Science is a method, and that’s all it is. It’s a way of looking at the world critically, with doubt and skepticism, a dogged quest for reality, a search for, and testing of, truth. But for some strange reason this makes it the enemy. Science has supposedly shape-shifted into a source of evil facts whose only goal is to attack our beliefs. Unfortunately, given how much we trust our beliefs this has meant drawing battle lines.
Politics and religion are the major opponents of science. Time and again they pledge to save us from its soul-destroying honesty.
Politicians rely on emotions. With their half-truths, exaggerations, and false empathy they cloud our judgement with rhetoric designed to induce our dopamine and adrenalin reactors. Their promise of personal integrity, future prosperity, and justice for all, are their favourite answers to problems far beyond their ability to even comprehend. And to protect their deficiencies they impose secrecy at every possible access point. Science asks straight-forward, difficult questions, and these questions embarrass and weaken politicians.
Meanwhile, religion, that other powerful anti-science advocate, is at an even greater risk with provable realities being their primary existential threat. Religion is home to the mystical, the miracles, where the impossible becomes possible if only we have faith. Their response to the threat of science is to roll forward their big guns; heavenly protection and life everlasting. Unfortunately, heavenly protection has always sounded better than it looked, placing whatever group you inhabit above the rest, like sports heroes who thank God for giving them victory over their supposedly less devout opponents, but it feels right to those who believe.
The truly scary one to lose would be the afterlife. Rejecting it is beyond frightening. To accept death as the end, with nothing more, changes our whole vision of ourselves. The entire history of self-aware humanity is based on life-everlasting. It has justified and explained our actions for over a thousand generations. Denying it must be wrong, even malicious, therefore, science has to be wrong. Of course, science doesn’t say there is no afterlife, only that no proof exists.
Religion holds tightly to its role as the traditional line of last defence, the drug that cures all of our fears. Its champions offer control, protection, and immortality, so long as we accept without question, but in doing so we must reject reality. For instance, they don’t explain that science isn’t an ideology, it doesn’t compete with faith. Its only task is to examine and test and because of this it must accept all possibilities, including the possibility that God exists. You can actually believe in God without the permission of organized religion. Many, perhaps most, scientists do believe in God.
In the search for truth science embraces uncertainty, and embedded within uncertainty is a recognition that, inherently, science must also embrace that we have no proof God doesn’t exist. It’s not a winner take all battle. Those who tell you differently have their own agenda.
Just a Picture
