Why I think Science is our only hope

Chucked into this world at birth, not having any say in the matter, we struggle to answer one simple question. What is it all about?

When I was a kid, I had no doubt in my mind what it was all about. There was a God up there in heaven who kept an eye on things. There was a Devil below us in hell who was a real mean and frightening dude. You had two angels hanging out of you, one your guardian angel who looked out for you while the other was a demon who tried to get you to do bad things. As long as you kept out of trouble and didn’t commit any really bad sins, then you’d be okay and would get to heaven at the end of your life. If you were bad you’d suffer for ever in the fires of hell. Mind you, at that age, I really couldn’t think of any sins that could be that bad. I mean, my confession for the first few years consisted of the same rhyme which my father told me to say at my first confession: Bless me father, for I have sinned, I told lies, was disrespectful to my parents and said a few bad words. That was it. Week in and week out, the priest gave me three Hail Mary’s to say for my penance and my soul was as white as snow once again.

However, as I grew older, other sins began to intrude. Questions arose in my mind and I began to have little niggling doubts about the whole affair. Even about God himself. But that period has no place in this article, except to say it led me torturously to atheism. I was a fully-fledged atheist for about the next forty odd years. However, even here doubts assailed me and today I live happily in agnostic land. To be honest, this is the only stance I personally can take. I don’t know whether there is a God or not. Maybe wishful thinking on my part hopes there is one, but I don’t know. And if that makes me sit on the fence, so what. To me it’s being honest.

So that brings me to my main theme: science is our only hope. Whatever else we know about this world, and admittedly there’s a lot we don’t know, the one constant for me has been the existence of science. A lot of people will jump up and down and proclaim that science knows nothing, that it is dangerous, that it brought us weapons of mass destruction and the ability to play God with our genes. I always like to ask somebody who says this, would they really like to go back and live during a time even as recent as the middle ages. Little or no hygiene, little and spurious medical knowledge, lands ravished by war and famine, little or no law. Even the rich, who may have been able to afford armies for protection, were unable to fend off disease. The black death killed off one third of the population of England alone.

Religion on the other hand has claimed to be about love and peace but is in fact responsible for mass murder, mayhem and war down through the centuries. Religion has brought us little comfort indeed. Science has brought us modern hospitals, modern disease control, proper hygiene. It has brought us modern technology, making our daily lives less of a drudge. It has brought us better food, clothes and standard of living.

I don’t want this article to be a discussion of science as against religion, but religion, in many people’s minds, does seem to be the other side of the coin. That’s simply not true. In fact science and religion have many things in common, the most important being that they are both systems which look to garner the truth. Religion says it already has the truth. But, come on! Does it? I don’t think so. Surely it cannot if one religion vehemently disagrees with another. Both can’t be right. Scientists sometimes say they are the only ones to have the truth. That’s not true either. But I will say, it tries honestly to get at the truth slowly and I think, surely. Maybe there is a God up there and maybe there isn’t. Whichever the fact of the matter, science will eventually come up with all the answers. At least physical answers. If there is a God, well, he’s taking a long time in coming.

Sometimes, science can be quite dogmatic, but even their lofty towers sometimes come crashing down. A new paradigm is formed and the old one whisked away. Perhaps we are on the cusp of some such revival today, as the speed of light, that bastion and pillar of absolute truth looks a little shaky. Personally I don’t believe the speed of light is threatened. The scientists, fastidious and all as they may have been, are mistaken. A slight misinterpretation of their results. Perhaps their measuring instruments are wrong, perhaps the software in them needs debugging. Then again it may be so. It won’t be the first time and certainly won’t be the last that some edifice of the scientific world has come crashing down as it did in the early part of the twentieth century with the overthrow of Newton’s theories. But scientists pick themselves up, dust themselves off and turn to new theories. It probably isn’t quite correct to say that Newton’s theories were overthrown, they were simply modified for higher speeds and higher masses. The theories still work for all intents and purposes today, but once we start travelling at speeds close to light or approach extremely heavy or dense masses, they need to be modified.

Now let’s have a brief look at medical science. From the time of Jesus Christ, who himself suffered an appalling death crucified on a Roman cross, the Christian world seemed hell bent on suffering. People were queuing up to be martyred for their faith. For example, Ignatius, a bishop of Antioch, wrote letters to his followers on his way to be devoured by wild beasts in the Colosseum in Rome around 108AD, begging them not to intervene as he wished to die in the service of his lord and God. And down through the ages, the church has praised suffering and have even invented a place called purgatory, so that people who led good lives would go through a bit of suffering after they died and before they entered heaven. I remember being at a funeral where the priest said proudly that he was a “purgatory man himself” and we shouldn’t think that our departed loved one would escape such a “beautiful cleansing of the soul”. And purgatory, mind you, wasn’t the sort of place you could sit around peacefully before finally being admitted to heaven. No, purgatory was exactly the same as hell where you were burned with unquenchable fire, the only difference being that you knew you would eventually get out unlike the poor suckers in hellfire.

Personally, I consider suffering an abomination and science is the only thing which has helped us immensely today to escape from it. Anaesthesia was only discovered in the nineteenth century. Before then if you needed a leg amputated, you were lucky to get a piece of wood in your mouth to bite down upon as the surgeon hacked through your bone. And it doesn’t bear to think about the millions of people throughout the ages who died in agony without the benefits of modern medicine. Science gave us that with no thanks to the priests who blabbered on about hell fire and such like.

We have taken the bull by the metaphorical horns and looked around the world. Initially we tried to make sense of it in a religious sense and ascribed everything to the gods. But as time went on, some curious men began to ask curious questions and some of them found that things didn’t quite appear as neat as first appeared. When the local witchdoctor, magician, priest prayed for rain, it didn’t always come. The harvest spoiled and people died. So the rain god either wasn’t bothering to answer our prayers or was angry with us. But maybe there isn’t a rain god at all! That would also be a reasonable and logical explanation for the lack of rain or whatever. So mankind started to become more sophisticated in his understanding of the universe he found himself in. There may indeed be a God, but he wasn’t interested in dealing with mundane daily events even if they resulted in hardship. Perhaps he dealt with business on a more spiritual plane. But still some people were not satisfied. The questions could all be answered simply by assuming the non-existence of God. And if he didn’t exist, then what? Perhaps we needed to started fending for ourselves. Stop looking to something in the sky for all the answers. Get down and do it ourselves. And so we did, and came up with science and medicine and all sorts of interesting ideas to help make life a little easier.

While the last paragraph is somewhat tongue in cheek, as a story, it isn’t far off the mark. But the religious institutions didn’t like that the ordinary man was beginning to see through their puff and smoke. Galileo was imprisoned for his view that the Earth went around the Sun rather than the other way round. The inquisition didn’t only go after heretics and witches. Anyone purporting a scientific theory which disagreed with the bible was threading on dangerous ground. While many great scientists and inventors were deeply devout and religious men, they still went ahead with their scientific exploration often with risk to their own freedom. For example, body snatching was practiced when doctors needed cadavers for study and dissection. As this was a crime till the mid-19th century, anybody caught were liable to be sent to prison. But needs must, and many took great risk for the advancement of medicine.

Of course, science has brought many bad things as well as good. The problem is that science itself is neutral, neither good nor bad. It is what we do with it which makes the difference. A kitchen knife is a very useful implement around food, but if you stick it in somebody’s throat it is being used for evil.

Something which often gets people incensed is the science of genetic engineering, particularly when applied to our crops. Why? Genetically-modified foods have the potential to solve many of the world’s hunger and malnutrition problems. They can help preserve and protect the environment by reducing reliance on pesticides and herbicides.

And others think playing around with genetics is playing God. I don’t see it that way. I believe it is incumbent on us to investigate this whole area. It gives us the potential to do away with life threatening diseases. It gives us the opportunity to eventually plan our own evolution. Make us into creatures better equipped to deal with our environment. Of course it also gives us the power to create monsters like ultimate fighting machines. Unfortunately there is always the stupid individual who will want to do things like that, particularly power crazed military types and their governments. But we have to take the bad with the good and the possibility of somebody doing something evil should not prevent others from doing good. Powerful technologies always have two sides and it is up to mankind to make sure, as far as possible, to put them to the better use for the benefit of the whole human race.

We can put science to good use. We can feed the world, eradicate hunger and poverty, control our environment and eventually leave this world altogether and take up our home in space where we really belong.

I know that science can be as dogmatic as religion. Today, for example, physics graduates who go against current string theory probably would damage their careers if they even got one because of their opposition. Science can have its high priests who can be as arrogant and dogmatic as any theologian or religious minister can be. Still, in my opinion, science is all we’ve really got.

I don’t advocate waiting on God to make things better. He hasn’t shown much signs of his existence and when you look around the world, at the appalling injustices which ravage our planet, we have to ask where is God. And I don’t believe that we should have faith and pray. If we’re going to make things better, we going to have to do it ourselves. Besides if God did exist and gave us the brainpower we have, wouldn’t his first question be: “Why didn’t we use it?”

And if we are playing God, why not? If we wait on God, we’re probably going to wait an awful long time.