashes. Churchgoers attend services out of habit while quietly trusting science and rationalizing it with humanism. Agnostics find spiritual community in neo-pagan movements. We are, if anything, very complicated—and so was humanity at the beginning of history.

That's the rule I try to follow when I write about the ancient world: the people there weren't dumber than us. They were just working with less information, and a lot of faith. Same as us.

Related reading: What the Knights Templar Found · What Was the Holy Grail Before It Was Holy?