That Was Then But This Is Now

A Complex Fractal Image, Public Domain

When I was in school I used to watch the BBC's Horizon, back when entertainment hadn't yet cross-bred with factual programming. Cosmology really interested me and I proceeded to loan A Brief History of Time from the school library. One thing that really irritated me was the way Hawking seemed to go out of his way to leave space for a god. Now, with his new book, he has closed the door on that - "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going".

Why not say that twenty-two years ago? Any good writer knows you have to leave something for a sequel. Naturally the various religions' media departments pounce on this new revelation. The usual line is that science and religion should learn to live together, or that the two explain very different and exclusive fields.

There is a difference between science and religion. Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation. Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. They are different intellectual enterprises.
-Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, The Times

In biology there is a concept called refugia. When a species is pushed back into a small pocket by whatever ecological pressures, it forms a safe haven from which the species might later expand and repopulate when conditions become more favourable. Once upon a time religion used to explain everything, and that worked quite well for people emerging from the last glacial maximum. Later when it became necessary to actually understand and replicate processes it became apparent no-one was driving. This is how we get to the current state of affairs. Now that the gods have been ruled out of practically every equation, religion sits tight in the 'spirituality' refugium. The one thing it has left is the possibility that it might provide a 'why'.

I've said before that there is no 'why' because 'why' is something only we would ask. Why is the universe perfectly suited to us? Because you have it back to front. We formed around it, not the other way around. Of course, if you deny evolution, then why not have a superbeing in the sky create us - anything's possible that way. It's ironic that creationists amongst others are so eager to debunk radiocarbon dating (unless they're trying to prove they've found Noah's ark) but not the idea of a magical man in the sky.

Why are indirectly threatening ideas like heliocentrism and evolution heretical? Religions are an accumulation of old ideas - the ash-heap of historical beliefs? Local customs, local culture, and the limited knowledge of any man of the day three millennia ago are cobbled together and held aloft as truth. By the time it's codified and written on papyrus it's a byzantine collection of interlocking delusions that spawns the clergy - a class of people whose purpose it is to understand the scriptures. If you believe the gospel is unerring, then someone who comes along several millennia after its compilation and translations and asserts that, in actuality, the Earth revolves around the sun will of course be branded a heretic. The Catholic Church arrested Galileo Galilei and burned Giordano Bruno at the steak for asserting just that. And they were so sure they were right that hundreds of years later the Vatican apologises because history proved them wrong. But not morally because they were defending the faith with what they knew to be true... at the time. Well then on what authority can any religious group denounce the assertion that there is no deity when they have been consistently wrong about every other scientific assertion?

It seems that in addition to species, religions also evolve. Richard Dawkins has categorised religion as a meme (analogous with a gene) - a virus or parasite of the mind that requires a host to live and spread. In the minds of the people of the fertile crescent were the technologies that would enable urbanism. In those same minds competing for survival were the Abrahamic religions. To stay alive, any organism must stay ahead of its predators. Like a lizard detaching its tail, theism drops geocentrism to live another day. How much more can it drop before it's all gone?

Why then put faith in science? Science is not about faith or about believing in the truth. Science is the means by which you can find the truth. I remember one day I found a feather in my garden and I thought of Gelileo dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Obviously a feather would get caught in the wind if I dropped it from my treehouse so I took a small stone chipping from the driveway and a large brick from behind the shed. I wanted to see this for myself because I figured a heavier object would obviously hit the ground first, but they both hit the ground at the same time - no matter how many times I repeated it.

By replicating experiments others have performed you will reach the same conclusion. If you want to do some home chemistry you can play around with a decent chemistry set for a few week's pocket money. When it comes to replicating the experiments that might discover the Higgs-Boson particle, the necessary setup will remain beyond the individuals reach for years until a cheap plentiful energy source is discovered. Particle accelerators are the apex of physics - high energy multinational billion dollar long term engineering projects staffed by professional physicists and mathematicians. This places the amateur scientists in a compromising position - with no way to independently verify their findings we're stuck having faith... for now.

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