You have to work at these things slowly.
I grew up in the Atomic age. Science was the answer to everything. I agreed. I loved science – If only I could have made the maths add up I would have been a scientist myself. In fact the first job I applied for and was offered was as a Scientific Officer with the Ministry of Agriculture and food. ( I turned it down. It involved staring at microscopic worms in Lincolnshire onions all day long.)
Every week throughout my childwood, the must see TV programme, Tomorrow’s World, painted glorious pictures of the fabulous future that awaited us. Apollo landed on the moon. Energy was going to be so cheap it wouldn’t be worth metering. “Put your faith in Science”, we were told. That now sounds a bit religious to me.
Then the science began to get really complicated. No one understood it anymore, so we were sold technology instead. Technology is the bit that’s easy to understand – like the boxes with screens that do stuff for us, that were once going to create the Leisure Society. Can you remember how we were seriously discussing what people would do when they didn’t need to work any more? How we would have to prepare new styles of government and social control?
Scientists are High Priests, locked away in their inner sancta, seeking the ultimate truth. We go along with this, paying our tribute every time we upgrade our computer or TV. We encourage them to go further, make new discoveries, apply those discoveries to even more amazing products we can upgrade every couple of years – and lets not worry about the effect on our physical and mental health or the state of the environment. “Don’t look at the man behind the the curtain.”
Evolution has now given us the ultimate high priest in Richard Dawkins. Of course you must be a little bonkers to believe in creationism- the evidence against such a simplistic story is just too strong. But people still choose to believe it – against all evidence. And Richard Dawkins asks us to believe in Science as the Truth. But the truth he asks us to believe is so incredible that what he is really asking for is Blind Faith.
I cannot see any difference between a story about a star moving across the heavens to be over the birthplace of one particular child and a tale about electrons that exist in many places at the same time that react differently depending on whether anyone is looking – (actually that sounds a bit like a description of the Norse God Loki now I think about it).
Quantum Mechanics are so incredible that one is required to accept it’s workings on trust. Yet the same scientists that ask us to believe their incredible truth think that faith in anything else that is equally unbelievable or intangible is wasted effort.
Perhaps it’s time Religion and Science began to talk to each other. They both seek the ultimate truth and both ask us to believe and accept as fact that which our brains our incapable of understanding. Maybe there is one truly simple truth – a unifying theory – the knowledge of which makes sense of everything else. If the High Priests found the answer, would they tell us? Would they want to hold that power to themselves? Which ever way you look at it, Science and Religion are both looking for the same answer. They just use different methods.
You have to work at these things slowly.