Leo Tolstoy: What is Religion and of What Does Its Essence Consist? (1902)
Excerpts for Chapter 11
"The feature is that all the scientific investigations of our times evade the essential question demanding an answer, and examine secondary issues, the investigation of which leads to nothing but becomes increasingly complex the further it proceeds."
"...however the origin is explained, it lies hidden from us in the infinity of time and space. Yet there are theories, refutations and new theories on this theme which form thousands of books in which the unexpected conclusion is always the same:that the law of life to which man must submit is the struggle for existence."
Leo Tolstoy compares the human endeavor of science with the inscrutable religions of the world, questioning how society has changed as our beliefs have changed. and how we ask questions about existence have been affected.
The focus on answering questions of the same nature in both Science and Religion are followed through in seemingly opposite ways. Tolstoy noticed how an increased faith in the Scientific Revolution and decrease in faith with various cultural religions have left a significant vacuum in the morality of society.
As people put dogmatic faith in statistics, research and empirical study, there is an effervescent and elusive truth that seems overlooked in the excess of details.
"Added to all this, the applied sciences, such as technology and medicine, inevitably diverge from their reasonable purpose and adopt a false direction as the result of the absence of any religious guiding principle."
While Tolstoy focuses on the loss of Morality when faith in Religions is no longer followed, there is also a loss in the public's ability to put faith in forces beyond our senses and perceptions. There is a certainty that once science has established something, it has become fact, when in fact even Laws and Theories can be retested and determined outdated or incorrect. It almost behaves in the same way blind faith convinces the religious communities of a certain Truth, but with the blind faith in science, it lacks the unity and morality that encourages passion for one another in society.
Science follows a discourse where one question leads to many more questions; in contrast it seems spiritual questions flow the other way so that most small questions lead to the biggest questions of all, the origin and purpose of existence.
While both religions and sciences provide detailed explanations for the origin of mankind, only developed religions provide a purpose. Sciences give reason for self-derived purpose, but not the eternal meaning that the infinite concepts common to religions provide.
Science should be more apt to asking the ambiguous and metaphysical questions like they do in Philosophy, in Religions and in Art. It is accepted that systematic and routine ritual helps in concentration for both science and religion, but when the technical distracts from the purpose, either endeavor can end up no longer being impressionable.
There is a slight hypocrisy in the way some people are willing to blindly trust scientific studies and statistical inquiry, yet completely disregard any religious study whenever it puts any faith in an unnameable, sublime and higher power. There have been many forces in science from magnetism to atomic fusion that were seemingly unexplained until tools were found that allowed those forces to be seen with empirical results.
Perhaps the ineffable found in religions is a way to hold onto the idea that not all is know to mankind, and that asking questions that do not have logical answers can also be a tool for discovering truth, whether in the endeavors of Science or Religion.
Ink Sketch on cotton paper, 2017.
