The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion

We place no reliance on Virgin or Pigeon

Our method is Science, our aim is Religion

God and immortality, the central dogmas of the Christian religion, find no support in science. It cannot be said that either doctrine is essential to religion, since neither is found in Buddhism. (With regard to immortality, this statement in an unqualified form might be misleading, but it is correct in the last analysis.) But we in the West have come to think of them as the irreducible minimum of theology. No doubt people will continue to entertain these beliefs, because they are pleasant, just as it is pleasant to think ourselves virtuous and our enemies wicked. But for my part I cannot see any ground for either.

Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (1925)

Aleister Crowley’s classic periodical The Equinox proudly bore on its cover the slogan The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion. This was a fairly revolutionary thought over a hundred years ago, considering that in the wake of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution the practice of Science was considered by many people (on both sides of the divide) to be the polar opposite of Religion. And with very good reason: the foundation of most religion then, as now, was in the notion of Faith, which Science attacked.

Why is this so? And should the Method of Science be so important to those of us who want to achieve spiritual progress?

To detail the Scientific Method completely would take up more space than this essay allows, but I will attempt to offer a highly simplified version so we can at least begin to approach it. It is actually a collection of methods that work together to produce a desired result. Here’s a useful graphic that illustrates the basic principles:

 

The Scientific Method as an Ongoing Process

  1. Make observations
  2. Think of interesting questions
  3. Formulate hypotheses
  4. Develop testable predictions
  5. Gather data to test predictions
  6. Refine, alter, expand or reject hypotheses
  7. Develop general theories
  8. And go back to making more observations based on our new theories

…and the circle keeps going like that in an iterative process.

Note that hypothesising is never enough: I must test my hypothesis by experimentation, and by prediction. If I am on the right track with my ideas, I should be able to use my ideas to predict what is going to happen when I test my hypothesis. If my predictions turn out to be wrong, then my hypothesis must be faulty and so I must change it.

As a scientist goes round and round the circle she refines, alters, or rejects her previous hypotheses until she arrives at one that fits all the predictions and passes all the tests, and that then becomes a Scientific Theory.

Now this brings up an interesting point: a Scientific Theory can never be proven to be right, it can only be proven to be wrong. At first sight this statement seems to contradict everything we know about science – isn’t science about proving what’s right? Well, not really. Science is about proving enough stuff wrong so that what we are left with is probably right.

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

Sherlock Holmes

Thus spake Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first scientific detective, and it was that attitude that made him scientific.

Note that I said above that what remains after all our hypothesizing, predicting, and testing is probably right. Yes, only probably. The fact that the sun has always risen in the East as far back as human history recalls does not prove our theory that it will rise in the East tomorrow. We can only say that it is is highly probable that it will. However, all it takes is for the sun to rise in the West once to disprove the theory that “the sun always rises in the East”.

The 20th century philosopher Karl Popper took this one step further: he stated that unless a theory was falsifiable it could not be scientific. In other words, if we can’t test if a theory is wrong, then it can’t be said to belong in the realm of science – it belongs in the realm of faith i.e. a belief that cannot be tested. Let’s take an example:

I call in an exterminator to get rid of a mouse in my garage.

Exterminator: Let’s take a look in the garage then, see where this mouse is.

Me: Oh, that won’t work, it’s an invisible mouse.

Exterminator: OK, how about I set a trap that will spring when the mouse stands on it?

Me: Won’t work either, the mouse is weightless.

Exterminator: All right, I’ll get some infra-red goggles, track it by its heat signature.

Me: It doesn’t give off any heat either.

Exterminator: Laying down some poison pellets will just kill it then.

Me: This mouse doesn’t eat or drink.

Exterminator: Then I will just fill up the garage with an airborne poison, kill it that way

Me: No good, it doesn’t breathe.

Exterminator: Are you sure you actually have a mouse?

Me: Yes, definitely, because it’s keeping me awake at it just thinking about it.

Exterminator: But how do you come to believe that there’s an invisible mouse there if you can’t see it yourself?

Me: Well, I called in an Invisible Mouse Expert earlier and he said it was definitely there. So that’s why I need you to get rid of it.

And this is pretty much the difference between science and religion. Religion says “We believe the mouse exists, regardless of whether you can find it or not”. Science says “If we can’t find it or track it, or see the results of the mouse’s existence, then we must question its existence”.

And this brings us to another important facet of the scientific method: Occam’s Razor. This principle states than when we have more than one possible hypothesis to explain an event, it is preferable to choose the simpler one, since there is more chance of the simple explanation being the correct one. So in this example we have two choices: to believe that my garage contains an invisible, intangible, immortal mouse; or to believe that there is no mouse there. Occam’s Razor would tend to favour the simpler hypothesis: that there is no mouse.

We can also add another important question: “Even if there is a mouse, if you can’t see it, feel it, and it doesn’t eat anything, why do you need an Exterminator?” In other words, what good does it do us to believe in the existence of the mouse if it has no quantifiable effects on us? Which brings us neatly to religion. Conventional religion says that belief in the mouse is vital because it does have important effects on us, even if we can’t measure those effects.

So what is “religion’? That’s a difficult question to answer, because it is used in so many different ways in the English language. Aleister Crowley went back to its original etymology when he used the term – the Latin word ligare, to bind or connect, with the prefix re (again) –  so re-ligare: to reconnect. For Crowley the aim of religion was to bring together again two things that had been disconnected – the same purpose as Yoga.
We must then begin the study of Yoga by looking at the meaning of the word. It means Union, from the same Sanskrit root as the Greek word Zeugma, the Latin word Jugum, and the English word yoke. (Yeug-to join.)

…You may note incidentally that the word Religion is really identifiable with Yoga. It means a binding together.

Aleister Crowley, Eight Lectures on Yoga

Note that the title of this essay is Crowley’s phrase “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion” [emphasis mine]. The words chosen are important – we are to focus on the aim of religion, but use the method of science to achieve that aim. And that aim is to bind together – to reconnect ourselves with that to which we are no longer connected, something that exists outside ourselves, or within us undiscovered. But why use the scientific method for this?

Everyone who has done any scientific investigation knows painfully how every observation must be corrected again and again. The need of Yoga is so bitter that it blinds us. We are constantly tempted to see and hear what we want to see and hear.

Aleister Crowley, Eight Lectures on Yoga

And here we have the crux of the matter. The human mind is a great deceiver and our desire for the “religious experience” often blinds us to the reality of it when it happens. Someone goes to a Christian church, prays, and feels an outpouring of transcendent love. Result: they believe that it was because of Jesus, therefore Jesus must exist, therefore he must be immortal if he still exists after death, and therefore he must be invisible if I can feel his presence but no-one else can see him, and so on. So from the flawed attempt at comprehending that mind-blowing transcendent experience flows a whole heap of reasoning that appears on the surface to be logical and coherent, but is actually completely nonsensical. The primary religious experience is “true” inasmuch as the person experiences it, but the secondary beliefs have no validity beyond that, and are likely as not to be “false”.

Actually they are not even “false” since they can’t be falsified in the scientific sense. As physicist Wolfgang Pauli is famously reported to have remarked when looking at pseudoscience:

Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!

(That is not only not correct, it isn’t even false!)

In other words, it is entirely unscientific.

So in order to properly examine our experiences and to truly reconnect we need to reject “belief” – because belief will blind us to the deeper reality that we are trying to find, test, and understand. We may hypothesize about the existence of gods, demons, secret chiefs etc. but we must not believe in them. Not only that, we can only hypothesize insofar as those hypotheses themselves are falsifiable. It is not enough to say “they exist because I think they exist, and therefore everyone else must believe they exist because I say so”, because then we are back to the invisible mouse in the garage situation. Unless we can continually test our hypotheses by observation and prediction, they are not useful.

Let’s take an example: I wish to win a lot of money in the lottery. So I evoke a demon by the classical method as made famous in many Hammer Horror films featuring the late Christopher Lee, and send him (the demon, not Christopher Lee) off to make that happen. Lo and behold, a week later my lottery number comes up and I win a hundred bucks. Can we then say that demons exist and magick works? Well… sort of. We can theorise that that is one possible explanation. However there is another explanation: that it was random chance. Now we use that sharp and shiny magical sword known as Occam’s Razor to decide which is the simpler explanation: that an invisible demon manipulated the lottery machine to make sure I win a hundred bucks, or that it was random. Doing the math, I think most of us agree that it is probably more likely that it was random chance – however both are still possible.

So how to test these competing theories? Well one classic way is to repeat the experiment. If we repeat it a bunch of times and we only win a random number of times, then it’s probably just random chance. However if we repeat it a bunch of times and we win every single time then it’s probably a demon, right? Well… no. Because there are still other possible theories that we need to consider. Perhaps there is some power within my mind that allows me to reach out and manipulate probability. Perhaps I have some ability to sense when the universe is “flowing my way”, and knew exactly when to buy lottery tickets with the right numbers each time.

In fact, all of these explanations have been used to explain “magick” in the past, and all of them are vaguely possible. The problem lies when I decide that one of them must be the correct way. This is where the method of science deserts us. We cannot be “scientific” if we decide that a theory must be true without properly testing it – and even then the most we can hope to do is prove the theory to be false. Most especially, if there is no way of testing the theory we cannot accept it as having any strong validity at all.

But, I hear you say, what about the Invisible Mouse Expert? If he says there’s an invisible mouse, and he’s an expert, then it must exist, right?

This is the classic Argument from Authority. If a person in a position of authority, who has previously been shown to be right about a certain subject, says that a certain thing must happen, then it definitely behooves us to pay attention to the authority’s statement. However, no matter how authoritative they may be, any statement they make must also be “scientific” and testable, otherwise the statement has no validity at all. It doesn’t matter how much the Invisible Mouse Expert insists that the mouse is there, until we can figure out some way to test for the presence of the Invisible Mouse the expert’s statement is still scientifically worthless. In other words, authority can be used to lend more weight to a theory, but it cannot replace the scientific method, only augment it. So we must take pronouncements from authority carefully and test them ourselves scientifically, not blindly accept them as “truth”.

There are two kinds of people who like to say “God told me to do it” – priests and serial killers. Scientifically both make the same equally invalid statement – the fact that one has more “spiritual authority” than the other does not make the statement any more true. As Pauli says, it’s not even false. It’s just nonsense.

This is where science and religion clash head on again: most religions are based on a Holy Book, which is generally considered to be the Word of God. It’s not. Scientifically unless we can call God into the lab to give us a sample of his handwriting we must assume that this ain’t the Word of God.

Now all sorts of wacky theories have been advanced to get around the “lack of God’s handwriting” problem, most prominent of which are variations on that same old favourite “God told me to do it” theory. The problem is, of course, that anyone can say that. Hell, I could easily turn out three chapters of flowery-sounding spiritual gibberish and say it’s the Word of God before the day is over, and who is to say it isn’t? Well, pretty much everyone actually. Most people are smart enough to say “That isn’t the Word of God, you’re just trying to screw with us”. And they would be right.

But if I spend enough time, energy, and marketing dollars persuading you that I am, in fact, some kind of Invisible Mouse Expert, and then come over to your house and tell you that you have an Invisible Mouse living in your garage, and this book by the World’s Greatest Invisible Mouse Expert shows that Invisible Mice really exist, then you are more likely to believe me. Despite it being just as unscientific as having some hobo come by and tell you the same story. Because I have Authority.

And that’s why religions have “Holy Books” – because they are a physical manifestation of the ultimate Voice of Authority that Must be Obeyed.

Aleister Crowley is as guilty as anyone else of this behaviour. He wrote the Book of the Law and claimed it was dictated by a “discarnate entity”:

The Voice of Aiwass came apparently from over my left shoulder, from the furthest corner of the room. It seemed to echo itself in my physical heart in a very strange manner, hard to describe. I have noticed a similar phenomenon when I have been waiting for a message fraught with great hope or dread. The voice was passionately poured, as if Aiwass were alert about the time- limit … The voice was of deep timbre, musical and expressive, its tones solemn, voluptuous, tender, fierce or aught else as suited the moods of the message. Not bass – perhaps a rich tenor or baritone. The English was free of either native or foreign accent, perfectly pure of local or caste mannerisms, thus startling and even uncanny at first hearing. I had a strong impression that the speaker was actually in the corner where he seemed to be, in a body of “fine matter,” transparent as a veil of gauze, or a cloud of incense-smoke. He seemed to be a tall, dark man in his thirties, well-knit, active and strong, with the face of a savage king, and eyes veiled lest their gaze should destroy what they saw. The dress was not Arab; it suggested Assyria or Persia, but very vaguely. I took little note of it, for to me at that time Aiwass was an “angel” such as I had often seen in visions, a being purely astral.

 

Aleister Crowley, The Equinox of the Gods

There are several theories that might account for this phenomenon:

  1. Crowley was consciously lying
  2. Crowley genuinely believed it, but the voice did not exist outside his brain
  3. Crowley genuinely believed it, and there really was a cloud of smoke that dictated a book to him

Number 1 is distinctly possible, we know from history that the man was an inveterate liar and teller of tales, with a gigantic ego coupled with a desire for to be recognised by posterity. So yeah, we have to take that as a possible theory. However, having said that, examination of Crowley’s diaries show that he never once wavered in his story, even in his most private unpublished works; so he either pulled off a 24/7 con, never once breaking character, for over 40 years, or he actually genuinely believed in his own story. The weight of evidence suggests that he genuinely believed this, so although this first hypothesis is possible, it seems unlikely.

Number 2? Also possible. Hearing voices is a classic symptom of schizophrenia. And also of religious experience. Julian Jaynes postulates that early humans heard voices all the time, and considered them the instructions of the gods “They were voices whose speech and direction could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes, as voices are heard by epileptic and schizophrenic patients.” (Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind). In that case we can see Crowley’s story as being “true” in the sense that it was certainly true for him.

I think even a quick application of Occam’s Razor makes the third hypothesis incredibly unlikely. For one thing, how would a cloud move the air in such a way to form and transmit words? More likely is that the key is in the first two sentences of the quote: “The Voice of Aiwass came apparently [emphasis mine] from over my left shoulder” and “It seemed [emphasis mine] to echo itself in my physical heart in a very strange manner, hard to describe.” Crowley’s own words imply that even he was not convinced that the voice was actually spoken in any kind of exterior manner.

When push comes to shove however, the important point is that hypothesis 3 is simply not testable. Until a cloud of incense smoke appears in Times Square and announces to the world on late-night television: “I am Aiwass and I wrote the Book of the Law”, and gives us a sample of his handwriting, it must remain in the realm of Faith, rather than the realm of Science.

The “God’s handwriting” problem is, of course, dealt with in the text of the Book of the Law itself, which says:

This book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in the writing of the Beast

Liber Legis I, 47

That is: we do have “God’s handwriting” this time, and it’s identical to Aleister Crowley’s. He literally wrote the Book of the Law.

Does this mean that it is invalidated at a “Holy Book”? By the terms of conventional religions like Christianity, in which a Holy Book contains its power and authority by being seen as the literal word of the gods, yes, I guess it does. However if that’s the case, how come it is so powerfully resonant and life-changing to us today? Clearly it (at least to Thelemites) has meaning that is deeper and more profound than a conventional “non-holy” book.

To find an answer to this dilemma we need to go back to Jaynes. In his model, the “voices of the gods” are the voices inside your head – it’s just that these voices spring from a part of the mind that is normally hidden from normal consciousness, but may be activated by various religious and spiritual techniques. And these “divine” voices seem to emerge from a layer of the mind that contains a deeper perception and understanding of the self and the world, and are able to communicate that directly to us. This part of the mind is variously called “God” (or “the Gods”), the “Holy Guardian Angel”, the “Higher Self”, the “Secret Chiefs” etc. even though in actuality it’s none of these things – it’s something unique inside each of us whereby we connect with something great than our normal consciousness.

This is why, of course, when the “follower of a prophet” claims to channel the entity that “the prophet” already channeled, it never, ever sounds the same, and usually is just a crappy ersatz version of the original. It’s because it’s never real. Because the voice of God only ever exists internally for each individual. A classic example is the Bible, written by a multitude of authors over a period of centuries, but supposedly all “inspired by Jehovah to write his literal word of truth”. If that was really the case why does it contradict itself all over the damn place? And why is the writing style so different in every section? If it was really just one god being channeled logic would dictate that the linguistic style would be exactly the same from beginning to end. When in reality even the four gospels, which were ostensibly written at the same time by four guys who knew each other intimately, all say different things, and are all written in completely different styles and from a completely different perspective. Even the fact that they have different perspectives shows that they could not be written by one “God” because an all-seeing, omnipotent, omnipresent God could not have more than one perspective.

However despite all of that, the Bible, and the Book of the Law, clearly have the ability to change people’s lives utterly and be a gigantically powerful force in the world. So the voices that these channelers hear must have some kind of validity. Yet the voices that other people hear do not. Try reading a cross-section of “received wisdom” books in the New Age section of your local library (please don’t waste your money buying them) and you will very quickly realise that most of them are turgid drivel. So why is this? The conventional explanation is that it’s because there’s only One True God, and all the others are fakes, or demons, or Satan, or SOMEBODY BAD. When the real explanation is more likely to be that the problem lies with the person doing the channeling. Either the voices they are hearing aren’t as powerful, or as wise, or they are simply not able to hear and communicate them properly, but the long and short of it is, they aren’t very useful to us.

So this does lead us to a way we can initiate a scientific exploration of the problem. If these voices are internal and personal we can straight away discount there being an actual third-party entity involved. It may seem like it to the channeler (as in Crowley’s description of Aiwass), and we can approach it that way as a psychological model of the experience, but ultimately there’s just the individual and their ability to create (and recreate) this experience. The sense that I am contacting an objective entity is simply that, a sense.

Crowley discusses this in one of his earliest magical works, The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic:

The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain.

Their seals therefore represent … methods of stimulating or regulating those particular spots (through the eye).

The names of God are vibrations calculated to establish:

  1. a) General control of the brain. (Establishment of functions relative to the subtle world).

(b) Control over the brain in detail. (Rank or type of the Spirit).

(c) Control over one special portion. (Name of the Spirit.)

Aleister Crowley, The Goetia

So if I perform a magical ritual to evoke the Goetic spirit of Samigina, who traditionally appears in the form of a little donkey, the little donkey I see is not going to be the same little donkey you see. The demon I evoke is not the same demon you evoke. It might look similar, and perform a similar function, but to say it’s the same demon would be like saying the frontal lobe of my brain is the same thing as the frontal lobe in your brain, which it clearly is not. This explains an old problem of how it is that you and I can both evoke the same entity at the same time – because we are not evoking the same entity. My Samigina is not your Samigina. He may have the same function in my brain as he does in yours, but he’s still mine in my brain, and your Samigina is still yours in your brain. And that’s why he might say different things to me than he does to you, or perform his functions differently, because he’s a different thing. He belongs to the same class of things (just like my frontal lobe and your frontal lobe both belong to the class “Frontal Lobes”), but he is not the same thing. We are each just connecting to the same parts of our respective individual brains and bringing back information contained there, which although it will probably be of a similar type, will still be entirely a unique product of our own individual heads. So when I get a new book of the Bible  from Jehovah, it’s not the same Jehovah who talked to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, and so what my Jehovah tells me will definitely not sound like the ones who talked to each of them when they wrote the gospels. Similarly, if I perform Crowley’s Liber Reguli ritual, which invokes Aiwass, it’s not the same Aiwass that talked to Crowley, and he’s not going to deliver the missing fourth chapter of the Book of Law. And if he does, it’s probably not going to be very good.

Which is an important point: why is that some people’s “Holy Books” are better than others? Why is Crowley’s Book of the Law so much better than say, Jack Parson’s Book of Babalon which purports to come from similar sources and be effectively a sequel to it? Now, I like the Book of Babalon very much, but it clearly has not had the impact that Crowley’s work has had. Why?

The religious fanatic says: “That’s obvious – he wasn’t truly chosen by the Gods to deliver their message to mankind”. Well, that may seem obvious to someone who already believes in the Gods, and all that goes with them, but it presupposes way too many Invisible Mice being involved to be a theory that we can truly take seriously. We have to presuppose that there are Gods out there sitting on a cloud somewhere, that they are looking at the Earth and want to guide its future, and are watching 6 billion people all day long trying to find one, just one, that they can talk to and crown as the New Messiah for All Mankind. That’s a lot of Invisible Mice. It also means that ultimately we judge who the real Gods and the real Messiah is – and if that’s what it’s all about, why didn’t the Gods just tell us directly in the first place and cut out the middle man?

No, we need examine this more scientifically. And as we do, one much more plausible theory stands out: that Jack Parsons, despite being a good magician and a great scientist, just wasn’t as good a magician as Aleister Crowley. He didn’t have the depth of background and experience, he didn’t have the philosophical profundity and gravitas of Crowley, and he just wasn’t capable of grabbing people’s imagination the way that Crowley did. He was a good magician, and turned out a reasonably good “Holy Book”, but he wasn’t a great magician and so couldn’t turn out a great “Holy Book”. This is why most New Age channelers turn out shitty holy books – because they are basically shitty magicians. In other words, the quality of the “Holy Book” has got nothing to do with the “god” or “spirit” or “alien intelligence” who supposedly transmits it, and everything to do with the abilities of the person writing it down.

This is also why, for example, the Book of the Law contains passages of sublime, old-style Biblical English language – because Aleister Crowley grew up as the son of a preacher in an extreme old-school Victorian Christian sect and thus was exposed to the King James version of the Bible on a daily basis at a young age, and then was sent off to English upper-class schools to learn traditional English grammar. He was surrounded by people all his early life who actually spoke like that. So his “holy book” reflects that bombastic, apocalyptic style. Whereas anyone these days who tries to produce “Thelemic holy books” purporting to come from Aiwass or V.V.V.V.V. or Ankh-f-n-Khonsu (or one of any number of Crowley aliases) always try to sound vaguely “biblical” or “Crowleyesque” as well but never approach anywhere near the sublimity of Crowley’s writing. If they were really channeling one of Crowley’s alter egos, then the writing would be every bit as good stylistically if nothing else, but it never even comes close. These latter day pretenders to the throne simply don’t have the background knowledge and linguistic richness that Crowley had inculcated into him from the day he was born. So usually what they produce is a pastiche that is, at best, a passable forgery, and at worst, completely laughable.

That’s not to say that a latter-day Thelemite can’t or won’t produce another great “holy book” – and in my opinion Parson’s Book of Babalon definitely comes close – but it is to say that they won’t be by the “Aiwass” or “Ra-Hoor-Khuit” or “Babalon” or whoever that Crowley “heard”. They will be from the “Babalon” that exists inside my head or your head or Jack Parson’s head, who is a completely different Goddess from the Babalon that existed inside Aleister Crowley’s head. She may share the same function and have a similar effect on my psyche, but she’s not the same thing.

So how do we approach this from the method of science, with the aim of religion? It seems from the foregoing that there are several inferences that we can draw:

  1. That the “voices of the gods”, spirits, demons etc. are actually functions of our individual brains
  2. That these “entities” can provide information and inspiration that can be extremely powerful, life-changing, and ultimately world-changing
  3. That since they exist within ourselves, my “god” and your “god” are two entirely different beings, although they may share a similar nature and function
  4. That their communications are coloured by our individual experiences and abilities
  5. That it is possible to improve that communication through magical training and environmental stimulation

Those are our hypotheses, and form a coherent methodology for further exploration.

[Author’s note: I am not satisfied with this ending, however I honestly can’t think of how to take this further at this present moment. Possibly here is a time for further experimentation before drawing any more conclusions. So consider this a Work in Progress for now.]